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The day before President Obama heads to Cape Canaveral to announce his plans for NASA, the White House finds itself under attack by a team of former astronauts who object to his proposed changes as laid out in his budget
"Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity."
The first man to set foot on the moon Tuesday penned a letter that rips President Barack Obama's new space program.
Neil Armstrong, along with ex-Apollo commanders James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, wrote the letter that says the initiative prevents the U.S. from realizing its potential in terms of manned space exploration.
The President came down here in his campaign and told these 15,000 workers here at the Space Center that if they would vote for him, that he would protect their jobs. 9,000 of them are about to lose their job.
Being the coward that he is, NOT ONE space worker from the port was invited to attend his speech today. I guess he was afraid that he might get heckled and booed for his decision to gut the program.
My son and his freinds, all 18-20, were talking about this today. They seemed enthuastic about the changes for whatever reason. They are much more science minded than me, I don't have a clue about any of this.
Being the coward that he is, NOT ONE space worker from the port was invited to attend his speech today. I guess he was afraid that he might get heckled and booed for his decision to gut the program.
Would you rather he fund it and raise taxes to fund it? If you want to criticize anyone for gutting NASA, look to Ford, and Nixon.
You complain about him gutting a program. Would you rather he hikes taxes to pay for it?
I have a gut feeling you would criticize him for anything, just because he has a D after his name, or he's black. I can't tell where your bias is, but it becomes more evident with each post.
“This isn’t a step backwards,” Jim Kohlenberger, chief of staff at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said to BBC News. “I think the step backwards was trying to recreate the Moon landings of 40 years ago using largely yesterday’s technology, instead of game-changing new technology that can take us further, faster and more affordably into space.”
Shortly after Obama announced his decision, NASA awarded $50 million in grants to five private firms for that purpose.
The president’s shift from governmentally-manned spaceflight to the private sector is justified. Private research and development could yield a wider and more fruitful supply of ideas for more efficient space travel. It also could allow the recession-battered government to refocus its priorities on other areas of research like the effect of prolonged space travel on humans.
$17 billion is the current underfunded budget. Obama is actually increasing the NASA budget by $6 billion over 5 years.
Unfortunately actually going ahead and building the Ares/Orion/Constellation projects will cost hundreds of billions and would likely go way over projected budgets. It is this future and unpredictable spending that Obama is not committing to. George Bush made fantastic wet dream promises without any funding to back it up.
"When President George W. Bush established his new space exploration policy to return humans to the moon, NASA estimated the policy would cost $230 billion (in 2004 dollars) through 2025. [16] This figure includes the Commercial Crew and Cargo program, which is separate from the Constellation program. NASA has estimated that the Constellation program would cost over $97 billion (in 2008 dollars) through 2020, half of which would be for Ares I and Orion. However, unsolved technical and design challenges made it impossible for NASA to provide a credible estimate."
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