An Attack On NASA Is An Attack On American Innovation

What makes America great is not our size. We are outnumbered by the Chinese, but we are certainly not out-gunned mentally. We are not the greatest nation in the world because we have the most guns, or the largest army or the best pizza. The U.S. is not composed of the most ruthless people in the world, nor the most cruel or jingoistic. So why are we definitely the most powerful?

Our relentless drive to succeed in whatever we do is what makes us the dominant nation in the world today.

In America our primary motivator to innovate and succeed is not the government’s whip at our back, like so many other countries (particularly the socialist ones) throughout history. While national pride is very much alive in the United States, we strive to discover and create because we benefit personally along with the U.S. when new technologies and ideas are birthed in our laboratories, drafting rooms, basements and garages. This is the well-spring of American power.

The U.S. accounts for about one third of the world’s R&D budget. We are the world’s leader in all things scientific and technological. We founded the Internet and our semiconductors run the world’s computers (Intel, AMD and Motorola, some of the oldest companies in the game, are American enterprises). Our space program, which put the first human on the moon, has no rival and has long been the power plant for our Cyclopean engines of advancement in countless industries.

Oops. Wait a minute there…

President Obama’s administration just threw NASA under the bus. Right along with NASA goes a bevy of things that the government can do to encourage innovation in several of the key technological industries in the United States. Under Obama’s stripped out plan for NASA we won’t even be able to send our own astronauts into space. We will need to rely on Russian Soyuz capsules to get our people beyond the stratosphere, at the cost of 50 million dollars a seat.