RUSH: I\u2019m not suggesting Obama divulge anything. I\u2019m asking where\u2019s the media trying to find out for the rest of us?<\/p>\n
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CALLER: Well, let me get to the point I called about, which is NASA, because you opened you up your show with it and you were talking about this wonderful miracle, just about, that they pulled off, how technically intricate it was and how they nailed it. And I\u2019m thinking to myself, well, NASA\u2019s populated with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of PhDs who went to federal schools on federal student loans and federal student aid. It\u2019s a government agency itself, and it got it right. It seems like a premise of the show is the government doesn\u2019t get anything right. Yet before the EPA you had rivers catching on fire —<\/p>\n
RUSH: In the first place, I\u2019ve never said that government never gets anything right. Secondly, throughout the course of this program, I have always heralded NASA for the contributions they have made to the advancement of science and the human standard of living, American standard of living. Obama shut it down. Some people told me, Ray, that they didn\u2019t know there were any Muslims on Mars<\/a> because that\u2019s what Obama\u2019s turned NASA into after this, Muslim outreach. I don\u2019t know how many of the people in the Jet Propulsion Labs got student loans or any of that. I don\u2019t care. None of that matters. They did great work. It\u2019s a phenomenal thing. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve never said that government\u2019s totally worthless, but I can tell you the people running the government right now don\u2019t know what in the hell they\u2019re doing, and this program predates Obama and any of his people arriving on the scene, and we\u2019re just lucky they didn\u2019t shut it down. We\u2019re just lucky that they didn\u2019t decide this trip was worthless, because they\u2019ve pretty much said that everything else about NASA is. They walked away from NASA, gave the money to Solyndra, gave the money to a bunch of worthless so-called green energy. This is an illustration of what government can do right, and I\u2019ll guarantee you, Ray, I\u2019m gonna get some people calling me telling me that I\u2019m a little bit confused, that they\u2019re not that great at NASA, that happens sometimes. But NASA started and really is a Department of Defense program, is where you go to trace its roots, which of course people on the left don\u2019t dig at all.<\/p>\n BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n RUSH: You know, one might say when speaking of NASA that the space flight realm of NASA, the vast majority of it is actually done by private aerospace companies bidding for the jobs. Private aerospace companies bid for certain aspects. Like the government didn\u2019t build the rover. They got a contract for it. A private sector firm — yes, with Obama bucks — I take it back. The money was allocated before Obama came along. That\u2019s probably why the money was still there. But it was our taxpayer dollars that were rewarded to a private sector company, probably a bunch of \u2019em combined, built various aspects of the rover. The rocket. Somebody won a bid to build that parachute, for example. The rockets to slow the rover down as it approached the Martian surface. <\/p>\n What you\u2019ve got at NASA is the flight engineers and these people that manage the actual mission on the computer side, you know, engineer managers and so forth. And none of this stuff is cheap. There\u2019s always been an argument, what\u2019s the reward here, the risk-reward, what are we as a society gaining? Okay, what\u2019s the big deal, landing on Mars? I had somebody ask me yesterday, I was marveling at the achievement here, and I was going on and on, somebody said, “What\u2019s the big deal about landing on Mars?” and there are a lot of people looking at it that way. <\/p>\n When you compare what it costs to get there and pull this off and what we derive from it, benefit-wise, versus the age-old argument, “How many starving people could we have fed with the money spent on the mission to go to Mars.” Never-ending question. “How much money could we spend on education, Mr. Limbaugh, and rebuild some crumbling inner-city schools for the money we spent?” You\u2019re always gonna have those questions. We always have had. And the people that want to argue the benefits of missions like this fall in some cases woefully short in trying to explain to society at large how everybody benefits from the technological advances to pull this off. <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/Obama-Solyndra585.jpg\"\/)
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