As gas prices continue rising, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin is calling on President Clinton to release the fuel stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. Harkin says the gesture would help Americans who are struggling to scratch up the cash to fill their tanks.Harkin says farmers, truckers and lower-income Iowans are being particularly hard-hit by the high gas & diesel prices. He says some truckers have had to quit driving since the fuel prices have taken such a leap.He says getting more corn-based ethanol into the U-S gasoline market would help prevent a future supply shortage like we’re now seeing.Senator Tom Harkin has written a guest column in this month’s “Air & Space” magazine, urging NASA to abandon the international space station project. Harkin says the space agency should focus on bigger, bolder missions like building a base on the moon and putting astronauts on Mars, not building an orbiting station.Harkin says NASA is only taking baby steps now instead of the “giant leaps” in exploration that landed a dozen astronauts on the moon in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Harkin says since the end of the Apollo era and Saturn Five rockets, NASA’s mission has been “misguided” and a waste of tax dollars.The space station is being assembled at a cost of 100-billion dollars. Harkin says if the money from the shuttle & space station programs had been put into a moon base years ago, we could have now been harvesting the moon’s ice & water resources for energy. Many see the moon as a better launching platform for a mission to Mars.
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