I hope to God there are a bunch of stone cold serious men in the Pentagon who are NOT, under any cicumstances, going to stand by and permit Russia, China, Iran, or anyone else, to establish their predominance in space over America -- treaties, the president, the congress, the media, and the supreme court be damned.
BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars spent, with the russians dragging their feet at every turn. And now, they are going to throw it all into the trash can and disallow any possible return on the investment. Another check mark on russia's list of things to do to impoverish us, payback for their beloved, worthless, USSR.
Never in my life did I think I would see this day.
REMOVE THIS SOB FROM OFFICE!!! Before he does any more damage.
They won the high ground
I have a nightmare scenario, in which enemies of the U.S. blind or take out all of our communication satellites, spy satellites and any military hardware. Just one at a time, or a few at a time, we will be blind just when we need eyes. We will have to beg to get a ride to check it out, or borrow massive quantities from the Chinkonese to build the next gen way to get back to orbit. We are without the ultimate advantage, information, and communication if our enemies want us to be.
No. They are saying they are going to do it in 9 years. My bet is that pretty soon the Russians will back off the 2020 date, but talk a lot about how very expensive it is and that the US should be chipping in far more money to keep the station active. Cha-ching!
The space shuttle was a great idea. The purpose of the shuttle was to carry payloads from Earth to a space station. The original space station (Freedom) was engineered to have the capacity to build spacecraft for launch to the moon and other planets. It also had a space manufacturing facility, a science lab, a module to house astronauts, science experiments, and observation platforms.
It was killed by administrations more interested in buying votes via entitlement programs, sponsoring programs with results around election time, and unenlightened as to what promise R&D has to the economic and technological future of the country.
We have unenlightened leadership that has no clue as to relationship between economic leadership and R&D. Instead we have leadership that has enslaved our future to debt, and more and more entitlements, government regulation, and more taxes. There is no need for scientists and engineers in our new socialist economy.
The ISS is not Russian property. It’s owned between the US, Russia, Europe and Japan. And there will be American rockets going back soon.
Rumor has it that Russia/Pan Slavic Union, China, and Brazil want to build a joint space station by 2020.