This is what happens when you spend all your money on conquest and empire.
"Final shuttle trip to be short-staffed" July 07, 2011|New York Times
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. - On the 135th and final launching of the 30-year-old space shuttle program, there will be only four astronauts abroad. Normally, there are six or seven.
The reason has to do with Atlantis being the last flight: With no spare shuttle available to go and rescue the astronauts in case something goes wrong, the Americans would have to ask Russia to retrieve the US crew from the International Space Station. The Russian spacecraft - known as Soyuz capsules - hold only three astronauts, so two people would have to fly up and bring home the Americans, one at a time....
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"With shuttle aloft, US program’s future unclear; Next flights may take off after 2020" by John Noble Wilford, New York Times / July 9, 2011
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. - The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as Cold War history.
Yeah, how "ironic."
And shouldn't the word be American not "our" astronauts?
The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Russians in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition.
Foreseeing the end of shuttle flights, the Obama administration and NASA last year proposed new plans, approved by Congress, to develop heavy-lift rockets for sending people deeper into space, to be ready perhaps after 2020.
Meanwhile, NASA has begun financing research for intermediate crew-only spacecraft to be produced and launched by commercial companies, probably no sooner than 2016. Such plans, of course, are at the mercy of the budget cuts.
Lori B. Garver, the deputy administrator of NASA, insisted this week that the future was bright for human spaceflight.
Just not for NASA.
Other NASA officials noted that congressional support for the new programs was bipartisan. But they acknowledged that budget cuts were possible and would ultimately take a toll on launching capabilities....
Do you KNOW WHO SICK I AM of reading SHIT-SPUN SLOP article after article after article!!!!!????
Whatever happened to the space age as imagined back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when science fiction writers and rocket scientists spun tales of travel out in the solar system and beyond?
It was LO$T to WAR$ and EMPIRE, agenda-pushing pos media!!
Thanks for DESTROYING the DREAMS of that YOUNG KID YOU HOOKED SO LONG AGO (yeah, me, readers).
This alternate universe appealed to some in a society flush with confidence after winning the Second World War but feeling a bit confined in the postwar gray-flannel conformity. Americans seemed to have lost none of their can-do spirit.
No one disputes that the space age is here to stay. Think of how much our day-to-day lives depend on the herds of satellites occupying orbital space. They are integral to communications, social media, business transactions, military operations and surveillance, surveys for charting world resources and climate and the GPS devices that help us keep track of ourselves and others.
How come the "space age" is being applied down here in service of tyranny?
As an inspiring bonus, other robotic instruments have extended human curiosity to the very edge of the solar system.
This does not assuage the lingering disappointment of some of those who grew up with the space age, the countdowns, the moon walks. For various reasons, the spread of no-can-do limits has swept aside the optimism with which Americans met the initial challenges of the space age.
The Apollo lunar-landing successes, restoring national pride and asserting pre-eminence in space technology, reduced the immediate geopolitical pressures driving human space efforts. The Nixon administration rejected NASA’s post-Apollo plans for permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations and flights to Mars. Flying reusable space shuttles was NASA’s consolation prize.
And now they don't even have those tubs of junk.
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