Uncertain times for NASA

With its funding cut and its plans under review, NASA is facing a questionable future. Endeavor is scheduled for launch tomorrow, and the Ares 1-X—the early version of the booster for NASA shuttle replacement—is being tested.

NASA does the near-impossible…regularly

Personally, I find it strange that NASA takes such a hit. This is an agency which successfully sends astronauts into space regularly. It lands vehicles on the moon and Mars..and even sends robotic explorers to the outer planets.

NASA satellites have provided a wealth of data revolutionizing whole areas of science. It has succeeded in doing the near impossible and failed so few times that we can recall only a handful of failures in its five decades of existence.

Money for other things, some of them very bad things

Budgets are tight and we need to spend it, apparently, on helping out failed companies and fighting wars and offering tax cuts or whatever. Some of these budget items are worthwhile and others abominable.

It makes me think of the development of the shuttle. A budget-conscious government who didn’t care about space looked to cheaply follow-up on the moon landings. And they provided NASA with too little funds and too many demands. NASA came up with a compromise vehicle designed to do too much and promising more than it could possibly deliver.

Ares is being tested. But will politicians let it fly?

Birth of new vehicle following the dangerous precedent of the shuttle

Due to a cheap, demanding gov’t, the shuttle design was—in my opinion—botched. And yet, even then, NASA successfully flew a flawed space craft for decades, albeit suffering two terrible fatal missions.Still, how many deaths would have resulted from thirty years of, say, Apollo moon landings? Spaceflight is inherently dangerous, and even with its shortcomings, NASA has done, and continues to do a superb job.

But, I fear, well-meaning people are about to make a mistake and NASA’s next steps may become unnecessarily hazardous.