Obama destroyed NASA. As I discussed in detail in my investigative piece, Muslim Self-Esteem or the Stars.
On July 20, 1969, an audience of 500 million people watched a man set foot on the surface of the moon and plant an American flag in the gray powder of the Sea of Tranquility.
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.”
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”
The Space Shuttle, that final relic of space exploration, was scrapped and the remaining shuttles were passed out as pork to politically connected museums. The replacement Constellation program was also scrapped.
As far back as 2007, Obama had called for delaying the Constellation program, which would have replaced the space shuttles, for five years in order to pay for his education program. He was the only major candidate to do so.
Once he got into office, the delay became a full-fledged cancellation.
In 2008, Obama hypocritically blasted the Bush Administration for allowing “a five-year gap after the retirement of the Space Shuttle” during which time “the United States will have to depend on foreign rockets and spacecraft to send Americans to orbit”.
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.
There's more. A lot more. It's an issue that has been only lightly covered. But it's one of the ways in which Obama tore down what made America great.
But there's also a fresh new wind blowing through America. It envisions NASA doing something other than Muslim self-esteem and Global Warming. Like actually going out there. In his State of the Union speech, President Trump said, "American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream."
Now some of his advisers are signaling that we might go to the moon.
"There is certainly a renewed interest in the Moon in the Trump administration," said John Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University.
Some of Trump's advisors worked on the Constellation program, conceived by former president George W. Bush with a goal to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the pioneering US Apollo missions of the 1960s and '70s.
The possibilities are great. If we choose to reach for them.