Hanley still has money and sway to get some big things done by the end of the year, probably to use the gains to keep either the Ares I or the Ares V as the launch vehicle for Orion or a heavy lifter. Maybe the top brass isn’t going to call them Constellation anymore and rebrand this technological lunge backwards in space travel. So what? The important part is that Hanley and his people get to keep their jobs working on new rockets. And the lucrative, prestigious jobs involved are precisely why some members of Congress have been trying to paint Obama’s vague, but mostly forward-looking plan as a huge step back for NASA, complete with Cold War era propaganda so unabashed, I had to check if I was in the right time period. Did the Soviet Union suddenly fuse back years after I left? Granted, the idea of using Roscosmos to send NASA’s astronauts to the ISS would be a rather painful political setback for a number of reasons, but that’s not what Obama was suggesting. He’s actually trying to enlist ambitious space tourism startups that want to build a new generation of technology for space travel, new space stations, and make the whole thing a profitable enterprise.

One would think that the Republicans, who favor handing over government duties to corporations, would be all over this idea. But there’s a big difference between what politicians say and do. When it comes to NASA, they would much rather send jobs to Alabama, Texas and Florida, and to major donors like Boeing and Lockheed instead of small companies like Navada’s Bigelow, California’s SpaceX, and New Mexico’s Virgin Galactic. All of a sudden, giving work to the supposedly always more efficient and nimble private enterprise is taking a big gamble on “unproven commercial companies.” Funny how that works, isn’t it? Lawmakers who care about the prestige of space exploration jobs, nostalgia about the Apollo days, and good public relations want to keep on pursuing a strategy that was a bad idea from the beginning regardless of cost or final outcome, instead of just letting space exploration slowly mature into an industry by the efforts of people with the know how and drive to make it happen. They may was well tie a giant anchor to the next rocket NASA will test because this is exactly what they’re doing to the agency in the long term.

From a technical standpoint, yes, we will need a heavy lift rocket because even when we’ll be able to launch a space plane into orbit, the first generation of SSTO vehicles could only carry their propellant and their crew. A big payload couldn’t be sent into orbit by such vehicles for quite a while and we’d need a rocket that could use the space normally reserved for crew capsules to carry even more supplies. Travel to other planets, as called for by virtually all agendas for NASA, with just one huge space plane taking off from an extra long runway is out of the question entirely. But all this could be made faster and cheaper by aerospace companies working with experienced and extremely knowledgeable agency engineers who could be set loose to try amazing ideas for the next wave of space exploration vehicles. Simply chaining them down for the sake of politics is a disservice not only to the science involved, and not just to the nation, but to human progress in general. But of course, if politicians actually allowed scientists to do amazing things, we could all be living in a very different world by now, a world where discussions like this wouldn’t even have to happen.3VBMKR7GZA43

Put away the world’s smallest violin, this isn’t going to be a post about the plight of today’s new college grads. Instead, we’re going to focus on the very real challenges for people who have to go to college today and tomorrow. The simple idea of getting a degree, getting a job in the field for which you trained and building a career from part-time intern up to a cushy post in middle management doesn’t work anymore. It’s been altered by new technology, outsourcing and the kinds of unpredictable shifts in economic focus that leave entire fields of study in limbo at best and obsolete at worst. Simply put, four year degrees aren’t keeping up with the economy and if you pick a profession today, there’s no guarantee that the market for it won’t shut closed just a few semesters from your planned graduation date and leave you pondering whether to change majors as a junior or just take your chances and hope your grades will get you hired.

So on the one hand, many jobs require a degree. But because the economy can’t wait for a four year phase and people working longer than ever aren’t rushing to retire and make room for an army of new grads to take their place (especially in a deep, brutal recession which took the legs from under their 401k plans and placed their target retirement date between “maybe someday” and “never”), there are a lot of people with degrees and very little chance of getting a job. Even if you graduated suma cum laude, it’s really hard to get hired for a job that doesn’t exist. Or a job that’s slated to go overseas at half the cost. Unless you have the ability to predict what jobs will be in demand four years from now, you’re making an educated gamble when enrolling. And the government isn’t going to make it easier for you to get your education, actually steering you to take on mode debt and apply for more and more student loans.

Whenever state governments need to save money, one of the budgets they can cut with almost no resistance is higher education. Cutting deeper and deeper into the money slated for a state university or aid that goes to some private schools, they force colleges which rely on this type of funding to raise tuition as well as room and board. This is not to say that colleges flawlessly spend the money they have already and there aren’t places where they can save, but in reality is that a deep enough cut from the state means that you’re now paying more for your degree. As tuition goes up and pay for jobs goes down, the debt load you have to take grows. In the past, a student waiting tables for five years could pay off his or her education. Today, years after years of nearly double digit tuition hikes, make this idealistic scenario very improbable. Sure you can go out and get scholarships, but scholarships very rarely pay for more than half of your bill.

So where does that leave us? If you go to college and end up in worse financial shape than you started and with very few other career options, then why go to college? It’s almost like to enter the corporate world, you have to go through a hazing that lasts for decades. We can look down on the new grads and preach that they should’ve chosen their professions better but unless we can reasonably expect college students to have powers of precognition and outdo economists in predicting the future of the global economy, all we’d be doing is rubbing salt into the wound while acting high and mighty. The new grads aren’t being integrated into the economy as many past generations were and that’s a point of concern. We have to ask ourselves if we’re basically outsourcing and mechanizing millions of people out of the workforce and consider revamping our current approaches to globalization.

Rather than trying to compete with a low-cost foreign workforce, companies could instead cut their costs with efficiency and innovation, something that new grads would be very good at doing. Or rather than just sending orders for electronic components overseas, they could set up their own high quality, hyper-efficient assembly plants. We need to start thinking of how a new generation of college grads would find jobs and how to sustain our economy beyond a year to year time frame. One key to that is realizing that globalization the way it’s being practiced now is a one way street. In a truly globalized economy, our grads would be able to hold jobs in other nations and help them keep up with international demands for their services. But instead, these nations issue protectionist edicts which restrict all work to local residents and the only foreign workers they will allow are employed by multinationals. We need to reply by paying attention to our own economy and figuring out how to make it competitive without immediately trying to ship a division or two overseas because it’s an easy way to cut costs.

Of course the main motivation for going after science is the Republican desire to demonstrate that the Democrats are supposedly wasting money on nonsense rather than helping a John Q. Public in need during a financial crisis. To many of their supporters, science is not something emphasized in their education and the cultural motif embraced by many conservatives is that a scientist is just someone who can’t cut it in the real world of corporate cubicle farms. So if they obtusely and off-handedly mention scientific efforts and then mock their purpose, they believe the core adherents of the Republican ideology will rise up in support and help them in the 2010 election as they vent their anger at those wasteful liberals and their elitist colleges.

Now, it seems ironic that the party responsible for the biggest deficits in history which come to trillions of dollars, is picking on $140 million budgets for volcano monitoring, $2 million for a number of astronomy grants and genetics and pest control studies with just budgets just shy of a quarter million or so each. These supposedly horrifying examples of government waste on scientific gobbledygook are not even rounding errors in the kind of deficits that happened with their approval. Most of those deficits were for wars, bank bailouts (so much for the free market that’s supposed to regulate itself) and random tax cuts designed to goose consumer spending in tough times. Rather than helping create new markets and new jobs, the Republican strategy for helping the nation get through an economic downturn was to encourage spending when it was runaway spending that got us into the mess they were trying to mitigate.

After a Democrat is elected, now government spending is out of control, especially when we’re trying to safeguard people from volcanic eruptions (one word; Yellowstone) and figure out if a marauding asteroid could slam into the Earth and do tens billions of dollars in damage. Oh and on top of that, we’re now supposed to stop teaching science in biology class and instead teach the Book of Genesis or raise our hands and talk about how everything is so complex and weird and mysterious and that nobody knows anything about the living world. Are you joking? Are all the interns who could do some research and find out that science projects are necessary for us to keep the innovation economy going and for safeguarding people’s lives during such things as natural disasters out to lunch? Would it kill them to do some thinking on the subject before another condescending speech about science grants spectacularly backfires?

Don’t get me wrong, tax cuts are great. It’s like your landlord coming to your apartment with a smile to announce that he’s lowering your rent. Nice, isn’t it? However, when you don’t have any prospects for work, it doesn’t matter how low your rent is, you still can’t pay it at the end of the day. Giving tax cuts to companies in hopes they’ll hire more workers isn’t a viable choice either since these companies have a lot of places where to use that money before hiring even one new employee. So what we need to do is generate jobs and work on breakthroughs that will create a new economic boom in the future. Despite the dot com bubble, the internet has created a huge boom in available jobs that are now vital for any company that wants to succeed. And where did the internet come from? A grant to DARPA and a grant to CERN where the web as we know and love it was created to help scientists exchange huge amounts of data. Well today, to pull out of such a major financial crisis, we need a new internet and we need scientists to help us find it.

And hey, new jobs means more money and more people to who the Republicans can give a tax cut in hopes of swaying them to push a button with the red R on it next election year. Before we get there however, we need to realize that people who insist that doing more of the same is the only viable solution to resolving a mess that doing more of the same got us into to begin with, probably need to give a lot more thought to both their speeches and their policies.