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Obama Moves To Link Pentagon With NASA
Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg:
"President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."
Kinda like that "tolerant" neighborhood near San Francisco
If you think San Franciscans are tolerant try applying for a carry permit within the city......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
NASA will become a fourth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, known as 'Starfleet'.
Check NASAWatch to see some inacuracies in this Bloomberg story.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
My interpretation of the article is not that Obama will want DoD staff to help manage NASA projects, but rather he wants NASA to be able to use already developed DoD rocket technology (which is now too classified for NASA to use). Since it's already developed, the over-budget and over-time has already been paid for....
What, you'd prefer to buy when stocks are up? While it is true that a lot of investors do buy high and sell low, it's really not the best way to make money.
Well that's the point of the factionalisation and faux-rivalry of US politics, isn't it? To get people so divided into their allegiance to a party name that you can then pull the same shit with either party and only 50% of the people will complain whilst the rest are obliged to rationalise it somehow.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
...that the military hasn't been running a black budget man in space program right along all this time. Their budget is huge compared to nasa, and right in the article, they have heavy lift rockets perfectly good for the task. And who's to say they don't have a two stage to orbit rocket plane or hybrid scramjet/rocket whatever dropped from a mothership already? Like they are going to brag about this, or we take it as gospel that they just stopped developing black budget advanced flying craft 40-50 years ago? The last one they finally fessed up to is the B2, we are now being made to believe they just gave that sort of research and deployment up? Really? They just stopped? And look at the near hysterical fit they went into when that dude in england hacked into some servers and he claims he found evidence of *just that*, a running black budget military manned space program. They want that guy shut up, locked away for the rest of his life in the US. Why? He didn't do anything but look, no damages, seems like a two year sentence or something like that is his native country would be sufficient, but nope, they went into serious overdrive to get him extradited.
Don't dismiss the thought out of hand. My guess is, because I have yet to see any evidence that they have given up black budget advanced aeronautical research, is that we had the technology for man in space a long time ago now, and the military just kept doing it, with the nasa efforts beng the public misdirection effort to keep focus elsewhere for deniability purposes, They just got better at burying stuff inside the black budgets.
Space is the high ground, no way in hell would they NOT want that advantage, including having humans up there and a way to quickly get them up and back. There's another guy out there who has been imaging rather large and pretty secret orbital craft, I don't have the url handy but I have seen his pics, those are some really large spacecraft, some of they completely large enough to hold a small crew.
The whole reason the Space Transportation System (STS, or just "space shuttle") looks the way it does is entirely due to now-defunct military requirements. When they were designing the shuttle, the DoD had a requirement to be able to place a payload in polar orbit and return to Earth in one orbit, in order to "secretly" deploy spy satellites. This is hard. No, really, this is very hard. The earth is spinning "sideways" and it takes a tremendous amount of impulse (read: fuel) to change your orbit from sideways to vertical. Then you have to land again.
NASA, dutiful organization that it was, came up with the idea of "tacking" the orbiter on the side. And they gave it wings. This was the only way they could get the crew-carrying module to safely glide back to its original destination.
About 5 years into the design, the DoD said, "No, thanks, we don't want that system anymore," and left NASA holding the bag. So, we're stuck with this design where the re-entry surface is exposed to the outside during launch (nobody else does that). The engines on the orbiter remain the highest energy-dense engines ever developed.
For more trivia, see here.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
He wasn't "partisan whining" (as far as I can tell). He was just observing the lack of complaints and guessing that there would be a lot greater suspicion and condemnation if Bush had done this. And I think it's fair to say he's right. That doesn't mean that it would be better or worse if the Republicans had done this.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The fact that there would be greater suspicion if Bush had tried to do this does in no way interfere with the fact that there would have been good reason to be more suspicious if Bush had attempted it.
once more into the breach