Is the OMB Trying To End Planetary Exploration?

EccentricAnomaly writes "Lou Friedman (former head of the Planetary Society) has written a provocative article over at Space Policy Review where he accuses the Obama administration of working on plans to gut the robotic Mars program in order to pay for NASA's exciting new rocket. This is after NASA already killed the Europa mission that was to have been the next outer planet mission after Cassini."

Answer: No, it isn't

[F69631]

Look, we're in a debt crisis and cuts must be made, everyone agrees about that. What we don't agree about is what to cut: Some people say "Cut a lot of military spending", others "Cut a lot of social security" and still others "Both of those are more important than planetary exploration". If I were to support significant cuts to social security, it wouldn't be appropriate to ask "Is F69631 trying to end welfare?" as that certainly wouldn't be my motivation. It might be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 consider social security to be less important than our continued presence in [sandy country]" but even that would be questionable as the situation obviously isn't "either-or". It would be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 believe that it's better idea to cut that amount of money from social security than to cut only some of that amount there and cut the rest from [another program]?"...

I'd bet a month's wage that Obama administration has nothing against planetary exploration. It's always easier to create provocative straw-man arguments than it is to actually engage in a civilized discussion in which everyone acknowledges the facts (=the fact that in a democracy we need to make compromises and other people might have different values and opinions than you do). We need some sort of rally to restore sanity or something...

Re:Waste of time and money

[u17]

We don't need any breakthroughs; we already have good plans to get to Mars with existing technology. Have you heard of Mars Direct? It's a plan for routine manned flights to Mars accomplished with existing chemical rockets (actually the Shuttle launch stack), artificial gravity induced by spinning the spacecraft linked with a tether to an empty rocket stage around the common centre of mass, and using chemically propelled cars (why would we use electric if we can have something better?). If we had wanted to, we would have sent people to Mars by now. All the things you mention are completely unnecessary.