Don't listen to the astronauts, Mr. President

Obama's 2011 budget included a revamp of NASA's objectives.  Namely, aborting the Constellation program, and prioritizing core research into scientific and mission-enabling technologies.

Apparently, some (and I stress some, not all) astronauts have gotten their panties in a twist over this.

Here's my response to them:  Get over it.  And get over yourselves.

Armstrong, along with astronauts James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, called the proposal “devastating”...

Yeah, devastating to their egos, maybe.  News flash:  NASA doesn't exist just so we can lob meatsacks through the exosphere.  Manned space travel is sexy, sure, but contrary to popular cultural aggrandizement, it's not an end unto itself.  The mere existence of astronauts, that is, being able to say "humans physically go to space", is not self-justifying.  Sorry, Neil.  Emotional side effects notwithstanding, it accomplishes nothing.  More to the point, manned space travel has proven to be so error-prone and so expensive (and, arguably, so fruitless) that the long-standing single-minded obsession with it has become the Moby Dick of our collective efforts in space.

Pursuing manned space flight comes at such a high cost that it can only be done to the almost complete exclusion of all other space-related endeavors.  And that alone is the reason not to do it.  There are simply too many other legitimately valuable, achievable, cost-effective, and pertinent things we can be doing instead.

The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

Really?  It'll take longer and cost more than we think?  Guess what, Einsteins, that's precisely why Constellation got the ax, since it was already obviously well on its way to being a classically bloated space program.  That little maxim you just spouted about the unpredictability of developing manned space transport technology, as embodied by its predictable difficulty, is why we need to get OUT from under that burden for awhile, rather than heap more of it onto ourselves.

It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

Yes, sure, call it 'wasted' if you like.  Even so, I'd rather waste 10 billion than 50 billion.  Stubbornly holding course for its own sake is called throwing good money after bad.  A more formal name for it is 'Loss Aversion', 'Irrational Escalation of Commitment', or the 'Sunk Cost Fallacy'.  Whatever you call it, it's a thoroughly proven way to make a bad situation worse.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

Oh No!!!   What will the neighbors think?

Surely we don't measure ourselves, nationally, globally, spiritually, or even anthropologically, by the capacity to put a handful of ourselves into the vacuum surrounding our little spinning rock.  Please tell me we don't.

Even worse, still, is the insinuation in their argument that investment in manned space flight is for the purpose of underpining the reputation of the United States as ... what, the Big Man Around Town?  Are we still comparing penis size with the Russians?  I thought we'd mostly matured out of that adolescent puffery.  Guess not.  Apparently we need big rocket ships so that there's no confusion in anyone's mind just who's running the show down here.

That particular concept is what's called "Conspicuous Consumption" in sociology.  And it's basically just the human economic equivalent of biology's ornamental sexual dimorphism.  Are we really nothing more than nature's most obnoxious bowerbird?  (Sadly, evidence convincingly suggests precisely that.)

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space.

I'd much prefer that we choose to be a leader ON the Earth.  Again, this 'mediocrity' scare tactic is only according to the people-in -space yardstick.  And frankly I think there are far more valuable metrics against which we should judge ourselves.  The bitter truth is that by those measurements we're already mediocre.  Our education levels continue to embarassingly backpedal.  Our physical health is among the lowest of any industrialized nation.  I shouldn't need to even point out the dire state of our financial health.  We have a well-deserved reputation as the most environmentally hypocritical country on the planet, as we point fingers and make haughty speeches on one hand, while clinging tooth and nail to our totally unsustainable and hyper-consumptive lifestyle (which, by the way, we're also busily trying to shove down the throat of every as-yet-unsubjugated culture left on the Earth).

So, no, I don't think we need to be wasting our time, energy, resources, and opportunities irrationally prolonging our long and glorious tradition as the planet's reigning Buck Rogers.