In another world, a better world, with a media capable of actually doing more than regurgitating White House press releases like force fed geese, Obama talking up a Mars trip would have been met with howls of laughter.
Obama killed the space program. He killed the space shuttle. He killed its replacement vehicle. He killed a proposed lunar trip disgusting Neil Armstrong. He turned NASA into a global warming slash Muslim self-esteem shop.
In July 2010, NASA chief Charles Bolden, an Obama appointee, told Al Jazeera that his boss had given him three priorities… none of them involving space exploration. The foremost priority for the agency once tasked with sending a man to the moon was “to reach out to the Muslim world… to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”
A small step for one man had become a great step for Muslimkind.
This week marked the 44th anniversary of the moon landing. Three months earlier, an irritated Bolden had responded to critics of a directionless NASA by saying, “NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission. NASA is not going to the Moon."
In 2008, Obama's position paper said that he "endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020." He lied. In 2010, he announced that returning to the moon was not a worthwhile goal because it “lacked innovation”.
Obama claimed that he wanted to retain a working space shuttle. In office however he scrapped the shuttles leaving the United States wholly dependent on Russian Soyuz rockets. Around the time that Bolden was telling America that we would not go to the moon, his skeleton of a space agency, now concerned with Muslim outreach and Global Warming, was paying the Russian space agency $424 million for six Soyuz seats.
“By buying the services of space transportation, rather than the vehicles themselves, we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met,” Obama said at the John F. Kennedy Space Center.
Quoting him, Neil Armstrong wrote, “It was asserted that by buying taxi service to Low Earth Orbit rather than owning the taxis, “we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met”. The logic of that statement is mystifying.”
There's a lot more in there and it's all bad.
But Obama is looking around for a high note legacy. So he's suddenly talking up Mars. And his poodle press corps is enthusiastically barking along. Here's Obama's report from an alternate reality.
That's one of the reasons why, in my first address as President to the American people, I vowed to return science to its rightful place. In our first few months, my administration made the largest single investment in basic research in our history, and I went to the Kennedy Space Center to call for reimagining and reinvigorating our space program to explore more of our solar system and look deeper into the universe than ever.
In the years since, we've revitalized technology innovation at NASA, extended the life of the International Space Station, and helped American companies create private-sector jobs by capitalizing on the untapped potential of the space industry.
The same media that has factchecked comedy routines critical of Obama. Not to mention a teen on Twitter. Won't fact check this.
What's Obama's plan to go to Mars? Glad you asked. Lots of meetings and conferences and coordination. I'm sure Muslim self-esteem is in there somewhere.