as a tribute to Challenger, Columbia and Apollo 1...

The "private contractors" going into the manned spaceflight business is bullshit and everybody knows it. Without an immediate payoff, who the hell is going to invest the money?

Well, this guy at least SAID he was going to get them out of there. The doddering old gaffer on the other side said he'd be happy to leave them there for 100 years.

 

If you're going to pull shit out of context, pull the right shit out of context. He said that about Iraq.

 

And as someone who never had the math chops or science ambition to make a real run at it, but nevertheless always dreamed of being an astronaut, this is a sad development.

 

Actually, yes.
After the Apollo program ended most of the data was lost or mothballed. Hell, the original footage of the moon landing ended up in a vault somewhere and eventually got lost.
The SkyLab project and then the Shuttle are also completely different technologies, so as NASA transitioned to those programs a lot of the Apollo-era engineers and technicians started retiring. The institutional knowledge was lost, the technology was outdated or scrapped (SkyLab itself was made from a hollowed-out Saturn V), and we spent the next 30 years on low-earth orbit programs.
The 1960s moon program was basically a series of baby steps. You learn to put a man in orbit. You learn to put two men in orbit. You learn to track and rendezvous two spacecraft. You learn to track a spacecraft to the moon. You put a man on the moon. It was like climbing stairs. If we'd kept going, we'd probably have had a man on Mars by 1990. Instead we started running on a treadmill and kept it up for 30 years.

And that's the problem with ending Constellation AND the Shuttle at the same time. Once these things go away, they are not coming back any time soon. Within 10-15 years, if we get the urge to venture out into space again, we can't just go into the hangar and take the Shuttle for a spin. We have to start over. That will cost billions. Think Congress will approve that? I doubt it.

 

The Apollo/Saturn plans weren't lost.

http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five_000313.html

However, in a machine with hundreds of thousands of moving parts, the huge majority of which have been out of production for 30-40 years, that's why you can't just roll out a set of the blueprints and say, "get going."

 

No, we can't.

 

We can't, but we do.

 

I stand corrected, but my point is the same.
There was a really good History Channel miniseries on the space program a few years back that went over this. Post-Apollo, everybody was still in go-go-go mode, ready for the next challenge ... and then they sat around watching Skylab go in circles. And then they watched the Shuttle do the same. Those programs provided plenty of benefits, but they killed that wanderer spirit essential for supporting manned spaceflight beyond Earth's orbit.
Now we're killing the drive to even explore that far.
Sixty years ago putting a man in space was still science fiction. Now it's so common we think we can do without it. In another 20 or 30 years, I wonder if we'll look at it again as science fiction.

 

The whole idea of Mars was a pie-in-the-sky grandstanding ploy by the Bush Administration, attempting to create the public impression it was setting a bold new agenda for space, while in real life they were still strangling the program through underfunding and disorganization.

Let's go to Mars by the year 2030, woohoo! Shit, why stop there; we should be on the planet Krypton by 2040. Vulcan by 2050. The Planet of the Apes by 2069.

The Constellation program was doomed from the beginning; poorly conceived, contradictory objectives, underfunded, concentrating on old technology. Much like the shuttle program under Bush's spiritual forebear, Richard Nixon. A cynical ploy to create an unsound and unsustainable program, then dump the problem in the lap of your successors to deal with.

 

We went to the moon because . . .

--- Hitler was building V-2 missiles that he planned to use to rain destruction on the world.

--- Which gave the USA and USSR the technology and German brainpower to hijack the missiles for their own purposes when the Germans were defeated.

--- Which caused a "race" between the USA and USSR. Not a "space race", but one in which each nation needed missiles to strike the other (or to deter them from striking).

--- Which led to Sputnik. Not because of any great plan, but because the Soviets could not keep their nose cones (warheads) from burning up in re-entry, so while they were working on this problem, they needed to do SOMETHING with their missiles to keep the USA from knowing how much trouble they were having.

--- Which caused the USA to shit in its pants. World reaction to Sputnik was orgasmic, and everyone was proclaiming Soviet technological superiority. Soviets had no idea this would happen (USSR military saw no use for a satellite and fought Sputnik's launch with everything they had). But once the world started praising the Soviets, they milked it for everything they could. Khruschev boasted that he could rain missiles all over the world (even though they still did not have a functioning weapon, and even if they did, it could not be launched without 48 hours of preparation).

--- Which led to the so-called space race. And since the USA lost the race to launch the first missile, lost the race to launch the first living being, lost the race to launch the first man, lost the race to orbit the first man, lost the race to have a man walk in space and lost the race to land a vehicle on the moon, about all that was left was sending a man there.

To 10-year-old kids like me, it was all about exploration. But in reality, the space race was a military dick-measuring contest.

 

In 10, 20, 100, 200 maybe 2,000 years something is going to drop out of the sky and say hello to us.

Then they will fly away, and we will want to know how they did it. Every day we spend trying is a day closer to figuring out "how they did it."

The universe is so large, it is idiotic to think that we were meant to stay on our single rock the entire time.