On Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:56:13 -0800, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Ares-1, Ares-V, Constellation - all dead:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...,1252176.story
Possibly a heavy lift booster at some future point.
But ISS will be manned till 2020 instead of 2015.


I'm dissappointed by the end of the Moon program. How is it that 40
years after we landed the first time, it's anathema to going back!?

I'd hoped that the program could have been maintaned in some form,
perhaps with international partners. But I guess it's not to be. I'd
hoped Orion could still survive, mated to a new heavy lifter, but
there is no such luck. If anything, there is talk of "a re-vamp of
the Kennedy Space Center in Florida" (
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100201/...a_budget_space ).
WHAT!? So the plan is to gut NASA's man program and hope that $6
Billion in grants to private companies will make up the gap in a
timely manner!? As a stockhlder in OSC, I'm all for private space
efforts, but this is ridiculous!

To be fair, Obama has had a difficult first term -- entering office
with a messianic image he couldn't have lived up to in good time and
faced with more challenges that any president since FDR (no wonder the
man has already gone gray). To his credit, he sought expert opinion
on what to do about the space program (even if all Augusting did was
made the fault line in the online debates public -- Obama could have
surfed sci.space.* and done the job in half the time g). But it's
hard not to beleive he's not using Augustine to cover his butt as he
destroys a part of our national heritage. Will a "revamped" LC39 be
able to support a heavy lifter? Or has that idea been forgotten?
Looks like. And word is the administration will fight any
congressional attempts to save Constellation. Why? He's got budget
problems, no question. But how is reaming a program that gets 0.5% of
the federal budget going to make a big difference? This is almost
gratuitous.

I voted against Obama in '08, but I didn't have anything against him.
Now, I do. I hope he loses in '12. And he's the first president I've
ever said that about.