Petition to Save America’s Space Program

SMIC is Muzzling the Space Community

There’s a lot of hesitancy in the space community. Timidity. Absolute unwillingness to go public with deep truths, truths that can be vital to America’s leadership in space.

Three programs are killing America’s space leadership. They have amputated America’s ability to launch Americans to orbit on American vehicles for seven years. Ever since 2011, we’ve been forced to send Americans to the International Space Station on Russian Soyuz rockets. At a total cost of four billion dollars. Four billion dollars sucked out of America’s space program and sucked into Russia’s. Worse, we’ve been robbed of practical programs to put Americans back on the moon and to take Americans to Mars.
The three killer programs are a rocket called the Space Launch System, a capsule called the Orion, and a mini-space station called the LOP-G. These programs are prying $36 billion from NASA’s budget. That’s enough money to buy four hundred Falcon Heavy rocket launches. You read that right. 400!

More important, thirty six billion is enough money to put us on the moon in two years. To stay. And enough to money to start positioning food, water, and living quarters on Mars in five years.
Instead, America is stuck on the ground. We can send robots to space. But not humans.

Roughly 75% of the people in the space industry know this fact and are infuriated by it. They are outraged. Yet none of them dare speak up. And almost none of the space advocacy organizations are willing to open their mouths. Why?

The space advocacy groups have been bought off. Bought off by the folks Buzz Aldrin calls “the Darth Vaders of space.” Bought off by the SMIC, the Space Military Industrial Complex. Space advocacy groups need money from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or Northrup Grumman to throw their next conference or to pay their annual overhead. And Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman are making whompingly big profits from these three space-killing projects—the SLS, the Orion, and the LOP-G–projects that will be too expensive to get off the ground.

The corporations of the Space Military Industrial Complex are making profits by preventing the United States from having a practical Moon and Mars program, a program with a near-term delivery date. They are knifing America’s space program in the back.

One space advocacy group is speaking out. It’s the Space Development Steering Committee, a group that has included astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Edgar Mitchell and members of NASA and the National Space Society. The Space Development Steering Committee has issued a petition calling for an end to the programs that are killing NASA.

See https://www.change.org/p/save-america-s-space-program. Read it. Sign it. Write about it. And pass it around to everyone you know.
America can get to the moon and Mars. We can get there faster than you think. And on a far bigger scale. But first we have to kill the programs that are knifing NASA in the back.