Free Republic

Competitiveness: The president spent Tax Day reassuring Florida voters that money will keep flowing to NASA. But in space as well as on Earth, we'll be an unexceptional nation. In space, no one can hear you scheme. President Obama's speech at the Kennedy Space Center will never be confused with President Kennedy's clarion call in 1961 to send an American to the moon within a decade. Rather it was an admission that we will now boldly go where no one wants to go.

Achievement: The nation that put the first man on the moon may have put its last as budget cuts slash NASA's plans to return. Men will return to the moon, but they will likely speak Chinese. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced in front of a joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of that decade. It was a clarion call to the American spirit and technology to rise up and prove that America's best days were still ahead. Forty-one years after Neil Armstrong set foot on...

NASA will not be getting the $1 billion budget boost civil space advocates had hoped to see when President Barack Obama sends his 2011 spending proposal to Congress Feb. 1, requiring the U.S. space agency to make even tougher than expected choices about the future of its manned space program, according to sources with close ties to the administration. These sources declined to reveal the fate of NASA’s planned Ares 1 crew launch vehicle, which many observers see as a likely cancellation target, but they did say the budget proposal would fund a multibillion-dollar effort to foster development of commercial...

As the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to propose changes to NASA’s human spaceflight program in the president’s 2011 budget request to lawmakers Feb. 1, an independent NASA safety advisory panel is warning the space agency against abandoning its current plans. In an annual report issued Jan. 15, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel cautioned the United States against halting work on NASA’s Ares 1 rocket to fund unproven commercial alternatives. “To abandon Ares I as a baseline vehicle for an alternative without demonstrated capability nor proven superiority (or even equivalence) is unwise and probably not cost-effective,” the report...

NASA’s managers have settled on a fix they say will protect astronauts from potentially dangerous levels of vibrations that could otherwise reach the planned Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle during its climb to orbit atop the Ares 1 rocket, according to information posted on a NASA Web site. NASA Constellation program officials decided Dec. 17 to update the Ares 1 vehicle design to include upper-plane C-spring isolators and an upper-stage liquid oxygen (LOX) damper intended to keep vibrations originating in the Ares 1 main stage from reaching Orion and its crew. The Constellation program is a 5-year-old effort to replace the...

WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year. Obama pledged during his campaign to inject an additional $2 billion into NASA aimed in part at narrowing the gap between the space shuttle's retirement and the introduction of a successor system. While NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and his senior managers are adamant that Ares and Orion are the right vehicles to fill that role, Obama did not endorse either system...

WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year. Obama pledged during his campaign to inject an additional $2 billion into NASA aimed in part at narrowing the gap between the space shuttle's retirement and the introduction of a successor system. While NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and his senior managers are adamant that Ares and Orion are the right vehicles to fill that role, Obama did not endorse either system...

WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year.

A visitor walks past the Apollo 16 lunar capsule on display at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006. NASA engineers designing the next U.S. moon rocket are getting ideas from old museum pieces including the hatch from the 34-year-old capsule. (AP Photo/Rob Carr) HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - Jim Snoddy and other NASA engineers didn't just go to the drawing board or a warehouse when they needed ideas - and parts - for America's next lunar rocket. They went to space museums. ...tight deadlines and uncertain budgets...[forces]NASA [to] both cannibaliz[e] and analyz[e] pieces of...

Here at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., managers from the agency’s exploration program shared new details today about the Ares 1 rocket that will become America’s next manned launch vehicle. The first stage, a slightly longer version of the space shuttle’s pencil-shaped solid rocket booster, will help carry to orbit a Crew Exploration Vehicle housing astronauts. Unmanned versions will carry cargo. Initial flights will head to the international space station. Later missions will put astronauts in orbit for trips to the moon.

The first test flight of NASA’s crew launch vehicle Ares 1 will use a four-segment solid-rocket booster for its first stage, not the five-segment design specified in the baseline requirement. Ares 1’s current design uses a Space Shuttle-derived five-segment SRB first stage and a new liquid-oxygen/liquid-hydrogen Rocketdyne J-2X-powered upper stage. The launcher will place the agency’s Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) into a suborbital trajectory, from which the CEV’s engine would boost it into low-Earth orbit. The first Ares 1 test is due in April 2009. Steve Cook, NASA’s exploration launch vehicle director, based at Marshall Spaceflight Center, says the first...