Obama Would Redirect NASA Funding to Education

QuantumG writes "In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."

Err. Can we mod summaries?

Can we mod article summaries?

It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether.

-1 Drama Queen

So according to these doyens of space and associated fields, if a U.S. project is put off for 5 years (to educate children - how DARE they?) then this will quell humankind's desire to travel in space forever?

I think there's some space all right, but it's obviously not all out there beyond the stars...

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However if this is true or not, I think, it's a good idea and should be at least taken in to consideration! Just ask yourself: What would be more useful for the world and U.S. citizens?

1. a) "Quickly pulling out of Iraq" and therefore loosing some major in

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

I'm always amazed at the number of conservatives who believe that more money always buys a better gun, but more money can't buy a better teacher.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

> I'm always amazed at the number of conservatives who believe that
> more money always buys a better gun, but more money can't buy a better
> teacher.

Simple, lets start with guns. There are LOTS of guns, built for every possible use and you can pick the one best suited to your intended use. There are lots of good reviews to allow you to make an informed decision.

Now lets contrast this with teachers. Testing teachers for quality control is forbidden. Parents disagree over what 'teaching' even should be, but the State prescribes one doctrine for all. If one disagrees with WHAT is being taught it is hard to see how buying more of it will change anything. If we can't quantify quality other than waiting thirten years to see how many children out of each batch gets destroyed it is hard to get a grip on quality control, thus throwing more money at a broken design is contra indicated.

Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:

1. Create obedient drones to man the dehumanizing factories of the industrial revolution. (Leader types were to be the children of the wealthy who would continue attending the best private academies.)

2. Ensure every drone (child) was properly instructed in socialism, including their palce in the new order. i.e. They follow, and the annointed elite lead.

3. Remove children from the labor force, thus removing a major competitive pressure on the trade unions.

Even if the schools were operating with 100% efficency I'd be arguing for burning the lot to the ground and starting over. But the reality is even more horrible. No. Sending a child to government schools is child abuse and pissing away the entire Federal budget on the current schools could only, in a perfect world, bring them back to the dystopia I outlined above because that is their stated DESIGN GOAL.

When you are ready to join me in abolishing the current system and privitizing education we can talk about whether and how much the various levels of government should subsidize education.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

To be fair, allocating federal funding to pre-kindergarten education is pretty damn unlikely to buy any K-12 teachers.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

The problem is that the pool of available and willing professional expertise is not static. I've already witnessed this at my current workplace, where, after less than 1 year of abandoning a relatively complicated process for a far more simple but grossly less efficient one due to temporarily relaxed requirements, the very same people who used to run the former process are unable to revive it as requirements swing back towards tighter schedules and resources--in fact their efforts to do so have made things even worse.

It is always harder to start (or revive) a program than to keep one running, and even highly skilled people who are capable of the latter may not be able to do the former if it is interrupted or temporarily disbanded for a significant period of time.

If you interrupt an extremely technically demanding program for 5 years, it will either or both take a long time or a director and team of a totally different caliber to bootstrap it again.

The principles described in the above also apply doubly to political will. At this point, NASA's funding is largely due to the legendary inertia of the government. If it were scrapped, it would take someone with an overwhelming mandate and clear, focused vision to build the political consensus and drive it through congress again.

Note that 5 years means that he is scheduling the program's revival in the next presidential term. He does not feel that it should be his responsibility to put humpty dumpty back together again after pushing him off a the wall.

It is hyperbole to say that this would kill manned space exploration, but it may well kill manned space exploration in the US until the next cold war/space race, which we are likely to lose if we try to revive gutted institutions to compete with a program with strong, decades-long unbroken momentum.

Also, speaking to the larger issue of education, 'more funding' is absolutely not a silver bullet that will guarantee better quality, and the education section in his 'blueprint' booklet is totally opaque. It identifies many issues (the easiest part), states proposals to address the issues (also easy), and then does nothing to explain why or how those proposals will work (the only part that really matters).

In all honesty, I think Obama is probably the candidate I dislike the least at this point, but--and I don't hold the following against him directly, per se--it really bothers me that his supporters seem to be under the influence of a Jobs-esque reality distortion field. That people on /. of all places are willing to trivialize the scrapping of a major program of NASA because a politician cries 'think of the children'--without even attempting a strong explanation of why this is necessary--is just sad.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

Also the most important factor of going back to actual human space exploration instead of a shuttle service is to inspire people. If seeing the mars landing inspires a child to work hard to become an astronaut, engineer or whatever it's certainly a lot more cost effective than throwing another few billion at the education system.

Compare it to other countries and US education's problem isn't even lack of money, the whole system's just fscked up.

Also, if Mister Universe would slash the DoD budget to more sane levels (i.e. less than the money spent by all other nations on earth combined when the majority of that money is spent by your allies), then instead a few billions he'd be able to distribute a few hundred billions and perhaps he could even give NASA another billion or two without anyone noticing.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

Also, all three are senators. There's something about the US Senate which tends to detach you from reality. The longer you are there, the worse it gets. By now Ted Kennedy must be wondering when he's going to get his sainthood declared.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

Obama is too radical and disruptive.

(Apologies in advance, because I know how touchy Americans are about people from anywhere else voicing opinions on US politics; the fact is, if the US was less powerful, we'd care less)-

Radical and disruptive is exactly what the US needs right now.

Re:Err. Can we mod summaries?

Absolutely NOT. Radical and disruptive is what we have RIGHT NOW, in the form of the bizarre swing to authoritarianism that has taken place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and oddly enough, France.

What we need is a return to rationality, common sense and decency, real compassion for other beings, and respect for human rights.

That's disappointing

It's actually the first major thing I have disagreed with Obama on. My hint for those keeping score at home is that quickly pulling out of Iraq would generate a lot more spare funds. It's not like NASA is actually a major drain at all, and almost all of the money comes back to R&D and the like. *sighs* Still not wanting HRC or McCain though.

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Quickly pulling out of Iraq will create an Iran which is double the size of present. There will be a Kurd fragment in the north (with a tiny bit of oil) which may or may not end up being eaten by Turkey, an arab fragment in the west (with virtually no oil,

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The worst bit here is that if we did not topple Saddam we would have never had this problem on our hands.

Assuming that he isn't immortal - for which there is empirical evidence - it would have happened anyway. It's just a question of when.

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Oh noes! Iran! They're gonna NUKE us with their ICBMs!!!!1 Seriously, stop drinking the kool-aid and realize that we have bigger issues to worry about than freakin Iran.

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I recently went to a dinner with some friends (from Syria, Egypt, China, Lebanon and Iran). There were no people from the USA in the table (only British and Mexicans), all of us PhD students, R.As or Professors at my university.

One of the conversation the

Re:That's disappointing

Unless you're in an open state of war with said country, which technically speaking the US was, and said country readily breaks the cease-fire, thinking that there's no way in hell you'd end up retaliating. Admittedly, the actual reasons for the invasion were different, but the fact remains that the US and Iraq were still in a state of war.

Re:That's disappointing

My hint for those keeping score at home is that quickly pulling out of Iraq would generate a lot more spare funds.

The Iraq war is paid for almost exclusively with special funding initiatives, it is not part of the budget. So ending the war won't suddenly free up trillions of dollars for other uses, it will just slow our descent into debt from the Demon Drop speed it is currently.

The rigors of kindergarten

"Mommy, can I go out and play?"

"Oh no you don't! Not until you've studied up for your advanced color identification exam!"

No one needs pre-kindergarten education

I will never understand why people have children they can't be bothered to raise. Shunted into daycare as soon as possible, raised by nannies, and they are still always clamoring for yet more school at younger ages.

Open letter to the people having these children: Your genes are not special. Your kid will not cure cancer. Get over yourself. It's expensive to raise children--especially when you have to pay the people who are actually doing it. Why don't you just volunteer for one of those Big Brother programs on the weekends? You'll see those kids just as often as your own, with the added benefit of not causing all that emotional damage.

Rigors of kindergarten, pffft.

The US has no monopoly on human spaceflight!

America-centric bollocks. If NASA were razed to the ground and all its employees rounded up and shot, it still would not spell the end of human spaceflight... as John F. Kennedy knew perfectly well when he launched the race to the moon.

Nothing could please the Russians more than to have lost the battle for the moon, but to have won the war for space.

Bring on the robots!

Humans are, fundamentally, abysmally unsuited to survival in space. Plus, we insist on bringing astronauts BACK, which makes every manned mission FAR more complex and expensive.

Human spaceflight may be romantic and inspiring, and a human may be far more flexible and adaptable than any robot, but humans also have outrageous supply and environmental demands. It's simply impossible for manned missions to do more than a tiny fraction of what far cheaper automated probes can do.

And every time NASA shoots a Shuttle into low orbit to feed the ISS so that it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule [umd.edu], they do almost zero to advance human knowledge, and spend enough money to send a whole new robot-rover mission to Mars and then run it for three months.

People who insist that manned spaceflight is worth the price do not, I think, usually comprehend the magnitude of the difference between that price and the price of unmanned probes. They also seem to have a pretty poor grasp of what space science actually entails, and how little of it even theoretically can be done by people.

So, I think I agree with Obama

(My karma is screwed up, but you should read this anyway, despite the zero)

At first, I was like, "Oh no, not the space program". But then I realized, maybe just because I'm trying to rationalize a way to agree with Obama, that I think I do actually agree. Here is why.

Firstly, thanks to Bush, we really aren't going to be doing anything interesting in space anytime soon. Sure we could putter around and send some probes, but we aren't going to have the resources to do something really extraordinary for awhile.

In the meantime, the US is slipping. We aren't the smartest, we aren't the biggest economy and we slowly shifting away from the center of the world. Like Egypt, China and Europe before, it is possible that the world's reins may slip from our hands unless we do something. Now whether that is a bad thing or not, I don't know, but as a government, I'm assuming a main goal is to retain influence.

One of the best ways to maintain our influence is through education. If we really go all out on the next generation, then in 30 years, we'll still be the center of the modern world. If not, then in 30 years, China, Japan, Europe and India are going to stop sending us their smartest people and keep them for themselves, and then we'll just have the brain-deads over here watching American Idol.

The best, most surefire way to increase the overall effectiveness of our education system is early education. We can pour trillion into high schools and get microscopic results, but just a fraction of that going into getting education out there to pre-kindergardeners and we will probably see general competency double. No I don't have a source for that, it being pure speculation, but it is well known that early development is a critical stage.

Lately I've realized how little parent teach their kids. Some, I dare say most, do absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe the teach them to count to ten, but that is all. You're lucky if you get the ABC's as well. I find it shocking when I talk to people who didn't get taught anything as a child, and even more shocking when I see children not being taught.

I was reading fluently and doing basic algebra before I entered kindergarden, and that lead has stuck with me my whole life. (Quite frustrating actually.)

So yeah, those of you who are complaining that Obama isn't thinking long term, take a moment to consider whether you are thinking long term. Getting off of the planet, to a different solar system is going to take hundreds and hundreds of years of dedicated work and research. Furthermore, throughout those hundreds of years, society will have to be intelligent enough in general to realize the need for such a project and support it (which they aren't now). Possibly, before we dive straight for space flight, we need to raise the intellectual level of society high enough that they aren't looking at their own wallets so hard that we'll never get off the ground.

Early education sounds like the best way to do that to me.

P.S. I've only gotten one, count them, one bad mod (overrated), and I've got several (8 or 9) good ones, yet my karma has decided to become "bad". So now all my posts start at zero and no one ever reads them (let alone mods them up), meaning I can never get my karma to good, or at least normal. What is up with that. Should I just start a new account. Seriously, does one overrated mean I should be censored like this? Bah. Bah. I bet no one reads this either.

Re:I call shenanigans

Source seems to be:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/HQpress/112007%20education%20plan%201.pdf [barackobama.com]
barackobama.com, of course, being the official Barack Obama website.
This link then redirects to the 3cdn hosting site, where the PDF is located.

Re:I call shenanigans

This story has been all over like a month ago. The Orlando Sentinel had a story that they ran where it compared things Obama said outside of Florida to things he said while in Florida. Outside of FL, he goes on about slashing the NASA budget. Then, when talking to people that directly affects, he changes the story to spending less on education and more on NASA to try to get votes.

Fuck, I hate politicians.

Re:Not a bad idea

.... [the X-Prize winner] never came close to leaving Earth's orbit

They never came close to being in Earth orbit either. That requires 20 times the speed and 60 times the energy [wired.com] than they achieved.

Rich.