John Pike of globalsecurity.org is quoted in this Fox News report saying that NASA's manned space program is such a fundamental expression of the pioneering spirit "that the country would be impoverished [without a manned space program] and we'd really have to reexamine what it is to be Americans."
Excuse me? I love space exploration, and greatly admire the technological accomplishments we've made, but there is almost no sense in which a government-run, coercively-funded, expensive, inefficient, and obsolete space bureaucracy contributes to my sense of what it means to be an American. On the contrary; the American pioneer spirit has traditionally been based on the principles of individualism, self-reliance, independence, and personal risk-taking, not on forcing hardworking taxpayers to fund Senatorial junkets to Low Earth Orbit.
What it means to be an American is infinitely better represented by Space Ship One than by a bureaucratic machine that is in many ways stuck in the 60s--and that takes money by force from people who would much rather spend it supporting themselves and their families than paying astronauts to ratchet down solar panels in free fall. Space exploration is very cool, but its civilian benefits are vastly exaggerated; it's a big government corporate welfare scheme--not an essential principle of my Americanness.
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