[roc-chat] Re: Fw: It's Krauthammer Friday
- From: "Jim - TFJ" <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:59:46 -0700
So the systems needed for a manned orbit is more complex than an autonomous
rendezvous?
I guess he didn't realize that private companies built the Nasa rockets.
Of course the private companies would have to work without internal
bureaucracies.
Jim G.
_____
From: roc-chat-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:roc-chat-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Peaceloverockets
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 7:07 AM
To: roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [roc-chat] Re: Fw: It's Krauthammer Friday
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-Fu
ndraiser
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
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/charles-krauthammer/2011/02/24/ADJkW7B_page.h
tml> Krauthammer, Published: April 19The Washington Post
As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/space-shuttle-discovery-makes-final-fli
ght-over-washington-dc/2012/04/18/gIQAMtqcQT_story.html> around Washington,
a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/smithsonian-welcomes-space-shuttle-disc
overy-into-its-collection-at-virginia-museum-hangar/2012/04/19/gIQAENXWST_st
ory.html> 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
<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
<http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-t
he-fighting-temeraire> '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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