Bye-bye Moon program, hello ISS to 2020

On Jan 27, 5:05*pm, Me wrote:
On Jan 27, 4:01*pm, OM wrote:

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...-budget27-2010....
Possibly a heavy lift booster at some future point.
But ISS will be manned till 2020 instead of 2015.

...Best reasons I've heard for impeaching Obama, if not lynching him.
How the hell does he expect us to get to ISS? Keep buying Soyuz
flights?

Simple answer can be found if you would keep up on events.
NASA is going to buy rides from US commercial providers, meaning
Spacex and others. *Proposals will start coming out of the woodworks
from Boeing, LM and others. *Ares I wasn't going to be ready for 5
years or more, which is more than enough for the standard aerospace
contractors to have some ready or for Spacex to get things right.

I sort of agree with giving an assist to private space flight with
government contracts. It's similar to when the government gave an
assist to early aviation with mail contracts. And that worked out
well.

Fred J. McCall wrote:

The difference is that there WERE private aviation vehicles that could
do the job.

Where is the private 'astronaut delivery vehicle' that NASA can put
private contract money against? Airmail didn't have to directly fund
AIRCRAFT DEVELOPMENT.

But it did once the concept got up and running; the Spirit Of St. Louis
was based on a Ryan designed mailplane:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_M-1
....and it wasn't the only aircraft designed to carry the US Mail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...anes_1920-1929

Pat