What Do American’s Think About Flying in Space?

Space-X Dragon 3

Boeing CST-100

This morning’s news carries a headline in Bloomberg Technology “Americans Will Head to Space Again Without a Russian Taxi.”  The article talks about the efforts of Elon Musk’s company Space-X, and the Boeing Company's progress in qualifying a capsule for manned-flight.  Allowing us to move away from our current dependence on the only NASA approved space capsule, the Russian Soyuz, as our ride to the international space station.  NASA’s last flight with the Space Shuttle was in August 2011.  If all goes well we could perhaps have a capsule ready for routine use by 2019, but 2020 seems more likely.  If we keep to this timeline, it will mean the Russians have met our needs for almost ten years.

Exploration is one of the essential qualities of mankind.  At least it used to be.  What would the world look like if the Queen of Spain had not financed Christopher Columbus’s failed venture to find a shorter route to China?  With the exception we would be tearing down someone else's statue, I think it would look almost exactly like it does today.  For within the human spirit, others would have stepped up to finance and sail in search profit and knowledge.  But we have lost the fire that John Kennedy ignited when he decided we must compete with the Communists of the USSR and reach the moon by the end of the decade, and we have lost the ability to reach the consensus that Lyndon Johnson played against as he sank massive numbers of dollars into the race to the moon.

Today NASA, and our space program, has become just another of the on-going and self-justifying bureaucracies without the clear national vision it once had.  You need only look at the fact we’ve been willing to use the Russian Uber service while we putzed around seemingly without purpose and clearly without vision on how best to get ourselves into low and medium earth orbit. 

In the same amount of time that NASA, with scientists, mathematicians and engineers, using slide rules and less computational capability than an apple watch took to organize and run three building block programs that took us from single person sub-orbital flight to landing two astronauts and a dune buggy on the moon, we may be able to approve one or two different capsules able to reach the international space station and return with two or three passengers.

Off-hand I’d say we Americans don’t think too much about flying in space, and that is unfortunate.

10 Things I Don't Expect to Change in 2017

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1.     De-legitimizing the President.  For the past eight years’ supporters of the President have decried as fiction any criticism that questioned the legitimacy of the man for the role.  For the next four years those same defenders will do everything they complained about to the new President.  The irony of this transference will be lost on most people.

2.    The current trajectory of civil conversation

3.    The size of the Federal Government

4.    The use of government departments as overt political tools

5.     An honest public-assessment of the DNC goals, objectives, and its approach to helping the lives of the poor improve to escape the oppression of poverty and achieve a sense of worth

6.    Violence in the major cities

7.     Global climate change...

8.    Government spending greater than government income

9.    Terror as a political tool in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North and South America, Asia, the sub-continent, and Australia.  I think Antarctica may be safe.

10.  The number of human beings who've landed on the moon

On This Day!

This Day in History, May 5th

Today we are told the Moon will be at its perigee, its closest approach in an elliptical orbit, and will appear much larger than normal.  It is an ironic twist that it is also the day Commander Alan Shepard began the United States' journey towards it with a brief suborbital flight.

So now 51 years later we are actually further from the moon than we were then.  

Rest in Peace: Admiral Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. (USN), LtCol Virgil Ivan (Gus) Grissom (USAF), Captain Walter Marty (Wally) Schirra Jr. (USN), Colonel Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. (USAF) and Major Donald Kent (Deke) Slayton (USAF).

T minus 140,400

It is now 140,400 seconds to the last US manned space launch probably in this decade.  That is assuming it launches on time, which is not likely, but still, it will be a sad to think we as a nation have so many problems we can no longer put men into space without help from Russia.

I guess that should be chalked up as a consequence of 9/11 and the sky rocketing [pun intended] cost increases in the cost of the shuttle program.

So in honor of that event I share this poem 

Once, there was a scientist sitting in Germany, wondering just what to do

When along came a monster who sat down beside him, and said I can make a rocket for you 

Well quick as a wink, not stopping to think, the scientist said yes -- that will do

Then after the war, when he had rockets no more, the American's came wandering through

Said the Yankee's to Warner, come back  across the water, and we will make rockets -- Just us two

So off he did go, to Huntsville you know, in hopes his big dreams would come true

Two decades away, the US would play with the Saturn he had built his own way

On our way to the Moon, it happened so soon, we didn't know just how to stay

Unfortunately for us, we have lost the vision he brought and the dream he tried to instill

And so we arrive at this very sad day with nary a hope, we just pray

God speed dear Atlantis as you lift this last time; on your fini flight for U.S.A.


PS:  I know there are private ventures in the works in western U.S.  I don't count them for two reasons.  First, they will not carry a practical payload to space.  They will be, at best, thrill rides.  Next, they may launch from the US but they are substantially foreign venture capitalists funded projects.