Obama is no Kennedy
335 words.
An old post from my Drafts…
Everyone (by which I mean everyone in the media) likes to think of Barack Obama as this generation’s Jack Kennedy, but there is one very striking difference between Kennedy and Obama:
JFK, May 25, 1961: “First, 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 the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. … Let it be clear-and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make-let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs: 531 million dollars in fiscal ‘62-an estimated seven to nine billion dollars additional over the next five years.” (Emphasis mine.)
JFK, September 12, 1962: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon… 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 that 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, and the others, too.” (Emphasis mine.)
Barack Obama, November 20, 2007, on his plan to postpone the Constellation program by 5 years to pay for his education plan: “We’re not going to have the engineers and the scientists to continue space exploration if we don’t have kids who are able to read, write and compute.”
Precious little else about Obama’s plans for the space program can be found, unless you like empty platitudes.
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