Comments on: It’s all your fault, Bill

By: SpaceMan

SpaceMan — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:35:42 +0000

Looks like this post was excellent ignorant troll bait. Three responses and not a bit of knowledge of reality. Such is the Reagan Spell delusions.

By: John Malkin

John Malkin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:47:26 +0000

I agree I don’t see why they want to keep 10,000 workers around for Ares I and V. I hope far less are required but they may want to keep some key people around for Ares V but not 10,000. Oh I know why, I just haven’t heard any good justification.

The blame goes on past Presidents and Congress since not until VSE did we have a firm goal for access to space. None of the attempts at manned spacecraft have had full Presidential and Congressional support as a real end goal since Shuttle. NASA was left to determine their own goals. This is not the job of an agency or department. It’s the job of Congress. It’s not to say that the NASA administrators are without blame but they don’t have the real power and they change ever 4 to 8 years. VSE was based on recommendations from CAIB which is sad that vision has to come from such tragedy. It also recommended that the vision exist beyond a single administration.

By: pr

pr — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:12:26 +0000

The mere fact that anyone could make the statement that “… tens of thousands of jobs at the Kennedy Space Center … are in jeopardy” says a whole lot about the Space Shuttle program. It takes that many people to get next to nothing accomplished in space. It also says that a lot of people understand the most significant thing the Space Shuttle does: provide barrels of lard to be spread out by pols who claim that they are “creating jobs.” Never mind the jobs that got destroyed by the taxation to pay for it. It’s the modern version of bread and circuses to distract the peasant class.

If those 10,000 Space Shuttle workers are worth anything they will find something more productive to do pretty quickly, so the sooner they are dropped off the Shuttle payroll the better. If they aren’t, same thing. If Florida wants to pay to keep that worthless enterprise afloat, let them have at it, but Wyoming shouldn’t be compelled to.

By: Terence Clark

Terence Clark — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:05:41 +0000

Ultimately, NASA funcing is a pretty hard sell for anyone not directly interested in it. And given the basic facts of the shuttle, it’s far from surprising that there aren’t many championing post-2010 flights on anything other than a special interest level. It’s just not a national priority at the moment, though I agree that the jobs on the space coast demonstrate that maybe it should be.

Lets just hope that if we simply continue to march step by step into a shuttle-less 2011 that all those talented minds on the space coast find their way into either other NASA projects or into the private space industry. In fact,having some insiders working for the COTS folks could prove to be a bureaucratic boon to teams like SpaceX who’ve set their sights on D capabilities.