“I met Jack Kennedy, and Barack Obama is no Jack Kennedy”
Cape Canaveral — NASA’s mighty astronaut corps has become a shadow of what it once was. And it’s only going to get smaller.
It’s down to 60 from an all-time high of 149 just a decade ago, with more departures coming once the Atlantis returns this week from the very last space shuttle voyage.
With no replacement on the horizon for the shuttle, astronauts are bailing fast, even though the International Space Station will need crews for at least another decade.
NASA always was a waste of money- a political exercise. Its sexy to have a “reuseable” space shuttle. Time to shut it totally down and move the few good projects to central government. In deed close all the multitude of agencies and centralise it.
Yeah, none of those satellites they deployed are doing us any good. I say close down the whole lot, switch off the SDO, Hubble etc. There’s no point in enhancing our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.
..and NASA are much better at researching climate using ground based observations.
*cough*
Well, NASA does keep some 19,000 people from joining the rolls of the unemployed. At a cost of around $940,000/yr per job. I’ll bet if we increased that by two orders of magnitude they could employ at least 150-200 more people.
If the shuttles are considered expendable, what the heck is that stupid orbiting hotel, the ISS?
What a disastrous money pit. And pointless. The moon was the only logical choice for permanent bases.
Which would be wildly expensive without an orbital refueling point.
Which is more expensive?
Scenario-1
Point-A … Earth
Point-C … Moon
Scenario-2
Point-A … Earth
Point-B … ISS 200 miles above Earth
Point-C … Moon
Everything on Point-B needs to come from Point-A, so I can see no ‘savings’ at first glance. I suspect the addition of Point-B between A and C cannot reduce costs, just increase them.
Since the fuel does not come from something done uniquely at the ISS, and it would necessarily only store fuel sent up from Earth, the ISS has to add to cost the same way any storage unit adds cost.
Presumably you envision two separate vehicles, one from Earth to LEO 200 mile altitude where it parks in orbit, and a 2nd one that blasts off from orbit to travel the remaining 200,000+ miles. The orbiting parking step step will necessarily add something to fuel costs and risks. While this 2-step approach would decrease the required fuel from Earth to orbit (fuel for the 2nd leg not carried during 1st leg), the fuel still needs to make the trek to LEO at some point (at some cost and at some risk).
The alternative is the 3-stage rocket technique like the Saturn-V used and I suspect it would be cheaper than Scenario-2, but I am open to ideas!
Note: there was a reason certain birds like the SR-71 took off with nearly empty tanks and re-fueled shortly after reaching altitude, it had to do with thermal expansion of the porous tanks sealing up when hot. But it is not cheap to place tankers in the air. Though necessary in this case, they would have liked to avoid the costs if possible.
It is an interesting thought exercise though and I am no expert, but instinct tells me that any hyper-expensive way-station would have to produce momentous gains somewhere to justify its mere existence in the final cost analysis.
After all Obama’s boot licking to the arab world, he is liked less than Bush was. But the “smartest man in the world” is just too stupid to know that the last institutionalized slavery on the planet are Muslims enslaving blacks. Indeed, the root of the Muslim word for black people is slave.
” An Arabic word for African is abd, the same word that is used for black slave. Arabic has about 40 words for slaves. White slaves are mamluk. Islam took more than a million European slaves into slavery. The highest priced slave in the Meccan slave market was a white woman.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UVmSQHquJc&feature=player_embedded#at=37
And this guy gets to the heart of the matter around the 3:29 mark…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tssBq4jCWtw&feature=player_embedded