Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, April 18, 2010 9:15:26 PM
The President pulls the funding for the Constellation rocket program. No, wait, the funding is still there, he's just pulling the program. Obama wants other things, notably that the future of space exploration should be less pure science and more targeted programs that can produce concrete results.
And he got an earful last week from the great NASA recluse, Neil Armstrong, who took the President to task for creating a situation where, for the forseeable future, we will only get men into space if we send $50 mil per man to the Soviets to hitch a ride.
Mr. Armstrong is talking about the right thing, but not for the right reasons. The primary problem is national security. I'll say it again, folks: there were two great techs in the 1980's that won the Cold War for us. One was missile defense, which at that point didn't work- but the Soviets never had an idea how much processing power we were capable of, and that was the great X factor. The other one was the space shuttle.
You could plant a high school scientist with a pair of binoculars outside of Vandenburg AFB, track the launches and pretty much guess what we were throwing up there. But every time we closed the cargo bay doors on the shuttle and sent it up on a DOD mission, they had no fargin' idea what was going up. It scared the crap out of them.
We need to be able to launch men into space at will. We need to do satellite maintenance. We need to maintain a presence with the Chinese and the Soviets in orbit, because they are not always our pals.
Of course there is more out there. We need to colonize a low gravity planet with a water source, to create an outpost for food and fuel for longer travel. I want to know what's under the ice on some of Jupiter and Saturn's larger moons. We need to get out there, and until we create a tensile cable elevator to a geosynchronous orbiting platform, the jump from Earth into low orbit will have to be a rocket.
But the first issue is national security. No getting around that. Which is why, after the NSA people get done taking a ball peen hammer to Obama's toes later this year, the decision will be made to continue the shuttle program a while longer. You heard it here first.