NASA: Not Afraid to Spend Agency

So yesterday Barack Obama held a press conference about NASA, where many people expected him to say he was canceling many of NASA’s programs and reducing their budget, because that would be the smart thing to do. Instead he decided to give them $6 billion dollars, which apparently he had lying around under his couch cushions.

Just to get this out of the way, I’m not a big NASA fan. I’ve already expressed my opinion about space on this site. So understandably I’m a little mad about this. I mean $6 billion dollars? Do you know what I could do with that much money? Absolutely nothing is what I would do, unless you count sitting on my butt all day on a beach in Hawaii doing something. But if NASA can do a lot with $6 billion, imagine what actually useful branches of the government could do with that money. We could stop asking people like you and me for money and just buy every kid in Haiti their own mansion already. We could build a thirty-foot tall concrete wall across our Mexican border. Or we could of course start to pay back our multi-trillion dollar debt to China (or nuke China and be debt free!).

I mean NASA is the least efficient government program ever as far as spending, and I am including Ralph Nader’s campaign committee in that statement. The problem is that NASA uses a lot of science, which involves a lot of “theoretical work,” (as in lots of “failing”). They spend a lot of money just testing things. This means that by the time they actually figure something out, they’ve spent half their budget. They then spend more money trying to build this new thing they’ve invented before it inevitably doesn’t work. Then they spend money fixing it over and over again until they finally get it to work, when they send it off into space where it is never heard from again. That’s the main problem with NASA, they never get to reuse anything because they either send it hurtling towards the sun or it crashes in the middle of New Mexico of the Pacific Ocean and breaks into a gajillion little pieces.

So while $6 billion may seem like a lot to you and me, for the people at NASA $6 billion barely covers their coffee budget. And what do we get out of NASA? Oooh pretty pictures of nebulae. Oh wait, I can do that on Microsoft Paint. So they landed a guy on the moon. Big deal, it’s not like we can live there, or on any other planet. So unless we are just going to store junks there or something I don’t really see the point. It’s sort of like sending people to survey North Dakota, except maybe easier because there are no bears on the moon. Luckily Obama has told NASA to stop spending money on missions to the moon, which is smart. We’ve already done that; let some stupider country have a turn, like Australia.

But Obama has some other big plans in store for NASA. First off, he wants to send people to Mars. I’m not sure why; maybe he wants to see how the rest of Lady Gaga’s species are doing. The problem with going to Mars has always been that it takes too long. That means that by the time a normal astronaut gets there and comes back, they no longer have bladder control, much less the ability to conduct any useful research. Also, Obama said he wants to send someone to Mars and back “safely,” which is really not cost efficient. Just sending someone to Mars before letting them die a horrible death somewhere in space is much cheaper. But fear not, as our local rocket scientist I have a solution: we send Justin Bieber to Mars. Think about it. He’s young, so he won’t die on the long trip and we hate him, so we really won’t miss him or care if he somehow dies in space. The only drawback might be that if he somehow does actually get to Mars alive and starts singing to Martians, they might declare war on us.

Obama also for some reason wants to land a crew on an asteroid. I can only deduce from this that he, like me, has been watching way too much Armageddon on TV recently. In fact, I’m assuming that most of the decisions he made yesterday were made because of that movie. He probably got scared that if he reduced NASA’s budget, the next thing you know there’s a giant asteroid headed towards us. The $6 billion was probably to help cover the cost of sending Ben Affleck into space.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that is a bad thing. Armageddon is one of my favorite movies, with all of its epic action and moving soundtrack and shots of Liv Tyler (by the way, putting her and co-star Steve Buschemi in the same scene may be the biggest gap in attractiveness ever). As for people who nitpick and say that the movie wasn’t good because it wasn’t “scientifically accurate,” so what? By that measure, Gigli was a better movie than Avatar. That’s not to say that there weren’t parts of Armageddon that were hard to believe. Like that a space shuttle could catch up to an asteroid, or that they could walk around on it, or that Bruce Willis can actually die. But to me the most unbelievable part of that movie was that NASA somehow did something right. Even with $6 billion dollars, that’s something that will only happen in the movies.