SB 19-33: Space Exploration, Development, and Settlement Act (Passed)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

NAY Ftr

I was actually going to make a long post about this subject but I basically overlooked it after reminding Jimmy to bring it up and then ran out of time Thursday/Friday.

In the last week and a half I have been binge watching short science Youtube videos, it is a shame this didn't happen like a week sooner (the videos I mean).

My first issue concerns that, and while I get that this bill is about settlement of space and this isn't exactly a viable option for that, I think we should also consider sending more probes to study Venus both to get a better understanding of its development, its runaway green house effect and ascertaining whether there is some kind of microbial life that is absorbing UV light in its upper atmosphere, as some have suggested may be the case.

I would insert the ancient alien's meme here but RIP pics


This would be way out in the future (hundreds of years, maybe thousands), but one idea I came across was siphoning off Carbon Dioxide from Venus and using it to create an atmosphere for Mars. One could also imagine reducing our carbon dioxide in a similar fashion though we would not be able to get enough from our planet without plunging us into an ice age.

To do any kind of terraforming on Mars you would need to create an imitation magnetic shield and that could be tested first on Venus since it is 1) Closer and 2) wouldn't have anyone on it in case early designs failed/went terrible wrong.

Even further down the road, using Venus as way to test sunlight reflection as a way to develop a means to protect earth from eventually having its oceans boiled away in a couple hundred million years, though obviously that is a very, very distant concern.

Before any of that comes though, we should definitely be studying it since it is so close to us, very similar in composition and size and basically is a window into our future either because of human self destruction or because of the sun's increasing brightness. We also could use deep oceanic pressure on earth as a way to develop and test probes and other unmanned space craft that could withstand the dense atmospheric pressure. 



And of course I have to express my dissatisfaction with the lack of direct funding. This is a substantial outlay and it comes to mind that several people said that the miniscule appropriations don't significantly impact the deficit during the petition discussion, this is one that is in the tune of several hundred billion dollars and while I don't have a problem with funding space flight, research and development, we have to be responsible and make sure that such large expenditures are funded.  Space investment is a very extreme long term outlay and we should not be deficit funding it at all, rather we should be building it on a solid foundation, of direct funding.