Some number of years ago, over twenty as I remember, the late (and IMHO great) Paul Harvey said that for every dollar spent at NASA, the return was seven dollars. So with that quote in my mind, the final Space Shuttle launch a few days ago, and Obama refocusing the NASA budget, I want to examine Obama’s NASA policy, as well as identify/review some of the daily benefits that we all derive from the NASA budget and space exploration.

Obama’s NASA Budget Proposal

Let’s look at what the Obama budget proposes. It ends our manned moon and space exploration, but it proposes a total NASA spending increase by $1 billion. So NASA won’t be totally out of business. His FY2011 budget proposed $19 billion, with emphasis on science, not on manned space flight. He wants to end NASA’s manned space flight program and rent space on Russian spacecraft. He wants to turn space transportation over to private, commercial companies, such as Space X, United Launch Alliance, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow Aerospace and others. There is only one problem with privatization with space flight – it does not work. Space X is where NASA was in 1960 with Project Mercury. The ability to put humans into orbit exists only on paper.

Here is what Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, said: “Mr. Obama risks blasting American space superiority on a “long downhill slide to mediocrity”. The decision to cancel Constellation, the project to send astronauts to the Moon again by 2020 and Mars by 2030, was “devastating.”

Obama’s decision places us totally at the mercy of the Russians. Armstrong continued, “America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz – at a price of over $50 million per seat with significant increases expected in the near future – until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves,” he said in his open letter to Obama , which was also signed by Gene Cernan, the last man on the Moon, and Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.

Obama’s plans for NASA include muslim outreach and making them feed good, and global warming. On the “making muslims feel good” front, here is what (then) NASA director Charles Bolden, a retired United States Marines Corps major-general and former astronaut, said that Obama told him. “… and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

On the “global warming hoax” front, this article by Larry Bell “kills two birds with one stone.” First, it shows that global warming (now referred to as climate change) is, indeed, a hoax. Second, it implicates NASA’s part in starting this hoax.

Says Larry Bell: S. Fred Singer, former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and University of Virginia professor emeritus commented about these sorry circumstances in the foreword of my book, stating in part: “Many would place the beginning of the global warming hoax on the Senate testimony delivered by James Hansen of NASA [director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies] during the summer of 1988. More than anything else, this exhibition of hyped alarm triggered my active skepticism about the man-made global warming scare.”

So now we see that Obama wants to “privatize” low-orbit delivery, while focusing on other areas. Most Americans cannot remember a time when the United States wasn’t the world leader in space exploration. But now Obama wants NASA’s budget to be refocused on global warming and other politically charged projects instead of manned space flight.

Benefits Derived From NASA Budget

For more than 40 years, NASA has facilitated the transfer of its technology to the private sector, benefiting global competition and the economy. Since 1976, Spinoff, NASA’s publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology, has featured between 40 and 50 of these commercial products annually. Spinoff has detailed 1,723 such inventions to date.

“We get better airplanes, or we get better weather forecasting from space stuff, sure,” said Daniel Lockney, program executive in technology transfer and spinoff partnerships at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. “But we also get better-fed children. That kind of stuff, people don’t necessarily associate.”

Here is a long list of commercial benefits derived directly from NASA. Below are some selected specifics that I found interesting.

• Military Benefits: Here is what the Official US Air Force web site has to say about NASA. NASA began operations on Oct. 1, 1958, just before the one-year anniversary of the Soviet Union’s successful Sputnik I launch. Concerned about the race for technological superiority in space, U.S. officials debated long and hard over whether the space program should be placed under military or civilian control. NASA was established as a new civilian agency that borrowed heavily from the Defense Department and other government organizations as it built its own capabilities. One doesn’t have to look hard to see the deep connection between NASA and DOD. Meanwhile, officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), another organization Eisenhower created in response to the Sputnik launch, have provided critical expertise that has benefited NASA throughout its 50-year history. Defense Department officials stood up DARPA to find and quickly develop advanced technology for the military so the United States would never again suffer a technological surprise by another nation. DARPA scientists and engineers concentrated on the first surveillance satellites that ensured U.S. presidents had accurate intelligence information on Russian missile program activities, historical records show. But DARPA experts advanced other space projects as well, developing the Saturn V rocket that ultimately enabled the United States to launch the Apollo missions to the moon. DARPA, BTW, developed the first computer network that was eventually to become the Internet. That development has proven to be commercially successful.
• Medical field: it helped enable body-imaging techniques such as CATScans and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). NASA research investigating the nutritional value of algae led to the discovery of a nutrient that had previously only been found in human breast milk. The compound, which is thought to be important to eye and brain development, has since found its way into 95 percent of the infant formula sold in the United States. And thermometers that are inserted in your ear and take your temperature in seconds? The technology was initiated by scientists at NASA.
• Computers: The first integrated circuit was built by Texas Instruments, funded by the Apollo program and the Air Force’s Minuteman Missile Project. TI developed it, but NASA was the customer.
• Television viewing: NASA scientists developed those panoramic views of football plays from all angles, based on robotic gigapan camera technology software used to create images of the Mars landscape from digital photos taken by space probes.
• NASA scientists developed lightweight, portable water filters that are deployed to disaster areas and remote regions of the world where water is scarce.

The list of benefits from NASA’s budget have a real and immediate impact on our daily lives is endless. You probably know about “the space-age technology” used to develop scratch-proof lenses, composite golf clubs, high-density batteries, blue-blocking ultraviolet sunglasses, the computer mouse and freeze-dried food. NASA is constantly collaborating with private companies to share its resources. For example, the space agency builds a wind tunnel, but then allows NASCAR to use it for testing, or loans a zero-gravity aircraft to filmmakers.

Where Does Obama’s NASA Budget Refocus Leave Us?

I think J. Christian Adams at Pajamas Media says it best: “Opponents of NASA’s manned space program crow about the benefits of privatized spaceflight. Of all the other federal functions ripe for privatization – the dinosaur postal service for example – Obama targets the one function that provides both national security benefits and requires massive accumulation of capital to conduct. Too bad Obama’s zeal to wipe out manned space flight through privatization doesn’t extend to other parts of the federal government.”

Crossposted at RWNO, my personal web site!

Sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back and get some perspective in order to be able to evaluate something that is right in front of you today. Sometimes that perspective goes back 40 years sometimes it goes back 40,000 years.

When Neal Armstrong stepped on the surface of the Moon in July of 1969 it was the culmination of one of the swiftest periods of advancement in the history of mankind. Since the dawn of human history, man had been watching with great fascination and jealously as birds soared above them. From giant eagles capable of carrying off an oblivious lamb to hummingbirds that floated on air, birds seemed to somehow have the favor of the Gods.

Although man often fantasized about flight, few it was a real possibility. One of the first to seriously suggest man could break away from terra firma was Leonardo da Vinci. We’ve all seen his 15th century helicopter sketches with their rotors that look more like a corkscrew than a modern rotor. Nonetheless, da Vinci was one of the first to actually believed mankind could break the bounds of earthliness and posit how it might be done.

Jump ahead to the court of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, France in 1783 where brothers, Joseph-Michel & Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier were putting their names in the history books by inventing the hot air balloon. Although they were certain their invention was capable of supporting humans, they decided to hedge their bets by choosing as the first passengers a sheep, a rooster, and a duck. A month later the first men would take flight in a Montgolfière balloon, although the brothers themselves demurred.

One hundred and twenty years later the Wright brothers took the next leap when they flew their biplane at Kitty Hawk, NC. Theirs was the first step in the most spectacular journey in human history. Over the next 66 years manned flight would advance at a staggering pace, from propellers to jet engines to rockets to breaking the sound barrier to putting men in space. The culmination of that journey would occur in July of 1969 when NASA not only put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren on the moon, but brought the pair (along with command module pilot Michael Collins) back to earth safely. From a rickety plane on the dunes of Cape Hatteras to the dark side of the moon and back the advances came at a blistering pace. Imagine, man spends thousands of years staring up at the sky and America goes from flight to the moon in 66 years…

Most of that sixty six year journey took place during a time of great national tumult and uncertainty; the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Cold War and the navel gazing sixties. Nonetheless, when JFK said: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” there was a feeling across the country that although no knew exactly how to do it, it was going to get done. While some of the science that helped reach JFK’s goal had its genesis outside the United States, it’s no coincidence that putting a man on the moon was an American success. Forty years later no other country has matched the feat.

NASA succeeded largely for one reason: it had a clear objective and nothing was more important than doing what was necessary to achieve that goal. Its success stands in stark contrast to the failure of government since the advent of the steroid era of the nanny state – 1965 and beyond. Today the government takes an unprecedented amount of our national income, involves itself in virtually every aspect of our lives and fundamentally fails at more of its basic responsibilities than at any time in our history. Simply put, government today is the anti-government of 1961 NASA.

Rarely does politics provide us with such a clear opportunity to measure Presidents against one another. Kennedy’s challenge provides just such a measure. In 1961 he challenged NASA and the country to do something that not only had never been done before, but something which no one knew for sure was even possible. That challenge resulted in a burst of activity that percolated throughout the economy from computers to telecommunications to construction materials to aerodynamics.

Compare Kennedy’s challenge to Barack Obama’s, as told by his NASA Administrator Charles Bolden:

When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — He (President Obama) charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

Rather than suggesting NASA build a base on the Moon, rather than fostering a healthy competition amongst the nascent private space industry, rather than challenging Americans to pull together and put a man on Mars, Barack Obama wants to use NASA (and your tax dollars) to bolster the self esteem of Muslim nations. While he’s at it he might as well use the Defense Department to braid the hair of little girls in Africa so they look nice when they become victims of genocide or contract AIDS or malaria, or he may even want to consider using Amtrak employees to teach Sunday school to the increasingly secular Europeans. All three are equally ludicrous.

If there is a better example of the absurdity of Barack Obama as President I can’t think of one. One might have thought that even through osmosis he would have picked up a couple of nuggets on how to do something right, anything right as President, even if he was simply using his highly vaunted rhetorical skills to inspire a nation to achieve things no one knew was possible. Unfortunately for America he hasn’t, so we’re stuck with a dysfunctional community organizer for the next two and a half years. Maybe by then the self esteem of the Muslim nations will have increased enough that they can stop exporting terrorists to the United States and the West. Don’t count on it…

Any surprise that Obama’s mediocrity rears its ugly head once again. This time by moving to kill the Constellation program, the program to get man on the moon…permanently, and then to mars…..how does he do it? As his Chicago upbringing has taught him

Constellation aimed to build upon what was arguably America’s greatest technological achievement, the first lunar landing of 1969, by launching new expeditions to the Moon and to Mars and worlds beyond. Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was “over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation”, but he has met opposition in Congress, which has yet to approve his plan.The head of Nasa, Major-General Charlie Bolden — an Obama appointee — has now written to aerospace contractors telling them to cut back immediately on Constellation-related projects costing almost $1 billion (£690 million), to comply with regulations requiring them to budget for possible contract termination costs.

The move has been branded a “disingenuous legal manoeuvre” and referred to Nasa’s inspector-general for investigation. “It’s bordering on arrogance by the Administration to boldly and brazenly go forward with this approach. It shows a blatant disregard for Congress,” said the Republican Congressman Rob Bishop, of Utah, whose constituency stands to lose thousands of jobs. Two weeks ago the Senate passed legislation that compels Nasa to continue work on Constellation unless Congress directs otherwise. That legislation is due to be signed into law by Mr Obama this month while Congress continues its deliberations over his proposal to cancel the current space space progamme.

~~~

Distinguished space veterans, including the first and last men to walk on the Moon, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, have complained that the abandonment of Constellation will set America’s space capabilities on a “downhill slide to mediocrity”. They say that, while Mr Obama has outlined a vision for Nasa that includes sending people to Mars at some point, it lacks a concise plan for developing the rockets and spacecraft to get them there.

“The Administration has no planning, no programme and no idea — they’d just have these things happen mysteriously,” Mr Bishop said. “Rockets aren’t something that Wal-Mart puts on its shelves. You have to have a plan for how you get from A to B, and Obama has just said we’ll work it as we go along and maybe some day we’ll end up on an asteroid or the Moon or somewhere. The bottom line is, those ‘maybes’ will never happen.”

Obama has gone out of his way to ensure everything this country stands for…innovation, excellence, pioneering…goes by the wayside. We are to be nothing but average. No better then the rest of the world and no worse.

This program requires all the traits that has made America great. It would allow us to explore the moon with new technology, investigate the origins of our universe all the while striving to get mankind onto our nearest planet.

But in Obama’s America we are not an exceptional people. So why strive for excellence.

Or maybe, as Daffyd puts it, he just doesn’t want anything overshadowing him:

…A grandiose narcissist who sees himself as simply too big for America’s britches must be horrified by a program of manned space exploration, the consequences of which threaten to overwhelm his own meagre achievements, assuming one can find any, in a Noachian deluge of science, technology, and future shock. Indeed, if we indeed returned to the Moon on a permanent basis, using that as a stepping stone to Mars and the rest of the solar system, then that would likely be the only thing anyone would remember, “generations from now,” about the administration of Barack Obama. Only our next faltering steps into the universe beyond; all else would be sucked down the memory hole, along with yesterday’s horoscope.

Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Telescope cross in front of the sun in this image captured by Thierry Legault

Enlarged section added to show greater detail. The shuttle was traveling at 15,534 mph. The trip across the sun takes 0.8 seconds.

Last week Atlantis was launched from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission to repair the aging and ailing Hubble Telescope.

These images captured by Thierry Legault help to put the enormity and awesome nature of our universe in perspective.

There are those who believe that mankind can influence the earth in a negative way. These photographs should help us to remember that we are miniscule in the grand scheme of things.

Shuttle Atlantis crosses in front of the sun prior to its’ rendezvous with Hubble. The narrow profile indicates that the payload bay doors are open.

And so, while the petty politicians bleat, and the small and not so small wars rage on in fits and starts, almost everyone on the Earth will sleep tonight with someone they don’t really mind all that much. And tomorrow the kids in the playground across the street will run and skip and jump at recess. And tomorrow our planet, one of many like it or perhaps alone in the universe, will turn full of much more goodness and grace than hate and suffering.

And tomorrow, somewhere in mid-heaven, floating weightless between the Earth and the Sun, men and women will carefully repair and refurbish a telescope so that we might see ever deeper into the whole of creation, and perhaps even, just a bit, into the mind and purposes of God.

Hubble’s Astounding Photographs:

[DELETED BY AUTHOR]

Being somewhat of a space junkie I could not let this day go by without referencing the fact that 38 years ago today man walked on the moon for the first time.  And it’s been 35 years since we last walked on the moon, which is just soooo sad, such a pathetic accomplishment.  From walking on the moon to flying a ship around the earth.  Progress should have been made.  Hell, we should already be on mars but instead the Democrats got their claws into the space program and killed it.  Because it cost to much, and too many people were hungry, and blah blah blah.   You sure solved that hunger problem didn’t ya?

Yuval Levin says it best:

It is a good day to reflect on the appalling failure of the American space program to build on its successes—or even just to hang on to them. We couldn’t go to the moon today even if we wanted to. To make it possible for us to go to the moon again would require an immense and expensive undertaking, because we have completely lost the chance to build on the immense and expensive undertaking that got us there last time.

Ok, rant off.

Hope you had a happy moon day.  My sincere thanks and gratitude to the thousands that made walking on the moon possible:

UPDATE

Another great video of the mission:

We all know that the Global Warming zealots are a crazy bunch, they would destroy whole economies because of a .00010 increase in temperature.  Now they want to torpedo the man mission to Mars:

A squeeze on funding for satellites to look down on the Earth’s environment at a time of growing need for research into the effects of climate change is creating alarm among scientists and on Capitol Hill.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, renowned for its pioneering role in science, is seeing its science budget shrink and its satellite Earth observation capacity endangered even as the agency’s overall mission grows.

Three and a half years ago, President Bush announced “a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system,” including a return to the moon by 2020, a step toward Mars and beyond.

The ambitious program vastly expanded NASA’s mission at a time when its near Earth science programs — arguably more relevant to humankind’s needs — were in decline.

Since Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration, the administration has reduced future-year funding for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate by a total of $4 billion, according to the House Science and Technology Committee’s space and aeronautics panel.

A two-year study released last January by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council found that NASA’s Earth science budget had declined 30 percent since 2000 and was threatened to fall even further.

How will they accomplish this?

Last week, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science recommended an increase of over $280 million above the requested level for NASA. However, within this budget markup, there is language that would prevent work on programs devoted to humans to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue “development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." THIS ANTI-MARS LANGUAGE MUST BE REMOVED! Otherwise, the program may turn into MOON ONLY program. We can’t let that happen.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a space junkie and I still bitterly complain that a Democrat controlled Congress cut funding to the Apollo program in 1972, just when we were getting good at visiting the moon.  They then approved money for a freakin bus to orbit the earth.  We go to the moon and then instead of going forward we move backwards.

Anyways, The Mars Society (whom members include officers serving in Iraq) has started a drive to get faxes, emails and phone calls to various politicians to get the offending language removed.

In the past week, the Mars Society "Save Mars Phone/Fax Blitz" has been a tremendous success. So far, almost 400 faxes have been sent and numerous phone calls have been made to Congress requesting that they remove the anti-Mars language that has been placed in the House version of the budget.

If you haven’t yet called or faxed your members of Congress, please do so soon using our automated system. We would like to have a total of 1,000 faxes sent within the next couple of weeks. It is imperative to remind both houses of Congress that the American people support human missions to Mars. If you have called your members of Congress or plan to, please let us know by dropping us an email at Marspolitics@yahoo.com.

And they have even started a Political Action Task Force to ensure that the human exploration of Mars remains the mission of NASA:

The purpose of the U.S. Political Task Force is to support the endeavor of The Mars Society to establish a human mission to Mars as the primary goal of the U.S. Space Program. This will be accomplished by means of an aggressive campaign of contact with our elected officials asking them to actively support the required technologies and legislation in support of this vision. The Political Task Force will mobilize and assist our membership and other space advocates with up-to-date information and the necessary tools for effective communication to accomplish this goal. Further, we will seek to act in ways that garner sufficient media and public support for the goal of sending humans to Mars.

All great programs.  Gus Grissom, the commander of Apollo One which tragically burned on the pad in 1967, once said:

Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves, because in the final analysis, only Man can evaluate the Moon in terms understandable to other men.

Exploring Mars is no different.  Only another Man (or woman) can really evaluate that planet in terms understandable to other’s.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june06/nasa_05-31.html

By Robert Farrow

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: NASA counted down to the launch of space shuttle Discovery on Saturday, hoping to fly a crucial mission and knowing that failure could ground the shuttle fleet permanently and leave the Space Station unfinished. Discovery was scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:49 p.m. EDT on a voyage to the space station that will test repairs to the shuttle’s troublesome fuel tank, which triggered the destruction of shuttle Columbia and the deaths of seven astronauts in 2003. the link is here

The Space Program should be something all Americans would be proud of. However, I am always surprised by the number of Americans that are hostile to our manned space program. Not surprisingly, the media also has become critical. I wonder if this is part of the same mentality that is responsible for the resentment that we are the only remaining superpower.

Questions orbit around future of NASA

By Traci Watson,

If all goes well this weekend, space shuttle Discovery and its crew will shoot into orbit, where the seven astronauts will plainly see landmarks back on Earth.The future of the nation’s space program isn’t as clear.

Gone are the days when NASA, in the 1960s, won the space race with a single-minded focus on getting a man to the moon. Today, NASA juggles competing demands — from proving it can fly the shuttle accident-free and retiring it in 2010 to completing the expensive International Space Station laboratory to developing new vehicles for space exploration.

The agency’s ability to manage them successfully will determine the future of its manned spaceflight program and whether the United States will return to the moon and fly to Mars. “My nightmare scenario is that we just slowly phase out human spaceflight,” says Roger Launius, head of the National Air and Space Museum’s space history division. “We’ve got some serious issues to wrestle with.”Americans’ support for NASA remains strong. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken last weekend found that 57% said the agency does a good or excellent job. One-third of respondents said NASA’s budget should be cut or eliminated.

As the federal deficit grows, it may be difficult to find the $104 billion it will cost to send Americans back to the moon, say Launius and Marco Caceres of the Teal Group, an aerospace analysis firm. Caceres warns NASA’s competing priorities may have consequences, especially if corners are cut. The nation “is giving NASA all this difficult, visionary stuff to do but … not giving them the resources to do it,” he says. “Eventually it catches up with you and you have an accident.” NASA spokesman Dean Acosta says the agency plans to move ahead, using whatever Congress allocates. NASA’s $16.7 billion budget has been essentially flat for 15 years. NASA officials are “very comfortable that we have in place a plan that can accomplish the (moon program) with the funding we have,” he says.

A look at the four parts of NASA’s human spaceflight program:

Space shuttle: Lame duck

After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard, President Bush ordered the space agency to retire the nation’s three remaining shuttles by 2010. By then it will be nearly impossible to extend the shuttle fleet’s life, because the assembly lines for crucial parts will have closed, says William Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s space operations division.Before they retire, the shuttles are slated to make 16 flights to finish building the space station, including the one expected to launch Saturday. Only the shuttle is brawny enough to carry the station’s pieces into orbit. A 17th flight, to fix the decaying Hubble Space Telescope, is possible. Shuttle program chief Wayne Hale recently estimated there’s a roughly 1-in-100 chance that a shuttle flight will end in catastrophe. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin does not rule out the possibility that the shuttle will have another accident before it retires. If “we were to lose another vehicle, I will tell you right now that I would be moving to figure out a way to shut the (shuttle) program down,” Griffin said recently. Hale and Griffin insist the shuttle will fly often enough to complete the space station. That would require four flights a year. Others are dubious. “For that to happen requires everything to go extremely well,” says Moshe Farjoun, an associate professor at York University in Toronto who co-edited a book about the Columbia disaster. “Each flight is a moment of truth for NASA.”

Space station questions

The space station, an orbiting laboratory that circles the Earth every 90 minutes, still needs solar panels, structural girders and several laboratories. Each piece to be installed has to work perfectly before the next piece is added, Gerstenmaier says, and the complexity means the unfinished half will be more difficult to build. “How you … pull that all together will be very, very challenging,” he says, adding the construction schedule has enough slack to address problems. The shuttle’s upcoming retirement forced NASA to cancel 10 flights that would have carried spare parts and equipment for experiments to the station. Gerstenmaier says some of that cargo will fly to the station on other vehicles being developed. Experiments that might have helped reveal how humans could stay healthy on a Mars mission have been cut, too, says James Pawelczyk, a Pennsylvania State University scientist who flew on the shuttle in 1998. Griffin said in March that NASA’s long-term role in the space station, which will cost the 16 nations building it roughly $100 million, is “a matter of speculation.” “We don’t know … what the (station) will become, whether it will be used properly or whether it will have been a huge waste,” says Vincent Sabathier of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former official of France’s space agency.

Constellation’s budget squeeze

Last fall, NASA unveiled with great fanfare details of what it dubbed Project Constellation, the spaceship and the two rockets it would build to carry Americans back to the moon. “Apollo on steroids,” Griffin called it.
Less than a year later, NASA has decided to shrink the Crew Exploration Vehicle, the ship that would carry the astronauts, because of cost and weight. It will carry four people to the moon, but the crew will be more cramped because the interior will be two-thirds the size engineers had envisioned.Nor will it be done as quickly as NASA had hoped. When Griffin unveiled the plan, he said he hoped the vehicle would be ready in 2012 to ferry astronauts to the space station. Scott Horowitz, head of NASA’s exploration division, says the ship won’t be running regularly until 2014. The agency’s engineers aim to develop the necessary technology by 2010, but “right now our budget supports a 2014 capability,” Horowitz says. That means that unless more money materializes, NASA faces four years when it won’t have its own spacecraft for manned flight. It hopes to rely instead on vehicles built by private industry, though Jerry Grey, director of science and technology policy for the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, says it’s unclear whether such vehicles will materialize. NASA will also buy seats on Russian spaceships through 2012. In its proposed budget for 2007, NASA has cut science spending to support its new mission.”Constellation is a size 14 foot in a size 8 shoe,” says Howard McCurdy of American University in Washington. “It’s just really hard to squeeze it in and make it work.”

Murky plans for moon, Mars

Bush’s proposal to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars has drawn cheers from space historians, former astronauts and members of Congress for looking beyond low Earth orbit. The only specific detail in the plan Bush announced in 2004 is a deadline: The return to the moon will be no later than 2020, the president said. That schedule worries Grey, otherwise a fan of Bush’s plan.Working toward a tight deadline, “you tend to overstress both systems and people in order to meet that, and it’s not necessary,” he says. “What’s the hurry?” NASA has not revealed where on the moon astronauts will go, how long they’ll stay or what they’ll do. Griffin said last year that such specifics will have to wait until other nations decide to join NASA in exploring the lunar surface, because NASA is sinking all its funds into developing the means to get there. “We will not, by ourselves, be able to conduct the robust program of lunar surface exploration and exploitation that (the moon) merits,” Griffin said.The agency has announced no plans at all for the four- to six-month voyage to Mars, though the new spacecraft are being designed to make the trip. Griffin has said work on such a foray would take place in the 2020s.Even the most pessimistic space experts say America is unlikely to abandon a program as popular and prestigious as human space exploration. But few are putting the odds on a bright future.”I want to see (NASA) succeed,” says Launius of the Air and Space Museum. “I’m just very concerned” that it can’t.
the link is here.

Actually, I am critical of the Shuttle program too, simply for it’s cost per pound to orbit ratio, but I am very pro-Space. And I think those that are not are selling America’s future short. And this is my argument why:

The Case for Space…..

“The earth is a cradle of reason, but one cannot live in a cradle for ever.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Around 600 Years ago a nation was on it’s path to dominate the world. It was called the Ming Dynasty. In almost every category it’s navy was superior to the nations of the West. Had the past been a bit different, the East might have been the power center of the world, enveloping the globe with it’s religion and it’s culture. The Emperor of the Mings, Yun Lo, enjoyed a fleet of over two hundred ships, all much larger then those of the West, and encouraged great voyages of exploration. The Mings quickly discovered Africa and would have soon sailed around it to make contact with Europe when the exploration money dried up. Political opponents of Lo decided the money would be better spent on irrigation projects, and the fleet was abandoned. A few years later, the Portugese rounded Africa, and with no one in their way, they kept going. One hundred years later the Portugese sized a small Chinese island which began the domination of China by the West. Soon after that the dominion of the waters passed to the British, who built an empire from which the Sun never set until the 20th century.

Like Seafaring, spacefaring has very marginal returns in early voyages. They were also very costly, in material as well as lives. Even the voyage duration are similar- trips to Mars is about as long as Magellan’s first voyage around the world. It is the same for us as well. In the beginning, most of the early American settlements were failures, a drain on the mother country’s resources more then anything else. But as the history of both Britain and America shows, those countries choose to expand, eventually, though, greatly prospered. And it is difficult to overestimate the importance the impact this expansion has played on our lives. Look at it this way, imagine an undiscovered world, devoid of international markets and global communications. Such is the power of exploration.

Though the price will not be cheap, a Mankind that colonizes space will be immeasurably better off then one that does not. And while trying to do this, discoveries are made that helps people and jobs are created directly and indirectly from a variety of space programs. And if civilization does not expand into space we may become extinct. Extinction by meteorite is not as far fetched an idea as one may think. And our sun’s lifespan is finite. So, in short, we either expand, or die as a species. So why not now?

Finally, I think exploration, whether it is space, the seas, or of knowledge itself, brings out the best in humanity and to deny it would be to deny an essential part of humanity itself. The Universe is full of wonderful things just waiting for us to discover them. And I can think of nothing sadder then to never know what they are.

There will always be projects that need attention at home, but that is no excuse to mortgage humanity’s future. There will always be poor people, and to wait until the poor are fed means we will never leave this planet and will wait for our eventual extinction like a bunch of hairy dinosaurs. Do the Chinese remember that particular irrigation project now? I doubt it? They do know for sure that their size, resources, and population they have not flourished as they might have or made the same impact upon the world as the West has made.

Humanity is notoriously short sighted, a lack of vision that this time may be fatal.

It’s about damn time:

Sept. 19, 2005, New York–With a plan reminiscent of the Apollo program, NASA is currently unveiling its architecture for a return to the moon by 2018. The plan calls for a series of new spaceships that borrow their designs from Apollo and their propulsion from the Space Shuttle.

For human flight, NASA plans on building a blunt-bodied Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV. By appearances, the CEV design is virtually identical to the Command Module from the Apollo mission — it will hold up to six astronauts (three for ISS missions, four on a trip to the moon and six for Mars) and will return to earth under parachute, greatly simplifying reentry. It will launch on top of a borrowed solid rocket booster and a main engine from the Space Shuttle, and it’s in-line launch stack design avoids the launch debris problems that plague NASA’s current manned spacecraft. (see images)

The CEV can also be flown robotically to ferry cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) or to stage supplies and equipment in Earth orbit, which allows the agency to perform routine launches without endangering a human crew.

But to get to the moon, astronauts will need much more equipment than the CEV launch stack can carry. For this, NASA’s plan calls for a second, nominally unmanned heavy-lift rocket powered by five shuttle main engines and two solid rocket boosters. The vehicle will be able to carry 106 metric tons into low earth orbit, and carry an earth departure rocket booster for a lunar mission. The CEV and the lunar rocket will mate in low earth orbit.

Now this is cool: (h/t DefenseTech)

After three years of being laughed out of meetings, the U.S. Marine Corps’ futuristic plans to deploy through space may finally be getting some traction. Although the chuckle factor hasn’t altogether disappeared, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Darpa are beginning a study of options for a reusable upper-stage space travel vehicle — the same kind of technology that the Marines might need for a ride halfway across the globe.

The effort is called “Hot Eagle,” and it could be the first step forward in the Marine Corps’ hopes for space travel. Within minutes of bursting into the atmosphere beyond the speed of sound — and dispatching that ominous sonic boom — a small squad of Marines could be on the ground and ready to take care of business within 2 hours. [One presentation muses that the capsule might later be picked up by a Osprey or by a "balloon cable and C-17" transport plane. Or, the Marines might "hike out," and "leave [the] crew capsule behind.” — ed.]

The Marine Corps calls the concept the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion Capability (Sustain). This plan, a growing group of Marine supporters say, is the natural evolution of the service’s proclivity for expeditionary warfare that began decades ago with amphibious landings, quick hops on helicopters, flights on fixed-wing aircraft and – very soon – rides on the Osprey tiltrotor.

The concept is to deliver strategic equipment or a small squad of soldiers to any point on the globe — even the most hard-to-reach location — within hours of need. Once on the ground, those soldiers can carry out strategically critical missions like reconnaissance or destroying a specific target.

…briefing notes obtained by Defense Technology International show the vehicle could be designed for a variety of missions, including “affordable, reliable” spacelift, global or theater intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and personnel insertion. One exotic use listed is “space-to-space ISR,” or spying on other satellites.

…A variety of other options for Marine space travel are also under consideration. For example, Darpa is spearheading the Falcon program to demonstrate a $5-million small-launch capability and separate hypersonic cruise vehicle. Four contractors are working on launch-vehicle concepts and the hypersonic cruise vehicle is being designed by Lockheed Martin.

…USAF Brig. Gen. (ret) S. Pete Worden – a research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizon and former top Air Force space official- says the Marine concept has credibility.

…”What is it that would change the war on terrorism in a dramatic way?” he asks. “If you could get people into place in an hour or so, that changes the whole complexion of the war on terrorism.” Worden notes a handful of times the government knew where high-value targets like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were located, but was unable to act quickly.