[roc-chat] Re: Fw: It's Krauthammer Friday
- From: Richard Dierking <richard.dierking@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:37:43 -0700
It does tan my hide a bit thinking about Chinese astronauts on the Moon
with rakes at the Apollo 11 landing site. However, when you think about
it, the Apollo program was unsustainable and if we get in another 'space
race' the same things would probably happen again. During the Apollo
program, the plaque on the lunar module leg said we came in peace for all
mankind, but it really should have said we came to beat the Soviet Union,
and yeah baby we did! But it was like looking at a sprinter after they
broke the tape at the end of the race. Hopefully, our motivation going
forward will be more about science and less about competition.
I have faith in the following generation of American scientists and
engineers to do a great job. NASA needs a clear mission, a new PR
strategy, and not to be at the whim of each presidential administration.
Richard Dierking
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 7:59 AM, Jim - TFJ <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> **
> 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-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
>
>
>
>
>
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