Expert Warns NASA Can't Afford Mars Plan [View All]

[dArKeR]

An aerospace executive warned a presidential commission Wednesday that NASA (news - web sites) does not have enough money — or bright young stars — to achieve President Bush (news - web sites)'s goal of returning astronauts to the moon and flying from there to Mars.

"It would be a grave mistake to undertake a major new space objective on the cheap. To do so, in my opinion, would be an invitation to disaster," said Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp. and head of a panel that examined the future of the space program for the first President Bush.

Augustine was among five aerospace experts who addressed the first public hearing of the current President Bush's space exploration commission, held in Washington.

Commission member Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, asked Augustine whether $15 billion a year for 10 years would be enough to set NASA on course to fulfill the moon-and-then-on-to-Mars vision put forth by Bush one month ago. The space agency's annual budget has been around $15 billion in recent years.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040211/ap_on_sc/moon_mars_commission_11

So why don't the patriotic defense contractors and the Bush Crime Family and the Moral Majority pay for it? God came to me in a vision last night and told me they should pay for it.