Candidates in Orbit by PJ O’Rourke laments the lack of vision when it comes to space policy from either side of the aisle. After an engineer states that Obama will “kill the manned space program”, he asks:

Then the engineer asked me a question.. “What message will it send in 2023 or so when China can put a man on the moon and we can’t put one in low Earth orbit?”

NASA is withering because it doesn’t have the funding to do anoher Apollo program and doesn’t have the vision to do something remarkable that it can afford. But something is amiss: Technology has advanced so much in so many areas that many hugely expensive things are now dirt cheap. Can we leverage that?

One good idea mentioned: Turing NASA more into an R&D rather than an operations agency. There is a better way than trying to put men in space the same way it was done in the 1960s, and perhaps NASA R&D can find it. We can revamp the concept of space exploration with a large focus on unmanned robotic exploration, just as we control UAVs today, remotely. It’s time to think about a permanent Moon base staffed by … robots.

By Patrick