Opinion: 93,000,000 miles seems just about right for this orb

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Do not look directly at this photo.

As you’ll remember from this Ticket item here, last week Democratic President Obama announced a reconfigured national space program for NASA.

With only three space shuttle flights remaining, he revealed part of the new plan on his way to two party fundraisers in Miami. Although Obama attempted to present his proposal as bold, the plan, as this Ticket item demonstrated, underwhelmed millions with its breadth of vision and Chicago-style ambition.

As part of Obama’s ongoing efforts to differentiate his administration from the eight years of failed you-know-what by you-know-who from Texas, Obama canceled planned trips by NASA crews back to the Moon’s dusty, cold surface. What he did mention last week was landing U.S. crews on a hurtling asteroid for some reason.

But now The Ticket has learned exclusively, Obama’s bold new space plan will involve a dramatic, yet-to-be announced manned solar landing before the end of 2016, which looks to be the last year of some Republican’s first term.

Perhaps as part of its research for the Obama-ordered landing on the Sun, NASA Wednesday released stunning photos of that inferno taken by the new Solar Dynamics Observatory as it turned operational this month. The observatory was launched in February and will provide research images with 10 times the clarity of high definition (See above photo).

However, unlike President John F. Kennedy’s historic promise to place an American on the Moon by the end of the 1960’s, Obama’s ambitious plan to land on the Sun raises a few special challenges given that there really isn’t any crust to land on and the star’s surface temperature runs around 1.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter even than Phoenix in August.

As a result, in the interests of astronaut safety and holding down healthcare costs, the Harvard-educated Obama White House, using newly-expanded federal work rules, has ordered that the solar landing mission be conducted completely at night.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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