Posted on 01/27/2010 7:07:00 AM PST by rightcoast
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.
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.
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.
There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis to take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station — a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years...
See link for full article...
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5smPcN8AoE
DON’T TOUCH THE MOON
Don’t touch them moon.
I need it for loving.
Don’t touch the stars.
I need them, too.
All you frantic scientists,
Find somewhere else to go.
—Cornell Blakeley, Fulton Records #2473, 1957
So we should keep shoveling tax-payer money into a pointless enterprise just so people can stay employed? I do think NASA is a waste now. However, if they axe it, the money will simply be wasted on some other useless pork project, so I guess we should just keep the status quo.
It'll never be used that way (by us). It'll just be an expensive location for a space toilet.
NASA is a joke. It was good when the Germans ran it. Idiots at NASA have supported Democrat Bill Nelson “the space hillbilly liberal AH gomer dumba*s” Senator.
Nice to see NASA getting payback from Dems like UAW workers. Idiots. The UAW workers will be toast soon.
It is run like the postal service. The space program died with Von Braun. Idiots sitting around in America watching ball games on TV while illegals and liberal who control TV stole your country.
Maybe someone like Dick Rutan can change things. The fact Americans elected an illegal alien from Kenya means things do not look good for America.
Well, whether or not a lunar rock is a relativistic projectile depends on how powerful your railgun is and how massive the rock is.
At the very least, you’re looking at something coming down at orbital velocity.
What is your plan for defending the USA if the Chinesse or Russians decide to start hurling rocks at us from the moon? I wonder what the kenekic energy would be for say a hard 1 ton rock falling 240,000 miles? Bet that would make one hell of a big band when it hit. And no pesky radioactive fall out either.
I also wonder what useful resources might be found on the moon in abundance. I do know there is lots of H3 there and H3 is something like 1000x more valuable then gold. Wonder what else might be there?
If Obama manages to implement his vision of a space program then the USA will have no man capable rocket or space craft (unless the Air Force has one they are not talking about). The Chinese will have one, the Russian already have one and the EU is very close to having one. And if I am not mistaken the Japanese are working on one and maybe even India is too.
This is going to be very bad news to the folks at JSC in Houston and bad news for the folks at KSC in Fla. I might be willing to go along if every other federal agency is similarly cut or eliminated to balance the federal budget.
Actually, a semi-permanent or permanent moon outpost of the US would actually ensure that such things didn’t happen - even if we didn’t equip it with its own accelerator.
I'm reminded of the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider. Many physicists of that era felt big government broke a covenant with academia dating back to before the Manhattan project. No longer could gifted young physicists and mathematicians dedicate their life's work to research with expectation of a career provided by the grateful government.
But it’s damn near unanimous on the Left. Strict libertarians are (unfortunately) not that common on the right, but it’s from the Left that you hear “dey should spend dat money on da people here” etc.
The Left opposes the expansion of humanity into space for the same reason as they hate rural America and want to drive everyone into cities: The more concentrated people are, the easier they are to control.
That is your opinion. There are tens of thousands of people who keep hundreds of business going here. So you are rooting for the death of an industry that you believe is dead and rooting for the death of our local economy and housing market.
Well Thank God NASA isn’t in your backyard, right?
There is more that goes on in Space than just circling the planet and taking pictures you know.
—Cornell Blakeley, Fulton Records #2473, 1957
Cornell Blakeley sounds like a Space Age luddite. Here's Lenny Welch's answer: Rocket to the Moon, from 1958.
If you were expecting me to say "Teflon" or "Velcro", don't expect me to bite.
However, high speed digital communications, one technology that I'm intimately familiar with, has direct ties to NASA technology from the Apollo program, along with many other advances in electronics technology. Advances, often rapid advances, in this area of technology were undoubtedly driven by the space program of the 1960's. Texas Instruments is a prime example. Motorola, too. The cell phone you probably use every day has it's roots in the heady days of the Apollo program. Those innovations in electronics and electrical engineering are far too numerous to begin to mention them all here, but those are good examples. Others include fluid pumping technologies on microscopic to Olympic sized swimming pool scale. As a result, major contributions to medical science and materials science needed to develop the systems of the Apollo project were also gained, either by the invention of new science and materials, or by bringing existing, little known science and materials into the mainstream of everyday life. The number of engineers alone in my generation that were produced after Apollo, myself included, are directly attributable to being inspired by the Apollo program as a child. I recall when I was an undergrad at Ga. Tech. One of my first engineering classes the professor asked the class how many people were there because they were fans of the space program. Nearly every hand in the class went up. This was in the early 1980's.
Look up "NASA Spinoffs" for more info.
Don’t need to hide it. Just call it an ‘economical vehicle launcher’ (which it is), claim that it is to be used to launch payloads of ore back to Earth orbit for recovery, or just build physically large capsules and size the railgun for that. Obama wouldn’t order a strike on that. :P
Who didn’t see this coming when the economy began to implode?
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