Chris Kraft Talks About The Decline of NASA

schwit1 writes in with a link to a recent interview with Chris Kraft, founder of Mission Control, discussing the impracticality of the SLS, and why the best and brightest are slowing leaving NASA. From the article: "The problem with the SLS is that it's so big that makes it very expensive. It's very expensive to design, it's very expensive to develop. When they actually begin to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They're going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up. Then there are the operating costs of that beast, which will eat NASA alive if they get there. ... You go talk to the guys who were doing Constellation (NASA's now-scuttled plan to return to the moon), and the reason they came to NASA was to go back to the moon. They're all leaving now. The leaders are leaving for a lot of other reasons also, but they're leaving because there's no future that they want to be involved in. And that's unfortunate."

Comments

Re:But but but......

[delt0r]

We can burn DT which is 100x easier, so its not useful as a fuel. Its also very rare, at between 1ppb to 50ppb, so even if you could burn it you need a mining operation bigger than anything on earth just for a power station. Oh and if you can burn 3He then you can burn DD, which produces 3He.

3He is not a reason to go to the moon. Its proof that even proponents can't come up with a good reason to go there at all.