Oh good, my favourite subject. Eight pages already so I'll first write down my thoughts on the matter before I read all the messages.
-There's nothing I love more than space and my goal in life is to get to somewhere like Venus (the cloudtops where it's the same temperature as Earth, so think Cloud City from Ep. 5) or Ceres before I die. I'm Canadian and my support of a party is largely based on their vision for space development. In the US though it seems to be different because the US has been overextending itself for a long while and isn't in quite a favorable situation.
I think there's a place for NASA at present and they only take up 0.75% of the budget, and RP has talked about a consensus being needed when he becomes president, since he can't just run in there with an executive order and start shutting things down. The war in Iraq for example costs about the same per month as NASA uses in a year, so shutting that down right away is crucial. The debate over NASA can come later.
Luckily there are a lot of really good private space companies that are up and coming, such as Bigelow Airspace, SpaceX, Armadillo Airspace, JP Aerospace, and so on. They're not quite ready for the big time though. Once they are you can bet that they'll start stealing the show by themselves, so really the onus is on them. However, NASA is:
-a good thing, and
-much too small to worry about at present. Space is not a waste of money. The most obvious examples are probes that tell us where malaria is most likely to spread, letting poor countries concentrate their minimal extermination budgets on areas where people are most likely to be affected, technological spinoffs, and:
The most important reason of all:
-The ability to leave the planet, because eventually we're going to need to and as long as we're concentrated in one area we're eventually going to die there. This isn't me talking, it's Stephen Hawking.
But I see no reason why a person that likes space as much as I do shouldn't support Ron Paul. Actually living within your budget and staying out of the affairs of others creates spinoffs the likes of which you can't imagine. How many potential Hawkings have been killed or maimed in Iraq for example, and how many people have been blindsided by the over-exaggerated War against Terror to the extent that they've lost their ability to think for themselves and therefore about important and peaceful subjects like space development?
Okay, time to read the rest of the thread now.
