[FPSPACE] But just imagine the bill after a big space rock hits Earth

[DSFPortree at aol.com]

Larry:

Rant warning... ;-)

Focusing on one goal to the exclusion of all else is the problem here. The 
reason that's happening is, I think, Griffin. If you read the January 2004 VSE 
speech, Bush called for a smorgasbord of NASA activities, not a single NASA 
goal, on a pay-as-you-go basis. Which allowed him to make a bold speech without 
actually doing anything (Mission Accomplished). The Decadal Planning Team 
philosophy, in other words - that was about making steady progress on a number of 
fronts of concern to the public, more or less under the radar. But grafted onto 
that was the moon & Mars goal. Griffin seized on that - he sees VSE as SEI 
Round Two (recall that he ran SEI in its final days).

Old hands warned me a couple of years ago that the young bucks had completely 
underestimated the difficulty of what they are trying to do with their return 
to the moon plan. The actual job of building the CEV isn't so hard, but doing 
it without enough money is. NASA pulled this off during Shuttle development, 
but look what happened to Shuttle and the rest of NASA's programs. Recently a 
not-so-old engineer told me that his colleagues were scared to death now that 
they couldn't build the CEV.

Another problem, if you want to call it that, is that space is really, really 
big. There's so much to do there that NASA could easily spend an 
interest-on-the-federal-debt-scale budget on it and still not do everything that's worth 
doing. 

Not much likelihood that NASA will get any kind of budget increase just now, 
with the cost of the Iraq debacle moving past $400 billion and the vet 
hospitals offering Soviet health system quality care and New Orleans half the size it 
was three years ago and Bush a lame duck and the Dem Congress firing off 
their first volley of subpoenas and inflation getting ready to ramp up. Welcome to 
the 1970s (on steroids). Will we get a 10-year gap in U.S. piloted flights 
this time around? Will ISS go the way of Skylab?

David

David S. F. Portree
author & educator
dsfportree at aol.com
(928) 226-1427
Flagstaff Arizona USA

DSFP homepage
http://members.aol.com/dsfportree/dsfp.htm

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http://altairvi.blogspot.com/

"It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the world's 
turning and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's 
standing still. I can feel it - the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our 
feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, the entire planet is hurtling 
around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're 
falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little 
world, and if we let go..." - The Ninth Doctor








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