US Fiscal Situation and One Million Mile per Hour Spacecraft

[giveitawhirl2008]

Obviously, now hardly seems the time to be talking about upping NASA's
budget to 1960s levels, 4 - 7 % of federal budget. I am looking
forward to a possible future date when we can afford to do what we
could afford to do in the 1960s and early 1970s: send humans to other
worlds!

My idea that 15% of the fed. budget should be for basic science
research (including the 5%+-, for space), looks even more undoable.
But if we AT LEAST got out budget back in line with the way,
essentially, that it was in the sixties, then we could at least be
sending humans to explore the solar system. On top of that, if we
could get ourselves straightened out enough to be able to put 15% into
Big Science, including Big Space, then we could be doing our best to
ensure an ongoing effort to improve our civilization and our physical
quality of life.

Think about it: since Big Space and Science can actually be viewed as
military expenditures (therefore allowing even conservatives to get
excited about them), how would we Americans like it if the USSR had
put Man in Space - and maybe the Moon, and maybe beyond, by now...and
we had YET to even put a person in Earth orbit!

Private industry is great, but to date it has only put a couple of
people up above the 100 km line where space officially begins, for a
couple minutes!