OK, Obama, we get it. 

Things aren’t as bad as people are making them out to be. Even though unemployment hasn’t risen, even though you got your big health care bill passed, even though you seem to be making all the right moves with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why this?

You don’t need me to tell you how much is going on in the country, but if most people in America were to list the most important issues that need to be tackled at this very instant, I doubt going to Mars is at the top.

I admire the president for going to the Kennedy Space Center on April 15 to reassure NASA that it has his full support. But going down there and saying we need to re-create certain parts of the space program and man missions to Mars makes me scratch my head.

I don’t get why we’re so focused on landing on Mars right now instead of landing the unemployed in work, or why we need to re-design rockets when we should be re-designing the way we monitor everything on Wall Street.

The space program doesn’t hold the luster it once did. The space race was a large part of the Cold War, and we poured a lot of money into it. In a way, we set a dangerous precedent. We must maintain these space programs now because they have gotten to be rather large.

Funding for space programs should have been one of the first things to be cut, and I don’t fault the Obama administration for recognizing that. But it seems like his speech in Florida was like telling the kid who just got his Popsicle stolen that you’re going to give him free ice cream for a year.

Making such large and lofty promises and stating such grand initiatives for a program that you’re cutting so much funding toward seems ridiculous. Especially considering it could cause almost 10,000 jobs to be lost, according to Geoffrey Dickens of the Media Research Center.  

I don’t think all of this bodes well for the message that the Obama administration is trying to give to the American people. It seems so blatantly obvious what the Obama administration is trying to do here. It makes absolutely no sense to promise such initiatives when you’re cutting such massive amounts of funding to a part of the government which doesn’t receive that much in the first place.

It’s not that NASA is not important. It helps us understand geographical and meteorological aspects of our earth that are definitely necessary, but our focus should be elsewhere right now.

Obama called all of these new initiatives for NASA a step in a positive direction, but I don’t get how. For now, we must continue to wait and continue to trust that our government is making the best decisions for our country. I can assure you that making useless promises to a once-prized part of the federal government to pursue extremely insignificant goals is far from what I want our president to be worried about right now.

David Kaplan is a sophomore broadcast journalism and political science major. His column appears weekly and he can be reached at dhkaplan@syr.edu.

Published on April 21, 2010 at 12:00 pm