Obama considers linking Defense Dept. with NASA
This is an artist's rendition of Ares I in the assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center. Ares I is a two-stage rocket configuration topped by the Orion crew vehicle and its launch abort system. It is designed to carry crews of four to six astronauts and has a 25-ton payload capacity.
(Credit: NASA)President-elect Barack Obama appears to be gearing up for a space race 2.0, this time with China.
Obama's transition team is considering doing away with some of the barriers that separate the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA, according to Bloomberg.
Citing people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team, Bloomberg says they believe collaboration between the country's civilian space agency and the military's space program would speed up the time in which the U.S. is able to send people back to the moon.
The main--and very costly--goal is to build a rocket that can carry Orion, NASA's next-generation spacecraft, to the International Space Station, the moon, and further out into the solar system. NASA has planned to use its new Ares I rocket for that purpose. Last year, it completed preliminary design review for the Ares rocket, which is slated to launch for the first time in 2015.
But Obama would like to get Orion in the air before then. Getting a working rocket system up and running will be critical to getting the U.S. back to self-sufficiency with its space programs. As it stands now, the current space shuttle is scheduled to retire in 2010. So if Orion launches with Ares as planned in 2015, this leaves a five-year period of time in which the U.S. will have to pay Russia to fly astronauts to and from the ISS. And that's assuming Orion (and Ares) are delivered on time. If history is any indicator, delays are likely if not guaranteed. And with added demands for federal funds due to the recession, it's unclear where NASA and some of its programs stand.
Bloomberg's sources suggest the Obama team believes the Defense Department (which spent about $22 billion in the last fiscal year) can share some of its resources to give NASA a boost--and that they're even considering scrapping development of the Ares rocket entirely in favor of using the Pentagon's Atlas or Delta rockets, which are much further along in development.
Whatever they decide, the incoming administration is likely feeling some pressure from China, which plans to land a robotic rover on the moon in 2012, with a manned mission to follow a few years later.
Jennifer Guevin is assistant managing editor of CNET News. She focuses on science and green tech. But she also makes the occasional contribution to CNET's kitchen gadgets blog or writes about the latest Web distraction. Once a week, she takes the mic as host of CNET's Daily News Podcast. E-mail Jennifer.
The moon has almost unlimited supplies of helium which is used in nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion (the opposite of current technology - nuclear fission) consume all of the helium in the process of creating energy with no radioactive wastes or any other toxic waste.
Helium is not available on earth in any quantity. It is estimated that one boxcar of helium could power all of the electric generating plants of the US for one year. Nuclear fusion on a large scale is currently a project in France being funded by a consortium of countries including the US, Japan, the EU and China. The deployment of this technology is still decades away. But it is the future of energy and it will shift the strategic military focus from the Middle East to Space. So it is totally appropriate that the DoD and NASA get linked up formally and that the US get back to the moon before anyone else to be the first to colonize, establish bases and create a defensive bubble.
Wasn't it designed to carry "also" military payloads?
Sorry, but curing hunger, war, and disease? We'd all be extinct as a species before any one of these conditions were 'taken care of'.
The problem is that we as a species will have a hard time going any farther in the universe if we don't look to space... all we do now days is accept that reality is what we see and can touch, nobody has an imagination anymore, to try and find the things that are amazing in life. Everyone is so concerned with finding a good job, so they can make money, get married and have kids and that just perpetuates the cycle. We as a species need to learn to Live not Survive, otherwise we will get no closer to solving Hunger, war or disease.
Even Jesus Christ admitted that the poor will always be with us.
China?s investments in anti-satellite warfare and in ?cyberwarfare,? ballistic missiles and other weaponry ?could threaten the United States? primary means to project its power and help its allies in the Pacific: bases, air and sea assets, and the networks that support them,? Defense Secretary Gates wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
Or is this a scheme to socialize NASA now ??
Hell what else is he going to try to socialize and how much is this going to cost us?
Just because he disagrees with something Obama is planning to do automatically makes him an "Obama hater?" God forbid we have people who disagree with the Messiah.
When did social become a dirty word?
Re: about the time myspace was invented...
Orion, the crew module, *is* designed to be resuable, BTW.
The other major uses of the shuttle, as heavy lift launcher and orbiting laboratory, are going to be filled by the Ares V launcher and the existing space station.
in my opinion the US military has too many things over their wings, why give them now the power to "control" scientific research in the space ... not that the military isn't involved with it already
With the Orion/Ares system, we're going backwards in terms of visionary design, and hardly seems to spark the imagination of what space travel should be like. You know what visionary design is like; it's the stuff that came out of Skunkworks and Area 51, the ideas of what supersonic flight would look like with the SR-71, the SRAM jet and stealth planes.
All it takes is one look at Space Ship One, to understand that our dreams of space travel lie not in pods sitting atop rockets, but in space ships that look like space ships.
Maybe NASA needs to farm out engineering to DARPA.
You said that the Department of Defense "spent about $22 billion in the last fiscal year".
Whitehouse.gov reports that "The President?s 2008 Budget: "Provides $481.4 billion for the Department of Defense?s base budget".
Perhaps they spent $22 billion on a specific sector?
To Boldly Go - At "Warp" Speed! Long Live (Elvis) and "OS/2 Warp" from 2010.....
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Commander_Spock and Crew keep telling folks that what ever operations are being conducted anywhere in the world it will eventually boil down to a few questions - those with regards to "INTERNATIONAL CONSIDERATIONS". Now, let's get down to the "INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC AND TECHNICAL EVALUATIONS"! regardless of the - "FREEBIE!!!!"
It is really sad to see the United States become a second class nation, we have lost the ability to produce the engineers and scientists that have enabled us to be the envy of the world. We have to import our engineers these days from Russia, India and China and pay Russia to access space. Sad.
Farm NASA out to private control first, so they can get a better handle on costs. The shuttles have never been economical because of defense department requirements.
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by Bernardo Ortiz
January 4, 2009 8:27 AM PST
- What is being missed in all of this is why NASA was formed. The defense department fialed to keep pace on the space race with the Germans, having to bring in Warrner Von Braun after the end of the war, and later to keep pace with the Russians. The DOD does not have the focus to succeed with any space race. If there are problems with NASA then their plate should be cleared from "other" projects to improve it's focus. This is if you really think that the space race, as defined, is a good idea.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (52 Comments)I think we should focus on commercialization of space and unmanned exploration. Putting a man on mars, in my mind, is a stupid waste of money! Make a business case for it first.