Last year, the U.S. Congress passed a law specifying that NASA must build a new heavy-lift rocket out of parts designed for the 30-year-old Space Shuttle and the cancelled Ares rocket. Why? So industries in their districts can manufacture the same old parts and fit them together.

As NASA tries to build a powerful new deep-space rocket capable of launching explorers to other worlds, it is forced to make technical decisions driven by politics, not sound engineering.

Congress has handed the reins of our space program to a few members fighting to keep contracts in their districts. It’s time for Planetary Society members to tell the U.S. Congress and President Obama to let NASA do its job before any more innovations in science, technology or space exploration are lost! more…

I don’t know what good this petition will do when congress is hell bent on cutting anything regardless of consequences, but it was a sorry day when we abandoned the moon decades ago and it is quite possible that we will give dominance in space to the Chinese and perhaps the EU in the decades to come.

What will that do to our self stated desire to be the “innovators” of the future, now that we have to rent seats to space from the Russians and send cargo via Japan and the EU?