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Senators Blast NASA For Lacking Vision
An anonymous reader writes "A Senate science subcommittee clashed with NASA's chief on Wednesday, saying the agency and the White House lacked a clear vision and goal for the program. Skeptical senators told the space agency that it should not just talk about plans, but set out to do something specific. Lawmakers expressed a bipartisan opposition to the agency's plans and the initiatives of the Obama White House." Updated 23:13 GMT by timothy: Reader Trent Waddington contributes this video link to the hearing, if you want to come to your own conclusions.
You do realize that the plans were unworkable, the designs flawed, and the very engineers for them introduced alternative designs which could be produced sooner/faster/cheaper. Look up "Ares V Base Heating Issue" sometime.
The management at NASA and the special interests behind key areas kept pushing for Constellation due to it's huge R&D budget, despite the laws of physics which stated that it would never work with the designs as/is. And Obama pulled the plug on the dead-man-walking. It was obvious 5 years ago that this would happen, which is why NASA's engineers "moonlighted" and introduced the DIRECT launch design.
Here is what they proposed. It could be ready from approval to launch within 36 months, as it is based on existing technologies *and* it has already passed PDR. If it looks familiar to you space nuts, you might remember it as the Regan-era National Launch System. Now it is called Jupiter.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esCGYkVhhnY&feature=channel
Watch the Senate Hearing yourself, a lot more interesting stuff happened.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The Apollo program cost about $145 billion in 2008 dollars (Wikipedia), and quite a lot more if you factor in the orbital programs (Mercury, Gemini) which led up to Apollo. That's not exactly peanuts. They only get about $18 billion a year right now.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Cuts to NASA are completely and utterly pointless as far as balancing the budget. NASA's represents less than half a percent of the federal budget. You could run NASA at current levels for 4 years on what the F-22 project alone has cost.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time