Open Letter to Congressman Rohrabacher

by Frederick Hoehn, copyright 2012, all rights reserved

12/29/12

Dear Congressman Rohrabacher:

I saw you today on C-SPAN.  You were saying that NASA is pushing the envelope and helping us with new technology.  You are quite mistaken, Congressman Rohrabacher.  

I'm a hardware and software Engineer, myself.  Some have said the space program and NASA gave us the microprocessor, which led to personal computers.  Nonsense.

The microprocessor was invented at Intel to meet the need of a Japanese client of Intel that wanted a set of integrated circuit chips to make calculators with.  

Your vision may be somewhat slanted due to the fact that NASA has so many facilities in your state of California.  Congressmen are expected to "bring home the bacon" for their constituents.  But bacon for California is not what the nation of the U.S.A. needs at this point.  

Now that we've gone to the moon and back, what do we have to show for our money except a pile of extremely expensive moon rocks?

NASA gave us the Hubbel Space Telescope.  And what has that done for us?  It has shown us that beyond the stars that we had been aware of, there are many more stars than we realized.

As far as shedding light on the origin of the universe, NASA can't do that.  The proper text book for that is the book of Genesis in the Holy Bible.  

And, by the way, if God decides to destroy all or part of the earth with an asteroid, NASA won’t stop Him.  

What few benefits might come from NASA are far outweighed by the cost of obtaining those benefits.

At a time now of multi-trillion dollar national debt, the fact is that our nation can't afford NASA.  You folks in Congress haven't even solved the Fiscal Cliff problem, nor balanced the budget.

From now on, there will be difficult financial times.  It is time not to clear space of space debris, but to scrap NASA, and abandon the space station, which are unnecessary financial drains on a nation that can no longer afford them.  

More pork for NASA would be detrimental to our nation.

Frederick Hoehn