Now You Listen To Me: No Moon Until You Finish Your Dinner!

NASA to unveil moon plan

"Agency plans to send 4 astronauts to the moon in 2018"

"NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018."(CNN.com - 'NASA to unveil moon plan')

$100 Billion Dollars? 2018? The Moon?

"U.S. President George W. Bush called in January 2004 for the United States to return to the Moon by 2020 as the first major step in a broader space exploration vision aimed at extending the human presence throughout the solar system."

Now, I like Star Trek as much as the next guy. And yes, it'll be totally awesome to say things like, 'Oh yeah, I went to highschool with a guy who's working on the Venus Oribital Waystation.' And sooner or later, we're gonna run out of things to do here, and need to amuse ourselves with living on chunks of space rock other than our original chunk of space rock. Maybe finding new and interesting kinds of metal. Encountering new colors of air.

But for Christ fucking sake, as long as people are hungry or sick and have no way to pay for it, we shouldn't, "be spending $7 billion a year on [NASA's] exploration efforts, a figure projected to grow to more than $15 billion a year by 2018," on the, "first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972." I don't see how or why 'extending the human presence throughout the solar system' is any kind of priority.

Look, we're back on that other space rock again! Look Mom, look! It's fucking fascinating!

CNN.com - 'NASA to unveil moon plan'