Mike Jr wrote:
On Feb 3, 1:34 pm, Mike Jr wrote:
On Feb 3, 11:48 am, "J. Clarke" wrote:

Mike Jr wrote:
On Feb 3, 12:03 am, "J. Clarke" wrote:
Mike Jr wrote:
""To people who are working on these programs, this is like a
death in the family," an emotional NASA chief Charles Bolden told
reporters Tuesday, choking up at times. "Everybody needs to
understand that and we need to give them time to grieve and then
we need to give them time to recover.""

http://www.space.com/news/nasa-futur...on-100202.html

NASA is going to be getting the top recruits now, no doubt about
it.~

And once again the politicians show us that all the hue and cry
about how the US is falling behind in science is just posturing
and that they don't really give a damn.

If you want Americans to study science and engineering, the
high-glamor projects and the good jobs have to be out there, and
the sad fact is that most Americans who did study those fields
cannot find work in them.

There is certainly a lot of damage that the next administration is
going to have to fix.

It is interesting fact that gamers are driving the evolution and
advancement of graphics cards. Those very same cards are being used
to drive the desktops used to analyze photographic intelligence.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/iec.htm

I think the lesson is that manned space exploration has to make
economic sense. It currently does not. NASA shouldn't be the
primary driver of manned space flight technology but rather the
beneficiary of technology being advanced by commercial concerns,
even if that commercial concern is something as mundane as space
tourism.]

* The trouble is that that puts the entire space program on the back
burner

for most of this century or kills it outright, and the US loses
another industry that the US created.

The entire *manned* space flight program perhaps.

Consider that the manned space flight "industry" got a huge assist
from an Atlas booster that was designed and built by the USAF as an
ICBM.
The cold war drove the need for improvements in rocket technology.
What we need now is a real industry to drive manned space flight in
the 21st century.

Not gonna happen until launch costs are a lot lower, and that's not going to
happen as long as the cost of replacing/repairing launch vehicles is greater
than the cost of the fuel to fly them.

But that's not going to happen because the development costs are too high
and the ROI too low to attract private investment, and the politicians want
instant gratification, not a series of x-planes leading after a couple of
decades to the final objective. That's why the shuttle was such a piece of
crap--it was an X-plane pretending to be an airliner.