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Posted on 07/22/2011 8:53:09 AM PDT by IbJensen
The Shuttles and International Space Station (ISS) were not the final goals envisioned by NASA when the project was started. The original plan was for the The Shuttles and ISS to be used as a staging point to assemble vehicles for maned space travel further into space and an isolation chamber for humans returning from other worlds.
The Shuttles were never used to their full capacity. They were designed for many more flights than they actually saw.
And now, the ISS, instead of being an asset for future use as originally planned, is scheduled for burning on reentry in a few years.
It will be disruptive, but if private enterprise will be allowed to do what it’s best at, it is recoverable.
To be fair, the end of the Shuttle program was initiated by President Bush. But it was Obama who cancelled the replacement for the Shuttle.
We had a 5 to 6 year gap between the end of the Apollo era and the start of the Shuttle era, but we had the shuttle in development all that time. Now, we have nothing. Nothing for future manned space flight.
Every launch vehicle and item put in space by NASA was built by private contractors, lowest bid. Who did you have in mind to build this stuff at half the price???
Or, are you shooting off your mouth out of ignorance????
Re: But it was Obama who cancelled the replacement for the Shuttle.
Cancellation of the Shuttles replacement is what hurt. But wait that frees up more money to buy votes from the freeloaders.
I will concede, without arguement that your point is probably true that the shuttles were built, being as safe as possible at the lowest reasonable cost, because with most government beaureaucracies it isn’t the product that is the most costly part.
It is the administration.
It will be interesting how these freed up engineers and scientists help Virgin and the other space companies get into space.
Punish Republicans in Texas? Yep! But Obama is accomplishing much more than that. Take a look a NASA's facilities around the Country.
Obama taking out NASA is like a brain surgeon working with a shape knife. He's punishing the self sufficient, educated and skilled middle class Aerospace workers, Aerospace contractors, and Aerospace investors. These normally aren't 'Holder's People'. They are typically Republican even if living in a blue county or state.
The money saved can be 'invested' in the dimocrat voter base.
Thanks IbJensen.
I doubt he’s doing it to punish Republicans, though that’s not something he’d regret doing.
Oit is largely to have a slush fund to bribe their constituency.
Thanks for clearing that up.
R/Janey
A private company would never get the permits. This had to be a military operation, and remains one in spite of the half Witt notion that putting a civilian on the lunar lander changed any of that.
Almost everthing that started out military has eventually gone civilian, whether it be computers, preserved food, GPS or Tang.
We’re just at a point where civilian capabilities have developed where it no longer has to be exclusively military.
The Rogers Commission concluded:
More broadly, the report also considered the contributing causes of the accident. Most salient was the failure of both NASA and Morton Thiokol to respond adequately to the danger posed by the deficient joint design. However, rather than redesigning the joint, they came to define the problem as an acceptable flight risk. The report found that managers at Marshall had known about the flawed design since 1977, but never discussed the problem outside their reporting channels with Thiokol—a flagrant violation of NASA regulations. Even when it became more apparent how serious the flaw was, no one at Marshall considered grounding the shuttles until a fix could be implemented. On the contrary, Marshall managers went as far as to issue and waive six launch constraints related to the O-rings.[37] The report also strongly criticized the decision making process that led to the launch of Challenger, saying that it was seriously flawed.
U.S. House Committee hearings conclusion:
...the Committee feels that the underlying problem which led to the Challenger accident was not poor communication or underlying procedures as implied by the Rogers Commission conclusion. Rather, the fundamental problem was poor technical decision-making over a period of several years by top NASA and contractor personnel, who failed to act decisively to solve the increasingly serious anomalies in the Solid Rocket Booster joints.
Even though they disagreed on the detail of the cause of failure, both investigations pointed to administrative/management failures.
If you look into all spaceflight failures, you will find most result from administrative/management failures.
Project management, the allocation of resources and quality assurance, is probably the most critical part of large scale high tech projects.
Before trashing NASA, an organization with a proven record in all facets of getting the job done, one really needs to have an alternative in hand that is in fact producing a product. Plans, dreams, and good intentions don't put people in orbit and bring them back alive.
I’m not intending to trash NASA, but I think its existence was hindering private enterprise from growing in this area.
Like all beauraucracies, they never disband voluntarily, so its highly unlikely NASA would have reduced its role as corporations proved their capability.
I agree this may seem a step back, but I don’t think it is in the long-term.
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