Heavy Hitters!

After wasting billions (with a B) on the shuttle and losing many lives and paying Russians and Europeans to launch important satellites for over twenty-five years and losing most of their best rocket scientists, NASA has returned to the BIG DUMB BOOSTER. Of course the supporters of the shuttle made out like bandits while all reaserch withered on the vine, and they still refuse to admit their failures which almost killed space research.

It goes without saying that NO other country was stupid enough to follow NASA's example. The Russians stole our shuttle plans and started to copy them, but soon discovered a Brobdingnagian money pit and quickly cancelled the project. So the US is back where it was 25 years ago with the same type of idiots in charge.

Time to face facts! The last American to walk on the moon has done so!

The exact same type of pointy-headed bureaucrats will administer Universal Health Care!

For first time since 1981, the rocket that took off Wednesday from a launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center here was not a space shuttle.

With a clearing in a partly cloudy sky, the Ares I-X rocket — a prototype of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s next-generation Ares I rocket — zipped off at 11:30 a.m., heading east over the Atlantic Ocean.

“Vindication really does not describe it well,” the program manager, Jeffrey Hanley, said at a news conference after the flight. “It’s a sense of validation that the course we have laid out is executable.”

Really? What about the Saturn V in 1969? I thought it took men to the moon and back! Just another pointy-headed bureaucrat taking credit where NONE is due!

The first flight of the Ares I carrying astronauts is scheduled for March 2015.

Really? Five and a half years! Where is von Braun when NASA needs him?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/scien ... nstapundit



go Glenn Beck

We have been to the moon. There is nothing there of value to humanity.

The USA needs to concentrate of the commercial value of space, such as launching communication sats.

The rest is just so much PR. We cannot afford it.

Ares' Continued Technical Problems and Money Troubles: Guest Analysis

So after 40 years under the "shuttle geniuses", NASA can NOT repeat von Braun's Saturn V. Perhaps NASA should dust off the Saturn V plans and scrap the Ares. But what a foolish thought! NASA will NOT admit that NASA is run by idiots that only think of their careers.

Space analyst Rand Simberg argues here that last week's test flight of the Ares I-X rocket, NASA's planned, vaunted crew-launch system, did little to stem the controversy over the program. The space agency claims that the flight was a success, providing data needed to retire some of the risk in the development of the eventual booster. But the flight was hardly flawless, Simberg says, and may have uncovered a previously unknown (or, at any rate, undiscussed) risk. Even with all of its technical issues—thrust oscillation, reduced performance margin, a gantry collision risk and now a risk during stage separation—the real problem of the program, Simberg argues, remains how much it will cost.

It will cost between 2 and 3 times what NASA estimates, if the taxpayer is lucky! And will be operational sometime in 2025, if the taxpayer is lucky!

Yes there are more problems.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science ... 35662.html


go Glenn Beck