Space program writers, go back to school, we just placed our capability in a Museum--WAKE UP!

 
Candidates in Orbit
The late, great U.S. space program
 
P.J. O'Rourke - The Weekly Standard Magazine
 
We’ve had some fun with space policy in the 2012 presidential race. Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show, candidate debates, and other forms of low comedy had us all laughing at Newt Gingrich’s proposal for moon statehood. Ron Paul said, “I think we should send some politicians up there.” So it would be a blue state, and there goes Republican control of the Senate. Mitt Romney said, “If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired.’?” Ha, ha. A president, a Congress, and a number of wives have tried to fire Newt, and he’s still on the job. But fun with space policy is about all we’ve had. Space is not an issue in this election. There are good reasons it should be. NASA is cheap. Its budget is $17.7 billion, one-fourth the budget for the Department of Education, which ought to—considering the state of public schools, where none of the kids can do this math—give its money to NASA.
 
Tyson: ‘We need new Arguments’ to win public support for space
 
Jenny Dean - Space News
 
By doubling its investment in NASA, the U.S. government could recapture the public’s Apollo-era fascination with space travel while spurring new inventions that energize the economy, celebrity astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson said April 17. In 1961, when then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy issued his bold challenge to land an American on the Moon by the end of the decade, the national appetite for science, invention and exploration was palpable. It seeped into nearly every corner of the culture, from sci-fi movies to car fins mimicking rocket ships. “Everybody was dreaming about tomorrow,” remembered Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, author and opening speaker of the 28th National Space Symposium here.
 
Shuttling the Shuttle: Discovery’s last flight
 
Rob ‘CmdrTaco’ Malda - Washington Post
 
This past July, I stood a few hundred feet from Atlantis as she perched on top of the iconic orange fuel tank and towering solid rocket boosters (SRBs) in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The sun set and the sky went from a pathetic gray to a rich, dark blue. I took pictures and punched mosquitoes the size of softballs. The image I witnessed that day was remarkably similar to the cardboard puzzle I vividly remember assembling when I was just a kid. The night before Atlantis’ final launch, I slept in my car. A few hours later I watched Atlantis fly into the sky for the very last time. STS-135 was America’s last Space Shuttle mission. I saw it from the press site at Kennedy Space Center with people who had seen a hundred launches before this one, but we all knew this was special.
 
Google billionaires, James Cameron backing space resource venture
 
Alan Boyle - MsNBC.com's Cosmic Log
 
The folks who brought you zero-gravity airplane flights and multimillion-dollar trips to the International Space Station have lined up some billionaire investors for their next space venture — but they're not quite ready to tell you all about it. Instead, they're sending out a media alert for a Seattle news conference next week, when they promise to "unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity's prosperity." The new venture, called Planetary Resources, has the stated aim of expanding Earth's resource base. That's led a couple of observers to speculate that Planetary Resources is being formed to go into the extraterrestrial mining business.
 
“It comes after twelve:” The unlucky days before Apollo 13