Posted on 09/22/2011 9:06:34 PM PDT by lbryce
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, told lawmakers Thursday that the end of the space shuttle era has left the American human spaceflight program in an "embarrassing" state.
"We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Armstrong told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
"For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable."
Armstrong was part of a four-member panel of space experts who told lawmakers that NASA needs a stronger vision for the future and should focus on returning humans to the Moon and to the International Space Station.
"A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain," said the US astronaut, now 81, who was commander of Apollo 11 and walked on the Moon in 1969.
President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation program that would have returned humans to the Moon and called on NASA to instead focus on new, deep-space capabilities to carry people to an asteroid by 2025 and Mars by 2030.
The retirement in July of the three-decade-old space shuttle program brought an end to the US capability to send humans to space until private industry can come up with a new commercial space capsule to the ISS, maybe by 2015.
In the meantime, Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only taxis for the world's astronauts heading to low-Earth orbit, and a ticket to the ISS costs global space agencies between 50 and 60 million dollars each.
(Excerpt) Read more at space-travel.com ...
We are going to Utopia. We will get ther on spaceship stimulous via the Koran.
“I want my dammed ride to the station!”
You and me both. Things have really gone to hell since 1968.
Pan Am is kaput. There’s no space station. The magnificent Saturn V rocket is gone. The boring “ space truck”, the Space Shuttle, replaced Moon shots.
I would have thought we’d have space stations and a Moon colony started by now. There are no great adventures nor men of vision. No wonder Obama got elected.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzCsDVfPQqk
“BTW, there is a book out there called “1421” where it claim the Chinese came to Western America in that year.”
That has to be the year the Chinese sent out a huge fleet of junks. Shortly afterwards the Chinese turned inward and that expedition was largely forgotten. Some have speculated that Columbus was inspired by a map made by those Chinese adventurers.
That’s from August.
Things have changed since then and a crewed Soyuz launch date has been set.
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