- This topic has 8 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 7 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I think this is great, but we need to stop playing around in LEO, and get out there and start mining some asteroids.
If SNC needs any office space near JSC, there’s about 3 different 4-5 story buildings standing totally empty after the shutdown of the shuttle program. NASA is a shell of what it once was and will never make a comeback. I could see it dissolved altogether in 15 years.
Tex said: ” NASA is a shell of what it once was and will never make a comeback.”
Wow…
Personally… I did not realize that things with NASA had evolved to that point.I’m not a “rocket scientist”… but my Pop was for 37 years…. with Bell Labs at the Carolina Missile Plant in old B’ton.
But I know this….
In my lifetime, nothing has done more to build common ground among a very diverse people/nation than NASA and the space program.
Starting with the launches on TV
(watching those during elementary school in the 1960s was the second coolest thing in school… right behind watching the ACC bball tournament in the classroom on that Friday in early March).Then came the moon trips…
Later on… it was the Space Shuttle.Now it’s all just corporate stuff and unmanned visits to faraway places….
Just another sign that, for some of us, the world we live in is not the world we grew up in…..
BUT! Does anybody else ask the question…
Why hasn’t some ‘smart person in Washington (or where ever the ‘smart people’ hang out these days) figured out how to NOT throw the baby out with the bathwater ????
#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!If SNC needs any office space near JSC, there’s about 3 different 4-5 story buildings standing totally empty after the shutdown of the shuttle program.
SNC is based in Colorado, and has offices all around the country, including Durham, where they are full of NC State graduates. Mark Sirangelo, the executive VP of SNC, told me that the office was “all red and white inside.” For the Dreamchaser, they are leasing facilities from NASA/KSC and are going to add 500 jobs down there — hence their partnership with Space Florida.
NASA is a shell of what it once was and will never make a comeback.
Considering that Congress gave them full funding for the next generation of extra-orbital spacecraft development, and that they are going to have a test flight of the Orion capsule this year where the mission design is essentially equivalent to that of the Apollo 4 mission of 1967, which validated the Apollo flight control system and heat shield at re-entry conditions planned for the return from lunar missions. That is necessary to validate the same items – flight controls, the heat shield at 20,000 MPH (far faster than the Shuttle) etc. it is hard to agree with that.
On top of that NASA is fostering the development of at least one and probably two low-earth orbit vehicles, the Boeing CST-100, the SpaceX Dragon and the Dreamchaser from SNC. Test flights of all three are expected in the next 18 months.
I saw the ground-test article of Orion in the VAB last Thursday when I was at the Cape for the launch of the TDRS-L satellite. The flight-test article is about 2/3 completed in another building and will be put on a Delta IV in a few months.
In my lifetime, nothing has done more to build common ground among a very diverse people/nation than NASA and the space program.
Well, I guess that kinda explains why Muslim outreach is now one of NASA’s “foremost” tasks.
“When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things,” Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
