Comments on: NASA mulls 2010 shuttle retirement plans

NASA managers are expected to stop work that was dependent on an extension of space shuttle flights beyond the current 2010 deadline.

[gertruded]

The Orion/ares will never be completed. This is the end of American space flights and is just another tangible event in the destruction of American technical competence. The American banksters have gambled away our future and left the country broken.

[d3vildog69]

you got it.. we are totally screwed when it comes to seeing another planet under our feet. I won't even get started on what needs to be done before Lord Vader gets here... sad day

[Rod Roddy]

NASA had years to develop and quite possibly debut a new launch vehicle...they failed. The U.S. must now rely solely on small privately funded programs such as X-Prize to continue our long, storied history of space exploration.

[Hep Cat]

Wow - thanks, genius. can you spell out - exactly - how NASA was supposed to keep up with the mandated shuttle flights while developing a new vehicle(s) and fostering existing projects on the budgets allocated by congress over the past several years? Here's a hint - Bill Clinton funded NASA to build the station - which is happening now - and Hermann Bush announced the "VSE", but didn't fund it, since he was too busy playing cowboys and indians in Iraq.

As usual, the most vehement critics of NASA know next to nothing about the agency or the budgeting process. A 33% increase in NASA's budget would still place it as the SECOND-most funded space agency - behind the Air Force's star wars playset.

Tell me again - how is that orbiting Ray-gun dream doing for all the money it gets for the Air Force? What are they doing that's so groundbreaking next to NASA?

[rayalasoler]

We have lost precious time thinking so conventionally that we have left all our dreams only to be done on sci-fi movies. The Orion system is a step backwards in design and functionality and NASA and the goverment has thrown to the trash too much money with this. Also we have spent too much money in the stupidest war; killing people, destroying humanity's future; but can't find enough money to advance humanity. You know what, put in NASA as a director someone that writes about sci-fi and watch him or her put an human on the moon again or in mars!

[Hep Cat]

Rod Rodbert:

"The U.S. must now rely solely on small privately funded programs such as X-Prize to continue our long, storied history of space exploration."

Really? I'm sure the XPrize contestants could hae done better if it had not been for 50 years of U.S. policy inured toward furthering anything that can "kill the other guy" instead of pure exploration.

Please explain how - with the system of military-industrial contractors in place - we could have done better on the paltry $18B a year NASA gets - less than the U.S. Air Force Space Budget.

[aforslund]

The USA should have never built the Space Shuttle. It is/was a distraction from what our mission in space to be. We should have followed the road map laid out by Apollo and headed for Mars a long time ago. If the shuttle had never flown we would have been exploring deeper into space and making discoveries that would benefit human kind. Not growing moss and crystals in low Earth orbit.

[Hep Cat]

The uninformed folks here are simply hilarious.

[knowles2]

It sounds like giant mess. No way nasa going to launch ten missions in a year, it just not gonna happen. Even with those ten mission then still going to be literally hundred millions dollars of hardware left on the ground which was intended for the space station.
As for the orion is one giant leap backwards in capabilities in every area. Shuttle is the best design, an provides most capability in a craft, far more than orion will any hoe, there some minor issues with safety, most them are not in the design but in the protocols use on the ground and the lack of investment in the craft before Columbia. The thing that makes me laugh is that Nasa spent billions developing stuff for the shuttle after Columbia and all of it will now literally be thrown down the drain.

And as for the person who mention where nasa should got the money for the new craft before the retirement of the shuttle, just take your pick on the fail projects or cancel projects in the past 18 years I pretty sure the few billions there somewhere, and it should really cost more than 5 billion to developed a new craft but then again lack competition in contract means the contractors will take at much cash as they can before they have to deliver the craft.

[fgsdfgdsfgdsfg]

18 billion for NASA is chump change. Their budget doesn?t even keep pace with inflation, so technically they have been seeing a budget cut every year.
We just spent 5 times that on the 8000+ earmarks in the budget Obama just signed. Earmarks for projects like studying the smell of pig dung in Montana. If they would take half of that money and put it into the space program we would have been on Mars already.

[tepmi]

This is unreal. Taking so many steps back and relying on Russia? We can't even agree on who can use what bathroom in the space station. This is a joke. Talking about the creation of jobs, how many jobs will be lost after ending the shuttle program? It's a disgrace.