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| Science & Technology |
| Obama's budget slashes moon mission, new rockets |
| 2010-01-28 |
| 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 big 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. The White House budget request, which is certain to meet fierce resistance in Congress, scraps the Bush administration's Vision for Space Exploration and signals a major reorientation of NASA, especially in the area of human spaceflight. "We certainly don't need to go back to the moon," said one administration official. |
| Posted by:Beavis |
| #13 Good Lord. Satelites that guide smart bombs. Take pictures of enemy dug in. That can pin point an incoming Nuclear Warhead tipped missle and direct an interceptor to take it out before it hits us. Provide us with GPS Navigation capabilities. Allow us to test many technologies used on passenger airliners. Weather research (but don't tell that to Al Gore, now we know why Obama doesn't want NASA.) The list goes on and on and on as to how NASA has made the US a super power. And that is precisely why Obama is afraid of such technologies. |
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| #12 The history of failed Fixed it. Just my way of helping out. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2010-01-28 22:04 |
| #11 I've been expecting this. While I admit NASA has p*%%#d a pretty sum away in comparison to the Federal budget it really isn't all that much. NASA gets .6% of the budget. That means for every 10 bucks they get 6 cents. What does piss me off is the way NASA starts a project at Administration or Congressional bequest, works on it for a few years and then the political winds change and the project gets shelved. And a couple years down the road the whole thing starts over again. Heavy Lift is but one good example. |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2010-01-28 18:07 |
| #10 You see in Florida we are going to get enough money for HIGH SPEED RAIL! Enough money a billion and change to build a line from Tampa to Lakeland, which is around 30 miles give or take. So the question is how does a train do 100 mph with stops to make it better than driving? |
| Posted by: Don Vito Anginegum8261 2010-01-28 17:15 |
| #9 It depends, Play4keeps. How badly do you want the entirety of Earthly species on this planet when the next dinosaur-killer asteroid hits? It would be awfully nice if someone could drop by after the volcanoes calm down, to open the seed vaults and jump start the reseeding of the earth so the surviving critters didn't subsequently starve to death. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2010-01-28 16:45 |
| #8 WOW Now lets blame OBAMA for not getting us to the moon LOL LETS SEE HOW MUCH MONEY HAS NASA JACKED OFF REALLY? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget The history of failed missions to Mars,Moon stretches back 40 years, so are they a waste of taxpayers' money, which would be better spent on more earthly needs? |
| Posted by: Play4Keeps 2010-01-28 16:18 |
| #7 What about the X Prize? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2010-01-28 15:42 |
| #6 Obviously decided that he won't need to carry Florida. |
| Posted by: DoDo 2010-01-28 11:21 |
| #5 I'm kinda not feeling sympathy myself. They've gotten hundreds of billions of dollars over the last thirty years, and managed to spend damn little of it on developing a launcher that costs less than half a billion dollars a launch. (They did manage to throw a billion dollars or so allegedly 'proving' that cheap launch couldn't be done with the X-33 program. They should have stuck with macdac's proposal instead, at least they were trying to get stuff done). |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2010-01-28 10:27 |
| #4 Call me crazy, but wouldn't figuring out how to establish a functioning moon base have some kind of relevance to exploring asteroids and/or the inner solar system? So, other than politics, why are we hopscotching straight to re-enacting the blowing up the asteroid scene out of "Armageddon"? (BTW, am oh so happy Teh One figured out how to keep the money flowing to junk science, sorry, I meant climate change research.) |
| Posted by: Cornsilk Blondie 2010-01-28 09:39 |
| #3 Scientific exploration, return trips to the Moon and beyond are lofty future goals. At the present however, ensuring that Americans can make trips to the grocery store must take priority. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-01-28 06:45 |
| #2 Sigh! sigh! 3 more years of this dip shit. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2010-01-28 01:59 |
| #1 "We certainly don't need to go back to the Moon" > The US-WORLD + future OWG-NWO will see come Year 2029/30-2036 + COMET APOPHIS. This opinion might change iff at that time, OWG SCIENCE-PERTS amke errors in their Calcs which causes SMALL/TINY SPACE ROCK APOPHIS to slam into the BIG SPACE ROCK MOON, destabilz its orbit and causing the Moon to reverse vector back towards Earth. JUGGERNAUT > in Myth, among other one way to destroy a Juggernaut is to apply exactly a right amount of force at an exact point. AKA MURPHY'S LAW > WHAT CAN GO WRONG, WILL GO WRONG. MSM-NET > US, GLOBAL RECESSION-DEPRESSION > may last for DECADES + SCORES LONGER ["score" = 20 Years ea.] that what our Parents, Grandparents, + Great Grandparents = so-called "Greatest Generation" from WW2 went thru from 1929-1937/39. WHAT MORE IFF THE US IS STILL FIGHTING RADICAL ISLAM, ETC. [NUCLEAR MILITANCY-TERRORISM]AT THAT TIME. IOW, COMET APOPHIS 2029/30-2036 = future OWG SCIENCE at that time , as affected by FLUXES/CHANGES IN GEOPOLITICS AT THAT TIME INCLUD [POOR?]OWG US-WORLD ECON AT THAT TIME. OOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPSSSSSIES.... |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2010-01-28 01:21 |