Congress, NASA

The “best language” for an HLV in the authorization bill?

In a discussion with the editorial board of the Huntsville Times this week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) credited his colleague, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), for ensuring that NASA Marshall Space Flight Center would have a leading role in the new exploration plan through the development of an heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLV) in the authorization bill passed by Congress. “We got the best language we could get in the authorization bill,” he told the paper. “We worked hard to get that in; there was a lot of resistance to it.”

That statement is a little curious, since Shelby indicated that he was a little unhappy with the HLV language in the bill. “I remain concerned with the limiting direction set forth on the heavy lift rocket’s design,” he said in a statement last week after the House passed the bill. “NASA must not deliver a rocket that is simply a shuttle without wings. This would not represent a step forward for innovation or for the future of our space program.”

In that respect, Shelby is on the same page as some NASA officials, including chief technologist Bobby Braun, who told the Orlando Sentinel this week that the HLV design decision should be made by agency engineers and not members of Congress. “I would like to believe now that we are making progress in Washington towards the 2011 plan that the engineers…will weigh in and that we will move towards the technically correct choice,” he said. But will Congress allow “the best language we could get” to be improved?

52 comments to The “best language” for an HLV in the authorization bill?

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    Maybe I’m naieve but I would have simply specified: “It must do the following things and be available by this date. You will get the following amount of money to do it and not a penny more.

    In practice, of course, it isn’t that simple. Certain sources and suppliers are ruled out for political reasons (overseas or lack of reliable history in the industry). Additionally, as a government-funded enterprise, the wealth needs to be shared around as many states as possible.

  • Dennis Berube

    Now that will be something, if they build Ares V and not Ares 1…..

  • HotShotX

    MSFC being designated as the Heavy Lift Propulsion Research Office was already a part of the President’s FY 2011 proposal.

    ~HotShotX

  • “NASA must not deliver a rocket that is simply a shuttle without wings. This would not represent a step forward for innovation or for the future of our space program.”

    LOL! I think this is funny as hell, he was one of the biggest enemies of DIRECT and now because of his political hack partisanship, MSFC is getting stuck designing a DIRECTish HLV!

    Stop your whining Shelby, you got your SD-HLV for MSFC, just make sure the damn thing gets built by 2016!

  • Codicil to the above, “Be careful of what you wish for!”

  • Brian Paine

    New technology or not there is one (frightening) constant…US…I mean all of us. Reminds me of a song I composed:
    Round and round and round we go
    Where we are heading nobody knows,
    It’s the same for you and me
    A great big trip to eternity…

    See the Earth afloat in space
    It’s the home of the human race,
    Six billion people singing different songs
    How the hell will we ever get along…

    On a positive note Congress could now apply its new found expertise to designing zero emission engines and re-usable toilet paper. At last the voters are getting value for their money.

  • amightywind

    Senator Shelby went along with a compromised SDLV agreement knowing full well that rebuilding of NASA (after the Obamaspace fiasco) will take time. NASA will be restructured by the GOP congress in 2011. Expect the 10m SDLV to make a return – Ares V in everything but name.

  • Honestly, in this whole debate, I find Shelby to be the least credible. I even agree with him here, but his history of shrill, nonsensical rhetoric on the subject makes me distrust him even with the pieces I do agree on. The ‘killing human spaceflight’ meme was, if not started by, certainly first popularized by Shelby in congress.

  • Dennis Berube

    Now wording is very important, and it remains to be seen just what they consider to be shuttle derived. A shuttle without wings, well would a canister with probes inside tied to a central external tank and 5 segment SRBs be considered a shuttle without wings????? How far from the shuttle design are they willing to bend?????

  • Robert G. Oler

    Ben Russell-Gough wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 7:39 am

    Maybe I’m naieve but I would have simply specified: “It must do the following things and be available by this date. You will get the following amount of money to do it and not a penny more.”…

    yeah that or something like it is precisely what would have happened had they really been serious about a SDV.

    As I have been saying for a long time, the case study on how to “preserve” a program until perhaps a more friendly administration rings in is the B-1 program. When Carter cancelled the B-1 in favor of cruise missile development; the California delegation (and some powerful “defense hawks” in the House and Senate were determined to save the program or at least preserve it in the event that there was a one term Carter administration.

    They were very clever not only in the way that they wrote the language preserving the funding for the airframes that existed, essentially funding a developmental effort, and then the rhetoric that justified all of this. And it worked.

    I have a friend (who Whittington has met) who is well connected on the Hill (he is a lobbiest now) and according to him ATK (who is not one of his clients or a client of the firm he is a part of) presented quite a few of the “space hawks”) a model of how to preserve the option for a “shuttle derived vehicle” based on the B-1 effort. More money of course but actually something that was doable (I have a copy of it) and would have preserved at least the ability to go SDV in both the HLV and maybe to completely change course in the future.

    Nelson was open to this…he tried to get about 1 billion more dollars attached on for “flight research” and the duds in the Cx office had been working overtime to come up with a test regime that would actually fly something in a fairly short piece of time (I am told that Nelson’s line was “even if you put concrete in orbit that helps”)…like 18 months.

    But 1) there was no money and 2) there really was no support for the entire effort as both Charlie B and Lori G pretty much made the case that to do this, well kills everything else.

    The next step, and the one KBH wanted was to try and add at least one maybe two shuttle flights passed the LON (and making it firm). There was no money for that because that required almost full shuttle funding for the year.

    In the end when you get right down to it I am told Jerry Nadler (spell) Congressman NY nailed it…”it is just to expensive”.

    and it was.

    The real problem is that there is this sucking wind problem when talking about a SDV…”what do we do with it” there is really no real “plan” or desire for one.

    As I have said for sometime the death panels are more or less shutting this one down.

    Robert G. Oler

  • “I would like to believe now that we are making progress in Washington towards the 2011 plan that the engineers…will weigh in and that we will move towards the technically correct choice,”

    Given the future budget constraints by a possible future GOP Congress (or even a conservative Blue Dog Dem Congress), there could very well be a problem with building even a simple Jupiter 120-ish vehicle, so the engineers might have to come up with something else.

    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Bob Oler is right about Delta IV Super Heavy?

    I wouldn’t mind if that got built instead of the Jupiter. The old and expensive STS infrastructure has served its time and needs to go away.

  • Coastal Ron

    dad2059 wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 11:37 am

    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Bob Oler is right about Delta IV Super Heavy?

    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if NASA underspent it’s budget by NOT building an HLV of any kind?

    I wonder if there is precedence for that – saying “sorry folks, but there is not enough budget to do this right, so we’re not going to start work”. If an approach like that was ever going to work, you would think the upcoming Congress would be the ones to allow it…

  • Robert G. Oler

    In my view what is going to happen with an HLV is that they are not really going to build one, they are going to “push up” some of the performance parameters of teh Delta IV heavy and start evolving that (as finances permit) toward the super heavy. The DoD wants that and it is likely that at some point in the future that kind of launch vehicle can be useful.

    I read the mail over at NASAspaceflight.com and the musings of “51D” and they are all fooling themselves. There is no way a SDV survives the sign off of the shuttle and there are no payloads or real plans for anything that rides on top of something like a “Jupiter”.

    By this time next year…the shuttle workforce(s) will all be “gone”.

    Thats how it is

    Robert G. Oler

  • David C

    Robert, if this time next year, you are right and “51D”, Congress, etal who had a hand in the S-3729, are wrong, then I will start studying very hard Revelations, get into Confession and swatting up on my Catechism for 2012; not saying you won’t be, just that the odds seem stacked against you, from a one against many point of view; HOWEVER, a small group of guys and gals got SDLV this far, so can’t say anything is impossible;

    Cheers

  • Robert G. Oler

    David C wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 2:58 pm

    “HOWEVER, a small group of guys and gals got SDLV this far, so can’t say anything is impossible; ”

    with all due respect to the “believers” particularly over at Nasaspaceflight.com…

    “this far” ….where do they think the thing is?

    NASA has gooped around with a SDV for decades and even Ares (despite the notions there) is an SDV knockoff. The folks who think we are on the verge of yet another attempt at an SDV are kind of like the folks who were still meeting in the Confederate Congress as the noose closed around Richmond…oblivious to where things are actually going.

    I am curious though, what makes you think that an SDV has gotten “much farther”?

    Robert G. Oler

  • Bennett

    Robert,

    I’d say much of their enthusiasm comes from the language in the Senate Authorization Bill, but semi-mandating something without providing adequate funding is a pipe dream. We’ve seen this picture before.

  • Martijn Meijering

    DIRECT is all about pork, so of course they are happy.

  • Ben Russell-Gough

    @ Martijn,

    You, who have debated them, know that isn’t true. This forum is no place for throwing around insults.

  • Martijn Meijering

    Having debated them I beg to differ. Maybe we should leave it at that.

  • David C

    Robert,
    Bennett got it partly right; by “This Far”, I am talking about a 4 year trek, from a brief “hypothetical question,” through NASA FUD, “Against the Laws of Physics” and into the realm of the respectable, at the WH, Congress, and the Augustine Commission (where Direct’s already large margins, were added to, and then their figures were lumped into Side-mount) and almost word for word, into a Senate Authorization Bill, that passed with UNANIMOUS consent, and into the House of Representatives, where it passed with BROAD bipartisan support; not bad for a rag-tag band of “so called” rebels by the press last year; who only wanted NASA to wake up and see the TRAIN WRECK coming, that their Ares 1 was causing to their two rocket,.Altair Lander, and Orion Capsule;

    and Martijn, of course it is Pork!! You have been around these threads long enough to have heard why it had to be that way; that is the name of the American system of Government, and unless you want to come over here and wage a political war against it, to get it changed, then there really isn’t any cause for complaining; it is what it is, and it isn’t about to change; it is Pork that created the opportunity, and it is Pork, that will likely kill it if anything will; not a better system, or a cheaper one; it will be Lobbying power, and NASA dragging it’s feet to go against the Congress;

    Cheers

  • Robert G. Oler

    Russian spacecraft seriously damaged en route to Baykonur – industry sources

    Moscow (Interfax); Oct 6, 2010

    The damage sustained by the Soyuz TMA-20 manned spacecraft en route to Baykonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is “very serious”, Russian news agency Interfax-AVN reported on 6 October, quoting a source at Baykonur.

    “The preliminary inspection revealed that the spacecraft had sustained damage,” the source was quoted as saying. “[This damage] is very serious and requires a significant amount of repairs.”…

    this is entertaining.

    Robert G. Oler

  • David C

    Entertaining, like watching a passenger train about to collide with a freight train, both at full bore; yup, that is entertaining; sorry I don’t share your idea of entertainment;

  • Martijn Meijering

    and Martijn, of course it is Pork!!

    But they pretend it isn’t. I can’t change the world, but at least I can complain. ;-)

  • Bennett

    David C wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 4:46 pm

    Agreed. There is something truly great about a rocket capable of reaching orbit. I don’t care if it’s the 100th off the line, it still represents some of the best engineering of the last 75 years.

    Seeing one whacked into a building or another train is a painful wrongness.

  • Meg

    Mr. Oler:

    If you think the damage to the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft is entertaining, I suggest you contact a qualifed doctor to help you sort it all out. You claim to fly planes. No real pilot would find this kind of situation amusing or ‘entertaining’. Anything YOU post on the boards from now on, I will take it as babbling of a “mad man”.

  • Alex

    “In my view what is going to happen with an HLV is that they are not really going to build one, they are going to “push up” some of the performance parameters of teh Delta IV heavy and start evolving that (as finances permit) toward the super heavy. The DoD wants that and it is likely that at some point in the future that kind of launch vehicle can be useful.

    “I read the mail over at NASAspaceflight.com and the musings of “51D” and they are all fooling themselves. There is no way a SDV survives the sign off of the shuttle and there are no payloads or real plans for anything that rides on top of something like a “Jupiter”.”

    Yes, oftentimes the conversations at NSF are not taking place in the real world.

    From what I’ve followed over the years, the DIRECT plan was supposed to be a way to salvage Constellation’s goals with a cheaper, faster replacement for Ares I and V.

    But now that Cx is gone, there’s no need for Ares or DIRECT. DIRECT was always the best way to make use of existing assets in a budget environment with Shuttle going to 2012 or 2015. It is not “the best way.”

    Give me the uprated DIV-H, maybe have Marshall do a J2-X upperstage for it, and call it a day.

  • Robert G. Oler

    David C wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 4:46 pm

    Entertaining, like watching a passenger train about to collide with a freight train, both at full bore; yup, that is entertaining; sorry I don’t share your idea of entertainment;..

    there is nothing “entertaining” in the example you used…it is about like saying “Columbia or Challenger’s loss was entertaining”. neither was. In both cases (as well as they hypothetical you raise) someone screwed up and because of that, some folks are going to get killed.

    Unless I missed something in the story (and its possible)and while someone screwed up (or something broke) no one got hurt and no one died.

    So the example you use is not valid.

    It is “entertaining” to my mind because of the impact the effort has on policy and politics and maybe even turning the LON into a real mission…

    …and while those things might resemble a train wreck, it is only metaphorically.

    and thats entertainment.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Meg wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 5:44 pm

    well then I wont tell you that a tradition before most test flights is to watch airplane crashes…

    Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    David C wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 4:42 pm

    Robert,
    Bennett got it partly right; by “This Far”, I am talking about a 4 year trek, from a brief “hypothetical question,” through NASA FUD, “Against the Laws of Physics” and into the realm of the respectable, at the WH, Congress, and the Augustine Commission (where Direct’s already large margins, were added to, and then their figures were lumped into Side-mount) and almost word for word, into a Senate Authorization Bill, that passed with UNANIMOUS consent, and into the House of Representatives, where it passed with BROAD bipartisan support; ………

    well if that is what has them cheering then I suggest that they go buy some alcohol and have it handy when they find out DIRECT is going nowhere (nor is any SDV actually).

    They got nothing in the Senate language. Nothing. Already NASA leadership is backing off of a SDV and the SDV that was going to occur anyway wasnt anything like DIRECT…

    While their sincerity is entertaining, the reality is that engineering does not make policy, policy drives engineering…and the folks who think “wow this is going to give us DIRECT and then we are going to the Moon or whereever” dont have a clue about what policy is happening.

    While it is accurate that Shuttle and Cx are having their plugs pulled…the real patient that is being given a “soft landing” is the notion of human exploration of space beyond GEO. And Alex is correct…with it goes DIRECT or anything else.

    The engineering actually wasnt that good either.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Coastal Ron

    Alex wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 6:23 pm

    From what I’ve followed over the years, the DIRECT plan was supposed to be a way to salvage Constellation’s goals with a cheaper, faster replacement for Ares I and V.

    But now that Cx is gone, there’s no need for Ares or DIRECT. DIRECT was always the best way to make use of existing assets in a budget environment with Shuttle going to 2012 or 2015. It is not “the best way.”

    I guess I look at any new, bigger launcher as an unneeded expenditure, so from that standpoint I consider it “pork”. All things being relative, I would have definitely preferred DIRECT over Ares V, but really that boils down to “how much unneeded spending would you like?”.

    So when Martijn says that DIRECT = Pork, I tend to agree with him. However, if Constellation was still going, and the DIRECT folks would have been able to de-scope Ares V down to the Jupiter 130, then I would have said “good job”. But it still would have been pork.

  • Alex

    Robert, what is your opinion on Orion and where that will end up? It always struck me as the one part of Cx that could stick around and maybe accomplish something useful.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Alex wrote @ October 6th, 2010 at 6:50 pm

    Robert, what is your opinion on Orion and where that will end up? ..

    If I were the program managers at Lockmart and the folks at NASA associated with Orion, I would start figuring out a method to make Orion and the program relevant to something.

    The notion of using Orion as a long term CRV and from there morph the systems into something that could evolve into a modern long term long use vehicle is appealing to me, but they need to do it quick and figure out how to do it for some sort of dollar figure that is affordable.

    The clock could always run against the vehicle…but where things are going is that SpaceX and (someone) probably Boeing are going to come up with crew vehicles to and from ISS…and unless there is some niche at an affordable price that Orion can work into then its going to die as the money cranks down.

    In the end what killed Cx is that five years and 10 billion dollars nothing was flying or close to flying and the dollars to get to flying were “high”…all the while other vehicles are moving toward (or are) flying.

    The notions of using Orion as some sort of 10 billion dollar 1 week asteroid exploration vehicle are doomed.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Bennett

    It’s sad, because I’m sure that Orion is the cat’s meow (or could have been if Ares-1 didn’t under-perform so savagely) as far as a pretty large re-entry capsule could be, but it’s hardly the optimum design for a BEO spacecraft designed for point to point in space manned operations. A cylinder is easier to fabricate and provides much more room. Inflatable, and do a second launch to bring up mass for radiation shielding. Rendezvous with the lander, fuel up in orbit and head out to, wherever.

    Form follows function, everything else flows from there.

  • @Bennet…Look folks, ALL of these theoretical upgrades for the Orion CEV—inflatable casings for radiation shielding, expansions for living-room space,—could all be flight-tested on Lunar missions. The Orion was even set to be left unattended in low Lunar orbit while the crew was conducting its surface stay. Maybe during one of the expeditions, the CEV could be deliberately under-manned (with perhaps one astronaut, left on-board, reminiscent of the Apollo CMP days), during the Lunar orbital phase, and the crewman could work on the new hardware check on one or two of these items, which might be utilized on longer Lunar flights and/or far-deep space flights. Obama’s intention of forbidding further Moon flights is just going to doom the whole quest to total failure. The only hope is that Obama is out of office, come January 2013, and that the next man who gets to the White House understands that there is major proving ground work that needs doing, if mankind is to have a future among the planets, and that the Moon is the obvious Gemini-project-type of intermediate goal needed to work out these problems. Antarctic style bases could readily be emplaced, once the lander modules have proven themselves as viable, via the first few sortie missions. In no more of a span of time than the Apollo flights were exploring the Moon—four years (1968-1972)—America could have full scale outpost missions conducting half-year stints there.

  • Frediiiie

    “Robert, what is your opinion on Orion”

    I’ve got to agree with Robert.
    Once you get into LEO you can go anywhere in the Earth-Moon-Mars system in bite size steps of <5kps delta-v (with judiciously placed fuel depots.)
    For a deep space craft why not use an off the shelf Sundancer. It has heaps of room, costs around $100M. Dock it to an Aces or Raptor upper stage upgraded to refuelable and with multiple restart capability and there's your deep space vehicle.
    Your mission starts at the ISS, progresses in easy steps refueling along the way and ends back at the ISS where you catch the next commercial CST-100 or Dragon back to earth.
    All up your deep space vehicle is going to cost a fraction of Orion and is totally reusable.

  • Ferris Valyn

    Obama’s intention of forbidding further Moon flights is just going to doom the whole quest to total failure.

    Ok, Obama didn’t forbid further Moon flights. Not when he first announced the budget, nor when he went to Florida in April

  • Frediiiie

    Chris Castro wrote @ October 7th, 2010 at 2:11 am
    said
    “Obama’s intention of forbidding further Moon flights… ”
    Obama didn’t. He just recognised the fact that there wasn’t enough money to built landers.
    In fact under the mighty Griffin the Altair had already been cancelled.
    That was the problem.
    Ares 1 had sucked up all the money.
    And the Augustine Committee was quite explicit.
    There was no chance of landing anywhere under any forseeable budget.
    The option chosen – in fact the only real option – was to keep it small, keep it real, and slowly build up our capability by doing no landing mission.
    But most importantly NASA has to learn to live within its budget.
    The most dissapointing thing about the Senate bill is that it doesn’t force NASA to live within it’s budget.
    The extra shuttle flight is not funded at all.
    Constellation closeout is not funded.
    The HLV is drastically under funded.
    And that’s just for starters.

  • Frediiiie

    A. Thomas Young, Former Godard chief said this
    “My big worry is that we’ve gone from one unaffordable program to another unaffordable program,”
    http://articles.dailypress.com/2010-10-05/news/dp-nws-nasa-langley-20101005_1_nasa-career-moon-mission-mars-mission
    QED

  • Wodun

    “NASA must not deliver a rocket that is simply a shuttle without wings. This would not represent a step forward for innovation or for the future of our space program.”

    Depending on how far you want to stretch that analogy, it could include any chemical rocket. None of the current alternatives can return the same mass to Earth as the shuttle.

    Unless the DoD is holding something back, it doesn’t look like there are any evolutionary technological breakthroughs in the near future that will bring down launch costs.

    Fuel depots are great but their advantage is not on cost. Their advantage is that they would allow us to do something with our current EELV’s.

    Would you guys think a HLV is pork if NASA opened the various development stages up to bidding?

  • Martijn Meijering

    Would you guys think a HLV is pork if NASA opened the various development stages up to bidding?

    Less so, but still pork. Or at least wasteful spending. We don’t need new launch vehicles, we need spacecraft, preferably a refuelable transfer craft even if it just uses hypergolics. And of course eventually we will need new launch vehicles that will give us cheap lift, not heavy lift. Heavy lift is a superficially attractive idea that makes no sense at all once you start delving into the facts.

  • Bennett

    Chris Castro wrote @ October 7th, 2010 at 2:11 am

    Chris, I’m fine with the moon as a destination, I just rue the expense of a throw away Orion capsule as the primary vehicle. But I’d be okay with it so long as it never reentered earth’s atmosphere. As frediiie noted, we’ve got CST-100s and Dragon capsules for that duty at a fraction of the cost.

  • Martijn Meijering

    In that case it wouldn’t have to be a capsule, it would be a manned orbital transfer craft a la Huntress’ Deep Space Shuttle or Buzz Aldrin’s XM. Such a module could evolve into a lander. And if it is refuelable (with the currently planned hypergolics say), it would provide an initial market for RLVs.

  • Meg

    Mr Oler,

    When you made your “interesting” comment, you didn’t know the status of the crew (whether they were injured or worse). Down play it anyway you want but most of the long termed readers know about your behavior.

  • Reality Bites

    “When you made your “interesting” comment, you didn’t know the status of the crew (whether they were injured or worse).”

    I’m pretty sure the train engineers had a sore ass from the bump, Meg, thank you so much for your ‘concern’ about some Russian train engineers. What would be great is if you took as much concern about US astronauts riding on top of, or in the side of, segmented shuttle solid rocket boosters.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Meg wrote @ October 7th, 2010 at 12:29 pm

    Mr Oler,

    When you made your “interesting” comment, you didn’t know the status of the crew (whether they were injured or worse)…

    the crew of what? The Train….

    what crew?

    Robert G. Oler

  • Bennett

    The crew of the Soyuz, of course. :-)

  • Reality Bites

    I fear for our astronauts, riding the train all the way from Utah to the cape!

  • Beancounter from Downunder

    How long precisely have you been doing that Meg? ‘Reading’ that is? Forget about the ‘understanding’ bit.

  • Ed Tessmacher

    NASA has one chance, ONE CHANCE to get this right. They already proved that they can’t handle design work on their own, especially if it’s forced by an ego-driven administrator like Griffin, to build the “BIGGEST BADDEST ROCKET EVER!” Shuttle-derived HLV, which was what the original 2005 NASA Authorization called for, could have been flying already if the engineers had been allowed to engineer, instead of having to keep their megalomaniac administrator on his self-imposed path to historic glory.

    We didn’t need to out-Von Braun Von Braun. DIRECT Jupiter would have been enough to have gotten us back to the moon, and prepping to go on to Mars. But no, Griffin imposed his will on the data, and lied to the American Public AND to Congress, by massaging the data, and in some cases, putting a thumb on the scales, and claiming that DIRECT Jupiter “defied the laws of physics”… Well, I don’t give a rat’s rosy red rear how many degrees that man had, he had no clue what he was doing, and darn near killed NASA doing it. If the remaining Griffinites at NASA want to keep treading down that path to Ares all over again by building a rocket that nobody could ever afford to fly, then we just will have to do without the agency. Because that’s what will happen if they don’t get on with building DIRECT Jupiter. Period. No way around it.

    NASA, don’t foul this one up, this is your LAST chance. The Senate said, “Here is what you get. Build a rocket with this.” which is how it ought to be done, instead of “we want to build this ginormous rocket, give us three times what it will cost!” NASA, you get what you need, shut up and build the rocket… Don’t try to tell us that you don’t know how to build rockets with the available resources. Because if you try to claim that it can’t be done, then you don’t need to have any rockets. We’ll let the Russians go to ISS, and the Indians and the Chinese tramp all over our Apollo sites.

  • Reality Bites

    Yawn. Is that all you got, Ed? Please try harder. And check back here in five years of so, ok? We’ll give you the results then, they can’t be as bad as the last five years were. But they certainly won’t be much better on your track.

  • People, face the facts: Obama DID forbid future Lunar flights! He totally trivialized any concept for further manned forays out there, instead opting for the sensational “we’re going to 100% Virgin Territory” approach: Which will bring us NO bases NOR resource exploitation. The Antarctic is occupied by scientific personnel today, precisely, because America’s national leadership in the 1950’s considered it important to re-visit a previously reached frontier, and build & expand on what was done in the far past. The Moon is the next Antarctica! Let’s deal with it, pronto.

  • Reality Bites

    People, face the facts: Obama DID forbid future Lunar flights!

    Er … no he did not. I believe the actual quote was :

    ‘I just have to say pretty bluntly here, we’ve been there before’

    which hardly forbids any return. But heckava lie there Mr. Castro!

    So much for your ‘facts’. Have you ever considered reality? It works for me.

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