Boldly not going where man has gone before

Apparently NASA is letting the Moon mission wither rapidly on the vine before Congress has a chance to act on it. From Times UK:

"Nasa has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon - effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight programme despite a congressional ban on its doing so."

"Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation"..."

Hmmmm. I guess with those guide lines we'll be scrapping about 90% of the rest of our budget!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7149543.ece

For the good or the bad, Obama's kissing that Moon mission goodbye.
David E

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[QUOTE]david elosser said:

For the good or the bad, Obama's kissing that Moon mission goodbye.
David E

It's for the good. President Obama hasn't killed anything that didn't deserve killing. When President Bush redirected us to the moon, he forgot one detail: paying for it. NASA's budget was laughably insufficient to send a mouse to the moon by his target date of 2020. Obama has redirected NASA once again, toward more international cooperation, privatization and use of instrumented missions rather than human-occupied. It cost 6 times as much to send a human into space and the scientific payback (and that's what it's about, right?) is nearly the same. Granted, we won't have astronauts reading scriptures, but we can do that ourselves on Sunday.

Putting humans back on the moon is not justified other than as practice for a Mars mission, and we have the capability to do that now. We have landing sites on Mars, we know about long-term effects of living in space, we will have the delivery vehicle soon, and we will certainly get in our warmups on the moon. IMHO, when most of us talk about "we need to go back to the moon," what is not said is, "in my lifetime." We want to identify with those people out there and be able to say to our grandchildren, "I saw it on TV." (and they'll ask, "what's a TV?")

There is absolutely no political reason to go back to the moon, nor is it in our national interest other than what I've said above. The scientific benefits wouldn't justify the cost, and going back would actually delay a Mars mission. I can deal with it.


There is

This administration has killed US manned space flight. I know they said that they would promote private space flight, which is good, but private space flight is where NASA was 30-40 years ago. The cancellation of Ares/constellation was purely political. The program was not as far behind and over budget as the administration claimed. To me it's unimaginable that the US will no longer be the leader in space flight, hell we won't even be in the game anymore. It's a sad day for the US.

Andreas