Bear in mind that President Obama was all of 8 years old when Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface. The President has no real personal connection to the decade long march to the moon and by the time he was 12, the Apollo program was over. Anybody 45 or younger doesn’t in the general public and most are unfamiliar with the particulars of space policy. Their benchmarks are Challenger– and Columbia. Their perceptions are of astronauts in diapers chasing down spurned lovers or old moonwalkers making dancig fools of themselves on national television. (Ever see Lindbergh do a game show?) Not really the rightest of stuff. Furthermore, the people President Obama has to depend on for recommendations- his staffers- were in diapers or not even born to have witnessed the golden age of American manned spaceflight. It’s literally the stuff of museums to them, collecting dust down the street at the Smithsonian.

The true culprits in this unbelievable decision lay squarely at NASA itself and the turf wars between bureaucrats in the aerospace industry like Michael Griffin and Lori Garver. What NASA really needs is another Vom Braun and a new generation of general purpose spacecraft. Something similar to Soyuz, a space vehicle that has been flying basicly unchanged atop a rocket that’s similar to the one that lofted Vostok and Sputnik. Cernan once said of it, borrowing from an old VW ad, “It’s ugly, but it gets you there.”

So in the short term, fast track Orion, man-rate and launch it atop existing liquid LVs and get it flying in five years. In the midterm years, perfect a lander and plan a lunar base. Make a return to the moon the ‘Gemini’ program of a long term plan to head for Mars. Keeping two guys alive for a couple of days at a time over six different moon landings isn’t much experience to make the jump to Mars. No sir. Perfect a long term lunar facility then extrapolate that experience for a trip to Mars. That’s a whole lot of manned space program for the next 30 years.

Then sell the U.S. stake in the ISS to China. There already was a ‘space station’ in orbit– the moon. That aerospace works project should not have been built to orbit the Earth but been assembled and firmly anchored to the Ocean of Storms.

It’s for crew rescue (at least initially), not crew transport.

“Up until now I really did not think the Obama plan was a way to kill human space flight, but this new corruption of a plan makes it pretty obvious, that is his goal.”

Yes, because you havn’t bothered to read the Florida Today article or the White House talking points and understand why NASA is pursuing Orion-lite (and commercial crew and ISS extension and HLV acceleration and human exploration technology), there’s obviously a huge conspiracy against human space flight afoot.

Oy vey…

Up until now I really did not think the Obama plan was a way to kill human space flight, but this new corruption of a plan makes it pretty obvious, that is his goal.

On EELVs, per Borenstein’s article:

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100413/ap_on_sc/us_sci_obama_nasa

“Decide on heavy lift in 2015?! WTF?! What is there to decide? Do you want to be a space faring nation or not. If you do you need heavy lift.”

It’s not a decision on whether or not to pursue an HLV. It’s a decision on what HLV design to pursue. See the White House talking points released to Florida Today:

floridatoday.com/assets/pdf/A9155579413.PDF

FWIW…

No, you don’t.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/space/