[roc-chat] Re: Fw: It's Krauthammer Friday
- From: Peaceloverockets <peaceloverockets@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:06:54 -0700
Plus, we have SpaceX and a number of other private industries.
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 22, 2012, at 8:40 PM, Cliff Sojourner <cls@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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, 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
>>
>>
>>
>
Other related posts:
