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Do you recall who abandoned the shuttle replacement program?
Well, Constellation was pretty much the embodiment of what GregW calls "an economic development and then jobs program". If burning money could get you into orbit, Constellation would have reached Mars long ago.
In the meantime, Elon Musk's company developed a launch vehicle for what it cost NASA to put on the dog-and-pony show known as Ares-1x: Putting a mock-up 2nd stage and payload on top of an off-the-shelf Shuttle booster to make a flight into the Atlantic.
And SpaceX has 2 unmanned orbital launches of their Dragon capsule under their belt already.
Too bad we let Johnson change the space program into an economic development and then jobs program for the south. We stopped exploring with the last moon landing. That was a very big mistake. We should have been doing exploration instead of playing at war with the rest of the world.
Now we will get to watch the Indians, Brazillions and the Chinese continue the exploration we abandoned.
Well that's what happens you want to the preeminent military power on the planet and decide to use war to implement foreign policy.
The shuttle program, which was scheduled for mandatory retirement in 2011, saw the final launch with Atlantis launching on July 8, 2011, in accord with the directives President George W. Bush issued on January 14, 2004 in his Vision for Space Exploration.
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I am absolutely floored at what Space-X has managed to do. That's my idea of American entrepreneurship at its best.
The ultimate fate of the Shuttle was cast in 1981 when the Reagan Administration chose to end the construction of new orbiters to the 4 orbiters and parts to make a potential 5th orbiter that had been contracted by the preceeding Administration. NASA never got the chance to build a block 2 vehicle or build a fully resusible flyback booster for the orbiter. A cargo only vesion capable of launching 3-4 times as much as the shuttle was also ignored.
The Shuttle needed a mini-shuttle for those missions where you needed a car rather than a truck. Shuttles were expensive to fly and cost almost as much as those Apollo moon shots.
Aslo they blew up every 50 or so flights. Its time to do better and I think we can. So I think it is time to use the knowledge we got from STS and forge ahead, my vision is of bored bureacrat named Heyward flying to a large orbiting wheel of a space station all to the sound of Strauss's Blue Danube.
Shuttle REPLACEMENT program. Obama kicked us out of the national space industry by shutting down the shuttle REPLACEMENT program. Now we get to let Vladimir Putin kick us around a bit if we want a ride into the stratosphere and beyond.
I don't see how it can be interpreted as the end of U.S. space exploration as we went without a manned space launch vehicle between 1972 and 1981. It's merely a transition.
I don't see how it can be interpreted as the end of U.S. space exploration as we went without a manned space launch vehicle between 1972 and 1981. It's merely a transition.
Shuttle REPLACEMENT program. Obama kicked us out of the national space industry by shutting down the shuttle REPLACEMENT program. Now we get to let Vladimir Putin kick us around a bit if we want a ride into the stratosphere and beyond.
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