poignant and timely. but don't give up quite yet, there's something you can do!
the NASA Bake Sale! http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/116811-NASA-Announces-Bake-Sale-Fundraiser On 2012-04-22 17:34, Norbert Soski wrote:
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
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/charles-krauthammer/2011/02/24/ADJkW7B_page.html>,
Published: April 19The Washington Post
As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/space-shuttle-discovery-makes-final-flight-over-washington-dc/2012/04/18/gIQAMtqcQT_story.html>
around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport
for retirement in a museum
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/smithsonian-welcomes-space-shuttle-discovery-into-its-collection-at-virginia-museum-hangar/2012/04/19/gIQAENXWST_story.html>,
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
<http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/mpcv/test_flight_2014.html>
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
<http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-fighting-temeraire>“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
