Astronauts are stranded on the space station. America’s once-mighty Space Shuttle fleet has been disassembled and mothballed with nothing to replace it. The Russians, once the inferior player in the space race, is the only hope left to rescue the stranded astronauts. No, this isn’t the treatment to a B-list summer movie — it is playing out before our eyes.

It never had to be this way. When historians look back on the American space program over the past 5 years, they are bound to scratch their heads and wonder, “what on Earth happened?” Where were our bold strokes of genius that propelled us to the Moon, created a fleet of shuttles that were the workhorses of space — where was the leadership that ensured America’s technological dominance in the world? Why did we throw in the towel?

With President Obama allowing the Space Shuttle program to die and laying off thousands who worked lifetimes solidifying its success, we had to turn to our old rivals – the Russians. This week, the Russians launched a Soyuz rocket filled with supplies bound for the space station. The rocket exploded scattering smoldering debris for miles. The Soyuz is the world’s last chance to travel into space. Yes, a rocket designed in 1966 is our last modern operating manned space vehicle. Pathetic.

It was President George W. Bush that realized the shuttles had run their course, and he set a date to replace the program. Instead of the low-orbiting shuttle, America would build the world’s largest and most powerful rocket to return to the Moon, build a base there to launch more ambitious missions — go to Mars, where the presence of ice indicates the ingredients of alien life. But, when Atlantis rolled to a stop at Kennedy Space Center, we had no way forward. Obama cancelled the Bush plan, and no one was quite sure where we were headed. The only certainty is that we would layoff over 4,000 unique and highly trained American space experts – in both the public and private sector.  America’s space program is a metaphor for much of what ails the nation, the President left us listless and adrift with no plan to move forward.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Ben Domenech is joined by Rand Simberg to discuss the end of NASA’s manned space program, Paul Krugman’s latest idiocy regarding space, and preview of what Rand thinks the future of space exploration looks like.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Mothball The Space Shuttle
Space Policy, Explained (Part 3)
Krugman calls for space aliens to fix U.S. economy?
Paul Krugman Calls for Space Aliens to Attack Earth Requiring Massive Defense Buildup to Stimulate Economy
Perry slams Obama for closing down NASA’s space shuttle program
Rand Simberg’s Transterrestial Musings
Rand Simberg at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (more…)

Remember the line in Apollo 13?  NASA flight director, played by Ed Harris, showed how little his patience was with those who accepted anything less than success. When faced with a doubter, Harris boasted:“With respect sir, I think this will be our finest hour.” That line was awesome! NASA was on the brink of disaster and the Apollo astronauts were facing the prospects of being entombed in the Odyssey forever. However, NASA pulled it together. Disaster was avoided and the astronauts returned back to earth safely. It was dubbed a “successful failure.” Their objective – the moon – wasn’t reached; however, the space program was saved from a devastating setback by a little grit, determination, and luck. Not to mention, with pennies compared to what the NASA budget is today.

Today, NASA has no objective and no shuttle program. And just like with any other entity heavily subsidized by the government, overtime it loses its effectiveness, becomes bloated, and is subject to political control. The latter obviously can only be explained by its Muslim outreach program and other positions recently taken under the guide of the Obama administration.

According to Obama it’s time to modernize NASA’s space program. And by space program, he means telling Muslims how smart and wonderful they are and how the world has a debt of gratitude from all their accomplishments. Had there been no Muslim scientists there never would have been a NASA. It should all be another giant leap for mankind.

Michael Griffin, who headed NASA during the last four years of the Bush administration, says the space agency’s new goal to improve relations with the Islamic world and boost Muslim self-esteem is a “perversion” of NASA’s original mission to explore space. “NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.” (Washington Examiner)

While Muslim scientists and Muslim contributions to space exploration may not be as wild and speculative as global warming and concerned aliens, NASA goes undeterred.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

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On the morning of April 12, 1981, I had the privilege of doing something few other 6-year-olds got to do: I watched the very first Space Shuttle launch from the air near Cape Canaveral.

My father, at the time, owned a helicopter charter company and was flying press runs and national news anchors from hotels to the Cape (Dan Rather was nice enough to let me get some sleep in his hotel room the night before the launch). At the time, the launch of Columbia marked the end of a six-year American-less era in space, as the Shuttle program succeeded the Apollo program that by the year 1975 had become a service vehicle for the joint Russian Skylab program.

The optimism that spring morning was palatable, as thousands of people camped out all night and filled the causeway over the Banana River and lined the streets and beaches of Titusville and beyond. They had reason to be optimistic about this new age of space exploration. This “Space Shuttle” — designed in the 1960s, built and tested in the 1970s — would usher in a new era of cheap and frequent manned space flight. In fact, it would become so commonplace people would probably cease to notice. With space flight being affordable and accessible, it was only a matter of time before the idea of growing up to become an astronaut wouldn’t require all those years of studying and hard work; why, anyone could go!

As we know now, it was not to be. NASA’s first attempt to put a civilian in space ended in spectacular tragedy when the Shuttle Challenger broke up during liftoff on a frigid day in January, 1986.

This disaster, later attributed technically to an O-ring failure in the shuttle’s solid rocket booster, but more broadly attributed to a rushed and overambitious schedule and bureaucratic negligence, grounded the program for 2 1/2 years.

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This week I filed a lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in federal district court in the District of Columbia on behalf of The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. On the heels of obtaining a court order last month compelling the University of Virginia to produce the long-sought ‘Hockey Stick’-related records, ATI’s transparency project now seeks to force NASA to release ethics records for taxpayer-funded global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, specifically those pertaining to his outside employment, revenue generation, and advocacy activities.

What we are trying to determine is whether NASA approved Hansen’s widespread, well-documented, high-profile and, it turns out, extremely lucrative “outside employment and other activities”, permission for which must be obtained in writing, in advance. Public financial disclosures and other documents reveal that he has received at least $1.2 million in the past four years, more than doubling his taxpayer-financed salary.

You may have seen Monday’s Washington Post front page article, titled in the print edition “Deliver the sound bite, watch donors eat it up: incendiary comments can light a fire under candidates’ fundraising”. As we demonstrate in our complaint, the connection seems to exist elsewhere in government, too.

That is, although we removed from the final version a reminder of Hansen’s escalation to knee-jerk invocation of Nazi analogies, this remains a key point about this gusher of outside income. All of which comes on top of — and, more troubling, is all “related to” and is sometimes even according to his benefactors expressly for — his taxpayer-funded employment.

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Google’s growing influence with government is beginning to pay dividends for the company while leaving consumers and taxpayers on the short end of the stick.

Since donating over $1 million to the president’s campaign and building its online presence and fundraising base, the company has reaped continued returns on their investment, so much so, that Google’s former CEO is rumored to be on the shortlist to be the nation’s new Secretary of Commerce.

In order to pad its bottom line, Google made a conscious effort to grow its influence in Washington by hiring insiders and placing Google executives in the Administration. In a short period of time, Google has been rewarded with over 25 contracts with government agencies including the NASA, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency.

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Whether or not you’re buying the sudden, unlikely, belief in American Exceptionalism that Barack Obama displayed during his State of the Union speech, one thing is clear.  However great we, as a nation are, we cannot “win the future.”

In his address, Obama spent a lot of time talking about our “Sputnik Moment.”  In the mid 50’s, the United States was on the receiving end of a space-race smack down.  The Russians had been the first to put a satellite in orbit.  Soon after, they would outpace us again, by putting a human in space and returning them safely to Earth.  Despite the objections from Democrats like Walter Mondale, America funneled its collective will into rectifying the situation.  According to the President, we had recognized our “Sputnik moment” and were on our way to “winning the future” by beating Russia to the Moon.

That was 50 years ago.  In the following decades, we maintained our space-age dominance through multiple lunar missions, Skylab, the space shuttle, and unparalleled advances in satellite technology.   We’re now seeing our leadership status erode.

When George Bush left office, we were on pace to return to the moon – ahead of our new space-rivals, the Chinese.  Barack Obama put an end to that program.  He gutted NASA’s budget and all but eliminated manned space flight, while paying lip service to a nebulous, underfunded, Mars mission that many believe will never come to fruition.  Liberals regularly tell us that there’s nothing a human can do in space that a machine can’t.  According to the scientific mind of Barney Frank, “Manned space travel adds far more cost than is justified in terms of scientific return.”

Predictably, while the left decimates American space exploration, China is ramping up its Space initiative. The CNSA (China National Space Administration) is aggressively pursuing a series of orbital missions and moon shots, which will be funded by the interest paid on the money Barack Obama is currently borrowing. As a result, where space exploration is concerned, China has become the new Russia, and once again we’ve fallen behind.

Only this time, we’ve done so by choice.

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I was taken aback by this paragraph in a Politico story by someone a colleague of mine styles as the best reporter in DC on these issues. It reveals the media are not only telling us what to watch for this year, but getting an early jump:

Despite mounting evidence that the greenhouse gas buildup in the Earth’s atmosphere is causing runaway changes to the climate – NASA this month declared 2010 the hottest year on record – several pollsters say the American public isn’t listening. (emphases added)

Now, the reason no evidence — mounting, or otherwise — of runaway climate change was cited there is because there is no evidence of runaway climate change. Let alone man-made. There is as there always has been a continuing stream of evidence of changes in climate, because change is the sole constant in climate. But it takes an environmentalist or axe-grinding politician to say that whatever happens is evidence supporting his faith and/or agenda. The ‘runaway’ business is just absurdly hyperbolic. Which, again, is why no such evidence was actually cited.

Get this straight because you are going to get used to this: their new talking point, 2010 being the hottest year ‘on record’, wouldn’t be such evidence even though it is knowingly intoned as a self-evident example of cause-effect. This is true even if the claim by cited source, NASA — meaning James Hansen’s runaway office, known as GISS — did not reflect GISS having done two things: adjusting the historical record to make older years cooler (rewriting history) and ‘extrapolating’ data over vast stretches in the Arctic where they have none…but which happens to be where they find the warming (making history up).

None of which is secret, all of which then makes the above-cited paragraph an embarrassment.

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On Wednesday night the Competitive Enterprise Institute, through its outside counsel Gibson Dunn, filed its brief arguing against NASA’s rather scattershot and contradictory effort to dismiss our lawsuit requesting certain documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Our suit, CEI vs. NASA (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia), followed on the heels of ClimateGate, and a December 2009 Notice of Intent to Sue if NASA did not turn over certain records withheld since CEI sought them in August 2007 and January 2008 requests. That Notice was eleven months ago and, despite NASA offering some documents and admitting — temporarily — that certain others relating to the advocacy site used by NASA scientists, RealClimate.org were “agency records”, NASA then ceased its brief steps to comply with the transparency statute FOIA.

Despite NASA stonewalling CEI has already learned, for example, that NASA does not, contrary to widespread media and pressure group claims, have an independent temperature data set. Instead, as NASA told USA Today in an email, despite its serial, breathless press releases trumpeting some new temperature high, it actually is just a modeling office, which also (for unknown reasons, possibly extra attention and importance, or mere advocacy)  cobbles together some US data from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with that of the Climatic Research Unit’s temperature history. You may recall how CRU withdrew its claim to a temperature history data set after ClimateGate led to an admission it actually lost its data.

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We landed on the moon over two generations ago, and ever since NASA has been used as intellectual support for those who think we can solve any problem with a wave of the legislative or regulatory wand.   “If government can put a man on the moon,” goes statist conventional wisdom, “it can do anything.” If you’ve ever been in a debate with a true believer in the magic of big government, you’ve probably heard some variation of this generic argument.

Despite the significant flaws in this logic, it was always difficult to convince the general public just why it was wrong.  Now, with the ridiculous admission of NASA Administrator Charles Bolden that the so-called space agency’s priority is to boost Muslim self-esteem, this last fig leaf of big government has finally been removed.  Believers in grand government solutions to all social problems are left naked for all to see.

The comment itself isn’t really the big story.  Yes, it’s outrageous.  It represents everything that is wrong with the PC-obsessed, America-bashing, leftist administration currently occupying the White House.  But it’s merely the latest  in a lengthy list of NASA disappointments.  The real story is the slow, drawn-out transformation of NASA from a symbol of American exceptionalism into a national embarrassment.

Given the dramatic and iconic bang with which NASA introduced itself to the public, it’s easy to overlook that it’s a government bureaucracy just like any other.  It suffers from all the typical failings of government institutions.  Without market pressures, NASA has grown increasingly wasteful.  A recent GOA report found that 9 out of 10 assessed projects experienced cost overruns and delays.  That’s almost a perfect score in inefficiency.

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Reason.tv presents Citizens Against Government Waste’s Porker of the Month for June 2010. CAGW makes this award to a politician or special interest who takes pork-barrel spending to new heights.

This month’s winner is Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)!

The Constellation Program was intended to modernize NASA and replace the aging Space Shuttle, but has been plagued by cost overruns and blown deadlines.  President Obama and NASA have proposed canceling the unsustainable program—turning instead to the emerging private space industry to oversee launches.

In response, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) co-sponsored a measure protecting Constellation, which was attached to an emergency war funding bill. Such a measure ensures millions of taxpayer dollars will continue being funneled to politically connected NASA contractors.

Contractors like Alabama’s own Radiance Technologies, which—wouldn’t you know it—just happens to be one of Shelby’s biggest campaign contributors.

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After three weeks, most Americans still do not understand all of the behind-closed-door deals that had to be cut on the $965 Billion dollar bailout of Greece.  It’s yet another complicated deal, with little transparency to let non-governmental folks understand the specifics.

But, I do understand the power of a dream that can inspire a new generation.  And I know that Obama just killed that dream.

Obama’s decision to expand bailouts to include Greece coincided with a Senate hearing on another decision Obama  made to cut funding for a government space travel program, killing the dream of a permanent station on the Moon or a landing on Mars.

As an unintended, but cruel, joke,  Obama’s decision to retreat from space exploration has been pushed as an example of  the President’s fiscal discipline.  No doubt, Obama was hoping that such cuts would mask the fact that  he has endorsed the greatest deficits spending in the history of the United States.

But, as with many of Obama’s posturings, fiscal discipline was a canard.  Obama’s decision to cut NASA’s space travel wasn’t fiscally disciplined, it was just ill-informed.

Let’s take another look  at these two decisions.

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Canada’s Macleans has a profile of the skeptic at the center of the ClimateGate e-mails (what, you expected an American newspaper to cover this story?):

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.

In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.

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Over at the Weekly Standard, the always impressive Steven Hayward has a good summation of where we are in Climate Gate:

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

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One thing about “ClimateGate” nagging at the back of my mind is the absence of any discussion by ringleader Phil Jones (or others) of the remarkable, shocking discovery that Jones now claims he had that his precedessor destroyed the raw data in the 1980s.

That is the data that scientists have for years been seeking from Jones under the UK’s freedom of information law. Against numerous such requests he offered equally numerous excuses for refusing access culminating with the September 2009 claim – when it looked like he’d been cornered and had no excuses not to provide it to Prof. Ross McKitrick who met all of his long-stated qualifications – that in fact he’d lost it.

First, it does seem odd that Jones would so firmly and crisply articulate his many, very specific excuses for so many years about why he could not provide something that in fact they had, as he now tells it, lost. His refusals all clearly imply that a belief that he had it.

But where are the emails putting out the word, oh, snap, you guys aren’t gonna believe this?

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The alarmists’ reaction to CEI’s Notice of Intent to Sue NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for withholding data–now for nigh on two years–has been particularly shrill, as regards my inquiry into the clearance and other deliberations over the non-official activities for the nasty, deceptive, third-party advocacy blog RealClimate.org by one GISS spokesman Gavin Schmidt on official, taxpayer-funded time.

When considering that apparently unacceptable Request for transparency as to what NASA was thinking in agreeing to spend my money that way, our Notice and the alarmists’ reaction in the current “ClimateGate” context, also consider the following relevant excerpt from “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” (pp. 104-104). That nice red cover would look great under the tree this year, even if what’s inside the cover is burning the retinas of the global warming industry right about now:

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Yesterday, on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal – for nearly three years – to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “ClimateGate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer codes and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material and that sought for years by CEI go to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

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Why ask why? National Science Foundation and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study why children ask so many “why” question

Harvest time: The Washington Apple Commission receives federal funds to educate retailers in China, Russia and other countries how to handle apples and other perishable products

NASA wants you to know that the world won’t end in 2012; U.S. space agency launches Web resource to counter fictional new movie

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