'INSTEAD OF GOING TO THE MOON ..........'

Former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt is a frequent guest on NBC-TV news programs. This morning he appeared on the Today Show to comment on the case of 17-year-old Chelsea King whose body was just discovered after she had been missing for a week. 30-year-old John Albert Gardner, a registered sex offender with a history of sexually assaulting young girls, is believed to have raped and murdered the San Diego teenager. He is in custody. His DNA was detected on Chelsea’s panties.

When asked how closely sex offenders were being monitored, Van Zandt replied that because there were 83,000 registered sex offenders in California, authorities find it hard to keep up with them. He also pointed out that parole officers with 70-man case loads could not give sex offenders the attention needed to protect women and children from sexual predators.

Van Zandt noted that because California finds itself in an enormous financial crisis, it is releasing thousands of prisoners, thereby putting more people at risk. He said that “instead of going to the moon” we should be spending our tax dollars taking care of our needs at home.

It so happens that I live only a mile or so from NASA. The manned space program is a sensitive subject in my community. There have been dire predictions that the cancellation of NASA’s program to return astronauts to the moon will cost this immediate area several thousand jobs.

I am all for spending billions of dollars on unmanned space exploration, but I have long questioned spending billions on manned space flights. A friend who retired from NASA claims that for every dollar spent on the manned space program we get back 15 dollars in return. When I pressed him to give me specific examples of what we got in return, he could only say that we got the jobs of the people working for NASA and its subcontractors.

California is not the only state facing an enormous financial crisis. Like California, other states are resorting to the early release of prisoners in order to reduce their budgets. These early releases will jeopardize the public’s safety. That’s why I agree with Clint Van Zandt’s position that instead of going to the moon, we should use the billions of dollars appropriated for the manned space program to alleviate the financial difficulties our states now find themselves in.