Market for space odysseys growing astronomically

Times Online ^ | 3 Sep 06 | David Robertson

[Shuttle Shucker]

Can you believe what the pork-barrelers are doing to the NASA-funded competitive prizes program?

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&dbname=cp109&sid=cp109s0tv8&refer=&r_n=sr280.109&item=&sel=TOC_385521&

"The Committee does not provide any funding in fiscal year 2007 for the Centennial Challenges program. Funding provided in previous fiscal years for this program is sufficient for NASA to run a prize based competition, as
well as to verify that NASA will see tangential benefits from running such a program. Providing additional funds to a program based on prizes only creates a pot of unused funds while other aspects of NASA's mission are
being cut or delayed due to a lack of funds."

Discussed here:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/001028.html

and indirectly here: http://www.spaceprojects.com/prizes

[SunkenCiv]

It's a kum-bi-yah, diversity in action, wet dream, just as it was intended to be in the first place.

It hasn't produced anything worthwhile that required a crewed station, and primarily was a taxpayer subsidy for the Russian space program. We need to pull the plug now, since the Russians are making loads of cash off their hydrocarbon sales, and selling rifle factories and advanced fighters to Venezuela.

But we won't.

[Shuttle Shucker]

>>>the Russians are...selling rifle factories and advanced fighters to Venezuela<<<

This is most unfortunate. Chavez is a problem.

[SunkenCiv]

So is Putin.

[Shuttle Shucker]

Both Putin and Chavez want to remain in power indefinitely, and have tried to modify the laws accordingly. Chavez's push is reportedly underway right now (through a referendum).

[SunkenCiv]

Chavez's push s/b down an elevator shaft.

[Brit1]

Couldn't agree more..its not a shuttle never has been.
I get the 'shuttle' from home to the train station or airport. But exactly as you if NASA offered me the chance to 'fly'you would have to kill me to prevent me from taking that opportunity

[nuke rocketeer]

Before you do that Spin off JPL and let them run the unmanned planetary exploration program. Those guys do a great job there.

[FreedomPoster]

Yeah, if they're the ones doing the mini-probes and such, that's not unreasonable. Mostly I'm talking about the Shuttle fleet, and manned efforts in general.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

The title is misleading. Odyssey makes it seem as though the article was at least about trips to Mars, if not about generation ships, or other extrasolar exploration.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

The United States is the leader for construction of the ISS, but Americans will probably hand over much control over the stations to the other members (Russia and the ESA mainly, but Japan and Canada are also members), as NASA tries to go on with Bush's vision for space exploration.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

How come the article has ESA, but uses Nasa? The British seem to lowercase the nonfirst letters of phonetic acronyms, hence Nasa instead of the proper NASA. But shouldn't ESA be Esa, then. Unless they are using American English in which case it should be ESA and NASA.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

See comment 52.

[orionblamblam]

> How come the article has ESA, but uses Nasa?

My Conspiracy Theory Of The Day: it's subtle psyops. Same as news articles that refer to President Clinton out bopping around, and meeting with Mr. Bush.

[AFreeBird]

Galactic’s space ship is being built by Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, and Burt Rutan, an aerospace designer.

I certainally hope that the ship is being built by Mr. Rutan. I wouldn't want to ride in a ship built by a guy who's company is known for "Blue Screen of Death", lock-ups, crashes and 5 minute boot times. :-/