I propose that the same thing is true for the DOD. If we are just talking about what the rest of the world would do. Economically is does not make sense to attack us. I can’t even imagine how much “occupying” the US would cost a foreign invader. Turn the DOD budget off for 4 years and “The gap is meaningless from any sort of strategic, national security, or scientific perspective.” Lets save 1/2 trillion per year, and give the militias a reason to exist! You think I’m kidding? Look at North Korea, buying them off regularly is a hell of a lot cheaper than attacking. I’m reminded of the old saying “You can catch more flies with honey, than with vinegar”. 500 billion is a lot of honey!

Only the Ares heavy lift vehicle serves any useful to pursue, IMO. But even this vehicle shouldn’t take over a decade to build. It took NASA just five years to test launch the first Saturn V vehicle.

Too bad the middle school minds here don`t “get it” & just want to rant about their pet projects and peeves. Reality is hard to admit to when you are in fantasy land and have little real world experience.

Life does go on.

How much are we paying the Russian government for Soyuz? Are we going to outsource our manned space flight program to the Russians because they can do it cheaper?

Re-approriate $40billion from the military budget this year to NASA to continue shuttle flights and get us to the moon and mars.

Except mother nature, with a national debt now approaching $10 Trillion dollars, human population approaching 10 billion souls, carbon dioxide concentration approaching 400 ppm, the sixth global mass extinction now well underway, asteroids whizzing around with humanity totally clueless.

Another severe ice storm will have you all down on your hands and knees praying. Katrina should have been your wake up call, but instead we have :

Constellation!

No enemies will gain tactical advantage on the US.

No scientific research (except the reflexive kind done to justify further human activity) will go undone (rather much more scientific research might get done).

No critical technology will go undeveloped.

The gap will come and it won’t matter.

“What has not been recognized is that there is no system today which can meet the Constellation requirements,”
Isnt it obvious that in this case, that the requirements need to be questioned and reviewed ?

And I am giving in right now!!!

Administrator Griffin said: “NASA has had many discussions within the administration on this topic,” Griffin said. “We have many funding priorities in the nation, all of which clamor for first attention, and the priority of closing the gap between shuttle retirement and deployment of the new systems did not make it to the top.”

I wish someone would have mentioned that lots of useless programs did make it to the top – missile defense of questionable dependability, high tech fighter planes when we don’t have a suitable enemy to use them against, aircraft carriers when we don’t have sailors to run them, etc.

Sigh. I feel better now.

Charles

A huge problem with our flagging space flight capability is aging hardware but a big part is the priorities of the people (at the highest levels) controlling the program.

A case in point was the cost and time needed for an Orbiter maintenance effort (called the OMDP) but when the managers decided to fly an Orbiter for a few more missions – suddenly a “mini-OMDP” was an option. This one, surprisingly, was cheaper and faster yet provided most of the functionality of the entire OMDP. Of course we do need to do needed maintenance, but if people just want to stop flying the Shuttle on an arbitrary day – they should admit that.

We have been told that the cost of flying Shuttles is known, and mostly that is correct. But there are options that can be, prudently, exercised that would help close the gap while we figure out where to go from here.

One other note – we have no option but to buy more Soyuz flights from Russia. Wouldn’t it be good to be able to put an upper limit on the cost of each flight? The problem there is that our friends in Russia would find out that number, and then the cost of each Soyuz flight would suddenly be somewhat above that number.

We should only hope that we will be permitted to buy seats on the Soyuz – at any price. In a couple of years the Russians are going to tell us that anyone can buy seats – except the US.

Charles

This starvation diet is like beating a underfed Mule to carry more weight than it can.