Posted on 01/28/2010 9:59:38 AM PST by MindBender26
NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.
There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.
Officially, companies such as Boeing still support Constellation and its millions of dollars of contracts. Some believe that in a battle with Congress, Ares may survive.
"I would not say Ares is dead yet," said an executive with one major NASA contractor. "It's probably more accurate to say it's on life support. We have to wait to see how the coming battle ends."
The end of the shuttle program this year is already going to slash 7,000 jobs at Kennedy Space Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
When the Appolo program ended and when Challenger exploded, home values dropped 40-60%.
Forget about vague future promises, (which Obama gives whenever he kills a good program), it's gone.
Bottom line: Eventual loss of between 18,000 and 40,000 high tech jobs in Central Florida, California and Huntsville, Alabama.
All this so Obama will have more money to give to (and buy the votes of) Acornistas, those who will not work.
But Obama will spend 1 billion on a train between Tampa and Orlando.
But hey, he is giving $8 billion dollars for high speed rail in Florida....speculated to create an alleged 25,000 jobs.../s
The decision is also intended to reduce any tendency to be proud of your country. Since we are so evil, we shouldn’t even THINK of doing that.
When the government tap runs dry, the whole country will suffer. Reality check.
So this money can be put to good use funding community organizing groups such as ACORN. Just unbelievable.
The future belongs to China.
If these projects and dreams depend on tax money, maybe we’d better rethink it. Trying to do more in space with less might be a worthy objective for American inventors and investors.
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third world countries don’t need a space program
“All this so Obama will have more money to give to (and buy the votes of) Acornistas, those who will not work.” ~ MindBender26
Not in this case. This is a funding payoff to James Hansen, et.al., to continue providing the fraudulent “Anthropogenic Global Warming” CO-2 data to the ‘RATS that gives them the cover they need to impose cap and trade, BTU, and every other tax they can think of on the duped citizens.
A [James] Hansen Stimulus? [Daniel Foster]
President Obama is redefining the mission of NASA (for the record, the National Aeronatical & Space Administration) away from space and aeronautics and toward the monitoring of global warming:
When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon. . . .
In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects principally, researching and monitoring climate change and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible.
Perhaps NASA could use the extra climate-babysitting money, as a new report suggests the agency may have been complicit in skewing the record on global warming:
[Report authors] Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea which has a warming effect on winter weather.
Over the past two decades, they say, “the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half.”
Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.
Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.
They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia a high-altitude, landlocked country but instead “interpolates” or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from “nearby” temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.
The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.
“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”
The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York.
Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.
“NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis,” he said. “The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures.”
01/27 02:00 PM http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/
Speaking of Monkeying with the Data [Greg Pollowitz]
. . . and ocean acidification.
The Science & Public Policy institute, SPPI, has a new and lengthy PDF report bringing together material from Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, and other sources that addresses various temperature-data issues and controversies. It’s a 6MB download, but check it out here. A summary:
Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.
That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.
First, they called it “global warming”. Then they noticed there had been no warming for 15 years, and cooling for 9, so they hastily renamed it “climate change”. Then they noticed the climate was changing no more than it ever had, so they tried “energy security”, and even named a Congressional Bill after it. Then they noticed that most Western nations already had bountiful energy security, in the form of vast, untapped domestic supplies of oil, gas, coal, or all three, so they switched to “ocean acidification”.
This is the new phantasmagoric for the tired, old scare whipped up by the NRDC and the environmental extremist movement for their own profit at our expense. The world’s corals, they tell us, will be eaten away by the acidified ocean within not more than ten years hence. Shellfish will be no more, their calcified carapaces and exoskeletons dissolved by the carbonic acid caused by our burning of fossil fuels. The oceans will die. Sound familiar?
Yet, as the indefatigable Craig Idso here demonstrates, the scientific consensus if science were done by consensus at all, which it is not is that the rising “ocean acidification” scare is just more piffle.
01/27 10:15 AM http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/
Obama: Wirth Waiting For [Chris Horner]
So here’s a money line from President Obama’s global warming riff during tonite’s SOU:
“even if you doubt the evidence [for Man-made global warming], providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future. Because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the world.”
Now, put aside the rather thin empirical or even theoretical evidence for his economic hypothesis, and recall then-senator Tim Wirth’s eerily similar formulation in 1988 the very same year he helped invent global warming as a policy issue with his “ stagecraft” hearing featuring James Hansen, with Al Gore accompanying him on the Alarmacord:
“try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Twenty-two years. Still waiting for warming. Still using the threat as the vehicle for their agenda. And with rhetoric either cribbed or so closely paraphrased Wirth ought to demand a script credit. The very boldness of these fresh ideas and approaches send a thrill down my leg.
01/27 10:45 PM http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/
FUBO...FUBO...FUBO...FUBO...FUBO...FUBO!
LLS
Not to worry, the hundreds of thousands of Haitians that will be dumped in Florida will surely stimulate the economy in FL./s
The high speed rail is a joke. Always has been, always will be.
On the anniversary of the Challenger Distaster no less... what an %^%$#%^%$.
As a fan of the space program in general, let me play devil’s advocate:
1) The space program shouldn’t be a jobs program for Florida.
2) Other than a feel-good exercise, there’s little point in spending billions of dollars to send 2-3 people back to the moon to collect more rocks and take photos.
3) Isn’t this something that should be left to private industry? In all these years, the government hasn’t developed a practical replacement for the space shuttle, what makes us think this will happen now?
as a muslim, Barack Hussein Obama would rather spread any future development and scientific advancement of the space program to the 13th century over-populated third world countries that he so much affection and allegiance to, as he not only has lived there, but is one of them.
All those rocket scientists can now go to work on the high speed railroad 0bama is promising.
24 years ago today President Reagan gave this speech:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we’ve never lost an astronaut in flight; we’ve never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we’ve forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we’re thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, ‘Give me a challenge and I’ll meet it with joy.’ They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.
I’ve always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute. We’ll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: “Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it.”
There’s a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, ‘He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.’ Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’
Thank you.
Ronald Reagan - January 28, 1986
We’ve fallen a long way, since then.
NASA is in Democrat Suzanne Kosmas’ district. Her website is down “for maintenance” right now.
Which is just as well as she hasn’t done a thing in the past year other than kiss Pelosi’s rear.
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