Richard Ingvaldsen wrote:
“As much as I hate to agree with Obama he is right. The Constellation program is a joke, it is nothing more than a forty year old Apollo capsule on steroids. What a shame advances in manned space flight technology stopped advancing in 1979 with the shuttle program. As someone who is old enough to remember all the advances made during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs its hard to believe that the only manned vehicles left will be Soviet era capsules that are almost as old as the shuttle. Guess the government figures the money needed is better spent on Depression era agencies or continuing the mohair subsidies.”
(I’m with Ingvaldsen on this, as far as I could see the Ares was just a larger version of the Apollo command & service modules and updated lunar lander with absolutely nothing new about it. Plus that part about the problems of exposure to Galactic Cosmic Rays and high-energy protons from large-scale solar events has not been solved.)
Going back to the Moon as designed by NASA is a reprise of a magnificent stunt. Let us do something new.
Since the end of Apollo, NASA has been about maintaining the standing army of staff. It is now a great hindrance to the development of private efforts.
The government needs to fund the development of a heavy lift system, mostly for the military and lots of X projects. Single stage to orbit systems, high specific impulse (ion) propulsion systems and nano sized science probes would be a good targets for X projects.
The valuable but long term payoff science and exploration projects can piggy back on those projects.