NASA wake up to reality

NASA Needs To Wake Up to Reality
 
Christopher C. Kraft – Space News (Opinion)
 
(Kraft is NASA’s first ever Flight Director & former director of the Johnson Space Center)
 
Today the U.S. space program is laboring under a set of unrealistic goals because the present leaders in the White House, Congress and NASA are ignoring the environment the nation faces and the history of canceled space initiatives over the past 30 years. It really doesn’t have to be that way. To be specific, the present concept to initiate a large-scale rocket with the plan to land on an asteroid in 2025 and travel to Mars in 2035 is not a realistic goal. The national budget will not support the cost and the technology required to accomplish these objectives. The money is simply not available, nor will it be anytime soon. The studies that have been conducted over many years by both NASA and other groups support this conclusion. Therefore, as time passes, it will become painfully obvious that this approach is unrealistic and overly expensive, and it will likely meet the same fate that other large NASA projects have in recent decades and be canceled.
 
Soyuz