Three words that lead to serious depression....Abandon In Place

Almost twenty years ago I was temporarily stationed at Davis-Mothan Air Force Base outside of Tucson AZ. One of the major item there is the Air Force grave yard, where they bring old planes to sit out their life as they are decommissioned. Parts are taken from old airframes as needed, but for the most part it's just where one plane after another sits.

One day I was driving onto base and I looked up and saw a B-52 landing and it struck me, "That is the last time that plane will fly." Depressing. I drove around the facility and one thing that came to mind was all the billions I was looking at on the desert ground. But at least they served a good purpose...and all good things must end.

This Friday the last shuttle mission is scheduled for launch. I remember being a high school sophmore when the first shuttle took off. A few years after Apollo–Soyuz Americans were back in space. Now the program has run it's course and it looks like it's not ending well.

Final NASA shuttle mission clouded by rancor

It is the nature of a shuttle to look kind of lonely out there on the pad, kept at a safe remove from the control room, the hangars, the observation platforms. The pad is not far from the beach, one of the last stretches of Florida coastline unblemished by hotels and condos. Beach houses were torn down years ago when the federal government showed up with rockets. Old-timers talk of 11 graveyards and an old schoolhouse lurking somewhere out there, the remnants of the era before the coming of the spaceport.

Now the U.S. space program itself is middle-aged, facing a painful transition. Atlantis will blast off, if all goes as planned, at 11:26 a.m. Friday for a 12-day mission to the international space station. And then . . . what?

Then a lot of uncertainty. The only sure bet is that thousands of people here will be out of a job.

NASA’s critics say the human spaceflight program is in a shambles. They see arm-waving and paperwork rather than a carefully defined mission going forward. NASA has lots of plans, but it has no new rocket ready to launch, no specific destination selected, and no means in the near term to get American astronauts into space other than by buying a seat on one of Russia’s aging Soyuz spacecraft.

The space agency’s leaders say everything’s on track, that the private sector will soon launch astronauts into orbit and let NASA focus on the hard work of deep-space exploration. There is a new heavy-lift rocket in the works, one capable of going far beyond the stamping grounds of the shuttle. President Obama has picked a destination, a near-Earth asteroid, though he did not say which one.

Right...forgive me if I don't believe the man-child who told his NASA director one of his major goals for his organization was Muslim outreach because of contributions of Muslims to math. Dumb s%^&...it's actually the contributions of Arabs to math...before Islam took over the Middle East.

I will take these gentlemen's word over BO's.

...Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and someone never known to be a rabble-rouser, recently co-wrote with fellow Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan an op-ed in USA Today declaring that the space policy of the Obama administration is in “substantial disarray.” The astronauts protested the decision to kill the Constellation program, the George W. Bush-era plan for a new lunar mission with new rockets and spacecraft.

Here’s Bob Crippen, who was the pilot of the first shuttle mission, STS-1, back in 1981: “I’ve never seen NASA so screwed up as it is right now. . . . They don’t know where they’re going.”

Even one of NASA’s senior people here at the Kennedy Space Center, Mike Leinbach, the launch director who will supervise the final countdown and launch of Atlantis, has blasted his agency for the lack of direction.

“We’re all victims of poor policy out of Washington, D.C. — both at the NASA level and the executive branch of the government,” Leinbach said recently at a news conference here. He said he was “embarrassed” about the lack of guidance.

NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. said he respects Crippen and Leinbach but “could not disagree more” with their comments. “Our future is bright, and the U.S. will continue to be a world leader in space exploration for many years to come,” he said.

...(NASA Deputy Administrator Lori) Garver suggested that the agency’s critics fail to recognize the dire condition of the human spaceflight program when Obama took office.

“We have brought the program back from the brink,” Garver said. “We inherited a program that was in disarray.”

What hasn't the Obama regime inherited in disarray...and put it over the brink. The economy, foreign policy, medical, now the space program.

...On a recent morning, NASA let reporters take a peek into the retired space shuttle Discovery, which is headed to the Smithsonian...

...Surprise: It’s cramped inside. Seven astronauts had to pack into a modest crew compartment and, just above it, the flight deck. All the spaciousness is in the rear, in the payload bay, where the shuttle hauled jumbo telescopes and satellites and chunks of the international space station. So when people called it a “space truck,” they were not joking. It’s a pickup. A space pickup...

...But in twilight, it has flowered into something attractive. It can do things that the next generation of spacecraft won’t be able to do. Bolden, the NASA administrator and former shuttle commander, speaks for many, “We are going to miss this incredible flying machine,” he said.

Versatile is the word that the engineers use. The space shuttle could not only carry 50,000 pounds of cargo into orbit; it could house seven astronauts, dock with orbiting space stations, grab satellites and telescopes and pull them into the payload bay for repairs, and haul enormous amounts of cargo back to Earth for a soft landing.

In retrospect, that was arguably too much spaceship for most of what was needed for missions in low-Earth orbit. NASA wants to get away from using a single vehicle to carry humans and cargo. It’s safer and cheaper to send cargo separately.

Cost will always tarnish the shuttle’s reputation. Once sold to Congress with promises of weekly flights for just $7 million a pop, the shuttle program never managed to make spaceflight routine or inexpensive. The shuttle program, in its totality, has cost more than a billion dollars per flight...

...After Columbia, NASA needed to make a fundamental change. President George W. Bush signed his name to the Vision for Space Exploration in 2004. The new strategy called for retiring the shuttle and using the freed-up money to go to deep space again. The new program, Constellation, featured plans for two rockets, a new crew capsule and a lunar lander. The agency vowed to put astronauts on the moon by 2020 and develop the tools and techniques for an eventual mission to Mars.

But the administration and Congress never funded the Constellation program at the level that NASA managers had envisioned. A new rocket, Ares I, ran into technical issues and fell behind schedule. By the time President Obama took office, it was clear that the United States faced a major gap, five years minimum, between the shuttle’s retirement and the availability of Ares I.

A presidential review panel led by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine concluded that, without an extra $3 billion a year, Constellation would not be able to get astronauts to the moon until 2028 at the earliest, and there’d be no money left in the program for the lunar lander. In essence, NASA could afford only to crash astronauts into the moon. The Augustine report said NASA was “perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.”...

...Obama zeroed out Constellation in the president’s 2011 budget request...

...The shortest path to orbit for NASA is likely to come via “commercial crew,” a program advanced by the Obama administration in which private contractors, with upfront government assistance, are developing spaceships that could take astronauts to the space station by the middle of this decade. The dream is for spaceflight, at least in low-Earth orbit, to become akin to commercial aviation. Buy a ticket, blast off....

Man, will TSA be happy with this gig...

Also three billion a year. That's a rounding error for Obamacare. And unlike nationalization of the heath care industry the space program actually works and has led to other advancements (computers and other electronics, metals).

Here at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA managers say they plan to build a “21st-century spaceport,” but the effort has a cart-before-horse problem. NASA is trying to get infrastructure in place for rockets that haven’t been approved and destinations that haven’t been selected.

The space center has a new half-billion-dollar mobile launcher, soaring 355 feet into the air and designed for Constellation’s Ares I rocket. But with Ares I defunct, the launcher is an expensive piece of hardware searching for a purpose.

Among those most displeased with the state of NASA is former administrator Mike Griffin, who masterminded the Constellation program.

“What they did was abandon a plan for no plan,” Griffin said. “We are retiring the shuttle in favor of nothing.”

Bolden, Griffin’s successor, is pushing back against the critics. In a message to NASA employees delivered Friday morning, he wrote: “Some of my best friends died flying on the shuttle. I’m not about to let human spaceflight go away on my watch. And I’m not going to let it flounder because we pursued a path that we couldn’t sustain.”

Well Mr Bolden, give us a clue of what you will do. Jack Kennedy said take man to the moon and back by the end of the decade. Will your buddy man-child commit to having us back in orbit by the end of this decade...probably not. He don't like the US showing it's greatness....it might show arrogance to borrow his term.

Relics of a bygone time

One of the powerful impressions of the Kennedy Space Center is how antiquated the place has become in certain respects. It’s not digital, it’s analog. The Kennedy Space Center wants to be a 21st-century spaceport, but there are places where it looks like the Rust Belt of the Space Age.

On a recent day, an 87-year-old former NASA employee, Charlie Parker, volunteered to give a reporter a tour of the abandoned pad where the three Apollo 1 astronauts died in a fire in 1967. Pad 34, on the Air Force side of the cape, is a forlorn place surrounded by weeds and scrub. Two plaques and three stone benches honor the martyred astronauts...

...Pad 34 is the past, draped in silence, its only obvious inhabitant a lumbering gopher tortoise that dives into his burrow at the approach of visitors. Two rusting structures, flame deflectors that look like skateboard ramps, have been parked at the edge of the vacant concrete pad. In the center is a monolithic platform that once held rockets. A pillar has three words stenciled on it: Abandon In Place.

“We call this Stonehenge West,” Parker said. “It just costs too much to tear down.”

I read this Sunday but didn't want to post on it till after the holiday. It's depressing. The greatest nation on earth reduced to this. We put man on the Moon and reached Mars in the 70s. Now we have to ask for assistance getting men to earth orbit.

Sorry Mr Bolden but this is showing a lack of what George HW Bush called "The Vision Thing..." Jack Kennedy and the men who followed him had it. You are clueless. It's not your fault entirely...there has been no leadership from your higher and without that nothing will go forward.

And I don't see leadership coming back to this nation until after January 2013 at the earliest.