Going to Mars

This past week, Barack Obama, whom we keep trying to forget is the current president of the United States, said something to the effect that we were going to try to have a manned mission to the planet Mars in the 2030s.

Let us set aside, or get out of the way quickly, all the immediate thoughts about perhaps sending him there now, as an involuntary astronaut, and perhaps having Hillary Clinton as his co-pilot on the trip.  I admit that thoughts like that were my immediate reaction when I heard, a day or two later, that Obama had actually said that.

Then I started to ask myself the obvious question.  No, it's not the one about why we should go to Mars; that would be an interesting question that otherwise like-minded folk could agree or disagree on.  I don't know that I actually have a strong opinion about it; it's a question between the proper use of the money it would take (i.e., should we borrow it from China) vs. the potential secondary and tertiary scientific benefits that might come from the development of the vehicle and systems needed to do such a thing.

My question is actually much simpler.  Why would Barack Obama, who is a totally political being in the last couple three months of his unfortunate presidency, care one bit about going to Mars?  Do you see what I mean?

Obama can do exactly nothing about it.  We are already into the government fiscal year 2017, so there is nothing that is going to get redirected in the NASA budget that wasn't already there, for the purpose of starting this.  Barack Obama will be mercifully out of the White House by the time anything could even get started.

So again, why would he bother?  His approval ratings are easing higher, presumably because he has been out of the public eye and therefore not in a position to screw any more things up visibly.  He simply does not have to hitch his creaky wagon to something like a Mars expedition, certainly not in any association with an actual effort to go there.

I have to go back to the whole "political beast" part of the argument.  Obama is always going to want to keep spending our money, so he can justify his successors' reaching into our pockets ever more, whether it goes to NASA or HUD.  He clearly has more sympathy for spending on HUD, but his comments were about NASA.  So why ...?

The political part apparently is associated with the "legacy" part -- Barack Obama cares about what people will think about his presidency even more than getting anything done during it.  That's why he insisted, despite the change to the situation, on moronic adherence to campaign promises and statements that he made years earlier, like setting deadlines to pull US troops out of places that led to the rise of Islamist terrorism.

But Obama can say he "kept his promises."  Yippee.

Nope, I think this has to do with John Kennedy, the former president from the 1960s, as opposed to the utility infielder from the 1960s. Remember old JFK talking about getting a man on the moon before the end of the '60s?  You might.  Hardly a news clip remembering Neil Armstrong or the Mercury astronauts goes by without the obligatory clip of JFK's speech about how we would get a man on the moon, and return him.

The left controls the media.  They will rewrite the facts of Barack Obama's abysmal legacy the day he leaves office, and Obama knows it.  That's why the press keeps letting the Hillary campaign refer to the birther movement as the "racist" birther movement, trying to discredit "the first black president", even though the birth movement had zippo to do with Obama being half black.

Obama knows that it is almost inevitable that NASA will continue pushing to try to get a man on Mars, and he wants to have his John Kennedy moment -- even though he will have had nothing to do with it, and will have almost eight years of trying to take funds from NASA to spend on wasteful Federal pursuits.  He knows that Mars is inevitable, and he knows the slavish, fawning press will start replaying clips of his declaration until we forget that Barack Obama couldn't have cared less about NASA in actuality, and certainly not until his term was mercifully over.

What a depressing state of affairs, to think that we can already predict how this is all going to play out.  Certainly Obama can, and that's why we have speeches like that.

But Barack Obama, you are no John Kennedy.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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