After a week off to work on a special ultra-double-secret project, I’m back. I’m so tired of the endless Washington ugliness, I decided to go elsewhere (sort of) for a cartoon subject. As a long-time space geek, I’m as troubled as anyone by the seeming lack of direction at NASA, its inability to leapfrog the old technology and come up with the next generation of space flight. Canceling the Constellation project was probably the right thing to do, given the lack of imagination and the bloated costs of the program, but it was still a blow to those of us who are still impossibly smitten with the allure of space exploration. Given the economic realities, we’re in no position to continue throwing billions at manned space travel when unmanned missions are so much less expensive and  produce important science, but the incurable romantic in me argues that man wasn’t built to sit safely at home while robots do the work. We need to go there and see for ourselves.

Topics: budget, budget cuts, Constellation, manned space flight, moon, NASA, opinion, space flight, space shuttle | Trackback URL