Re-visit the CAIB report. The quicker this program is ended, the better it will be for the long term health of HSF. Aside from the fact it is 35-40 year old technology, NASA needs a good house cleaning and the first thing to go is the shuttle management and its culture.

Cognitive dissonance and neo-con Newspeak, two concepts that have no problem existing in a right-wing mind.

“The only gamble we are making with our children’s future is saddling them with a level of debt they can never pay.”

And yet you advocate that the government should pay $Billions to Republican donors for a rocket that doesn’t have a funded mission.

The two halves of your brain are calling each other idiots – no wonder you don’t make sense…

CCDEV 1 funded a emergency detection system from ULA that will work on both Atlas and Delta. NASA does not appear that worried about the safety of the launchers. The only thing ULA had planned to do this year was find a contractor to make the detection system that was the only bid they put in. ULA thinks they can be ready to fly by 2014 and Atlas by its nature is just about human rated. The 21st century launch complex money can be used to fund pads.

The hubris that global warming hysterics display in their messianic desire to seize control of the global economy is breathtaking! You could zero out the NASA climate research budget and the world would never know the difference. The only gamble we are making with our children’s future is saddling them with a level of debt they can never pay. A plague on the ‘baby boom’ generation and their entitlement gluttony.

We have the ISS, and it is now the primary research platform into both zero-G and reduced-G life science. You know, doing stuff you can’t do on Earth?

We already know that muscles and bones atrophy and that radiation is harmful. The fantastic cost in obtaining additional minutiae of knowledge defies reason. It simply isn’t worth it. We could build the Super-Collider for the cost of a few years of ISS.funding.

A word about CCDev2. Why on earth did NASA fund 4 (!!!) spacecraft projects and 0 launchers. One would think you newspace ninnies would expect a few bucks to be thrown at Boeing and Lockmart to man rate their launchers. Half a billion $ more and still no coherent plan! Total madness.

Re-read the CAIB report. When you’re finished, you’ll see why Houston not only doesn’t deserve to be ‘rewarded’ with an orbiter, but should apologize to Americans for maintaining a management culture that lost two of them, killed 14 astronauts, and cost the people of the United States billions of dollars in various venues, both political and business, including redesigns costs and scheduling slippage and obligations with international partners. it should apologize to the people of the United States. NASA’s shuttle culture remains a poorly managed entitity. This is not your ‘grandfather’s’ NASA– the Apollo era folks have long since retired, and with it their ‘can-do’ attitude. The quicker the space shuttle program comes to an end and the NASA management running it is swept out of the agency, the better.

“Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) complained about a lack of support for NASA from the White House. “I am afraid that NASA does not have a friend in the White House…” Perhaps ‘Mo’ should change his name to ‘Mel’ because his comments are hilarious- NASA hasn’t had a ‘friend’ in the White House since the 1960’s, the days of JFK and LBJ.

The ISS has been habitable for 40 years? How did I miss that newsflash?

The ISS is starting its full operational phase where we can test the technology and medicine required to keep a space based society healthy and able to reproduce safely.

Please read about what happens to bodily fluids in a zero-G environment, especially in a woman’s reproductive system to understand some of the challenges. I know we don’t need to reproduce in Zero-G in the short term, but just finding drugs to help maintain bone mass would be great.

We have the ISS, and it is now the primary research platform into both zero-G and reduced-G life science. You know, doing stuff you can’t do on Earth?

If we can get a centrifuge a la Nautilus-X, we can find out the answer to a really old question – Can humans thrive on the Moon or Mars?

It would be a shame to dump the ISS just when we’re starting to use it, eh?

Cut the science missions and you might as well crawl back in your cave and forget about putting humans in space, only science and it’s child engineering can do that.

GOP is as clueless as Mr. Allmighty about the benefits or science and the important warnings that ‘hippy camps in the arctics” are giving humanity. GOP can choose to wait till man’s extinction is on the brink sitting atop their piles of gold and silver, the rest of us, I hope, aren’t willing to gamble on our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives like that.