Space Exploration
I just finished one of Orson Scott Card's latest books, Ender in Exile, and it gave me much food-for-thought regarding space travel and exploration. Our current government just announced a very modest raise for NASA, and the decommisioning of the space shuttle program. Many are up in arms about this, except they forget that this has been the plan for at least the past 5 years...anyone remember this graphic?
This shows the budget plan laid out under W's "New Vision for Space Exploration" plan, with the space shuttle budget in red. The dotted line is at Fiscal Year 2009, which ended last October.
Phasing out the space shuttle will free up a whole lot of money in NASA's budget to devote to other projects. However, cancelling the Constellation program is a new development to this plan, and even though my "gut feeling" is that this is a blow to future progress, I don't have enough information to really make a judgement on this.
Private industry is making great strides towards manned spaceflight, but most are years away from the payload capability that NASA already has with Delta and Atlas. The Ares I launch vehicle, designed to get humans back to the Moon, is in the flight test phase of development. The Ares V, a heavy cargo lifter with a greater payload capacity than even the space shuttle, is designed to deliver 71 metric tonnes to the Moon, and could take us to Mars and beyond. Ares V is in the preliminary design phase, but will be using an upgraded version of current Delta IV engines, which will reduce overall development costs and time substantially.
Even with private industry making the progress that they are, can they bridge the gap at this time? So far, only one private space company in the world has achieved orbit, and that is SpaceX, with the Falcon 1 launch vehicle having delivered its first sucessful payload to orbit last July.
This shows the budget plan laid out under W's "New Vision for Space Exploration" plan, with the space shuttle budget in red. The dotted line is at Fiscal Year 2009, which ended last October.
Phasing out the space shuttle will free up a whole lot of money in NASA's budget to devote to other projects. However, cancelling the Constellation program is a new development to this plan, and even though my "gut feeling" is that this is a blow to future progress, I don't have enough information to really make a judgement on this.
Private industry is making great strides towards manned spaceflight, but most are years away from the payload capability that NASA already has with Delta and Atlas. The Ares I launch vehicle, designed to get humans back to the Moon, is in the flight test phase of development. The Ares V, a heavy cargo lifter with a greater payload capacity than even the space shuttle, is designed to deliver 71 metric tonnes to the Moon, and could take us to Mars and beyond. Ares V is in the preliminary design phase, but will be using an upgraded version of current Delta IV engines, which will reduce overall development costs and time substantially.
Even with private industry making the progress that they are, can they bridge the gap at this time? So far, only one private space company in the world has achieved orbit, and that is SpaceX, with the Falcon 1 launch vehicle having delivered its first sucessful payload to orbit last July.