I am calling BULLSH-T on all Airline Baggage Fees

IF this picture doesn't convince you that the Airlines are a bunch of conartists, I don't know what would - IF a 747 can do this, my extra bag is not even an issue. What a scam. Nice Picture of the Shuttle Endeavor heading out on it's last flight to California.

Picture from a Politics Free Zone

PIC from the surface of MARS via Curosity - Many likley wish they could be there to escape the non-stop BS from the POLS....This is what the surface of another world looks like and we need to keep reaching for the stars, not letting the POLS kill off NASA.

Earth as viewed from space

If this is what the Aliens see, it is no wonder they like to stop by to see what is going on....what a view.

Nasa's HL-20, The Dream Chaser.....Is this our next Space Vehicle ??

There's been quite a bit of anguish due to the end of the Space Shuttle program. I feel that way too but at the same time, it is 1970's technology....we've retrofitted it with improvements but it is still akin to loading the family into a 1972 Impala Station Wagon for a cross country trip and hoping nothing goes wrong on the 6000 mile round trip.

Here is one of the proposed replacements.....It is on schedule for a 2015 launch.

Pictured above is a scale model of Nasa's HL-20, the Dream Chaser's inspiration. On the right, a wire-frame image, again of the HL-20. Before the Dream Chaser launches in 2015, it needs to pass a safety checklist that includes, atmospheric, orbital and crew-rated testing.

Like many other vehicles, they evolve and the newer ones are "leaner, meaner, cheaper & better".....Here's hoping that they "make it so.."


Will This Spaceship Replace the Shuttle?
Space.com

The next-generation spaceship chosen to fly American astronauts into orbit and back may look a lot like NASA's soon-to-be-retired space shuttle — and it even has NASA roots, too.

The Dream Chaser space plane, a private spaceship under development by the firm Sierra Nevada Corp., is in the running to provide orbital taxi services to NASA for trips to the International Space Station.

With the end of NASA's space shuttle program, the space agency will rely on others for travel to space. Here are the leading companies and their current generation space taxi systems.

The Dream Chaser vehicle looks much like a miniature version of the space shuttle, and its design is based largely on the HL-20, a NASA concept vehiclefirst drawn up in the early 1980s.

Sierra Nevada officials celebrated Dream Chaser's NASA heritage with a June 22 event at the agency's Langley Research Center in Virginia.

"I had made a promise that if we ever got to the point where the program was beginning to go to the next level, that we would find a way to come back and thank all of those people who enabled this," Sierra Nevada chairman Mark Sirangelo told the crowd, according to a NASA statement. [Vote Now! The Best Spaceships of All Time]

Secret Soviet spaceship origins

NASA didn't dream up the HL-20 all by itself. Rather, the agency was inspired by photos taken in 1982 by an Australian spy plane, which showed a Soviet ship recovering a spacecraft from the Indian Ocean.

"We spent a long time trying to figure out what it was," said Del Freeman, who was one of the few people at Langley with security clearance to see the photos.

The Soviet craft, it turns out, was a mini-shuttle called the BOR-4. NASA engineers used the photos to build a cherry-wood model of their own, which served as a starting point for the vehicle that would come to be known as the HL-20 (for horizontal lander). [10 Unrealized Military Aircraft Concepts]

"We were reverse-engineering it," Freeman said of the BOR-4. "Finally, we got enough information to build a model, and we put it into [a wind] tunnel. When we tested it, we really figured out that we had something."

The HL-20 evolved, then stalled when NASA moved on to other things. Then the idea of a space taxi stalled altogether, NASA officials said. But Sierra Nevada eventually revived the vehicle's basic idea.

Dream Chaser takes shape

The commercial space company SpaceDev, which was later acquired by Sierra Nevada, publicly announced plans for the Dream Chaser vehicle in 2004. Multiple concepts were initially considered, but ultimately company officials opted to go with the HL-20.

"The HL-20 had the best combination — a lot of history, a lot of testing done on it," Sirangelo said. "Also, the people who worked on it are still alive and around and engaged, so we had a chance to get that history."

The spacecraft of two decades ago and today's Dream Chaser look remarkably alike, officials said.

"You'd be surprised at how little it's changed," Sirangelo told the NASA employees. "The more we got into it, the more we realized how smart you all were."

The Colorado-based Sierra Nevada kept working on the Dream Chaser, and its efforts have paid off. On April 18, NASA awarded the company $80 million to continue developing the spacecraft after it was judged among four winners of the second round of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.

A Lack of TRUE LEADERSHIP in Washington has lead the US to possible 2nd place status in Space Exploration going forward

The lack of LEADERSHIP in Washington has been apparent for decades. The genuine Leaders we had in the past have given way to the political hucksters that dominate the halls of Government.

People's confidence in Congress & the Executive Branch are at all time lows.

It seems difficult to comprehend that we have not had any real LEADERS in the White House for almost 50 years....The list of the past nine Presidents since JFK reads like a train wreck of POLS who wanted to leave a legacy but only passed through leaving some accomplishments, but not the legacy that we saw from those who lead us through the first 2/3rd of the 20th century. Johnson (Lost Vietnam),Nixon (Lost it, period.), Ford (Placeholder), Carter(Another placeholder), Reagan (nice man but only really a figurehead - bankrupted the Soviets), Bush Sr. (Did well with the Gulf War but was dumped for Bubba), Clinton ( a True POL's POL ), GW Bush ( Another nice guy but light in real Leadership chops) and lastly, and the least (scraping the bottom of the barrel) Obama.

None of these men had the LEADERSHIP qualities of JFK, IKE, Truman or FDR. Comparing the "True Leadership" abilities held by the four men from 1932-1963 to the nine men from 1964 - 2011 shows that the real issue we have suffered over the last 48 years is a lack of genuine leaders. We have elected people who said they could lead but in the end, inspired little and left behind messes for those who followed them.....Now we have another group of " Wannabees" all jockeying to get into the Oval Office to replace the worst President we've seen since Hoover.

Well we need LEADERSHIP to stay ahead in the areas of Space Exploration as that was JFK's true legacy....He took us to the MOON and man has marveled at all that followed that effort.....to stop now due to inept political folly and lack of vision is not only wrong, it is a crime.


Kennedy targeted the moon within a decade, we'll be lucky if in ten years, we are where we were ten years ago
Posted By David Rothkopf Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - http://www.foriegnpolicy.com/

Last week, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in reference to Friday's launch of the last of 135 space shuttle missions,

" Some say that our final shuttle mission will mark the end of America's 50 years of dominance in human spaceflight. As a former astronaut and the current NASA Administrator, I want to tell you that American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we have laid the foundation for success -- and here at NASA failure is not an option. "

No, Charlie, at today's NASA, failure is not an option. It's an inevitability.

It's inevitable not because the quality of the men and women of NASA has declined. They remain among the best the United States has to offer. However, they have been drawn to a fabled program more because of what it has done in the past than what it is likely to do in the future. And that fact reveals the root cause of NASA's crisis -- and make no mistake, the program is more deeply in crisis than even during the dark hours around tragedies from the Apollo launch pad fire to the Challenger explosion to the disintegration of the Columbia on re-entry in 2003.

NASA is on a course to cede more than half a century of leadership in manned spaceflight not because of what has happened in Houston or at Kennedy Space Center in Florida or because of something that happened in space. No, NASA was undone by a loss of vision among America's political elites.

Simply put, they have forgotten how to lead and as a consequence, they have sacrificed our ability to lead as a nation. The national dialogue is devoid of a compelling vision of tomorrow, of the kind of lift that is essential if we are to head in any direction but down.

When I talk about such a dialogue, I'm not talking about the kind of reflexive, simplistic and misleading debate about whether we can afford a manned space program when the country is broke. No, I'm talking about the debate that real leaders, clear-eyed men and women who aspire to a better future, should continuously be having about how we ensure the country has the resources it needs to do those things it cannot afford to do without…including the exploration of new frontiers, the development of new technologies, and the inspiration of future generations.

You see, brain-dead political posturing of the sort that marks the current childish and irresponsible budget bickering in Washington has been going on for years. And as a consequence, the national patrimony has been given away in the form of tax breaks for rich individuals and companies that do not need them, deserve them or, in many cases, even want them. Whether George W. Bush offered up tax cuts and went into wars of choice because of deep seated ideological beliefs or for political gain, in so doing he didn't just obliterate America's surplus, he helped doom us to the period we are now entering: a period of austerity-induced withdrawal and decline.

When Republicans make the specious and childish arguments (see both David Brooks and David Leonhardt in the New York Times -- Leonhardt's piece is especially good) about not "raising taxes" at a time when we need to do everything to balance the budget, they are not just risking disaster and seeking to sacrifice the poor to pay for indulgences for the wealthy, they are effectively inviting China, Europe, India, and others to lead in the century ahead.

Manned spaceflight will continue…and Russians, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and others will step up to fill the void left by the fat, feckless Americans. We will be left with grainy images of John Kennedy setting the bold goal to reach the moon within a decade and wonder why such things could be achieved by greater generations that came before. How is it that once political leaders inspired by setting great goals and today our goals seem to be so defensive, so retrograde?

"We choose to go to the moon," said Kennedy in the late summer of 1962, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because the goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win…."

Now, our goals are what? To get back to where we were a decade ago? Back to a budget surplus? Back to a fairer tax code? Back to American global leadership that was untainted by missteps from Iraq to Guantanamo to Afghanistan?

To paraphrase another Kennedy, there are those -- among today's politicians -- who look at things the way they are and ask why…and then they dream of things that never were and do everything in their power to ensure we can't achieve them. In fact, in some cases, in the case of NASA and manned spaceflight -- the real stuff of dreams and inspiration and innovation and national pride and historical accomplishments -- it appears that we are going to stop even trying. As a consequence, when the Atlantis touches down, it will not just be a remarkable reusable spacecraft coming back to earth, it will also be, in a real way, a country's dreams grounded…at least until a true leader emerges again to set goals that lift us and drive us forward.

50 years later, JFK's words echo across time....." We choose to go to the Moon..."

John F. Kennedy was the right person at the right time to push us along into the Space Race. Russia was trying to assert itself and they had an edge in getting into space.....they also disregarded the safety of their Astronauts, unlike NASA where all efforts were in trying to keep the men we sent into Space safe.

JFK's leadership and vision are the true mark of leadership.....something that is completely missing from the White House and most of the Congress. Like driving down the highway in a restored 1961 Impala, we can imagine for a few minutes that we are back in that day & time when the whole world and our country were attentively listening the words of our 35th President who told us that we were going to the Moon and that while it would challenge our country's best, we would accomplish the task as it was the right thing to do....

Jack, we still hear you regardless of what the feckless idiot who presently sits at your desk says....We know you were the real deal, while others are only keeping the seat warm.

Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 23, 2011
NY TIMES

It was the spring of 1961. President John F. Kennedy, speaking of new frontiers and projecting the vigor of youth, had been in office barely four months, and April had been the cruelest.

On the 12th, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — one more space triumph for the Soviet Union. Though the flight was not unexpected, it was nonetheless deflating; it would be more than a month before Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and that was on a 15-minute suborbital flight. On the 17th, a force of anti-Castro exiles, trained by the C.I.A., invaded communist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs — a fiasco within 36 hours. Mr. Kennedy’s close aide Theodore Sorensen described him on the 19th as “anguished and fatigued” and “in the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him.”

At one meeting, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, “turned on everybody,” it was reported, saying: “All you bright fellows. You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we are not paper tigers.” At another, the president pleaded: “If somebody can, just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody — anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there.” Heading back to the Oval Office, he told Mr. Sorensen, “There’s nothing more important.”

So, 50 years ago, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, declaring: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

There it was, the challenge flung before an adversary and to a nation on edge in an unconventional war, the beginning of Project Apollo.

Echoes of this time lift off the pages of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon” (Palgrave Macmillan), a new book by John M. Logsdon, a political scientist and longtime space policy specialist at George Washington University. He has drawn on new research in archives, oral histories and memoirs available in recent years to shed new light on the moon race.

The famous speech came after five weeks of hand wringing, back-channel memos and closed-door conferences, often overseen by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. In those meetings NASA and Pentagon officials, scientists and engineers, budget analysts and others decided that sending astronauts to the Moon by the end of the sixties was the country’s best shot at overcoming the Soviet post-Sputnik command of the orbital front in the cold war.

But, Dr. Logsdon said in an interview last week, the new material highlighted some recurring themes that had been overlooked, like Mr. Kennedy’s return, time and again, to the idea of engaging the Russians in a cooperative venture, his continuing support of the project through a time of doubt, and how little was known then of Soviet capabilities and intentions.

Most of all, Dr. Logsdon said, hindsight had made him aware of his blindness to Apollo’s implications for the long run. He said he had been wrong, in a 1970 book on the subject, to think that the lunar decision “can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other “great new American enterprises.”

And like many others who for years lived and breathed the project, he finally had to recognize that the “impact of Apollo on the space program has on balance been negative.” It was, he explained, not the beginning of human voyages to Mars and lunar bases but “a dead-end undertaking in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet.”

Of course, it takes two to have a race. The American president could not be sure the Russians had a lunar-landing program. There was no evidence that the Russians were building facilities for a booster capable of launching people to the Moon. Was the president just double-dog-daring them to come out in the schoolyard and show their stuff?

An intelligence report in 1962 had nothing to add, short of speculating that “the chances are better than even that a lunar landing is a Soviet objective.” Only in 1964 did intelligence agents detect signs that there was indeed someone to make it a race.

Initially, NASA set its sights on late 1967 for the landing attempt. As spending escalated, Apollo ran into its first sharp criticism in Congress, the science establishment and the news media in 1963. “Even some of the Kennedy advisers were eager to slip the end-of-decade date and relieve the pressure, mainly to save money,” Dr. Logsdon said.

These “winds of change,” as he put it, may have motivated Kennedy’s renewed invitation in a United Nations address in September to the Russians to join in a cooperative mission. He had proposed this informally to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, at a meeting in Vienna shortly after his 1961 address to Congress. It was rejected out of hand. Russian accounts after the cold war have linked the rejection to a fear of exposing the technological shortcomings of the country’s program.

Walter A. McDougall, the historian who wrote “The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age,” has suggested that Kennedy’s periodic messages on space cooperation “were just exercises in image-building.” Dr. McDougall took a more skeptical view of spaceflight’s bearing on geopolitics, more in line with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address on the spreading influence of the military-industrial complex in national affairs.

Dr. Logsdon countered that the American achievements had by 1963 progressed to the point, as Mr. Sorensen said, that there was “a very real chance that we were even with the Soviets.” And since the Cuban missile crisis the year before, it was noted, Soviet-American relations had improved.

McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, talked tactics with the president. Either press for cooperation with the Russians, he suggested, or continue to use their space effort as “a spur to our own.” In a memorandum, Mr. Bundy said that “if we cooperate, the pressure comes off” regarding the decade goal, and “we can easily argue that it was our crash effort in ’61 and ’62 which made the Soviets ready to cooperate.”

In the year of criticism, Kennedy wavered but never backed away from his lunar commitment. Visiting Cape Canaveral on Nov. 16, 1963, he seemed to enjoy seeing preparations for the next astronaut flights. Days later, on Nov. 22, in the speech Kennedy never lived to give in Dallas, he intended to say “the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.”

The goal was reached on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin stepped on the gray surface of the Sea of Tranquillity. Since the last of six landings, in 1972, no one has been back.

No presidents since have felt the need or believed they could marshal political support for comparable undertakings. NASA has achieved dazzling successes exploring the solar system and the cosmos with robotic craft. But the agency was driven at the outset by the challenge of human flight to the Moon. At the conclusion of Apollo, Dr. Logsdon wrote, “NASA entered a four-decade identity crisis from which it has yet to emerge.”

In the book and interview, Dr. Logsdon sought solace in thinking that flying to the Moon at least “will forever be a milestone in human experience, and particularly in the history of human exploration, perhaps eventual expansion.” Even critics like Dr. McDougall conceded that “perhaps Apollo could not be justified, but by God, we could not not do it.

The Mighty Pen......

The pen is mightier than the sword......and it also appears that the pen was able enough to make sure Apollo 11 got home from the Moon....True history is always more interesting than anything the writers can dream up......


Apollo 11 — One Small Switch, One Giant Problem
Published: Thursday, 14 Apr 2011 | 1:01 PM ET Text Size
By: Jane Wells
CNBC Correspondent


Twitter LinkedInMore Share
The world is celebrating 50 years of humans in space, considered by many to be our species' greatest achievement. Nothing may be more spectacular than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon. What makes it especially amazing is how much of that feat was done with slide rules and basic engineering.

And circuit breakers.

Which broke.

In what may be one of the most fascinating pieces of space history, two sheets from the checklist Armstrong and Aldrin had on the Moon is up for auction next month at Bonhams. The sheets include handwritten notes by Aldrin scribbled as the two astronauts were on the lunar surface, shortly before Aldrin discovers a potentially fatal development (this after they'd almost run out of fuel landing).


Source: Bonhams.com

The checklist, expected to fetch $30,000 to $40,000, looks almost primitive.

My father used to test the Mark 46 torpedo electrical systems when he worked for Bendix back in the same era, and it looks like something he'd work off of.

The list starts with steps the two astronauts were supposed to go through "after completing our rest period."

You've gotta be made of tough stuff to "rest" while being the first men on the Moon.

I would be a little amped up.

The scribbled notes on the checklist were written by Aldrin, detailing instructions from Mission Control on what to do if they had trouble with computer programs tracking the orbiting Columbia command ship, where Michael Collins waited for the Eagle to return.

"This is one of the few sheets that actually has some mission notes made during our lunar surface stay," Aldrin says in a letter that comes with the items. "They were written just hours before leaving the Moon after history's first manned lunar surface exploration."

But it turns out the pen was mightier than the checklist. After scribbling the notes, as he and Armstrong prepared to leave the Moon, Aldrin writes, "I noticed that the ascent engine arming breaker push/pull switch was broken. Apparently during movement wearing our large space suit 'backpacks,' either Neil or I bumped into this panel and broke off that particular switch."

This was not good.

"Mission Control verified that the switch was open, meaning that the engine was currently unarmed. If we could not get the engine armed, we could be stranded on the Moon."

One small switch. One giant problem.

So Aldrin quickly started thinking of a solution. He didn't need help from a complex computer analysis, because the situation did not involve a complex computer. It was a simple switch. "As it turned, out," Aldrin says, "the very pen I used to record these notes was the perfect tool to engage this circuit breaker." Which is exactly what happened.

Who says modern technology is necessarily better?


© 2011 CNBC.com

U.S. military's second X-37 space plane due for launch...awesome use of the technology....

The Liberal Weenies who work for the Lame-Stream Media like to write a lot of crap about " America in decline"....."last days of the American empire", etc. etc.

It is a lot of HORSE-SHITE! Take a look at the news about Nasa launching the newest version of the X-37 Space Plane. It stays up in orbit for 9 months, unmanned and has the ability to carry out covert missions....you can only imagine what it can really do as it is classified.

China can't do it - Russia can't do it....Japan doesn't have this tech either....only the USA....

WE lead as we have the technology edge...We are the world's only real superpower and we will continue to be so as long as we want to be.....Our FREEDOM makes us better than others and that is something they can't replicate.

So let the Liberal LOSERS while about what they think is going on.....Real Patriots know that our country is leading the way in technology....and will always do so.

U.S. Military's second X-37 space plane due for launch
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: March 3, 2011

An Atlas 5 rocket crowned with a covert U.S. Air Force space plane rolled to a Florida launch pad Thursday to begin final preps for blastoff with a secret cache of military experiments.

The metallic gold-colored rocket, topped by a bulbous white nose cone, rolled from an integration building to the launch pad at Complex 41 Thursday afternoon.

Liftoff from Cape Canaveral is scheduled for a launch window opening at 2039 GMT (3:39 p.m. EST) Friday. The exact launch time will be announced around 8 a.m. EST Friday, according to the Air Force.

But breezy weather and cumulus clouds at Cape Canaveral threaten to thwart Friday's launch plans. There is a 70 percent the weather conditions will prohibit an on-time launch, according to Air Force meteorologists.

The outlook remains iffy over the weekend until a cold front pushes through the region, bringing more favorable conditions to the Space Coast by Monday.

When the 20-story launch blasts off, it will be hauling a stubby-winged spaceship called the Orbital Test Vehicle several hundred miles above Earth. Also known as the X-37B, the space plane is carrying a number of classified experiments inside its cargo bay, which is about the size of the bed of a pickup truck.

Resembling a mini-space shuttle, the OTV's purpose is shrouded in secrecy, but the vehicle itself is not classified. It features a powerful main engine to change its orbit, uses a solar array for power production and is covered in ceramic heat-resistant tiles to protect the craft during re-entry.

The craft could ferry into orbit materials science payloads, experimental reconnaissance sensors, innovative communications instruments, or a variety of other potential cargo.

Friday's launch will the start second flight of the Air Force's robotic space plane program, coming three months after an identical ship glided back to Earth and landed on a runway at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

The Dec. 3 return of the first X-37B craft was the first time an unmanned U.S. space vehicle fell back to Earth and made a precision landing on a runway.

This follow-up mission will attempt to achieve the same feat, but the OTV 2 flight will take advantage of lessons learned from the experience of the first X-37 sortie, according to Maj. Tracy Bunko, an Air Force spokesperson at the Pentagon.

"Like all flight test programs, OTV 2 will build on the on-orbit demonstration of OTV 1, so we're expanding and fine tuning our test parameters," Bunko told Spaceflight Now.

The X-37B stretches 29 feet long and has a wing span of 14 feet. It can weigh up to 11,000 pounds fueled for launch.

Built by Boeing's Phantom Works division, the space plane was initially conceived by NASA. The program was handed off to DARPA, the Pentagon's research and development unit, in 2004 after NASA funding dried up.

The Air Force took over in 2006 and brought the space plane to the launch pad last year. The first X-37B flight lifted off April 22 and spent more than 224 days in space.

The project is managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, a top-level group reporting to a board of senior branch officials including the secretary of the Air Force, the Air Force chief of staff, and the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics.

The office "expedites development and fielding of select Department of Defense combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities," according to an Air Force fact sheet.

Many of the Rapid Capabilities Office's projects are implemented on accelerated timelines, the fact sheet said.

The spacecraft can stay in orbit for up to nine months and will return to Earth for landing at Vandenberg, the Air Force said.

NO LACK OF MODESTY FROM POTUS....what a joke!

I cannot add how much I agree with Charles Krauthammer - He is rapidly becoming one of my favorite columnists as he cuts through the HORSE-SHITE and delivers it straight....

The sheer stupidity of this issue is only out ranked by the ability of POTUS to make us look like prize-winnning fools in front of other countries like Russia, China, England, Isreal...etc. etc....




The selective modesty of Barack Obama
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, July 9, 2010

Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama's vision of NASA's mission, as explained by administrator Charles Bolden:

"One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering."

Apart from the psychobabble -- farcically turning a space-faring enterprise into a self-esteem enhancer -- what's the sentiment behind this charge? Sure America has put a man on the moon, led the information revolution, won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation by far -- but, on the other hand, a thousand years ago al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra.

Bolden seems quite intent on driving home this message of achievement equivalence -- lauding, for example, Russia's contribution to the space station. Russia? In the 1990s, the Russian space program fell apart, leaving the United States to pick up the slack and the tab for the missing Russian contributions to get the space station built.

For good measure, Bolden added that the United States cannot get to Mars without international assistance. Beside the fact that this is not true, contrast this with the elan and self-confidence of President John Kennedy's 1961 pledge that America would land on the moon within the decade.

There was no finer expression of belief in American exceptionalism than Kennedy's. Obama has a different take. As he said last year in France, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." Which of course means: If we're all exceptional, no one is.

Take human rights. After Obama's April meeting with the president of Kazakhstan, Mike McFaul of the National Security Council reported that Obama actually explained to the leader of that thuggish kleptocracy that we, too, are working on perfecting our own democracy.

Nor is this the only example of an implied moral equivalence that diminishes and devalues America. Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reported that in discussions with China about human rights, the U.S. side brought up Arizona's immigration law -- "early and often." As if there is the remotest connection between that and the persecution of dissidents, jailing of opponents and suppression of religion routinely practiced by the Chinese dictatorship.

Nothing new here. In his major addresses, Obama's modesty about his own country has been repeatedly on display as, in one venue after another, he has gratuitously confessed America's alleged failing -- from disrespecting foreigners to having lost its way morally after 9/11.

It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I."

Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to Cabinet members and other high government officials as "my" -- "my secretary of homeland security," "my national security team," "my ambassador." The more normal -- and respectful -- usage is to say "the," as in "the secretary of state." These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution -- not just the man who appointed them.

It's a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama's exalted view of himself. Not surprising, perhaps, in a man whose major achievement before acceding to the presidency was writing two biographies -- both about himself.

Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama's modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence -- yet not of his own country's.

POTUS directs use of NASA for WORLD APOLOGY TOUR....

This ties into the posting I had about all the PC idiots who are all about " self-esteem". We now have to make Abdul and Muslims everywhere feel better about themselves......as if that was something that AMERICANS are truly concerned about right now.....let's think about this - what is most important to our nation right now - unemployment, the economy, financial crisis, terrorism, and oh yeah, that Abdul feels better about himself......WTF?

POTUS is trying to see if he can politicize the use of NASA to help Muslims feel good about themsleves....THIS is exactly what is wrong with POTUS' worldview - If the Muslim nations need to feel better about themselves, then THEY should do something about the vipers in their own midst.....and other issues that have nothing to do with SPACE and everything to do with better conduct by them on Earth.

Seeing our Nation's Space Agency used in this fashion is disgusting. NASA is not ACORN - It has a long and storied History of excellence....NOW, POTUS thinks it can become another tool in his warped PR strategy and another chapter in his " World Apology Tour" -

ARE YOU FRICKIN' KIDDING ME???

This idiot sitting in the White House needs to go - before he sets back the progress we have made over the last 50 years as a leader in Space, Technology, Exploration and Excellence - instead of the leader in all that is Politically Correct and Exceptionally Stupid.

====================

Former NASA chief: Muslim outreach is ‘perversion’ of NASA’s mission
By: Byron York Chief Political Correspondent

Washington Examiner 07/06/10 11:55 AM EDT

Michael Griffin, who headed NASA during the last four years of the Bush administration, says the space agency’s new goal to improve relations with the Islamic world and boost Muslim self-esteem is a “perversion” of NASA’s original mission to explore space. “NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”

Griffin calls NASA’s new mission, outlined by space agency administrator Charles Bolden in an interview with the al-Jazeera news agency, “very bad policy for NASA.” As for NASA’s core mission of space exploration, Griffin points out that it has been reaffirmed many times over the years, most recently in 2005, when a Republican Congress passed authorizing legislation, and in 2008, when a Democratic Congress did the same thing.

“NASA has been for 50 years above politics, and for 50 years, NASA has been focused by one president or another on space exploration,” Griffin says. “Some presidents have championed it more strongly than others, and it is regrettable that none have championed it as strongly as President Kennedy. But no president has thought to take NASA’s focus off of anything but space exploration until now, and it is deeply regrettable.”

Griffin says NASA has always played an important, but indirect, role in diplomacy. “I have championed the use of NASA as a powerful diplomatic and inspirational tool for U.S. policy writ large,” Griffin says. “But the way NASA achieves those goals is by doing great things. NASA does those things that make people all over the world say, ‘Wow.’ If NASA is making people say, ‘Wow,’ then they want to be part of what we do. That’s NASA’s role — it’s to do those things that make other people want to join us.”

For all his unhappiness with the new policy, Griffin says blame for the situation does not belong with NASA administrator Charles Bolden, whom Griffin calls “one of the best human beings you will find.” “When I see reports in the media excoriating Charlie for this position, that blame is misplaced,” Griffin says. “It belongs with the administration. That is where policy for NASA is set.

The NASA administrator does not set policy for NASA, the administrator carries it out.”

“This is not about personalities,” Griffin concludes. “It is about the intellectual content of the policy, which I find to be bankrupt.”