Source: The Cap Times
Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, has nothing good to say about President Barack Obama’s plan to all but ground the Constellation program, which calls for a return to the moon by 2020 and human landings on Mars by the middle of the century.
“I’m afraid what the president and his administration want is for the United States to no longer be preeminent in space flight,” Schmitt, an honorary fellow in the UW-Madison College of Engineering, says in a phone interview from Albuquerque, N.M., where he lives. “And that has very, very serious consequences.”
Schmitt, a geologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard and the only person without a military background to ever walk on the moon, will be in Madison on Monday to make his case for continuing human space exploration. Schmitt, who taught several graduate-level seminars at UW-Madison from 1996 to 2004, will speak at 6:45 p.m. in room 1610 of Engineering Hall, 1415 Engineering Drive. The free talk is open to the public and sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and its UW-Madison chapter.
To continue reading this article: http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/education/university/article_a9339038-4af7-11df-9b2e-001cc4c002e0.html
