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State of Alabama Fighting NASA's New Plan
FleaPlus writes "Alabama politicians have formed a 'task force' dedicated to fighting NASA's new plans to cancel the costly Constellation/Ares program, which is largely based in Alabama. The chronically mismanaged Constellation project attempted to build new rockets in-house and replicate an Apollo-style lunar program with minimal investment in new technologies. NASA's new boosted budget revives formerly suppressed R&D efforts into critical technologies needed for a sustainable push towards Mars and intermediate waypoint destinations, works with (instead of trying to compete with) existing commercial rockets to transport cargo/crew to orbit, and funds a stream of robotic precursor missions to scout other worlds and demonstrate new technologies. The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook."
Now, I dun know so much about rockets and flyin' to the moon and all that, but hooey, when you wanna start talkin' bout putting some downhome good ol' boys out of work, well, sir, I just gotta speak my mind. This ain't a threat, son. You take those jobs away from us here and God Almighty help us, we ain't gonna have nothin better to do than march on up to Washington and have us an ol' fashioned conference with each individual congresscritter that 'pposed us. Alabama style.
You catch my drift, fellas?
The Alabamans want to save their pork, plain and simple.
Their efforts should be attacked as being pure pork-barrel politics and characterized as a deliberate attempt to save a bad program purely for the money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Typical, people complain about taxes and wasteful spending, then shit themselves when the government stops spending wastefully ON THEM.
I guess I understand it. People don't really care about whether taxes are high or being spent wisely. They only care about how much of it goes to them. To most, the government is nothing more than a big ciculating fan that sucks money from somewhere and blows it to somewhere else. You jockey for position to stand where the biggest cash dunes collect, and from there use the money to shape the future direction of the wind.
That's all this is. It's got nothing to do with actual space exploration or engineering or research.
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
Remember the Republican mottos, kids:
- Earmarks are bad, except in my district!
- Government spending can't create jobs, except in my district!
"Troll" ?!? Excuse me!?!?
That's how it works in Washington. We have the same thing here in GA. Saxby Chamblis (R) and the rest our mostly Republican congressional team bashes Obama's spending ALL the time but when it comes to the F-22 project (they're made here in Marietta), he's got his hand out just like any other politician.
Both parties are guilty of it. WTF is it with you people, someone makes an observation that's actually true but says something negative you mod it down?!?
Some of you people are such ignoramuses! Troll indeed!