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Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager
Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."
Can you imagine if the Congress of the 1950s had, instead of funding the Apollo program, wanted to fund production of the Wright Flyer?
If Congress wants the US space program to be top notch and succeed, then they need to *fully* fund it. Its "put up or shut up" time. Either give them the money to go to the moon, or close down the program.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
What I have a hard time understanding is how NASA (the Americans) made it look so easy to complete six manned moon landings in a 3 year period 40 years ago, but nobody (neither NASA or any other country) has been able to do it since. By easy I mean banging them out every few months without incident/deaths.
You can't tell me during the high flying economic times, when people were going to go into orbit with their dog just for fun, that countries like Russia or China haven't wanted to be known as the second country to make it to the moon, or the first country to land three people on the surface of the moon during a mission, etc.
It's like 1972 happened and then every country on earth forgot that the moon existed, with respect to manned lunar missions.
I'm not saying it's easy, or cheap, but if NASA could do it 41 years ago why hasn't anybody stepped up to the plate?