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By any logic, the Congress and White House should be behind us 100%. This project is exactly the sermon the new group in Washington has been preaching. When asked about commercial space ventures, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said, "I wish commercial enterprise would be more commercial, and stop running to Uncle Sugar every time they want to do something."
The Artemis Project, and other private ventures into space flight, open the road to space without relying on tax money. That's great news for any politician who hopes to be re-elected. These factors are less important to other nations, but in the United States they are a key political factor. People want space flight; and the patronage that results from government employment isn't sufficient to elect a politician except in a few key districts near Houston, Huntsville, and Cocoa Beach.
The Artemis Project is also great news for current employees of government space programs. Today, NASA is struggling to define its own reason to exist in a era of ever-tighter money and ever-declining budgets. When we get private enterprise involved, the cost of everything associated with space exploration drops by an order of magnitude. One-of-a-kind spacecraft parts become off-the-shelf commercial equipment. Maintaining the cadre of expertise becomes a normal party of daily business. Competition drives products to reduced prices and improved quality. So in the near future, if NASA wants to explore planets, build laboratories in Earth orbit, or measure the interstellar medium, it will be much less costly to do so. At the same time, we are providing an industry, which, like the commercial airplane industry, needs a set regulations to work to and an agency to enforce those regulations. This is the best thing that can happen for a civil servant who wants to keep his job.
However, having said all that, we have an insurance policy: public support. Public support is political reason to do something, and if there is a large, documented body of public support for the project, then politicians will support it, too. One way to document public support is to have a widespread body of stockholders; another is the size and international spread of membership in Artemis Society International. That's a lot of political clout; and it is built into the program plans for the Artemis Project.
The best way you can make your voice heard is to join Artemis Society International and get involved in taking control of your own destiny in space.
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