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Continuing on our theme of NASA and rockets, NASA announced that they want a new heavy lift rocket and they are putting their money where their mouth is. They have allocated 8 million dollars for someone to come up with plans to design it. The last day to submit these plans was 29 July 2010. That was yesterday when I wrote this article. The things going on in NASA now have upset some people and notable among them is John Glenn. He didn't want the space shuttle fleet retired. He indicated that he doesn't think that things should be, “done on the cheap” and that we “must do it right.” Glenn continued by saying, “These are critical days for the future of Manned Space Flight. Conflicting views and advice come to the President and Congress from every quarter in the aerospace and science communities. There is good reason for the concern.” The U.S. for the first time since the beginning of the Space Age will have no way to launch anyone into space – starting next January...” “For the “world’s greatest space-faring nation,” that is hard to accept. I do not believe it has to be this way.”
Sen. John Glenn I believe that Glenn knows how dangerous the space shuttle is and how dangerous launches are, but I am guessing that to him, the status of this nation as a space faring one is the most important thing. I can not help but feel that there is a problem with this point of view however. The problem is that for the last 40 or so odd years we have relinquished our position just waiting around and sending out unmanned probes just as many other countries are now doing. When we decided to stop sending astronauts to the moon and discontinue our manned space program, what did we think would happen? Did we think that the rest of the world would just sit there and not take advantage of the situation? When I look at the situation that NASA is now in, it looks to me that politicians have put us there. An example of this is all the time wasted on the International Space Station, not to mention almost our the entire NASA budget between the station and the shuttle flights to it, and what was all this for? It was so that we could say we had a world project, when we were paying for most of it. It was just another stupid move.
Space Shuttle Launch President Obama had said in a speech that he wanted to include over 3 billion dollars for the development of a new heavy lift rocket, and he wanted it ready by 2015. The rocket is to be used to launch humans and cargo into space. If this rocket is meant for flying humans into space and taking them to the moon and Mars, might we be better served by building other types of vehicles instead, such as ion powered ships that would allow us to go much further into our solar system and explore places like the moons of Jupiter and maybe even the moons of Saturn? These are places that would take so long to get to by rocket that they are impractical to explore. Instead of putting so much money into one project, why not use at least some of it for this practical purpose and use the rockets that we have and are working on, some of which are quite large as stated in previous articles? We need to get men back into space and explore and not be sidetracked. John Glenn was right about space exploration.
Delta IV Medium Rocket Launch Here is the thing that is unspoken. If the military has a secret space program, then all this stuff about NASA is just nonsense. It would mean that NASA's space program was only there for show and it didn't matter if it succeeded or not, and all the money that was put into it was just wasted. I think that this would be a hard pill for most of us to swallow, if we found out that this was true. Would it be a huge surprise to us? Probably not, with all the secrets that we know are being kept by this country already. When the Orion Crew Capsule was announced many were very disappointed. The reason for this was the fact that it looked almost like a replica of the Apollo capsule. It was much more modern and bigger inside, but one couldn't help but not be able to shake the feeling that we were using old technology. It was like building a modern car inside a 1920s body. The intention of NASA was to use the Orion module mounted on an Ares rocket to replace the shuttle and also for trips to the moon. President Obama issued a cancellation directive of the Constellation program of which these components were a part. The government had proposed cancellation of this program as early as February 2010. For the time being we have heavy lift rockets like the Delta IV that can be used for all sorts of missions. The rocket is essentially three rockets joined together. Could it be that we might be able to join even more rockets together to form even more powerful launch vehicles? The Delta IV has the world's largest hydrogen-fueled engine. Each engine is capable of generating 17 million horsepower.* This really makes you wonder if we really need a new heavy lift rocket right now doesn't it? I know that we do not want to fall behind in technology, but maybe researching more efficient engines would better serve us. It is hard for me, an unqualified civilian, to suggest what should be done at NASA, but I do have experience with budgets and it is pretty easy to see where a lot of the NASA budget is being wasted. As I said before political choices were made when scientific ones should have been. Think of where we could have been by now. We should have at least walked on the surface of Mars and probably went to some of the moons of Jupiter, but instead we languish here on earth doing absolutely nothing to further the cause of manned space exploration. What will it take to get us off our butts and out there again? Will we wake up after some other country starts exploring space and it is too late to catch up? Maybe one of our robotic probes will discover life somewhere in the solar system and that will wake us up out of our deep sleep. Its hard to say what will get us moving again, if we ever do get moving again.
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