Topic: NASA's $10B rocket plan recycles shuttle parts, draws flak

[rickl]

This is utter insanity.

WASHINGTON — NASA's latest plan to replace the space shuttle would spend at least $10 billion during the next six years to test-fly a rocket made of recycled parts of the shuttle — with no guarantee the rocket would ever be used again, according to documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

NASA is proposing a so-called "shuttle-derived test flight campaign" to provide the agency with a rocket it can use to test its nascent crew capsule — and keep shuttle workers and the aerospace industry busy — while the agency figures out what it really wants in a next-generation "heavy-lift" rocket that could go to the moon or beyond.

"There is a senior contingent [at NASA] coalescing around this option," acknowledged a senior NASA manager not authorized to speak on the record about the plan, which the agency hopes to present to Congress by June 20.

But critics are already deriding the plan as "a rocket to nowhere" that would pay billions to the aerospace industry to perpetuate the use of 30-year-old shuttle technology while further postponing resolution of a fundamental question: What's the mission of NASA's human-spaceflight program?

"What we seem to have is a desire to spend money on rockets in the hopes that we will develop a mission one day," said Jeff Greason, member of the 2009 presidential committee that looked at the future of U.S. human spaceflight.

Oh, God.  Read the rest.  I'd just end up quoting the whole thing.   

[Libertas]

About what you'd expect from a bunch of bureaucrats, eh?

And just think, they run more than one Federal agency!  They run them all!

[Glock32]

I haven't read the rest of the article yet, but I'm guessing we have some union payoffs in there somewhere. Lord, if this administration had been around in the early 1900s they'd be finding a way to artificially keep the horse-drawn carriage industry afloat.

I watched 2001 the other day, and continue to be amazed at how spectacular the visual effects were for a 1968 film. But even more than that, I felt a bit depressed because the depiction of space travel in the first part of the film should be almost within grasp, yet it's not. Something else noteworthy in the film, it depicted space travel by Pan-Am. That shows you something about the mindset when the film was made. There was an assumption that it would soon get beyond this very bleeding-edge undertaking (that arguably requires the resources of the State) and become something pursued by private interests using their own capital, implementing the sort of efficiencies not possible in large public projects.

I just feel like with Obama at the helm, he's throwing the match. For the first time since we became a spacefaring country, we no longer have a completely in-house ability to reach low Earth orbit.

[rickl]

I haven't read the rest of the article yet, but I'm guessing we have some union payoffs in there somewhere. Lord, if this administration had been around in the early 1900s they'd be finding a way to artificially keep the horse-drawn carriage industry afloat.

My favorite comparison is this:  If the government was in charge of aviation from the beginning, by now they would have developed an airplane with four wings, twelve engines, a crew of twenty, that could go 90 mph and we would still be looking forward to the first trans-atlantic flight.