Source: NY Daily News
In a speech to political allies gathered at Cape Canaveral last week, President Obama laid out his vision for America’s space program. Under the Obama plan, NASA will spend $100 billion on human spaceflight over the next 10 years in order to accomplish nothing.
Of course, that’s not how Mr. Obama phrased it. But beneath the President’s flowery rhetoric, that’s how things add up.
Here’s the background. In 2004, the Bush administration launched a program called Constellation to develop a set of flight systems, including the Orion crew capsule and the Ares 1 and Ares 5 medium and heavy lift boosters, that together would allow astronauts to return to the Moon by 2020, and then fly to destinations beyond.
Under the plan announced by Obama, almost all of this will be scrapped. The only thing preserved out of the past six years and $9 billion worth of effort will be a version of the Orion capsule – but one so purposely stripped down that it will only be useful as a lifeboat for bringing astronauts down from the space station, not as a craft capable of providing a ride up to orbit.
With the Space Shuttle program set to sunset in the near future, what this means is that the only way Americans will be able even to reach low Earth orbit will be as passengers on Russian launchers, with tickets priced at the Kremlin’s discretion. In other words, instead of flying astronauts from the Earth to the Moon, our human spaceflight program will become a vehicle for transporting cash from Washington to Moscow.