The “Protecting Human Space Flight Act of 2010” had better happen pretty fast, Many people here in Huntsville were laid off last week and over 100 just today, not counting many who have been cut back to part time. If too much time passes then it will be difficult if not impossible to reassemble these teams. How’s that “hope and change” working out for everyone else? It isn’t going too good here in Alabama!

That is exactly why Obama is canceling Constellation. It has nothing to do with jobs, science, the deficit or pragmatism.

This the globalist, the marxist Obama at his worst; the radical who grew up studying and loathing the imperial West and what he perceives their exploitation. He is still harbors a grudge with Great Britain over their African empire.

In space, there is no one to reign the great powers. In his mind, the possibility of the US using outer space to gain exclusive access to new science, data, materials and military resources is something to fear, not embrace.

because I think the (P)resident is a petty vindictive thug who finds ways to support his union buddies at the expense of everyone else that didn’t support him.

Layoffs have been ongoing at KSC and Marshall as well as at Boeing for several months now. There isn’t an end in sight as he turns NASA into a climate information gathering organization.

It will take a decade or more to recover from this, I saw the same thing happen here in Huntsville in the late 60′s , early 70′s when the Appolo mission ended. The lost knowledge and flight of engineers will cripple the space agency and it can all be laid at the (P)resident’s feet because he decided that the false religion of global warming could be changed by limiting man made activities.

God help us all.

In all honesty, NASA’s budget has been leaking like a sieve for some time now, and I think that the decision to focus on unmanned exploration, while unromantic, is a wise one: diminishing returns to human-based exploration make it an expensive proposition that we can’t afford.

The argument about American jobs is a particularly odd one for a conservative to make: the government’s job is not to create jobs; that is a byproduct of the governmnet carrying out its functions. I would be irked to find that institutions like the military are mere make-work programs, rather than protectors of our way of life. The money used to fund these jobs can surely find some use, and foster employment, in the private sector, and it is wrong to use the coercion of taxation to fund a jobs program.

Future developments in space travel may make human-based exploration more tenable or necessary, and I hope that humanity’s thirst for exploration will not be satiated at orbit’s edge, but at the moment, it’s a drain on our coffers that we can ill afford, and which makes little sense considering the benefits.

Space… the final frontier…or at least it used to be.
Now it’s health care and Organizing for America.
I remember when I was a kid and we used to get these little Explorer readers in school that showed us how we were going to explore the universe. I remember watching the first moon landing with my brother sitting on my mother’s bed.
“Houston …the Eagle has landed.”
Every ten seconds or so there was that little metallic beep.
Every kid wanted to be an astronaut.
I don’t ever remember wanting to be a community organizer or sing songs about the president.

people lose their jobs, this is just about the only decision I agree with Obama on. NASA has been a spending giant and when times are tough, you cut. While there have been some new finds due to the space program, very little has been accomplished over the last 10 or so years except bleeding a budget dry. Time to cut the spending and find ways to take picture of space without spending trillions to do so!

of course, like Obama she is promising jobs and fiscal accountability. Cocoa, Titusville, Melbourne, etc in Brevard County, FL are being crippled by Obama’s disdain for American leadership on any issue, in this case Space. And they were being harmed by people like Suzanne Kosmas who tries to hide her liberalism by using words like “fiscal responsibility”. Maybe CEO Obama can make GM build a plant in Brevard county? Oh, that’s right, NASA is going to develop new “green” energy technology now. Obviously the private sector has totally missed out on how viable / profitable those “green” technologies are. Who knew?

November cannot get here fast enough. One way or another, real change is coming. The issue is how much pain people are going to endure before they’ve had enough.

NASA needs to be in the exploration business not the launch business, nor the launcher business. NASA should not be defining more than amounts of cargo delivered to point x,y,z in space with velocity vector ( X ,Y,Z) at time T. I have no trouble with them building robotic exploration vehicles, its something that they arguably do better than anyone else in the world but I would like to see more commercial spin off from the program.

Despite the spin we have not received the greatest return on investment from NASA. Focusing them down to what they are actually good at, and moving anything that might have commercial possibility away from them seems to offer a more promising future for all.

You also have to question whether its wise to hand more dollars and the influence that goes with them to an organization that while it may not have an agenda certain of its members certainly seem to.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/03/researcher-says-nasa-hiding-climate-data/

At some point you have to ask just why someone has to file freedom of information lawsuits for non classified climate data that is by law in the public domain ?

I remember watching the first rockets to the moon from the roof of the building I lived in. I drove to cape Canaveral to see the last night launch of the shuttle before the challenger disaster. I grew up in love with the idea we would have a new frontier. NASA just isnt what is going to get us there.

There long has been an association between the Republican Party and space exploration. Perhaps its just part of the general hopefulness and optimism we try to embody but NASA as an organization is not our party’s friend, and its no longer the road to the future.

Constellation is bad rubbish and good riddance. You may be correct that Mr. Obama’s space policies will reduce the number of government jobs in Alabama and elsewhere, but claiming NASA is good at “human exploratory space flight” anymore is just plain wrong. NASA hasn’t put a man beyond low earth orbit (unless you count fixing Hubbell) since the 1970s, and when it has put people in low earth orbit, it’s only been a few government employees at a cost of roughly $1B a flight, and not very often at that. NASA doesn’t even have a good safety record. I favor the idea of human space exploration, but there are far better ways to go about it than with the expensive, bloated, dated, and constantly slipping government project that is Constellation. No thanks.

you have but I live in one of the affected areas, and have seen first hand how this played out so follow me if you will, RSers, on a trip deep into the recesses and formative associations within the political subconscious of the Bamster. As Penguin’diary this week has us thinking about where he “comes from” psychologically and why he does what he does, consider if you will the following associations:

1) “Texas” = biggest RedState, with guns =very bad = didn’t vote for us in 08 = must be punished! = remove funding, shut down JSC Manned Space center in Houston (the crown jewel in the NASA organization). Collateral damage to Huntsville AL and KSC-FL, a “three-fer.” [Spare NASA JPL in CA (done).]
2) “Louisiana” = promising Red State governor = can’t hide my mess in the Gulf, won’t vote for me now = very bad = must be punished! = withhold federal assistance = shut down platforms = twist in the wind, Pelican State!
3) “Arizona” = State defying federal edicts! obviously = Alabama 1964 = German shepherds barking at freedom riders = must be punished! = sue Arizona = issue Executive Order on Amnesty = you must be dragged into the “future,” Arizona.

Whether you’re for it or against its programs, to the O, NASA was an easy political target to make a quick hit on three (not Blue) States & their defiant governors.

The above is only part /snark/. I really think some of this has been operant to some extent in recent WH decisions. Fault lines in this Administration, more than any I have ever seen, are geographic.

Everything stopped for the early spaceshots. I think we only had radio for the very earliest ones, “Educational TV” didn’t come until the mid-sixties. The principal would put the radio broadcasts on the school PA system. We built rockets and dreamed of being involved with the space program, we knew all the Mercury Seven’s names. I literally lived the movie “October Skies.” The excitement held even through the turbulent sixties and even people that had long hair and opposed the war gathered around a TV on July 20, 1969, though they might have had a joint in their hand.

But it has all become just another bloated bureaucracy and like all bureaucracies, it exists primarily to protect and if possible expand itself. It has no goals and no real purpose beyond “to boldly go where no one has gone before,” except we’re mostly going to the same places.

I can support pure space research; probes to look at whatever we can look at, to understand everything understandable. I can understand and support the things from which we all, or most all, benefit; GPS, satellite communications, Sat TV and radio, intelligence satellites, survey satellites, etc.

Looking back, I don’t know that we’d have gone to the Moon if the Soviets hadn’t been trying to go there, and there has been no benefit from actually going, though the process brought us all sorts of stuff that has been way cool though we might have been better off without some of it. Unless somebody sends a probe and discovers that Mars has oceans of oil just below its red surface, we got lots of red dirt on Earth. For most commodities, it is hardly economic to go get them from distant places right here on Earth, so what are we looking for?

We had a powerrful mythology about man’s drive to explore behind the original space race, but it wasn’t true then nor now. Those iron men, mostly iron headed men, who set out in wooden ships didn’t go out on the bounding blue out of intellectual curiousity; the set out to get rich by finding a faster, cheaper way to get spices, gold, textile, porcelain, otter fur, or whatever looked profitable at the time. There doesn’t seem to be much profit in space exploration these days, so if the only reason is intellectual curiosity, there isn’t a big consensus for that and expenditures in pursuit of that curiosity are going to be limited.

NASA doesn’t embody a dream of spaceflight anymore; it embodies a large bureaucracy and its supporters’ desire for self-preservation.

Seems the agency has an ill defined mission, too much money, and time on their hands.

Unmanned spaceflight is the way of the future. NASA has the same 1990′s mindset that the USAF had resisting UAV’s. The future of military flight will be 75% unmanned. The future of spaceflight is unmanned as well.

We can continue the a space program without the huge costs of manned flight.

And yes, I have some good friends who are astronauts.

I knew that the Bush’s VSE plan was in trouble when Obama was elected and also because of the the economic meltdown we are in. Obama earily in his campaign said that he was going to delay Constellation 5 years to help pay for his education plan. I was not prepared for him to totally dismantel the human space flight program!

I do support Commerical Space, but the problem with Obama’s plan is until another Company develops a Commerical Crewed vehicle to which would cause true competition. Currently Space X is the only “Commerical” Company that is close to developing a manned vehicle. Which could take years. So we will be dependent upon Space X success. In a Congressional panel, there was some concern that Space X could require bailing out if it runs into trouble.

While I supported Bush’s VSE, I was not a big fan of the “Program of Record” or the Ares 1 launcher (Launching people on a solid rocket, bad idea) What I suggest is this, design the Orion capsule so it could be launched on either the Altas or Delta Heavy lift Launchers, vehicles that have a proven record. That would give us reduncy in launch options. Heck, make it Compatible with the ESA’s Araine launcher that gives us 3 viable launchers too choose from if one should suffer a launch failure. That would give us a bonus of a rental or leasing fee to ESA to use our Capsule design and they could pay us for flights to the station. Allow Space X and whatever other companies that come along to continue to develop their own manned vehicle would give us further redunancy. Obama’s current plan talks about using the Orion as a lifeboat for the station, but to get it up their requires a launch of some kind unmanned. Why not just go ahead and give it manned launch capablities.

Here are a couple of articles discussing/debating the Commerical space plan

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1648/1

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1655/1

First, NASA could use a little streamlining, most of the inefficiency issues have to do with politics.

This crowd would have you believe they are science guys, nothing could be further from the truth, they are apperatchecks at best, they believe in science the way they believe in spirituality…. they believe in their own divinity.

However:

Want honest answers in global warming, NASA observation is best way to get real average global temp data.

Want to find better energy, NASA physicists are the best chance to develop fundamental understanding of how to do that. (Do you remember from the third grade that the SUN warms the earth ?)

Want to solve the issue with rogue nations having nukes, SDI / NASA are the answer.

Someone slipped a goodly amount of money into his pocket that was not spent on “proper” equipment and materials. Seven Astronauts paid for his avarice and greed with their lives, and now we no longer “have” a space shuttle named Challenger.
We need to make strong and lasting changes before space exploration can be practically resumed.

h/t Mark Levin

No wonder The One (termer) runs around sucking up to the tyrants. We’re not going to be able to defend ourselves, once the left gets done cutting.

http://marklevinshow.com/goout.asp?u=http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/28/debts-deficits-and-defense/

The Stash is for welfare, not science and technology and defense.

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

Russian Spaceship Zooms Out of Control Near Space Station

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/02/russian-spaceship-control-near-space-station/?test=latestnews

What now???

Send a Space Shuttle up – oh wait……