MAGA like all mainstream politicians support science and technology when it suits them and agrees with them, and tear it down when it dosen’t. That’s just a fact of life. The other parties are no different, nor is the far left. You can see this with all the talk from leftist groups hating on AI and calling for data centers to be dismantled. There are some who call for the deindustrialization of society in general like the whole solar punk movement and agrarianism. The only political groups who legitimately always support science and technological progress in all it’s forms are accelerationists and accelerationists come from all over the left-right spectrum.

None of what you are saying really adds up. Yes they are trying to establish a base on the moon and mars. That’s a hell of a long way to setting up an independent colony up there that’s self-sustaining and actually confortable enough for rich people. Many rich people would rather die than live somewhere like the ISS, and the ISS is miles and miles away from being in any way self-sustaining. They are tied to supply shipments from earth. We are decades away at the minimum from having somewhere fully self-sustaining on mars, the moon, or even LEO nevermind somewhere Jeff Bezos would want to live. Jeff and Trump would die before that happened.

There are loads of reasons but if you want a practical one we should do it for the helium 3 and other materials that can be found on the moon and in space.

If we are talking about SpaceX then maybe you are correct. I don’t think that’s even close to true for NASA who are surviving on a much smaller share of the budget than they had in the 1960s.

Actually they made this whole project on a much smaller share of the national budget. That’s why it’s taken them so long. So this is actually ass backwards.

What you should actually be doing is pulling funding from the military and putting it into NASA and other programs. You spent so much for so long yet are struggling against Iran, a tiny country with a fraction of your budget and man power. It’s embarrassing. Stick to things you are actually good at.

Before this mission the furthest humans have been was Apollo 13 which essentially did a flyby like this one. This one will do a similar manoeuvre but slightly further away from earth.

I agree that these kinds of missions are needed but this isn’t really comparable to Apollo 8. Apollo 8 made it into lunar orbit, this one is just doing a fly by. In a lot of other ways it’s an improvement. Much safer, carrying more people in comfier conditions with better video cameras and even bringing women and non-americans. Not just test pilots either, but actual scientists. It’s a representation of what’s changed since Apollo for both better and worse. NASA has much less of the USA’s budget than it did for Apollo, and things took much longer. It’s also been stated that the next mission won’t make it to the surface as it was originally planned, but is instead going to be testing the lunar Landers in lunar orbit. They are relying on Blue Origin and SpaceX to not just build but also launch and transport the Landers into lunar orbit. It’s very different to how things were done back then. If this was like the Apollo programme and they started at the same time we would have landed multiple times by now probably some years ago. Apollo really was a crash development program.