You know, the Czar is so tired to pointing out the many ways the President has hurt the scientific community in this country that he isn’t going to bother listing them anymore, or even posting links to them.

But Obama was supposed to be the guy who was going to save NASA. Yes, he made many cuts to the space program, and even some conservatives agreed with the liberal rationlization that we need to privatize space more. And, some can argue, in the age of deficit spending, it may make sense to cut as much as possible.

So one might be unwise to suggest that the President has cut NASA down to nothing. What he has done, unfortunately, is eliminate any plausible goal for manned space flight. He did not cut the budget as much as the vision. Maybe we lacked a good vision—spending millions on a 30-year-old squad of smelly, peeling shuttles just to repeat microgravity experiments on an otherwise useless space station.

Meanwhile, robotic space missions have gone bonkers. Messenger is in final orbit around Mercury, Cassini has totally out-performed the wildest dreams of its creators, and we still have rovers on Mars more or less taking pictures and doing experiments years after they should have failed. And before long, we will be within a stone’s zero-gravity throw from Pluto and Ceres. And each of those two missions promises to be as mind-blowing as Cassini. And there are a host of others we did not mention, from the Webb telescope to missions to other planets. Wow.

Is it any wonder that the manned missions are feeling a little under-appreciated now? No, it is not news you get to hear, but astronauts are leaving NASA at the fastest rate ever: one every two months is departing NASA for work in the private sector.

Two things you should remember: astronauts are not easy to replace, and we never had a lot to start with. Perhaps there will soon come a day when NASA does not even bother with astronauts, but will farm out the work like they apparently will be doing with manned missions on Russian and Chinese hardware.

Which of course sounds really bad. But these astronauts are not leaving to work in the GAO or DoD: they are being hired—recruited, even—by the explosion of private space travel companies. In some respects, that is dramatic and exciting news. To most of us, a ’private space company” was some pie-in-the-literal-sky nutjob trying to build his own rocket; these companies have now reached the point in their development where they need to hire real-life, experienced astronauts. The hardware is there, the software is testing out, and the launch dates are probably less than two years away for a real space industry.

The Czar says we should look on this with cautious optimism. Let the private sector develop a profit-loss plan for manned travel (the most expensive thing there is), and let NASA handle the robotic missions they evidently excel at better than anyone else. This will greatly increase the focus and vision of NASA while considerably whacking the costs down.

And for those parties glumly realizing that NASA’s role in space travel is collapsing, cheer up: the best days for you are coming very soon. And it will be better than anything NASA did.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.