On Saturday, the SpaceX rocket was finally
able to launch, was supposed to launch last
weekend, weather delayed it. It went up Saturday
without a hitch. Everything is great. We got
two NASA astronauts now in orbit. Everybody's
happy, especially Donald Trump because on
Saturday when the rocket launched, and this
was the Saturday after he hid underground
in the bunker Friday evening. Trump was down
there in Florida for the SpaceX launch and
he gave a little speech where he said, with
this launch, the decades of lost years and
little action are officially over. Past leaders
put the United States at the mercy of foreign
nations to send our astronauts into our orbit.
Not anymore. Today we once again proudly launch
American astronauts on American rockets, the
best in the world, from right here on American
soil. Hell yeah, Mr. Trump. Way to do it,
right? You did awesome with this.
That's what he wants us to think. In reality,
he did absolutely nothing. That he had no
control over any of this whatsoever. He did
not make it happen. He did not negotiate anything.
He is not the one who came up with the idea,
but here he is down there in Florida and yeah,
the first rocket launched from the United
States since 2011 but he's acting like he
did it. You didn't, that was actually the
job of another egocentric millionaire or billionaire,
excuse me, Elon Musk and SpaceX. That's him
that he did this. But if you want to know
the truth, he's not completely wrong with
what he's saying. Back in 2006, George W.
Bush and the Republicans decided, you know
what, the United States is just spending too
darn much money on NASA, you know, space exploration,
science essentially. It's science is what
it is, but we're spending too much on that.
We can't do that.
So they began a program in 2006 under George
W. Bush Republican, to essentially prioritize
the space program. Now this program was continued
by Barack Obama. They liked it. They kept
it in place. You know, we kept defunding NASA.
If we needed to send astronauts up to the
ISS, we'd send them over to Russia and they
would go up with the sole use rockets there.
But if we needed to send cargo to the international
space station, we turned to private entrepreneurs
here in the United States because we've privatized
that part. We didn't have to send that stuff
to Russia. We would have companies like SpaceX
just send up the supplies dock with the international
space station. Worked beautifully. US saved
a lot of money. These companies got a lot
of federal grants to do it. So we weren't
actually saving any money at all. But companies
made a lot of money and that's always the
point.
So Trump is right about that fact. Yeah, we
did have to send American astronauts overseas
to go up to space. But you had nothing to
do with this program. This program was the
result of privatization and that's bad. The
United States should have a space program
that actually works, a space program that's
actually functional, but we don't, we even
have a space force now officially, at least
on paper, maybe not in person, but on paper
it exists. But we don't have any, like, we
don't have the rockets anymore. We don't have
the money for this agency. This is actually
something that is important, far more important,
by the way, than spending $740 billion a year
on tanks and planes and bombs. Maybe we should
be focusing on science and space exploration,
things like that. Things that could better
the planet instead of things that could destroy
the planet. But no, we would rather give all
of that money, money to private industry,
private companies to let the billionaires
get richer while our federal government has
to rely more and more on these corporations.
That's what started in 2006. That's what Obama
continued, and somehow that's what Trump has
taken credit for today.
