How Deep is the Red Spot?

As our nation agonizes over how to avoid the devastating impact of an unprecedented financial crisis caused by decades of irresponsible government borrowing and spending, the big spenders at NASA are poised to blow another $1.1 billion plus on a space junket to the planet Jupiter to find out how deep is the red spot.

NASA scientists are touting the mission as a key to unlocking secrets of how our solar system was formed by investigating what lies underneath Jupiter's atmosphere. “And that is why it is very interesting to us,” said NASA official, Scott Bolton, about the mission. He wonders about how much water is in Jupiter; whether the planet has a heavy metal core; and how deep is the red spot.

So the Space Mission Juno satellite project, a $1.1 billion dollar space lab, a decade in the making, will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 5^th atop a powerful and expensive Atlas V rocket, on a four year odyssey to planet Jupiter to satisfy NASA’s burning curiosity about a red spot.

NASA sent the Galileo orbiter and space probe already to Jupiter in 1989. It entered the planet’s orbit in 1995 and plunged to its destruction inside the gas ball in 2003. Voyagers 1 and 2, Ulysses and New Horizons, also NASA spacecraft, were launched to perform flybys of Jupiter costing more billions of taxpayer dollars. And that’s not all. Juno will be followed by other deep space missions, a whole series of new multi-billion dollar missions, to answer more questions about Earth’s origin and the evolution of our solar system.

That’s essentially it. That’s the most the American people can expect to receive from these huge expenditures of billions upon billions of dollars – more information about how the solar system was formed and how deep is the red spot. Maybe we’ll get some information; I’m sure we will, but it’s a certainty that we’ll never see those billions of dollars again. It will all be lost in space.

Now, I’m just as curious as the next fellow about how the solar system was formed. I’d like to know how deep the red spot is too, and why it’s red, and why it’s lasted so long, and how fast the wind is blowing inside it, and on and on. It’s all very interesting and fascinating and awesome too, but if it’s going to cost billions of taxpayer dollars to find out, I think the answers can wait – at least until after we know whether our nation can survive financially. After all, Jupiter’s been out there for billions of years and it’s not going away.

There’s a lot of interesting questions I’d love to know the answers to but those answers simply aren’t worth the cost of billions of dollars to find out. Right now, for example, I’d like to know how far the U.S. dollar is going to fall before it will take a wheelbarrow full of them to buy a candy bar. It would be good to know whether, within my lifetime, the credit instruments of the United States of America will attain the same status as junk bonds. Trillions have been spent so far on these questions and I fear that the answers are coming soon.

This debt and deficit spending crisis has been going on forever; proposals have been bouncing back and forth between the president and the house and the senate like ping pong balls, all ending up the trash bin; and still no one has a clue about what spending will actually be cut, if any.

Why doesn’t some smart politician suggest scrapping the Juno Mission and using the $1.1 billion saved to pay down the debt? Why not put the entire space program on ice, along with thousands of other wasteful government projects, until we can claw our way out of this financial hole and get back into the black? 

With all due respect to NASA and the interests of science, there are a whole lot more important questions facing our country right now than how deep is the red spot.