Posted on 07/31/2004 5:57:01 PM PDT by KevinDavis
I lived in Huntsville for 7 years. They named a civic center after Von Braun but I've always believed they should name the NASA center after him. He did a hell of a lot to get us to the moon.
Think of the English tourist trade! They'd come just to urinate on the signs.
Can they make a good jet-pack now?
The U.S. propulsion industry has been systematically destroyed--quite deliberately--over the last 20 years. I have watched it. Now NASA has basically announced that they are going to compete with the empty husks of its former contractors. Way to go.
With the Shuttle down, two of our national launch assets are completely dependent on a potentially foreign source of propulsion: Atlas uses Russian engines; Sea Launch uses Russian rockets. We are down to Delta II, Delta-IV, and the teensy Pegasus.
Boeing "walked away" from half the market for the D-IV due to government "punishment" for the stupidity of a dozen management types.
If Mr. Putin decides to turn off the flow of propulsion technology we are in bad shape--an understatement.
And NASA builds a new facility to compete with what is left.
One example. During Apollo, Rocketdyne (my company) had 20,000 employees. When I joined it in 1975, it had 3500. It is down to 3,500 employees again; Boeing is actively shopping it for sale. Aviation Week says the buyer will be Pratt & Whitney (others think Aerojet or ATK), which will basically decimate the place, pick over whatever tasty morsels they want and toss the rest into the big corporate dumpster. But be of good cheer; we may have lost the people and technology that put us on the Moon--but NASA has a shiny new facility staffed with bureaucrats and inexperienced college kids. We may have thrown away the NERVA (nuclear rocket technology), the F-1 (moon engine), the J-2, the H-2, etc...but we got this great site for photo-ops with the pols.
--Boris
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