[roc-chat] Re: Fw: It's Krauthammer Friday
- From: John Van Norman <yrockets@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <roc-chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:08:32 -0700
Sent from my iPad
On Apr 23, 2012, at 10:37 AM, Richard Dierking <richard.dierking@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> 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, 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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