Money spent in 2002 by the federal government on NASA:
14 billion dollars.
Money spent in 2002 by the federal government on the military:
330 billion dollars.
Projected cost of potential war with Iraq:
62 billion dollars.
Projected cost of President Bush's 10-year tax cut, per year:
67 billion dollars.

(Figures taken from the Budget of the United States Government Fiscal Year 2003 Historical Tables and CNN.)

Any wonder why NASA has to keep reusing twenty-year-old shuttles until they literally fall apart? Look at the table scraps it's been getting, compared to the U.S. Armed Forces. If the Air Force wants a brand new stealth aircraft, it gets a blank check to develop it, no questions asked; whereas for some reason NASA has to do things "faster, cheaper, and better", and witness the results. Even when a tragedy like the loss of STS-107 illuminates this disparity in a way that Excel charts and a slick PowerPoint presentation to Congress could never manage, the President's response is to mumble something about the astronauts going up to God (which God would that be, Mister President? The God you believe in, who doesn't care for pagans like Kalpana Chawla, Mission Specialist and will damn any Jew - such as Israeli astronaut Ilan Roman - not defecting to Christ's fold at the Second Coming to eternal hellfire? Too bad you didn't elaborate on how you square your beliefs as a born-again Christian with your feelgood, mealy-mouthed platitudes about "The Creator"), and announce that he's going to add a paltry five hundred million dollars to NASA's budget. Never mind that half a billion barely keeps pace with inflation. Saturday morning's disaster has reduced the size of our space shuttle fleet by a quarter, and it's now been made painfully obvious that we as a nation shouldn't be relying on those remaining three spacecraft to take us into a new century of exploration and discovery. It's not fair to NASA to be forced by financial constraints to keep flying a shuttle whose estimated accident rate is one in a hundred, as opposed to the one in twenty thousand odds faced by U.S. combat pilots (this chilling figure from NASA adminstrator Dan Goldin, courtesy of a 2000 article on Space.com), when the field of aeronautical and astronautical engineering has made a whole generation of advances that could be utilized by a new generation of spacecraft. Imagine what could be done if President Bush diverted just a year of tax cuts for his multimillionaire cronies towards building a replacement fleet of shuttles. Or if he chose to forego the costly and unnecessary (and at this point inevitable) war against Saddam Hussein. With a hundred and twenty billion extra dollars, we could have ten new space shuttles, fly to Mars, and still have change left over for social programs, health care, and education. But no. Our commander-in-chief is more interested in the needs of the few - the oil executives, the ultra-wealthy, the pharmaceutical companies - than he is in making the world a better place. So he makes pretend with doing good, promising to fight AIDS in Africa and Asia, for instance, but only offering three billion dollars a year to do it, while earmarking just as much to develop new vaccines to protect American citizens from the as-yet still phantom menace of germ warfare. You'd think a war against an actual disease claiming more lives in Sub-Saharan Africa than the Black Death did in Europe might garner a little more financial assistance from the people who once rid the world of smallpox, gratis. But no. Africa gets a little over three hundred dollars per HIV-infected person (that is, if the pro-lifers allow such a plan to get through Congress, which I doubt, because it will involve distributing such horrible godless things as condoms to help prevent the further spread of AIDS), and that's for treatment and prevention combined. I guess in this context, the "Columbia Seven" didn't die in vain after all - 71 million dollars per fallen astronaut in extra funding is nothing to sneeze at, in these fiscally and socially conservative times.