Obama Outlines Bold Space Policy ... But No Moon

The Bad Astronomer writes "In front of a mostly enthusiastic audience at NASA's Kennedy Space Center today, President Obama outlined a bold, new space policy. It's a change from his previous policy; the Constellation rockets are still dead, but a new heavy-lift rocket system is funded. He specifically talked of manned asteroid and Mars missions, but also stated there would be no return to the Moon. This is a major step in the right direction, but still needs some tweaking."

Comments

Re:"No Moon"

[DerekLyons]

Where Bush had a space program that made him look good but would never accomplish anything, Obama has one that has folks scratching their heads but which might just take space travel out of its 40-year coma.

Had space travel been in a coma, you'd have a point. But it hasn't. Instead we've actually had what all the space fans claim to have wanted for years - a routine workaday program. Turns out they were lying, what they want is stunts and spectaculars and big penile substitutes.
 
And really, Obama's program is something of a bust - a modest amount of money, a booster with no mission (I smell pork), and a capsule that might be adapted to have a mission at some date in the misty future. No clear goals, no timetables, no roadmaps nothing but warm fuzzy rhetoric.
 

And no, I'm not blaming W for the mess that is NASA. Every President since JFK has put politics over real accomplishments in this area, though Bush was just a little more cold-blooded about it.

I hope you're not referring to the Apollo program, because that was pure politics through and through.

Re:"No Moon"

[QuantumG]

I can only assume that you are a moron.. but let's try to educate you a little here. That 600 million metric tons that I said? That's approximately 1/100,000,000th of 1% of the mass of the Moon. So even if, over the period of hundreds of years, we cleared out the entire mass of the water ice that is expected to be at the north pole of the Moon, you next have to divide that by the square of the distance between the center of the Moon and the center of the Earth to get the effect of the change of the gravitational pull of the Moon on the Earth. It's less than the fluctuation of the solar output has on light pressure on the atmosphere. And, just for shits and giggles, you said "and brought it back to earth", which isn't the intention, there's plenty of water on Earth, there's no sense in bringing it back here.