[KevinDavis]

For other space news go to: http://www.spacetoday.net
For a list of Private Space Companies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_companies

[La Lydia]

Another sign of our nation’s decline under the BO administration.

[grobdriver]

The American-manned space program that galvanized a nation and made manned space flight a reality will be officially dead.

Obama really is as vile a loathsome gutter-crawler as we knew he was 18 months ago.

[saganite]

The reports of the death of the American manned space program are greatly over exaggerated. The emphasis will just shift to the private sector. That’s all.

[Eaker]

conduct science-fair-level experiments on the International Space Station

My thought for years.

[Keflavik76]

I can remember about two years ago when Obama visited Titisville Florida and promised the union workers at Kennedy Space Center that he supported the Ares project.

From Barack Obama’s Plan For American Leadership in Space:

As president, Obama will support the development of this vital new platform to ensure that the United States’ reliance on foreign space capabilities is limited to the minimum possible time period. The CEV will be the backbone of future missions, and is being designed with technology that is already proven and available.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=26647

[GovernmentShrinker]

I have mixed feelings about this aspect of the proposed budget cuts, and probably don’t really have anough detailed knowledge to take a position. But it seems to me that space travel is far enough along that it might actually be beneficial for the private sector to take over. Continuing to have the bulk of space travel/exploration done on the government teat invariably tends to increase the socialist mentality of the people doing the work, and socialist influence on the specific choices of what gets done and how and at what cost. By turning this over to the private sector, we may actually end up getting ahead of countries like Russia and China, where government is controlling every aspect of their space programs.

Israel seems to be doing fine with the private sector leading the charge in the space technology sector: “SpaceX and Spacecom Sign Contract for Falcon 9 Geosynchronous Transfer Mission” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2439718/posts

[olezip]

The American-manned space program that galvanized a nation and made manned space flight a reality will be officially dead.

This event has been on the horizon for many years, as our country's budget is dedicated more and more to entitlement and other socialist programs, and paying interest on debt. Socialists and Marxists understand not science and technology, and the relationship between technological innovation and standard of living.

What great space related R&D programs and accomplishments are associated with countries like Venezuela, Cuba, the UN and other third world nations? The Democrats would rather have degraded health care like those nations, and continue to punish and discourage the successful.

[magellan]

I had been thinking of making a pilgrimage to Cape Canaveral to watch the last Shuttle launch. I felt it may be the last American manned spaceflight, and therefore, historic.

My pessimism of lost American greatness appears to have been realized.

[guitarplayer1953]

Take all the foreign aid we give away each year and pump it into NASA and we could be back on the moon before 2020.

[M. Espinola]

"Obamaism does not compute!"

[leakinInTheBlueSea]

I had the pleasure of attending a brainstorming session hosted by NASA HQ during Sean O'Keefe's tenure as NASA administrator. The keynote speakers for this smallish group were Newt and Bob Walker (former House Science Committee Chair). Newt, Bob and O'Keefe all spoke at length about space commercialization and privatization of near earth operations. The view held during the bush terms was that 1) NASA was a budgetary mess (which is why they brought in a bean counter), 2) that the larger federal budget issues were not going away anytime soon, so there would be no BIG increase in NASA funding like during Apollo, and 3) that NASA's innovation was hamstrung by the budgetary realities of shuttle operations.

The solution they were advocating and asking for ideas on how to make a reality, was to commercialize your everyday manned space flight, and leave the high risk/no profit stuff to NASA. That is, privatize heavy lift and LEO activities and let NASA buy these services for the routine stuff like ISS supply/maintenance.

It was a very good time to have this meeting as Spaceship One had just completed its first of two qualifying flights for its x-prixe. They were throwing around ideas for growing the x-prize concept to spur heavy lift commercialization. I recommended that they take advantage of the second Spaceship One flight... be there when SS1 lands and present the big rubber check. Make a big PR event out of it and announce a large prize for the first U.S. company to land a craft on the surface of the moon and return it to earth (ignored of course).

The shuttle operations budget is the 800lb gorilla of the NASA budget... the expense of the routine manned spaceflight in the NASA budget will not change this no matter what vehicle NASA uses. To illustrate this point, Newt talked about what would have happened if the Spaceship One flight would have failed (it almost did, BTW if you remember that underdamped roll). He said they would mourn for a week, get to work figuring out what went wrong and try again as soon as they could build another vehicle. The public would shrug, pat them on the bacj and say "good try!" He contrasted that with what happens when after NASA loss of life... national mourning, congressional committees, multiyear delays. His point was that NASA is too risk averse to manage routine manned spaceflight that in itself is inherently risky... that NASA needed to save its money and its risk tolerance for the grand vision missions (e.g. manned mars mission).

I walked into the meeting a skeptic, but walked away convinced there was significant merit to this approach. The difference this time around is that the grand vision is not a mission to Mars, but rather a mission to earth (earth science). I'm not sure if it is a death sentence for NASA or not, but thinking is certainly not new. Kind of like Dubya's vision for Mars... I remember a book I used to own that detailed von Braun's plan for man on Mars... nearly verbatim... then again, that von Braun guy was pretty smart :)