The Possible End of Deep-space Human Spaceflight
Charles Miller - Space News (Commentary)
(Miller is president of NexGen Space LLC. He left NASA in January after serving as senior adviser for commercial space)
We are watching the potential collapse of America’s deep-space human spaceflight agenda. Meanwhile, many appear to believe that hope is our best and only strategy. Considering the stakes, this is highly risky and potentially disastrous. Any good program manager or strategist will tell you that we always need a Plan B. Now is the time to develop our backup. The root cause of the crisis is easy to see. The retirement of the baby boomers has created a huge structural budget deficit, which impacts everything, including national space policy.
Why Human Space Travel?
Richard Garriott - Huffington Post (Commentary)
(Garriott is a computer gaming pioneer and private astronaut - 1st 2nd Generation)
My first blog about NASA turning to commercial providers for launch vehicles seems to have opened an interesting debate. Why do we spend any money on human exploration of space? Now and always, every tax dollar we collect and spend should be measured by the benefit we gain from that expenditure. I do not claim that every dollar we spend on human spaceflight is well spent. Far from it. I have often been critical of how money is spent in space research. Yet space research is essential and humans in space are an essential part of it.
From Cronkite to Pelley: Covering the NASA era
Reid Collins Jr. - CBS News 60 Minutes Overtime
While we were kicking around ideas for an Overtime piece about Scott Pelley's "SpaceX" story this week, our executive editor Bill Owens made it easy. He used to be one of Scott Pelley's producers here at 60 Minutes, and he said, "Just talk with Scott about the U.S. space program. He's crazy about space." Sure enough, when we sat down with Scott, his enthusiasm lit up the room. He talked about his childhood memories of the early U.S. program and the role CBS News and Walter Cronkite played for the country, covering those early exciting days of manned space flight.
Back to the final frontier
Neil deGrasse Tyson - Discover Magazine
(Tyson is an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This article is freely adapted from his book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.)
Spring 2001, amid the manicured lawns of the Princeton University campus, I was recumbent in an office chair with my mind in the universe when the phone rang. It was the White House. They wanted me to join a commission to study the health of the aerospace industry. I agreed, but at first I was indifferent. I don’t know how to fly an airplane. But then I read up on that sector and realized they had lost half a million jobs in recent years. Something bad was going on. I distinctly remember walking into the first meeting. The 11 other commissioners filled the room with testosterone. There was General this and Secretary of the Navy that and Member of Congress this. It’s not as though I have no testosterone, but it’s Bronx testosterone. The kind where, if you get into a fight on the street, you kick the guy’s butt. This I-build-missile-systems testosterone is a whole other kind. Even the women on the commission had it: A former congresswoman from the South, who had an Air Force base in her district, deployed a vocal tone perfectly tuned to say, “Kiss my ass.” Another one was chief aerospace analyst for Morgan Stanley; having grown up as a Navy brat, she had the industry by the gonads. On that commission, we traveled the world to see what cultural or economic forces might be influencing the aerospace industry’s stability here in America.
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