Whom does NASA Administrator Charles Bolden think he's fooling? President Obama's new NASA budget is betrayal of our space program. For any serious observer, the termination of Constellation means that hardware will be replaced by hot air.
Let's look at the facts.
Bolden's position is that NASA has not abandoned human spaceflight. But the reason he claims this is true is that, under Obama's plan, there will still be astronauts who will circle our planet in low-Earth orbit. There will still be a space station and Americans will still fly a few hundred miles above the ground in a series of endless ellipses.
Excited yet? We've only been doing this since 1961.
For many in the space community, ceasely revolving above the Earth is not the kind of human spaceflight we have in mind. John Glenn and before him, Yuri Gargarin did this five decades ago. In the year 2010, our highest aspiration for human exploration of space is still only to circle the Earth?
Bolden claims that NASA's money will be used to fund new technological development. In other words, we will build castles in the air hoping that the castles will float.
Part of NASA's job already includes research and development, and very little has availed itself in that respect over the decades other than incremental improvements.
Given the track record we've seen, from the cancellation of post-Apollo flights to the termination of the aerospike-engined X-33 to the Constellation, every single program promising to develop new and radical technologies has proven to produce nothing more (or less) than evolutionary improvement.
And the majority of them, moreover, have been cancelled.
The warp engine isn't coming any time soon.
Yes, there is the ion engine, but it would take decades to develop that into a viable technology for human spaceflight. The entire weight of Deep Space 1, a demonstrator prototype, is less than the mass of the smallest engine necessary to achieve orbit, much less an entire rocket.
Bolden is taking advantage of the lack of education of many to attempt to fool them into the belief that months of manned spaceflight can be easily shortened into weeks and that NASA's new plan is to put that into effect. But we can't even do that for unmanned vehicles, let alone manned ones. And we won't, for many decades.
Bolden is, in short, spinning a line hoping that you will be fooled.
Will you?
Is President Obama prepared to tell the truth to the American people? For some reason, one is not inclined to believe he will.
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2 comments:
Pretty much. Expecting that the commercial sector can put astronauts into LEO and reach ISS isn't a wise approach. I don't think Musk has had much success in getting his tiny rockets into space. And even less for reaching orbit. I've been told the new 'Falcon' has something like a 20% success rate. Shuttle had two failures in about 135 flights and a lot of folks think that's too high. So how does anyone think a 20% success rate will work?
The figure I've seen quoted is 40%. I wouldn't call his rockets "tiny," although by comparison with NASA's primary rockets, their payload capability is quite unimpressive, with the exception of the Falcon 9, which hasn't yet launched.
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