Apollo Astronauts Are "Very, Very Angry" With Obama's Attack on U.S. Future In Space

This nation's senior astronauts—the men who gave this nation some of its greatest moments, by landing on the Moon—are speaking out against the Administration's outrageous "space program to nowhere." The day after the Obama Administration's FY2011 budget for NASA was made public on Feb. 1, Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan—the last man to walk on the Moon—said in an interview with Fox 26 News that he is "very, very angry."

"We have a responsibility to our country to inspire our kids to do bigger and better and greater things," Cernan said. He pointed out that the President is propsing a $100 billion jobs bill, but wants to cut a program that creates the most skilled jobs, which would cost just $3 billion more per year. "I am very, very angry," Cernan said red-faced. "It's very shortsighted... He [Obama] is somehow unwilling to invest in the future of this country, and the future of this country is important to me. I won't be here in 20, 30, 40 years from now, but my grandkids will. I want them to have the country I had. I want something better for them."

Testifying before Congress a few weeks before the budget was released, but fully cognizant of what it would probably contain, Gemini, Apollo, and Apollo-Soyuz astronaut Gen. Tom Stafford said the choice is either "we will provide the funding necessary to accomplish worthy objectives, or this nation will cede its leadership on the space frontier to others."

Stafford pointed out that with all the ranting about how the Orion/Ares Shuttle replacement was behind schedule, the European Space Agency's unmanned ATV vehicle that services the station "delivered its first payload approximately four years later than their initial delivery date." It was incredible to Stafford that the nation would give up NASA's capabilities, when it had been "the result of five decades of effort purchased at the cost of nearly a trillion of today's dollars, and many lives."

(Not in this group is Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who has believed for some time that there is no need to go back to the Moon, since he's been there, and is promoting instead, a "more exciting" near-term manned missions to Mars.)

Other seasoned, next-generation, astronauts have also weighed in on the fight. Four-time Shuttle astronaut, Scott "Doc" Horowitz, writing in The Space Review, says: "Contrary to much of the misinformation being presented, the Ares I Program is not behind schedule or over budget.... The perceived schedule slip... from 2012 to 2015 [NASA's current estimate] has not been the result of programmatic or technical hurdles." The cause is the $12.6 billion less in funding that it received since 2005, he points out.

Similarly, four-time NASA astronaut Tom Jones, writing in Popular Mechanics, describes the proposed course as "second-class status in space." "Even though I helped build it, the space station is not an ultimate destination. The ISS is a stepping stone to more ambitious exploration," Jones writes. "This nation once put its confident footprints on the Moon. Following the President's misguided course, we will trudge in retreat from the frontiers and promise of space."