A VISION OF HUMAN EXPLORATION AND TRAVEL IN SPACE IN THE NEXT AND CURRENT GENERATION.

By K Laspina

NASA's budget takes up 4/10ths of one penny on a tax dollar. if I held up the tax dollar, and I cut horizontally into it 4/10ths of one percent of its width, I wouldn't even get to the ink. so I will not accept a statement that says "we can't afford it.” the $850 billion dollar bank bailout is greater than the entire 50 year running budget of NASA. so when someone says we don't have enough money for the space program, I say, well it's not that we don't have the money. it's that the distribution of money that you're spending, is warped. in some way, that you are removing the only thing that gives people of today something to dream about tomorrow. the home of tomorrow, the city of tomorrow, the transportation of tomorrow. all of that ended in the 1970's when we stopped going to the moon. aft er we stopped, it all ended. we stopped dreaming.

Humans are innately curious. Humans live to explore. Space offers a subject on a scale we’ve never seen before, and it only makes sense to try to push our boundaries. It ’s what we’ve always done. the cultural mindset that the space program brought upon us was to make tomorrow come. and we reaped the benefits of economic growth because we had people wanting to become scientists and engineers! who, by the way, are the people who ENABLE tomorrow to exist today! even if you're not a scientist or a technologist, you will value that activity. and that in the 21st century are the foundations of tomorrows economy. and without it, we might as well just slide back to the cave era, because that's where we're headed, right now. broke.

NASA as best as I can judge is a force of nature like none other. what worries me is that if you take away the man program, which if you advance frontiers, heroes are made. there's a force operator on the educational pipeline that will stimulate the minds of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and technologists. you birth these people into society, they are the ones that make tomorrow come. I worry, that the decisions that congress makes, doesn't factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. they're playing for the quarterly report, the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation. tomorrow is GONE.

the most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to be doing. and that is making dreams come true.

How much would YOU pay for the universe?