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Nasa ends plan to put man back on Moon
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 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.
Legislators have accused President Obama's Administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill.
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.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican and member of the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said: "The timing of Nasa's decision to push forward with these actions now, before this becomes law, is highly questionable." Nasa is "willfully subverting the repeatedly expressed will of Congress", she added.
Scott Pace, a former Nasa executive and now the Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: "The effect will be to stop work on Constellation and lay off or transfer people to other jobs. If Congress then says it wants to continue going ahead with Constellation, those people will be difficult to re-hire. It's already a difficult situation, but this will introduce more instability."
Constellation was born in 2004 from President George W. Bush's vision for returning Americans to the Moon by 2020 and using it as a base to build the knowledge and technologies for a manned mission to Mars by 2030. Since then, more than $9 billion has been spent on designing and building the necessary space vehicles.
An independent review panel appointed by Mr Obama last year concluded, however, that without an extra $3 billion a year Constellation was on an "unsustainable trajectory". In his proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, unveiled in February, Mr Obama made it clear that there would be no extra money for its continuation. The proposal has yet to clear Congress.
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."
Private rocket developers, to whom Mr Obama proposes outsourcing the task of carrying crews and cargo to the International Space Station after the shuttle fleet retires, are making advances. Ten days ago Elon Musk, a spaceflight entrepreneur - and founder of the online payment system PayPal - launched a near-flawless test flight of his Falcon 9 rocket, which is designed to take payloads and ultimately human beings into space.
Triumphs and tragedies
Oct 4, 1958 A year after the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the US Congress passes "an Act to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes". The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is born
Feb 20, 1962 John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit Earth. The Russian Yuri Gagarin had made the first space flight a year earlier. Glenn returns to public adulation and later becomes a US senator
May 25, 1961 President Kennedy announces that he is setting the United States the goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the decade
January 27, 1967 Three US astronauts die in a fire during a simulated take-off, the first to die in the space programme
July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong takes man's first step on the Moon and plants an American flag, a significant propaganda coup. The US is still the only nation to have put a man on the Moon
April 13, 1970 An oxygen tank explodes aboard Apollo 13. It becomes clear that there is not enough air in the capsule to keep the three astronauts alive. They manage to board the self-contained Lunar Module and land safely in the Pacific
April 12, 1981 The US launches Columbia, its first space shuttle and the first spacecraft to land on a runway instead of in the sea
Jan 28, 1986 The Challenger space shuttle explodes 73 seconds after take-off, killing its crew
April 24, 1990 The Hubble Space Telescope comes online after being carried into space by a US shuttle
Feb 1, 2003 Columbia breaks up over Texas returning from its 28th mission, killing the crew
Feb 1, 2010 President Obama announces plans to cancel additional funding of the programme to return US astronauts to the Moon by 2020
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7149543.ece
/``-_-´´
2010-06-14 18:07
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Re: How would you feel?
Very interesting.
/``-_-´´
(2010-06-23 10:57)
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How would you feel?
You`ve had a lucrative mining business going for some time now. Not the most expensive of commodities, but fairly cheap and easy to extract and with a steady demand at a decent profit. "Bread and Butter" that flattens the "ups and downs" of your other operations, extracting more volatile commodities.
Your operation is remote and unlikely to be interrupted, so no need for expensive, non-productive security staff, making the operation even more profitable.
Then, one day, an unfamiliar craft lands just a few kilometres from one of your live operations, right beside the storage depot, where the extracted minerals are kept before being hauled away to various destinations.
The occupants of the craft start poking around, taking photographs, digging stuff up, placing measuring devices all over the place and planting a flag as if staking a claim. They`re gabbling constantly over their radios to someone, in some foreign and unintelligible language.
They stay for a while, then take off and disappear, leaving a load of debris and machinery lying around, totally oblivious to your careful and caring environmental policies; essentially acting as if you weren`t there.
Then, a little while later, the same thing happens again, but this time they land right in the middle of one of your open cast mines. You don`t know if they are armed. You don`t know what, if any, decontamination procedures they`ve been through before they came. You don`t know what they`re doing or what they want. You don`t know who it is they are talking to. So you have to suspend operations until you can find some answers.
You soon find out that they are from somewhere fairly close, where mineral resources are running out. It`s obvious they are looking for alternative sources and that they are intending to jump your claim.
So what do you do?
I think you would show a little muscle and tell them to keep off. Just let them know the extent and nature of your claim, tell them they aren`t welcome, tell them to stop prospecting here and outline the possible consequences of them ignoring your warnings.
Tell them that you`ve been mining this smaller member, of a twin planet system, for the best part of 400 million years. Tell them that your civilisation is over a billion years old and has access to the knowledge of civilisations ten times that age. Tell them you have an infinite number of ways of cleansing the larger planet of their presence, if they don`t heed your warnings to stop trespassing.
Then sweeten the blow by offering a trade, tourism and scientific research agreement, which would give your race, and many others, much easier access to the big planet, in exchange for knowledge and expertise. You might even let them have some of the minerals that you have no use for, but they seem to think are incredibly valuable.
So you think this is science fiction?
It`s not difficult to gather the supporting evidence, if you have an open mind.
Everything you want to know about the reality of this scenario is rght there on the internet. All you have to do is look for it.
Or you can carry on believing that we could get to the moon 40 years ago, but we can`t do it now because the Health and Safety guys won`t allow human beings to fly in those ridiculously dangerous Saturn V / Apollo machines.
The real difficulty they have, may be that the secretive human presence on the moon may now be so ubiquitous, that landing anywhere that it doesn`t show could already be next to impossible.
Secret technology is always decades ahead of public technology. A brief look at recent history will show this to be true beyond doubt.
Where do you expect public technology to be in 40 years time?
Well that`s what they`re already using and you won`t know about it officially for another 40 years at least.
Believing this to be the case is far easier than believing that public technology has caught up with secret technology in the last few years. That just doesn`t happen.
/Astus Rodinga, Astus Rodinga., Owfa Pitissake
(2010-06-22 18:27)
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Well...
The Constellation program ITSELF, was garbage. I am all for getting back onto the Moon, establishing a base and moving outward into our solar system. But not sitting on top of "Apollo on Steroids."
There were better ideas, that were ignored, in favor of Constellation. That THIS program was chosen, was a political move, and not one based on the technology we have available.
"From a purely propulsion point of view, we`re WAY better off just using nuclear power directly as in a thermal nuclear rocket motor. KIWI demonstrated 1,100MW of power in 1967, producing 75,000lbs of thrust from liquid hydrogen run through a solid core highly enriched uranium rocket motor the size of a 55 gallon drum. The motor ran for an hour, performed 10 restarts, and was designed to be 99.997% reliable. 7 of these clustered together will produce over a half million lbs of thrust, and the delta V will get you to MARS in days.
WITH A TECH WE ALREADY KNOW HOW TO BUILD.
Read that again: in 1967!!! The program was killed in a political tit-for-tat around the time the shuttle program got started.
Yep, it`s nuclear, get over it."
Thank you for the quote, Vaxheadroom, wherever you are!!!
Politicians; We should shoot them all into the Sun on a rocket. And send one more with all the lawyers.
/hall442
(2010-06-15 17:36)
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