Posted on 04/15/2010 5:49:49 AM PDT by Schnucki
President Barack Obama will on Thursday unveil a "bold and daring" new space mission to send astronauts to Mars months after he scrapped a project to return to the Moon.
The president promised that the programme would pursue trips to "a sequence of deep-space destinations", buoyed by a Nasa budget that will be increased by $6 billion (£4 billion) over the next five years.
By 2015, the agency will determine "the specific heavy-lift rocket" needed to send astronauts to asteroids, the moons of Mars and eventually to Mars itself, details of the proposal published on the White House website said. It also allocates $3 billion (£2 billion) more to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, a 60 per cent increase over previous plans.
The proposals also give private industry the role of building new "space taxis" to take humans to the international Space Station, after the space shuttle project ends this year.
But while the White House promoted the plans as "bold and daring", many retired astronauts and Nasa officials viewed it as just the opposite.
Mr Obama has faced fierce criticism from lawmakers and space enthusiasts since budget proposals in February revealed plans to axe the expensive and under-funded Constellation rocket project designed to return US astronauts to the Moon by 2020. The last manned trip there was in 1972.
A panel of experts appointed by Mr Obama decided that the scheme had been so poorly funded by the Bush administration that its goals had become unrealistic.
But in an open letter to the President, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, and other pioneering astronauts criticised the "devastating" decision to axe Constellation, saying the US space programme risked becoming "third rate" as a result.
With the demise of shuttle
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
From where I stand, the same thing can be said of the DoD.
Right now, I can think of several project that I have been involved with that had both NASA and DoD involvement (In the interest of full disclosure, I work for a small aerospace firm, so I am biased on this issue). There are some things that can get funded better by one agency vs. the other, but there is a certain amount of exchange between the agencies.
Could this be done better if it was all DoD? Perhaps, but there would be the appearance that all we were doing was militarizing space. That is not an easy sell to everyone, and would have been an even harder sell in the 1960's.
Let's allow the U.S. military to militarize whatever needs to be militarized, as long as it's in the best interests of our liberty.
The challenge is getting good leaders (unlike the current POTUS) to decide what are America's "best interests", and to make DoD run efficiently.
Let the universities, private research foundations, non-profit corporations, such as The Planetary Society etc. whether national or international, to do the science and exploration. Let Paul Allen and his group do the manned space flights for tourism.
I know, I know...private ventures don't have funding anywhere comparable to what the US government is able to pull out of its citizens and the Chinese banks.
Well then, the private ventures just better go out and raise the damn funds. If we had a Fair Tax in this nation, there would be plenty of private capital available for all kinds of private ventures, including manned space flight. But that's another topic for another thread.
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Perhaps there will be a time when NASA is no longer. However, I want it to cease to exist because something better came along, and not because it died withering on the vine. How we get there is a matter of debate.
Peace.
A few years ago when I was in Las Vegas, I saw Sigfried and Roy make a white tiger fly around the room. Looked as real as the moon landing. In “Forrest Gump” I saw Lyndon Johnson present Tom Hanks the Medal of Honor. That looked pretty real. You can fake anything.
I worked on that spacecraft that took those pictures. I know many of the people whose job it is to make sure they are accurate. I am not part of a conspiracy to hide the truth. So, I am going to flat out say it: Are you calling me a liar?
-K51
To Mars! To Mars! allah be praised and whatnot.....
/like, sarcasm, like, you know, like, off. for sure..
No, you seem to be honest and believe that your work is accurate. I do not believe that the US landed men on the moon in 1969 or at any other time. Spacecraft probably, but unmanned. The photos from your spacecraft show something resembling what the lunar modules were supposed to look like, but do not convince me that they were ever manned.
I watched the very first landing live on a closed circuit feed directly from NASA (or so I was told.) It didn’t look real then and nothing I have seen since has convinced me otherwise.
OK. Is there any evidence that would prove to you that we have been to the moon?
-K51
Zero reminds me of a playground kid—well they might have gone to the Moon, but under MY plan, we’ll go to an ASTEROID!!!
What a tool!
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