First, you'll notice coburn goes for the low hanging fruit; stuff easy to ridicule when taken out of context and which he can trust will never be looked at more closely. Next you'll notice, he's worried these "silly" expenditures take away from our ability to make bigger and badder...well, let me quote him here:
The $67.9 billion in savings in the “Department of Everything” report could pay for a third of the cost of the planned fleet of new strategic bombers for the Air Force. It could, likewise, pay a third of the cost of the fleet of Ohio-class replacement nuclear submarines for the Navy. For the Army, $16 billion over ten years – about 25 percent of the savings in the report – could mean robust funding for modernization or purchase of new rifles and light machine guns for every soldier.
His site:
http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/pressreleases?ContentRecord_id=e3ace3df-25a9-47c4-8c43-1403e134ce11
Direct link to the .pdf report:
http://coburn.senate.gov/public//index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=00783b5a-f0fe-4f80-90d6-019695e52d2d
A quote about the "Klingon" controversy in the report:
Further, DARPA paid nearly $100,000 for a strategy planning workshop on the 100 Year Starship project last year included an interesting discussion involving the Klingons, a fictional alien species who were villains and then later allies of humanity in the Star Trek series. The session entitled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” featured philosophy professor Christian Weidemann of Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum who pondered the theological conflict to Christianity if intelligent life was found on other planets.
This September, the 100-Year Starship organization spent $21,000 from the Pentagon to host another gathering for space travel enthusiasts.53 The focus of the meeting was to discuss how to get a manned spaceship to a planet in another solar system within the next century – a goal described as “most grandiose ... at a time when only two nations – neither of them the United States, at least currently – can send humans into space.”54
Most of the sessions were out-of-this-world. Participants discussed very long-distance
traveling that would take thousands of years, proposing either we need to create much faster spaceships or to manipulate space-time to accommodate our human needs.55 The ship would likely be propelled by a “warp bubble,” but a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) researching such a possibility cautioned “nobody should get excited at this point.”56 He further noted the type of energy needed would costs tens of billions of dollars per gram to produce.57
Space exploration should never get in the way of our ability to wage war.
There are additional links to the programs themselves which appear to be more interested in research for advancement than research to wage war.
If tom coburn told me the sky was blue, I'd grab a gas mask before checking to see what they were pumping in the atmosphere. his "reports" would make bernays blush.
Never, ever, take this guy or his flunkies at their word...never.
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