Ares, Orion and Altair: NOT going to the moon
According to the New York Times, the Obama administration’s new budget and plan for NASA outsources manned spaceflight to private companies.
The guys who brought us Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle are done designing rockets and spacecraft.
It somehow seems appropriate for this news to come out this last week of January. Because this time of year has historically been a bad one for NASA. The Apollo 1 fire took place on January 27, 1967. The Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986. And we lost Columbia on February 1, 2003.
If the administration gets its way, the Orion spacecraft and Ares launcher are dead. And what privately designed and built spacecraft is getting an American to the moon or Mars? I guess we’ll be staying in earth orbit for the foreseeable future.
