“The prerequisite to prosperity is keeping spending under control and not pushing our country further into debt.”
That’s what U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher tells his constituents. He says that he’s a strong conservative leader who will slash government spending…
…except when it comes to forcing the federal government to spend huge amounts of money to create human colonies in outer space.
This is not a joke.
Yesterday, Representative Rohrabacher introduced H.R. 4752, the Space Exploration, Development, and Settlement Act, to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. If the bill passes both houses of Congress, it would force the President of the United States to officially recognize that “expanding permanent human presence beyond low-Earth orbit in a way that enables human settlement and a thriving space economy will enhance the general welfare of the United States”.
Read that carefully, and you’ll see that the Space Exploration, Development, and Settlement Act is not just about putting a few people in a space station. It’s about spending so much money that there will be permanent human colonies of settlers far away from the Earth – enough space colonists that there will be a separate economy of trade with them.
Dana Rohrabacher actually believes that this kind of massive colonization of outer space is possible right now – when it’s been almost 50 years since any country has even managed to send human beings to the Moon for a brief visit.
Dana Rohrabacher wants to…
– cut Social Security benefits
– cut spending on education
– cut health care spending
– cut domestic infrastructure spending
… because he says that we just don’t have enough money for these things.
However, Rohrabacher wants the federal government to start spending huge amounts of money on a project of “the development of permanent space settlements” like people used to imagine in the gee-whiz Flash Gordon days of the 20th century’s space race.
America can’t afford to have politicians in Congress who keep their heads in outer space, while they are ignoring the real problems we face back here on the ground.