Anyone planning to respond and cite KiTE as a source don’t forget about proper attribution. Possible techs from this prescient comedy to include: energy-agnostic launch method; space junk detection, slicing, dicing and processing; “BIC” reusable orbit booster modules…and more!
You’ll see on until Tax Day April 15 at the president’s Space “Summit”. Skip the moon we’re adding some pocket change to the funding to zoom right out there to the…well, to the moon! And, oh yes, the asteroids, because that’s a spacey sounding word.And then evennnnntually…back to Mars. Mm hm. It would be back to Mars because as I’m sure the administration’s crack space advisers have told the summit organizers, Mars’ orbit is closer to Earth’s than the Asteroid Belt.
The President’s ambitious new strategy pushes the frontiers of innovation to set NASA on a more dynamic, flexible, and sustainable trajectory that can propel us on a new journey of innovation and discovery.
Catch that? Pushing the frontiers of innovation to propel us on a journey of…innovation!
And of course it all must be sustainable. A word that is already has the early lead as the decade’s most meaningless.
Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, like Houston’s Johnson Space Center and Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center, face thousands of threatened layoffs from Obama’s decision to end space shuttle operations at the end of the year and scrap NASA’s $108 billion back-to-the-moon Constellation program.
But it is the swing state of Florida that is getting the president’s attention, not perennially GOP states like Texas and Alabama.
“The Obama administration could care less about offending Texas politically,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
NASA releases the clearest composite picture of Earth ever taken. Assembled from images taken by the Terra satellite. The Daily Mail story includes a retorspective of Earth images from outside the atmosphere, included the first, taken from 65 miles up by a camera on a captured V-2 rocket.
Here’s NASA’s STS -130 ascent video. It’s merely awseome. Hard to believe it still gets lit off like a Roman candle. It’s old tech, yes – Earthlings should be long past it by now - but as far as manned space vehicles go, it’s still the highest rung on the ladder for getting people into space and back in a more or less civilized manner. (The tiles, though. Never could quite get on board with the tiles.) Be sure to watch it on the a screen.
There are space fans out there who’re unhappy with the cancellation of the Constellation program, but I’m not one of them. Here’s an account at HobbySpace of how its inception was botched…by self-interest and cronyism, sounds like.
And Transterrestrial’s one-word subject on this post succinctly captures the midset of a key congressional committee’s chairperson. Clearly the advantages of private sector investing their own money and competition is is completely opaque to the supergenius big brains who’ve somehow landed in the US government.
It’s time for NASA to back out. Space cannot be left to the modern equivalent of the WPA.
NASA awards $50 million in grants to private companies to develop technologies for Low Earth Orbit. A couple of the usual suspects are here , including Boeing, but also a start-up associated with Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
The Ares/Constellation blunt instrument space program gets funded with a boost. Good news? Partially. Mixed blessing if you’d like to see primal rethinking of the launch system and innovation in the technology. At least we’re still looking skyward; but we don’t suppose you can expect the supergeniuses in the US Congress to think anywhere beyond well inside the interior of The Box, let alone outside it.
Richard Shelby (R-AL) is pushing it, fine, but would he be if the Marshall Space Flight Center wasn’t in his state? Being lashed electorally (in other words, addicted) to protecting taxpayer-funded obsolete job descriptions is as stifling in a space program as in any other facet of an economy.
Plenty of other mixed blessings in here too. Some bad news that sounds like good news, etc. For instance: Administration makes free enterprise noises about turning over hauling to the ISS to private companies. Sounds good, and they’d make much PR hay about that to counter other massive anti-commerce moves. But that would be a small price to pay for getting what they really want, a law to make NASA one part of some international space exploration effort. In other words, turn NASA over to the UN so it becomes a handy conduit for funneling US advanced aerospace technology to our international “partners.” Not too much between-the-lines-reading needed there. Well we suppose it might be slightly more space-oriented of a change than making it officially subsidiary to the EPA, which parts of it already seem to have become.
Meanwhile: “As it stands, the U.S. must rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station for most of the next decade.”
No mixed blessing there. That the US needs to rely on Russia for anything…well, since it’s too late to be unacceptable, we suppose it must be accepted. This would put the US officially behind them again in the space race for the first time in more than 40 years.
Possible techs from this prescient comedy to include: energy-agnostic launch method; space junk detection, slicing, dicing and processing; “BIC” reusable orbit booster modules…and more!
Kite, NASA, Science, Science Fiction, space | bshears May 23, 2010 | 
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