As I look at the different budgets for the space program, I can't help but think that these may not be the final word. With a new President coming into office and the dire straits that our economy is in, I can only conclude that we are going to face a drastic cut in space exploration. The only thing that may save this from happening is that President-Elect Obama may feel that this area is too important to cut the budgets on. There is another course of action we could take. This is something that we should have done years ago. We should join with the rest of the world, share the costs of space exploration and make in an endeavor by the entire human race. We would be spending much less money and achieving much better results because we could launch far more probes instead of the duplication that is going on now between countries.

An example of what I am talking about is the Mars probe due to launch in 2009. NASA has to go to Congress for more funds for its Mars probe. I wonder how this is going to sit with congress at a time when we are going to have the biggest deficit in the history of this country? Another thing that we could do to solve the budget problems with NASA is do away with the International Space Station and all those shuttle flights back and forth to it. As I have said many times, the station is only there for show and really serves no purpose. Almost every experiment that is done there could have been done in a shuttle. We have spent far more than our share on something that is supposed to be supported by everyone involved. We are looking at saving billions. On top of all that, there have been persistent rumors that we have another space station, one that is secret and may be military. If this is true that gives us even more reasons to do away with International Space Station.

The cost of this new Mars probe has risen from 1.6 billion to 1.9 billion dollars. It makes one wonder if we are being ripped off again, or the probe is actually worth this price? It is hard to believe that we are getting any value for our money when we see what is happening in the defense industry and how they are ripping us off with things like missiles that don't work and ships that have to be canceled because they never come up to specs. Is it any wonder that we question the cost of things. You have to remember that some if not all of the companies involved with building these space probes are the same ones that are part of the military industrial complex that has been draining money from us at a record pace. We have actually given them contracts for things that don't work because they have promised to get them working before they are finished. Have you ever heard such nonsense in your entire life? It is like buying a car that doesn't run and being assured by the dealer that it will be redesigned by the time you get it. Yeah, sure!

When you look at the future plans of NASA, you have to conclude that a lot of this stuff is no longer going to see the light of day. I am a fan of space travel and I know that it leads to other inventions that benefit the human race. I also believe that a lot of what we have learned has been kept from us and is locked up in so called black projects. Many people believe that some of this stuff just might be of benefit to us in the form of improving our health. I certainly hope that we don't find out years from now that we had found cures for certain diseases that we kept from the public, or improvements in things like batteries that would have allowed us to make a practical electric car. There is just no way for us to know what is being kept from us.

President Bush announced that we will be going back to the moon and threw a lot of money into the budget for this. As the new president starts to go through the budget, he just might feel that we can no longer afford to do this. It would seem that way on the surface, but we may very well be able to make a profit by returning to Luna. If we could figure out how to get some of those minerals back to earth cheaply we could actually come out ahead. The moon's gravity is much less than the earth's. If we could use something like a rail gun, which is a sort of magnetic cannon that would allow for cheap launches, we might be able to get those minerals into orbit around the moon where they could be gathered up and brought back to earth. The engineers would have to look at this problem to see if it is doable and cost effective. Once brought out of orbit, could the solar wind take them most of the way back to earth if the minerals were packed into a sort of container with a solar sail and the moon was in the proper position? Who knows, with the correct type of heat shield maybe we could shoot them into the ocean where cargo ships were waiting to pick them up? I know this is all wild stuff I am talking about here, but I just want to get people thinking about this.

The truth of the matter is we also have to dump the space shuttle, it just bleeds money. It costs far more to launch than a rocket that can do a lot of the same things, but not all. As we know it was supposed to be cheaper than a rocket, but was redesigned to be able to take huge spy satellites and this made it non cost effective. We need a smaller, more reliable, cheaper to launch vehicle. It is said that the military has secret vehicles that are far better than the shuttle and take off like a plane. If this is true than we have been blowing hundreds of billions of dollars keeping up a pretense with the shuttle and space station and this is just a disgrace, when that money could have been used for things like providing hospitalization to American citizens.

Will the space program feel the president's scalpel? I have no doubt that there will be many program cuts as there will be in many other areas. It may come down to saving our country, or discontinuing space exploration for the next ten years or so. On the other hand we may discover that we have a second space program that we didn't know about and that it is much further advanced. There have been so many rumors over the years that the US Air Force was running a far more advanced covert space program and was using craft that made the shuttle look like something from the stone age. What is true and what is not is a very difficult question to answer, however there has been proof that something is flying around and it can hit speeds of at least 8,000 miles per hour, may be powered by a pulse type of engine and could be capable of going into space. Contrails were seen a few times on things like Google Earth that show the contrails of a pulse engine stretching from the west coast to across Asia.