Posted on 06/27/2012 11:30:04 AM PDT by NonZeroSum
In December of 1968, America won the moon race.
NASA didn’t actually accomplish JFK’s goal of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth until eight months later with the historic Apollo 11 mission, but on that fateful Christmas Eve, when the Apollo 8 astronauts read from Genesis to an awestruck planet, as they circled our nearest neighbor, the Soviets knew that they weren’t going to win, and they not only quit, but also pretended they’d never been racing.
It was a very risky flight, the first one to send an Apollo capsule beyond earth orbit, and the first manned flight of the Saturn V rocket, after an almost-disastrous first flight in which the vehicle had several premature engine shutdowns and almost shook itself to pieces. There was no second unmanned test flight to see if it had been fixed.
Does anyone imagine that NASA could do that flight today? Not just because they don’t have the hardware to do it. Even if they did, the agency, indeed the nation itself, no longer has the courage to do bold things in space.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Space Ping.
Manned space flight from NASA? It’s a no go because Obama knows it evokes too much patriotic nationalism. He’s busy stomping that out!
The house can do anything it wants as long as Obummer is in power and Harry Reid has the Senate there will be no achieving great things. Everything is stopped by Harry (Mr. No anything the house puts out is DOA in the Senate) Reid. Harry Reid is the real MR. NO. He is a one man party of NO!
Remember also that the Center Directors and the NASA Administrator serve at the pleasure of the President so they function to his, not Congresses, priorities. Obummers priority is to give away our national security to the Russians and the Chinese.
Ravenstar
“As an example, fast forward to this past fall, when two successive failures of the Russian launch system on which NASA is now dependent to get the astronauts to the International Space Station since last summer’s retirement of the Space Shuttle had the agency contemplating abandoning the ISS, in which the nation has invested almost three decades and around a hundred billion dollars.”
Obama killed the Space Shuttle Program and not only put the USA behind in the Space Race, but made us dependent on the Russians to travel to out Space Station.
Well, if we were to try again it would have to be a Private firm to do it, because gov’t hasn’t the will, or the money to do it. We have a myopic turd in the Oval Office who thinks the only good gov’t accomplishment is making more people dependent upon the government teat. He is as deep as a puppy pee on a sidewalk on a summer’s afternoon. And lastly, after Apollo program finished, all the data and mission tapes were erased and re-used for other gov’t work.
Even if Romney tried it, Congress would not let it thru.
But we are going to build trains!
Then next day I was allowed into the maternity ward. MOM was fine and daughter was great but when I suggested the name Apollonia I had to duck when the badpan came flying at me.
i think a private company could do it using off-the-shelf poarts
The ‘computer’ they used was no more powerful than a digital watch.
Dig up the original blueprints, fix them up wherever you can with modern stuff, and GO!
The decision to retire the Shuttle was made in 2004 by the Bush administration. And we have always been dependent on the Russians, because the Shuttle couldn't act as a lifeboat, as the Soyuz does.
RE: The tapes.. You are correct, I was a manager in the JSC Tape library back in 1972. On slow night shifts we would listen to the audio tapes from everything from Mercury to Apollo, interesting stuff.
The Space Shuttle Fleet was retired in 2011 long after George W. Bush left office and Obama seized power.
In the Obama years, we have lost the Space Shuttle, NASA is pandering to Muslims, we have not been to Mars or even back to the Moon.
The program was planned to end in 2010. It was being shut down when Obama took the oath of office, and many of the facilities and manufacturing needed to support it had already ended. He (or rather, NASA) extended the program an additional year to allow completion of the ISS. Not everything is Barack Obama's fault.
We could’ve gotten a candidate who is interested in space: Newt Gingrich. But everybody laughed at him - and now it seems that the entire world is talking about going back to space and has discovered this wonderful idea.
So instead we got Romney, who doesn’t have an original bone in his body and is just a non-Democrat, non-Muslim version of Obama. Bye-bye, space program.
[ We are utterly irrational when it comes to safety in space. ]
All the ninnies want to make flying in space safer than crossing the street before we do ANY space exploration.....
Even the astronauts themselves admit that even if space travel was 1000X riskier they would do it on a drop of a dime.
Nanny state safety mentality has ruined the government space program, wonder how bad it will hurt the private space program.
[ RE: The tapes.. You are correct, I was a manager in the JSC Tape library back in 1972. On slow night shifts we would listen to the audio tapes from everything from Mercury to Apollo, interesting stuff. ]
Any interesting UFO-y stuff in those tapes?
[ We could’ve gotten a candidate who is interested in space: Newt Gingrich. But everybody laughed at him - and now it seems that the entire world is talking about going back to space and has discovered this wonderful idea.
So instead we got Romney, who doesn’t have an original bone in his body and is just a non-Democrat, non-Muslim version of Obama. Bye-bye, space program. ]
The best jusification of a space program ever: To escape the Planet of the Liberals or to ship Liberals off planet.
I dare anyone to top that!
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