I had a chance recently of again watch the fantastic movie Moon with Sam Rockwell. Great flick. Realistic lunar scapes and environs.

And it may be the closest we get to men on the moon in a long long time.

Seems according to one news story President Obama has sliced any funding for both manned and unmanned Aries rockets as well as any money for lunar hardware such as landers or habitats.

Zilch. No Manned program going forward in the short term. Period. Except for maybe the occasional hitch-hike on a Russian relic.

NASA is to be instructed to go back to the drawing-board and come up with another manned-space plan to put into place maybe 20 or so years from now.
WOW!

Cybermonk Editorial Brain Dump: The President says he's tired of congress treating NASA like a jobs program. What? Did he just pick up Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff (book, not the glamorized movie)? Didn't anyone find it odd that we have Launch Control in a whole other time zone than Mission Control? Why? To make Texans happy.

The Space program has _always_ been a jobs program. A jobs program for very very smart people, remember. I'd argue we spent a lot of Dollars/Rubbles/Yen/Euro to build a space station nobody quite knows what to do with so that a whole bunch of Russian rocket scientists wouldn't go looking for work elsewhere. The biggest problem I see is not that NASA creates jobs but that those jobs are too locked in to programs. Why didn't we keep building Shuttles? Learn and build a better newer one each time? Why instead what we did was buy a fleet of late 70's Cadillacs (I'm being generous) and expect they'd run for 30+ years as long as we hired enough mechanics.

And now seeing the error of that, I can only assume we've decided to ditch it all for a bummed ride in the back seat and a dream to win the lottery in 20 or 30 years.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
--PKD

I have been reading a lot about NASA lately and I have come to the same conclusion that some other have and its very unfortunate, but NASA is a Cold War relic mired in politics and bureaucracy.

Think about it, NASA doesn't even have the launch capability it had 40 years ago. NASA can only get us to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) but has long lost the ability to go beyond.

There was so much promise towards the end of Apollo and we have lost it.

How many people out there could not wait to see what America was going to come up with to replace the aging shuttle fleet? What new technology was being cooked up that would allow us to launch from a runway into orbit and return to that same runway?

I dreamed of that and was glad that I was going to live to see a fully functional, real time space fleet, but instead I see plans for the (and let's face it) the ill-fated Ares rocket and a space capsule that's a little bigger than Apollo was 40 years ago.

Are you kidding me???

We spend piles and piles of money and suffered loss of life for the betterment of the International Space Station only to turn around an abandon the project???

NASA is doomed to be America's over-priced satellite launching service and no more.

Our only hope as a species is for private and/or commercial enterprise to get us beyond LEO. Government is to inefficient and far to mired in bureaucracy to ever be of use for future space manned space projects.

I hate to say it, but it will be the promise of money that gets us to space, the promise of people paying to experience LEO and then the promise to open up the worlds closed economy to space mining that will reap trillions and trillions of dollars once someone figures out how to do it and I can tell you that there are viable plans to do so. I have read how it could be done for a mere 2 billion dollars and after that, space flight would be self sustaining economically, it would only take the initial investment and about 20 years to get the whole thing started.

Space flight needs to have a real return in invested dollars before the common person takes it seriously.

The way NASA is set up makes it nothing more than a giant money pit that does not really add to the economy of our planet and that's why Obama and Congress are reluctant to fully fund it.
If you want to read how Space flight can become an economic machine that opens up the world's economy for unprecedented growth and wealth for all, I would start with author Stephen Baxter and his fictional book Manifold:Time.

Mr. Baxter takes the basic idea of how to turn space travel into a viable economic machine and tells a great story around it. I know its a fictional story, but it wont take but the first few chapters for you to get the idea.

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

Eye-D-10-tee...

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Fantom Thrust - SHW Battlebot
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