the International Space Station...$53 billion marvel - I'd like to see what that number does or doesn't include; it seems low for a program that has been spending about $3 B a year for 28 years, not including the 35 Shuttle missions and the money the internationals put into it
it was President Bush...who ended the shuttle program - but the actual plan was supposed to be to shut Shuttle down after a replacement was available; NASA and Obama had other options to keep the program going for many of the 5 to 10 years before a replacement comes on line
In cancelling Constellation...we have kept the parts of it that
made sense. A new heavy-lift rocket and multi-purpose crew vehicle - actually SLS looks sort of like an Ares V but it is not the same rocket; it doesnt matter, it is not much more affordable than the original Ares V; neither the SLS nor the Orion capsule have well defined or particularly useful missions; as long as you are talking about throwing the rocket and capsule away after every mission, which is what this system does, it is unaffordable and unsupportable; here is a good artile on why SLS likely will never fly: http://www.americaspace.org/?p...
Bolden and Holdren are making some political statements that let them off the hook and they are trying to make everything seem pretty rosy. Make no mistake about it, the American human space flight program has changed and so far we don't know how much we have lost, but we have lost everything we used to have. What it might someday be replaced by? No one knows.
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