What has happened with the Space program?

[Spec]

I just saw MTG's avatar and it got me thinking, what is up with the space program? Are they building another shuttle? Is the sapce program condemned?

Thanks for the info!


Spec.

[red_jon]

It got boring and they reallocated NASA funding to inventing the white-chocolate covered peanut.

[Spec]

Originally posted by red_jon
It got boring and they reallocated NASA funding to inventing the white-chocolate covered peanut.

Wow! Now that's what I call good news!!

No.....seriously...

[SlowwHand]

I think the next launch is scheduled for June/July.
Somewhat surprising to me.

[My Wife Hates CIV]

give up the shuttle. a waste. give up the space station - a bigger pile of junk.

spend money on missions to explore the planets. and they are. one is on the way to saturn. i read the other day a mission to pluto is planned for 2013 (or suppose to get there at that time?? can't remember).

but spending all that money just to send 7 people into orbit. or just to keep 3 people in a station... just to maintaine it. a waste.

[SlowwHand]

oh yada, yada.

Don't crawl, run a mile from the beginning.

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by My Wife Hates CIV
spend money on missions to explore the planets. and they are. one is on the way to saturn.

Spend the money on particle physics! There are lots and lots of unanswered questions that need to be investigated. They could lead to countless advantages a few years down the road. Would the defence of the US be seriously compromised if the govt were to divert ust 1% of the military budget to fundamental science research?

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Rogan Josh
Spend the money on particle physics!

Greedy bastard!

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Greedy bastard!

Well, I did say 'particle physics', not 'particle physicists'.

[PLATO]

Once the space station is fully operational, it should provide an excellent platform to launch missions to obtain resources from the moon. With these resources in hand, then we should be positioned well for planetary missions.

[Tolls]

There's a couple of rovers going to Mars from NASA, and one from ESA...I'm not sure about the shuttle, but July sounds about right to me, I thought they'd get back to it pretty quickly.

The Kuiper Express (the Pluto mission) has sadly been cancelled, so no nice closeups of Pluto and Charon in 2012/13.

Other than those missions, there's a couple of telescopes I think (and IR one?).

This is all in the next year or so.

[Lonestar]

Scrap the Shuttle Program, it was a clusterf*ck before the Columbia disaster.

Scrap the ISS, it was a money pit from Day one, after Al Gore killed Nasa's orginal plan for a one-shot skylab to a multimodule "International" cooperation thing.

Go to Mars! Use the Mars Direct Plan to visit Mars on the cheap. Setting a clear goal ("We will go to the moon by the end of the decade!") and holding NASA to it will drive the space program forward. If JFK hadn't insisted on going to the moon and back by the end of the decade, the space program would have just been finishing Gemini in the late '60's.

Toss the Outer Space Treaty out the window, restart serious research into all those technologies we had in 1973. The fact that our space capabilities have actually Regressed since then is shameful.

[SlowwHand]

Lonestar, you ****.

[Kropotkin]

The cold war is over. There's no need to spend huge amounts of money to seem advanced. Not when you can buy guns for the money instead and kill people without the fear of a nuclear war.

Maybe if the americans started a space race against the European space agency...

[Thud]

Once the space station is fully operational, it should provide an excellent platform to launch missions to obtain resources from the moon.

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational...umm never mind.

No! The ISS is an absolutely miserable platform on which to base anything. Earth serves a million times better. We can launch rockets to the moon easily, if there was anything worth getting there. (massive oil depositis discovered on moon! Bush administration, in an entirely coincidental development, has pledged to increase NASA's budget tenfold!)

We can launch anything from earth without resources from the moon or orbital platforms. Hell, even the ESA could launch a manned mission to mars in ten years with enough financial backing. (not that much, depending on the plan)

I care enough about two issues enough to write my elected officials: the enviornment, and the space program. The fact is, both have been extremely mystified by the media, but its really quite simple.

Please, if you are at all interested in the future of manned exploration or planetary exploration, check out this website: http://cmex-www.arc.nasa.gov/CMEX/da...ion_Table.html