The cool thing is that my brother is one of the engineers doing design work on this project. I get to hear all about parts of the development each week when I talk with him 🙂
I have such mixed feelings about this. It uses the same solid rocket boosters as the shuttle, yes? But going off of the same design cues as the old Apollos? Somehow it feels to me like we’re taking a big step backward, and that we’ve wasted the last 30 odd years. I’m glad we’re going back. I just think it could’ve been much, much sooner.
That’s the problem – we did waste 30 years doing nothing but messing around in LEO. The public got “bored” of the moon missions because we “beat” the Soviets. NASA lacked a vision after that, so they just sort of meandered about until someone cooked up the ISS project, which kind of gave us something to do.
We learned a metric ton of knowledge, mind you, but, yeah, we should;ve already had a permanent outpost on the moon by now. I just hope Obama, if he wins, doesn’t axe the space program for his education policy, because that money can come from somewhere else quite easily.
I love Obama, really I do, but there was some talk that if he wins there might be serious NASA cuts to pay for other programs and bring the budget in line.
Just as long as there are no major political changes between now and April 2009.
The cool thing is that my brother is one of the engineers doing design work on this project. I get to hear all about parts of the development each week when I talk with him 🙂
I have such mixed feelings about this. It uses the same solid rocket boosters as the shuttle, yes? But going off of the same design cues as the old Apollos? Somehow it feels to me like we’re taking a big step backward, and that we’ve wasted the last 30 odd years. I’m glad we’re going back. I just think it could’ve been much, much sooner.
That’s the problem – we did waste 30 years doing nothing but messing around in LEO. The public got “bored” of the moon missions because we “beat” the Soviets. NASA lacked a vision after that, so they just sort of meandered about until someone cooked up the ISS project, which kind of gave us something to do.
We learned a metric ton of knowledge, mind you, but, yeah, we should;ve already had a permanent outpost on the moon by now. I just hope Obama, if he wins, doesn’t axe the space program for his education policy, because that money can come from somewhere else quite easily.
PS, looks like the originating website is here:
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/ares/flighttests/aresIx/index.html
I love Obama, really I do, but there was some talk that if he wins there might be serious NASA cuts to pay for other programs and bring the budget in line.