DeSantis: Put NASA headquarters in Florida
At an event yesterday Florida governor Ron DeSantis proposed moving NASA headquarters to Florida, saving the half a billion dollars NASA now wants to spend to build a brand new gold-plated new headquarters building in Washington.
[DeSantis:] “They have this massive building in Washington, D.C., and like nobody goes to it. So why not just shutter it and move everybody down here? I think they’re planning on spending like a half a billion to build a new building up in D.C. that no one will ever go to either. So hopefully with the new administration coming in, they’ll see a great opportunity to just headquarter NASA here on the Space Coast of Florida. I think that’d be very, very fitting.”
The NASA transition team for the Trump administration is already sent out a trial balloon about cutting the size of NASA headquarters considerably. That team has also proposed eliminating NASA centers in California and Maryland and consolidating their work into the Marshall Center in Alabama.
Note the trend: All these moves shifts money from decidedly Democratic states to Republican ones. The announced goal would be to reduce NASA’s overhead, but at the same time the moves would take money and power away from Democrat strongholds.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
At an event yesterday Florida governor Ron DeSantis proposed moving NASA headquarters to Florida, saving the half a billion dollars NASA now wants to spend to build a brand new gold-plated new headquarters building in Washington.
[DeSantis:] “They have this massive building in Washington, D.C., and like nobody goes to it. So why not just shutter it and move everybody down here? I think they’re planning on spending like a half a billion to build a new building up in D.C. that no one will ever go to either. So hopefully with the new administration coming in, they’ll see a great opportunity to just headquarter NASA here on the Space Coast of Florida. I think that’d be very, very fitting.”
The NASA transition team for the Trump administration is already sent out a trial balloon about cutting the size of NASA headquarters considerably. That team has also proposed eliminating NASA centers in California and Maryland and consolidating their work into the Marshall Center in Alabama.
Note the trend: All these moves shifts money from decidedly Democratic states to Republican ones. The announced goal would be to reduce NASA’s overhead, but at the same time the moves would take money and power away from Democrat strongholds.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Turning NASA into a red-state only deal could undermine support.
From a cost standpoint, everything should go to Florida–but then NASA would be accused of being Florida pork.
You want widespread support.
Most states already lack NASA centers so it’s hard to see how adding a few more states to that list is going to affect the politics all that much. In any case, political support is only crucial if the government is the only one doing space stuff. That was true at one time but is certainly not so any longer. When it comes to boosting American space efforts, in fact, it has now become far more important to rationalize regulation than to try maintaining NASA’s crumbling 60s-era infrastructure. NASA needs to be right-sized to effectively accomplish what it still uniquely does and not pointlessly subsidized to do things it has lost both the need and the knack for.