http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/science/space/06gap.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1223316072-01opCd8VkSjMXo9YX6Sc+g

 

“The gap is coming: from 2010, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuts down the space shuttle program, to 2015, when the next generation of American spacecraft is scheduled to arrive, NASA expects to have no human flight capacity and will depend on Russia to get to the $100 billion station…”

 

Seriously? We couldn’t have added a couple of billion for NASA in the welfare bill?

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Challenger + Columbia = no budget for the shuttle program

time to move back to the more reliable way to send people into space… in a little capsule on a big ass rocket. 

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Nothing wrong with changing vehicles, we just shouldn’t have to suck the Russian’s dick to get back to a station that we spent billions on. We can send a Wall Street welfare bill wrapped in bacon worth 840 billion dollars, but we can’t throw NASA a couple billion to keep us going in space? Talk about BS… Everyone should brush up on their Mandarin, because China is about to leap-frog us — using our own money, no doubt.

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once the space station is finished and Hubble has been worked on we won’t need the shuttle anymore.  its a waste of resources to launch a shuttle just to carry people back and forth to the space station. 

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what is China gonna do that we didn’t do 40 years ago?  

I’m sure Obama is just chomping at the bit to waste billions of dollars sending up the shuttle when we can hitch a ride with the Russians and save billions of dollars, which ohh btw we get to spend on things like…. building a new vehicle for going back to the moon and to Mars.

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Check out SpaceX.  They’re a commercial company founded by Elon Musk (paypal) and partially funded by NASA.  They’re developing 3 rockets and a manned space craft.  They’ve been around for about 6 years.  They’ve already successfully launched the first rocket with less than 550 employees.  Their goal is to reduce the cost of sending cargo to space by 10x.  Their first rocket, Falcon 1, currently costs about $8 million a launch vs $30 million for the current most cheapest rocket.