Warbird Information Exchange

Okay, 3 Apollo astronauts - Cernan, Lovell, and Armstrong are against it. But there are others who support it in addition to Aldrin -

http://www.space.com/8430-apollo-astron ... olicy.html

I'm sorry, but when the most famous, and reclusive, of the Apollo astronauts comes out and goes in front of Congress to say that a mistake is being made, I'm going to listen. Not to mention a man who has seen how "interesting" things can get outside of Earth's orbit with Lovell. The USA has been out of the deep-space exploration for too long to just jump to Mars or an asteroid. Not to mention the fact that the cost per astronaut has just gone up for the Soyuz capsules, and will probably go up again before any real solutions are ready. I honestly don't believe for a second that Space X is ready for manned missions, now or in the near future. I also think that saying that we are using "private companies" for our space program now is just saying that instead of having one government entity to control the space program, we will now need 2, 3 or maybe more. Is it really going to be cheaper in the long run to say goodbye to NASA and their low-Earth orbit programs? We will already be giving money to the private companies who are doing the same job as NASA, but we will in the long run need oversight of those companies, an FAA equivalent... and of course we all know how much the government tends to like regulating things.

I just honestly don't see the privatization of the low-earth mission to be as economical as promised. I wouldn't no matter who was in favor, or against it. I do see some positives in it, but the low-earth missions are what lead on to the deep space missions. I realize that we ended up in a situation where space was boring, I was watching when it wasn't boring and we wished it was (Challenger I will remember for a very long time even though I was very young.) I was underneath the flight path of Columbia when we wished it wasn't boring. With a private company, who takes control in a situation like that? Does congress have the power to call them in and give them a smack on the back of the head when needed?

Sorry for the Wall-o-text... hope it makes sense.

(Long weekend with a sister getting married and my dad starting chemo today, my brain may not be functioning at 100%)

That's an interesting article but to be fair, Russell Schweickart has never been "in-step" with his fellow Apollo astronauts and always had very different views...

Some interesting stuff from former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin:

"What used to be a gap is now a cliff," said Michael D. Griffin, who served as NASA administrator from 2005 to 2009 under President Bush. "What really is happening here is the destruction of an American institution that has been preeminent in the world for the past 40 years. I believe it's tragic."
Griffin's chief complaint is that the Obama administration has scrapped the plans sketched out during the Bush years for the development of new spacecraft to take humans back to the moon. And he and others find excruciating the idea that the U.S. could be completely dependent for the next several years on Russian Soyuz rockets to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

The U.S. has signed a series of agreements with the Russians. The most recent, announced last month, included a sizeable price hike. And because the U.S. had earlier pledged to carry space station partners from Japan, Canada, and Europe, American taxpayers will pay the Russians for those seats as well.

"They're exercising their leverage," Griffin told ABC News. "We knew the minute the shuttle stopped flying the price on the Russian craft was going to go up. We told them capitalism was a better path. Well they have embraced that. The Russians are now in the catbird seat and they're going to charge for it."

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"Everyone wants to live here (New Jersey), evidenced by the fact that it has the highest population per capita in the U.S..."

And I go back to the fact being ignored here - whether we go with commercial or NASA, we're going to have a gap. NASA lied about how far along they were with Constellation and the independent review made them fess up that Constellation wasn't going to be ready until nearly 2020 at the earliest. At least the commercial guys competing with each other have a chance of being ready before then and at least one of them has a system that will at least provide the cargo service side of it (and thus reducing costs for launches since we won't have to rely on the Russians and Europeans to do all of that in addition to lifting the crews and charging their leveraged rates for it) and who knows, maybe they'll actually have an astronaut-ready system in the next 5 years.

I'm sorry, but I'll never vote for the Government to be able to do anything better than the private sector. They've never done it before, so why would they start now? Just because Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the STS had "NASA" on the side, there were very few actual NASA employees working on the design and construction of the vehicles compared to the number of private contractor employees. It was all private sector, all competing, that got it done. Constellation was NASA dictating to private sector what to do and how to do it with a lot more NASA employees involved. That doesn't work.