Shedding a tear for America

This week is a sad moment for Amer­ica. We have ceded our lead and pres­ence in space. I watched the space shut­tle on its funeral jour­ney aboard a 747 at Dulles ear­lier this week. Now the U.S. begs and buys seats as mere pas­sen­gers aboard Russ­ian space craft some at NASA and in the gov­ern­ment not so long ago derided dismissively.

We end the week with the Rus­sians in space and China plan­ning on mak­ing claims on the moon. Our moon.

In the 60s I watched Apollo 8 take flight from Cape Canaveral, watched oth­ers from the far side of Florida. We were inspired. Amer­ica once solely defined mankind’s ven­ture in space and reaped the ben­e­fits. Now we are just clue­less spectators.

I blame Obama today for allow­ing this mis­for­tune to befall Amer­ica. On his watch. And, absolutely, it did not start with him. We can go back to Nixon opt­ing for the low orbit space shut­tle instead of real space and every pres­i­dent since that barely giave lip ser­vice to our pres­ence in space.

Instead we turned to unjus­ti­fied and waste­ful wars that we were not pre­pared to win, nor pay for except by tak­ing funds from other pro­grams. We’ve expanded our wel­fare and char­ity pro­grams to give some­thing to every­one, includ­ing 10s of mil­lions of ille­gal aliens that have invaded our coun­try and taken Amer­i­can jobs. Our gov­ern­ment seems hap­pier to pay unem­ploy­ment and wel­fare to Amer­i­cans than free up those job oppor­tu­ni­ties usurped by ille­gal aliens.

Today Obama has bank­rupted Amer­ica, adding almost more debt than all pre­vi­ous pres­i­dents com­bined. It is a won­der we can even afford a seat on a Russ­ian spacecraft.

Obama killed the Amer­i­can space pro­gram, allow­ing and cash­ing in on its demise to fin­ish the hap­less path started by his predecessors.

“

Espe­cially in light of our new fis­cal con­text, it is not pos­si­ble to achieve the inspir­ing space pro­gram goals dis­cussed dur­ing the campaign.”–Obama administration

It makes one want to cry for Amer­ica. Our lead­ers have no vision, they squan­der our lives, our val­ues, our inge­nu­ity, and our spirit.

This arti­cle is also pub­lished at No Quar­ter USA.