The rumored Obama budget for NASA calls for a future heavy lift rocket to get people and material into space. Once again Obama gets things wrong. NASA and the USAF have a heavy-lift rocket for getting material into orbit; it is called the Titan IV rocket which grew out of the Titan ICBM that was also used to launch the Gemini space capsules into Earth orbit. NASA has a new man-rated rocket currently in development, it is called the Ares rocket. They have already spent $9 billion in tax dollars to create Ares. How far has NASA gotten in building Ares? They had a successful test launch at Kennedy Space Center on October 28, 2009. That is how close Ares is to being mission capable.
But President Obama, in his proposed budget for NASA, does not call for the $3 billion a year extra NASA will need to finish Ares and to field the Orion capsule that will take human beings back to the Moon. Instead NASA will get about $1 billion extra, told to focus on near-Earth science missions to study the discredited hunch of global warming, hope Russia will rent Soyuz missions to the space station, and pray private industry will step up and build a space taxi.
Yet another example of how President Obama and his administration are good at squandering tax money. $787 billion stimulus. $40 billion to GM. $300 million sent to Hamas in Gaza. What is throwing away another $9 billion as Democrats raise the debt ceiling to a height that can only be reached by Orion? Obviously squat even as they put into the unemployment column thousands of highly skilled people who once worked at NASA and its contractors.
Ares test launch October 28, 2009. KSC, Cape Canaveral, FL.
3 comments:
BUT...BUT...BUT.....They will be studying GLOBAL WARMING. What could be more important???
He's doing the same thing to the CIA. Obama wants to turn NASA into a political tool to support his goals for world socialism through the hoax of global warming.
I had hoped the space agency would recover the sense of mission which inspired me and millions of Americans in the 20th Century.
AndyJ, in Obama's mind nothing. Lets ignore all of humanity is living on one ball in a game of billiards. Shoemaker-Levy is so old news.
Mike, it seems to be that way. There is argument that Ares/Orion was not the way. But doing nothing for a couple decades more is not the way either.
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