LET'S PLAY HARDBALL SENATOR!

This man is Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL). I've known him for a long time. We coached our sons baseball team together back in the early 1990's in Orlando. I got hit in a car crash once and he was my lawyer. He went on to become Orange County Commissioner and then George W. Bush appointed him to his cabinet. From there Martinez went on to win the Florida senate seat in 2004. Many experts have reported that the Republicans did much electoral manipulations to win that year in Florida. Today Mel is the chair of the Republican National Committee. His main job is to recruit Hispanics for the Republican Party.

Martinez has just announced that he will be taking the lead to ensure that NASA's Moon base missions will stay a top priority in Congress.

That means that Martinez and I will get to play hardball once again as the Global Network has long been working to bring the light of truth to NASA's Moon program.

The Moon base the U.S. wants to establish is really about two basic things. One is the establishment of mining colonies on the Moon to extract helium-3, a precious resource that could be used for fusion power here on Earth. Scientists have long been saying that the profits from helium-3 extraction will make the money made from oil exploration on Earth look like nothing in comparison. But in order to make the Moon mining program possible, new launch capabilities must be developed to lift the heavy payloads necessary to build the Moon bases and return the mined resources back to Earth. This is where the nuclear rocket comes in. Nuclear reactors for rocket engines, NASA says, would give rockets greater lift capability and speed up transit time to the Moon and Mars. (NASA is working to create mining colonies on Mars as well. The Halliburton Corporation is today building a drilling mechanism for Mars.)

Nuclear powered mining colonies are also on the drawing board. So a host of nuclear launches would take place from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is important to remember that space technology can, and does, fail on occasion. We should also remember that the Department of Energy (DoE) nuclear production cycle has a long and dirty track record at the labs across the U.S. When the nuclear powered generations were fabricated at Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico, from 1994-1996 for the Cassini mission, over 244 cases of worker contamination were reported to the DoE.

The Army has had plans since the early 1950's to set up military bases on the Moon. Scientists have long known that there exists an Earth-Moon gravity well. Whoever sits at the top of the well, with bases on the moon, will be able to literally control who can get on and off the planet Earth. So military bases on the Moon play a key role in the space "control and domination" program outlined in the U.S. Space Command's 1997 document called Vision for 2020. It's hardly a coincidence that the NASA goal for establishing manned bases on the Moon is set for 2020.

The aerospace industry is an expensive game. Virtually every space technology project underway today is overwhelmingly over budget. The International Space Station, originally set to cost $10 billion, now costs out at over $100 billion. The aerospace industry publication, Space News, years ago editorialized that they know they must come up with a funding source for their expensive space programs. They have they reported. They said they are sending their lobbyists to Washington to defund the "entitlement programs." Officially the entitlement programs are Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and what is left of the welfare program after Bill Clinton got through with it.

The space industry has declared war on the poor and the working class. Which will it be folks? Social progress or bases on the Moon?

Let's play ball Mel!

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Our blog)