We have done some exciting things, landing a rover on Mars, exciting discoveries of possible Earth like planets by Kepler and more. But on the other hand we have fallen woefully behind in our manned space program and have taken giant steps backwards. The retirement of the space shuttle without any U.S. replacement capability was a sobering reality check. NASA’s heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System has a price tag of 41 billion dollars and will not be ready until 2030…yes 2030, 27 years from now. That long to build the basic equivalent of a rocket we built in the 1960’s in 8 years. We wont even go into the failed Constellation ARES Rocket and the time and money spent on it.
Hopefully in 2017 we accomplish this lofty goal and are once again are on a par with countries like China, able to place man in space on our own. Of course getting out of low Earth orbit may not happen in most of our life times at this rate, but we can dream. Maybe China will blaze the path for us.
Robots can do great things but man was meant to explore, we cannot allow a further degradation of our capability. Perhaps it is a sign of something more significant about the United States that either a lack of pride, ability, or desire has permitted this to happen. But people do still care. How that interest can be turned into something more tangible seems to have eluded NASA, perhaps that is something that they need to look at.
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I'm not into the "Camelot" aspects of man-in-space operations, but I do recognize the necessity of moving the species along the continuum to independent life in space. "Camelot" got us to the Moon and then allowed our capabilities to languish for half a century. I'm perfectly happy to use robots with or without AI for whatever purposes that they serve.
The SLS is more of that Moon shot psychology, shooting for the big, splashy one off missions. This is inefficient towards our permanent occupation of space. We need to put loads into LEO as inexpensively as possible and then move them wherever they need to go by far more efficient means than conventional rocket motors. Again, the SLS is not advanced technology, but a repeat of the political aspects of the shuttle, with many of the same flaws. If given a tiny fraction of the subsidy that SLS contracts represent, SpaceX will beat the SLS/Orion combo in putting people in orbit, at a price that will certainly be less than one fifth the cost per launch of the SLS while being a tiny fraction of the overall cost of the SLS "system". The Orion has the inherent inefficiency of using a bus to do what a taxi is supposed to do while being unable to act as the true safety backup for the ISS that it is mandated to be. The SpaceX Dragon capsule can carry the entire current crew complement of the ISS+1, while the Orion, without further modification can only carry two-thirds. The Dragon can be attached to any other mission vehicle as a crew return element, as it already has a heat shield capable of high speed reentry. I would suggest that Elon Musk is likely to get to Mars before NASA gets back to the Moon, and for less money.