[roc-chat] Fw: It's Krauthammer Friday
- From: Norbert Soski <norbsoski@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed recipients: ;
- Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:34:01 -0700 (PDT)
This is how some of us in the Space-industry (25 plus years) view our current
situation (read below); a glorious past with no future. Baby-boomers grew up
with those inspiring words from President JFK, but what took less than 9 years
to accomplish in the 1960's is almost impossible to accomplish again today. A
glorious industry with the "right stuff" heroes lost with no lofty goals nor
future. And we wonder why we can not motivate our youth to pursue the
sciences. We are a country crushing our "laurels" because of the weight of our
fat asses.
Norbert Soski
"rocket scientist"
>Farewell, the New Frontier
>By Charles Krauthammer, Published: April 19The Washington Post
>As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final
>salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands
>on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were
>witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.
>The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly,
>nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be
>sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.
>Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not
>Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive
>and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned
>follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into
>orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with
>that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.
>Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into
>orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)
>China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the
>Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of
>symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its
>taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then
>casually abandoned, by us.
>Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or
>inspiring the young — legacies of NASA — when we are in economic distress?
>Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and
>innovation — what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to
>last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American
>technological enterprise?
>We lament the decline of American manufacturing, yet we stop production of the
>most complex machine ever made by man — and cancel the successor meant to
>return us to orbit. The result? Abolition of thousands of the most highly
>advanced aerospace jobs anywhere — its workforce abruptly unemployed and
>drifting away from space flight, never to be reconstituted.
>Well, you say, we can’t afford all that in a time of massive deficits.
>There are always excuses for putting off strenuous national endeavors:
>deficits, joblessness, poverty, whatever. But they shall always be with us.
>We’ve had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 in
>1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and
>economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North
>Korea’s is today.
>Moreover, today’s deficits are not inevitable, nor even structural. They are
>partly the result of the 2008 financial panic and recession. Those are over
>now. The rest is the result of a massive three-year expansion of federal
>spending.
>But there is no reason the federal government has to keep spending 24 percent
>of GDP. The historical postwar average is just over 20 percent — and those
>budgets sustained a robust manned space program.
>NASA will tell you that it’s got a new program to go way beyond low-Earth
>orbit and, as per Obama’s instructions, land on an asteroid by the mid-2020s.
>Considering that Constellation did not last even five years between birth and
>cancellation, don’t hold your breath for the asteroid landing.
>Nor for the private sector to get us back into orbit, as Obama assumes it
>will. True, hauling MREs up and trash back down could be done by private
>vehicles. But manned flight is infinitely more complex and risky, requiring
>massive redundancy and inevitably larger expenditures. Can private entities
>really handle that? And within the next lost decade or two?
>Neil Armstrong, James Lovell and Gene Cernan are deeply skeptical. “Commercial
>transport to orbit,” they wrote in a 2010 open letter, “is likely to take
>substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.” They called
>Obama’s cancellation of Constellation a “devastating” decision that “destines
>our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.”
>“Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides,”
>they warned, “the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to
>mediocrity.” This, from “the leading space faring nation for nearly half a
>century.”
>Which is why museum visits to the embalmed Discovery will be sad indeed.
>America rarely retreats from a new frontier. Yet today we can’t even do what
>John Glenn did in 1962, let alone fly a circa-1980 shuttle.
>At least Discovery won’t suffer the fate of the Temeraire, the British warship
>tenderly rendered in Turner’s famous painting “The Fighting Temeraire tugged
>to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838.” Too beautiful for the scrapheap,
>Discovery will lie intact, a magnificent and melancholy rebuke to constricted
>horizons.
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/farewell-the-new-frontier/2012/04/19/gIQA49o8TT_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
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