NASA wants to go back to the Moon, they want to land people on Mars and other extraterrestrial bodies. Big dreams are necessary when you’re the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the world biggest aeronautical organization. What does NASA need for those big dreams? New spaceships, excellent astronauts, the best and newest technology, probably some more random stuff that I’m forgetting or don’t know about, but I do know, and am not forgetting about one thing they’ll most definitely need: money.

Orion, the new generation spacecraft that will replace the Space Shuttle, will not make its grand flying debut until 2014, for “cost concerns are at the root of the delay.” That’s pretty talk for “we just don’t have enough money, and those Washington bastards won’t give us more.”

The United States federal budget for 2009 has $17.6 billion reserved for NASA — that is out of a total of $3.1 trillion, which means that NASA’s budget is only 0.56% of the total federal budget. I’m not saying that is not a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. Hell, with $17.6 billion you can vaccinate a lot of African children against life-threatening diseases.

But, if I tell you that $44.8 billion goes to Veteran Affairs — pensions, home loans (why?), medical benefits — and a whopping $660.6 billion ($515.4, Department of Defense; $145.2 billion, Global War on Terror) goes to military expenses, then all of asudden that $17.6 billion doesn’t look so big anymore.

No, if only they would transfer 1% of that military budget to NASA, the space money would grow to $83.7 billion — almost five times the old budget. We would already be busy colonizing the Moon (though really, who wants to live there?), having sun vacations on Venus (major tan), going on Martian field trips (learning Martian culture through experience).

But no, space exploration isn’t important enough for a sufficient budget, apparently. I could be a total asshole and say that a strictly Christian president doesn’t want to go too deep into space, because it could uncover more of the “God didn’t create us, the Big Bang did” theories — but I won’t. That would mean I would have to acknowledge that George W. Bush actually knows how to think, and that’s just ludicrous. It doesn’t matter how much I want to believe he’s pure evil, Bush really isn’t capable of conspiracies. Conspiracies need smart minds.