Being somewhat of a space junkie I could not let this day go by without referencing the fact that 38 years ago today man walked on the moon for the first time.  And it’s been 35 years since we last walked on the moon, which is just soooo sad, such a pathetic accomplishment.  From walking on the moon to flying a ship around the earth.  Progress should have been made.  Hell, we should already be on mars but instead the Democrats got their claws into the space program and killed it.  Because it cost to much, and too many people were hungry, and blah blah blah.   You sure solved that hunger problem didn’t ya?

Yuval Levin says it best:

It is a good day to reflect on the appalling failure of the American space program to build on its successes—or even just to hang on to them. We couldn’t go to the moon today even if we wanted to. To make it possible for us to go to the moon again would require an immense and expensive undertaking, because we have completely lost the chance to build on the immense and expensive undertaking that got us there last time.

Ok, rant off.

Hope you had a happy moon day.  My sincere thanks and gratitude to the thousands that made walking on the moon possible:

And what would any moon day without watching Buzz Aldrin punch out a freak, one of those KOSkiddie conspiracy nuts that we see everyday now.  Watch it and enjoy:
Go Buzz!

UPDATE

Another great video of the mission:

We all know that the Global Warming zealots are a crazy bunch, they would destroy whole economies because of a .00010 increase in temperature.  Now they want to torpedo the man mission to Mars:

A squeeze on funding for satellites to look down on the Earth’s environment at a time of growing need for research into the effects of climate change is creating alarm among scientists and on Capitol Hill.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, renowned for its pioneering role in science, is seeing its science budget shrink and its satellite Earth observation capacity endangered even as the agency’s overall mission grows.

Three and a half years ago, President Bush announced “a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system,” including a return to the moon by 2020, a step toward Mars and beyond.

The ambitious program vastly expanded NASA’s mission at a time when its near Earth science programs — arguably more relevant to humankind’s needs — were in decline.

Since Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration, the administration has reduced future-year funding for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate by a total of $4 billion, according to the House Science and Technology Committee’s space and aeronautics panel.

A two-year study released last January by the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council found that NASA’s Earth science budget had declined 30 percent since 2000 and was threatened to fall even further.

How will they accomplish this?

Last week, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science recommended an increase of over $280 million above the requested level for NASA. However, within this budget markup, there is language that would prevent work on programs devoted to humans to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue “development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." THIS ANTI-MARS LANGUAGE MUST BE REMOVED! Otherwise, the program may turn into MOON ONLY program. We can’t let that happen.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a space junkie and I still bitterly complain that a Democrat controlled Congress cut funding to the Apollo program in 1972, just when we were getting good at visiting the moon.  They then approved money for a freakin bus to orbit the earth.  We go to the moon and then instead of going forward we move backwards.

Anyways, The Mars Society (whom members include officers serving in Iraq) has started a drive to get faxes, emails and phone calls to various politicians to get the offending language removed.

In the past week, the Mars Society "Save Mars Phone/Fax Blitz" has been a tremendous success. So far, almost 400 faxes have been sent and numerous phone calls have been made to Congress requesting that they remove the anti-Mars language that has been placed in the House version of the budget.

If you haven’t yet called or faxed your members of Congress, please do so soon using our automated system. We would like to have a total of 1,000 faxes sent within the next couple of weeks. It is imperative to remind both houses of Congress that the American people support human missions to Mars. If you have called your members of Congress or plan to, please let us know by dropping us an email at Marspolitics@yahoo.com.

And they have even started a Political Action Task Force to ensure that the human exploration of Mars remains the mission of NASA:

The purpose of the U.S. Political Task Force is to support the endeavor of The Mars Society to establish a human mission to Mars as the primary goal of the U.S. Space Program. This will be accomplished by means of an aggressive campaign of contact with our elected officials asking them to actively support the required technologies and legislation in support of this vision. The Political Task Force will mobilize and assist our membership and other space advocates with up-to-date information and the necessary tools for effective communication to accomplish this goal. Further, we will seek to act in ways that garner sufficient media and public support for the goal of sending humans to Mars.

All great programs.  Gus Grissom, the commander of Apollo One which tragically burned on the pad in 1967, once said:

Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves, because in the final analysis, only Man can evaluate the Moon in terms understandable to other men.

Exploring Mars is no different.  Only another Man (or woman) can really evaluate that planet in terms understandable to other’s.

By Robert Farrow

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: NASA counted down to the launch of space shuttle Discovery on Saturday, hoping to fly a crucial mission and knowing that failure could ground the shuttle fleet permanently and leave the Space Station unfinished. Discovery was scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:49 p.m. EDT on a voyage to the space station that will test repairs to the shuttle’s troublesome fuel tank, which triggered the destruction of shuttle Columbia and the deaths of seven astronauts in 2003. the link is here

The Space Program should be something all Americans would be proud of. However, I am always surprised by the number of Americans that are hostile to our manned space program. Not surprisingly, the media also has become critical. I wonder if this is part of the same mentality that is responsible for the resentment that we are the only remaining superpower.

Questions orbit around future of NASA

By Traci Watson,

If all goes well this weekend, space shuttle Discovery and its crew will shoot into orbit, where the seven astronauts will plainly see landmarks back on Earth.The future of the nation’s space program isn’t as clear.

Gone are the days when NASA, in the 1960s, won the space race with a single-minded focus on getting a man to the moon. Today, NASA juggles competing demands — from proving it can fly the shuttle accident-free and retiring it in 2010 to completing the expensive International Space Station laboratory to developing new vehicles for space exploration.

The agency’s ability to manage them successfully will determine the future of its manned spaceflight program and whether the United States will return to the moon and fly to Mars. “My nightmare scenario is that we just slowly phase out human spaceflight,” says Roger Launius, head of the National Air and Space Museum’s space history division. “We’ve got some serious issues to wrestle with.”Americans’ support for NASA remains strong. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken last weekend found that 57% said the agency does a good or excellent job. One-third of respondents said NASA’s budget should be cut or eliminated.

As the federal deficit grows, it may be difficult to find the $104 billion it will cost to send Americans back to the moon, say Launius and Marco Caceres of the Teal Group, an aerospace analysis firm. Caceres warns NASA’s competing priorities may have consequences, especially if corners are cut. The nation “is giving NASA all this difficult, visionary stuff to do but … not giving them the resources to do it,” he says. “Eventually it catches up with you and you have an accident.” NASA spokesman Dean Acosta says the agency plans to move ahead, using whatever Congress allocates. NASA’s $16.7 billion budget has been essentially flat for 15 years. NASA officials are “very comfortable that we have in place a plan that can accomplish the (moon program) with the funding we have,” he says.

A look at the four parts of NASA’s human spaceflight program:

Space shuttle: Lame duck

After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard, President Bush ordered the space agency to retire the nation’s three remaining shuttles by 2010. By then it will be nearly impossible to extend the shuttle fleet’s life, because the assembly lines for crucial parts will have closed, says William Gerstenmaier, head of NASA’s space operations division.Before they retire, the shuttles are slated to make 16 flights to finish building the space station, including the one expected to launch Saturday. Only the shuttle is brawny enough to carry the station’s pieces into orbit. A 17th flight, to fix the decaying Hubble Space Telescope, is possible. Shuttle program chief Wayne Hale recently estimated there’s a roughly 1-in-100 chance that a shuttle flight will end in catastrophe. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin does not rule out the possibility that the shuttle will have another accident before it retires. If “we were to lose another vehicle, I will tell you right now that I would be moving to figure out a way to shut the (shuttle) program down,” Griffin said recently. Hale and Griffin insist the shuttle will fly often enough to complete the space station. That would require four flights a year. Others are dubious. “For that to happen requires everything to go extremely well,” says Moshe Farjoun, an associate professor at York University in Toronto who co-edited a book about the Columbia disaster. “Each flight is a moment of truth for NASA.”

Space station questions

The space station, an orbiting laboratory that circles the Earth every 90 minutes, still needs solar panels, structural girders and several laboratories. Each piece to be installed has to work perfectly before the next piece is added, Gerstenmaier says, and the complexity means the unfinished half will be more difficult to build. “How you … pull that all together will be very, very challenging,” he says, adding the construction schedule has enough slack to address problems. The shuttle’s upcoming retirement forced NASA to cancel 10 flights that would have carried spare parts and equipment for experiments to the station. Gerstenmaier says some of that cargo will fly to the station on other vehicles being developed. Experiments that might have helped reveal how humans could stay healthy on a Mars mission have been cut, too, says James Pawelczyk, a Pennsylvania State University scientist who flew on the shuttle in 1998. Griffin said in March that NASA’s long-term role in the space station, which will cost the 16 nations building it roughly $100 million, is “a matter of speculation.” “We don’t know … what the (station) will become, whether it will be used properly or whether it will have been a huge waste,” says Vincent Sabathier of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former official of France’s space agency.

Constellation’s budget squeeze

Last fall, NASA unveiled with great fanfare details of what it dubbed Project Constellation, the spaceship and the two rockets it would build to carry Americans back to the moon. “Apollo on steroids,” Griffin called it.
Less than a year later, NASA has decided to shrink the Crew Exploration Vehicle, the ship that would carry the astronauts, because of cost and weight. It will carry four people to the moon, but the crew will be more cramped because the interior will be two-thirds the size engineers had envisioned.Nor will it be done as quickly as NASA had hoped. When Griffin unveiled the plan, he said he hoped the vehicle would be ready in 2012 to ferry astronauts to the space station. Scott Horowitz, head of NASA’s exploration division, says the ship won’t be running regularly until 2014. The agency’s engineers aim to develop the necessary technology by 2010, but “right now our budget supports a 2014 capability,” Horowitz says. That means that unless more money materializes, NASA faces four years when it won’t have its own spacecraft for manned flight. It hopes to rely instead on vehicles built by private industry, though Jerry Grey, director of science and technology policy for the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, says it’s unclear whether such vehicles will materialize. NASA will also buy seats on Russian spaceships through 2012. In its proposed budget for 2007, NASA has cut science spending to support its new mission.”Constellation is a size 14 foot in a size 8 shoe,” says Howard McCurdy of American University in Washington. “It’s just really hard to squeeze it in and make it work.”

Murky plans for moon, Mars

Bush’s proposal to send astronauts back to the moon and eventually on to Mars has drawn cheers from space historians, former astronauts and members of Congress for looking beyond low Earth orbit. The only specific detail in the plan Bush announced in 2004 is a deadline: The return to the moon will be no later than 2020, the president said. That schedule worries Grey, otherwise a fan of Bush’s plan.Working toward a tight deadline, “you tend to overstress both systems and people in order to meet that, and it’s not necessary,” he says. “What’s the hurry?” NASA has not revealed where on the moon astronauts will go, how long they’ll stay or what they’ll do. Griffin said last year that such specifics will have to wait until other nations decide to join NASA in exploring the lunar surface, because NASA is sinking all its funds into developing the means to get there. “We will not, by ourselves, be able to conduct the robust program of lunar surface exploration and exploitation that (the moon) merits,” Griffin said.The agency has announced no plans at all for the four- to six-month voyage to Mars, though the new spacecraft are being designed to make the trip. Griffin has said work on such a foray would take place in the 2020s.Even the most pessimistic space experts say America is unlikely to abandon a program as popular and prestigious as human space exploration. But few are putting the odds on a bright future.”I want to see (NASA) succeed,” says Launius of the Air and Space Museum. “I’m just very concerned” that it can’t.
the link is here.

Actually, I am critical of the Shuttle program too, simply for it’s cost per pound to orbit ratio, but I am very pro-Space. And I think those that are not are selling America’s future short. And this is my argument why:

The Case for Space…..

“The earth is a cradle of reason, but one cannot live in a cradle for ever.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Around 600 Years ago a nation was on it’s path to dominate the world. It was called the Ming Dynasty. In almost every category it’s navy was superior to the nations of the West. Had the past been a bit different, the East might have been the power center of the world, enveloping the globe with it’s religion and it’s culture. The Emperor of the Mings, Yun Lo, enjoyed a fleet of over two hundred ships, all much larger then those of the West, and encouraged great voyages of exploration. The Mings quickly discovered Africa and would have soon sailed around it to make contact with Europe when the exploration money dried up. Political opponents of Lo decided the money would be better spent on irrigation projects, and the fleet was abandoned. A few years later, the Portugese rounded Africa, and with no one in their way, they kept going. One hundred years later the Portugese sized a small Chinese island which began the domination of China by the West. Soon after that the dominion of the waters passed to the British, who built an empire from which the Sun never set until the 20th century.

Like Seafaring, spacefaring has very marginal returns in early voyages. They were also very costly, in material as well as lives. Even the voyage duration are similar- trips to Mars is about as long as Magellan’s first voyage around the world. It is the same for us as well. In the beginning, most of the early American settlements were failures, a drain on the mother country’s resources more then anything else. But as the history of both Britain and America shows, those countries choose to expand, eventually, though, greatly prospered. And it is difficult to overestimate the importance the impact this expansion has played on our lives. Look at it this way, imagine an undiscovered world, devoid of international markets and global communications. Such is the power of exploration.

Though the price will not be cheap, a Mankind that colonizes space will be immeasurably better off then one that does not. And while trying to do this, discoveries are made that helps people and jobs are created directly and indirectly from a variety of space programs. And if civilization does not expand into space we may become extinct. Extinction by meteorite is not as far fetched an idea as one may think. And our sun’s lifespan is finite. So, in short, we either expand, or die as a species. So why not now?

Finally, I think exploration, whether it is space, the seas, or of knowledge itself, brings out the best in humanity and to deny it would be to deny an essential part of humanity itself. The Universe is full of wonderful things just waiting for us to discover them. And I can think of nothing sadder then to never know what they are.

There will always be projects that need attention at home, but that is no excuse to mortgage humanity’s future. There will always be poor people, and to wait until the poor are fed means we will never leave this planet and will wait for our eventual extinction like a bunch of hairy dinosaurs. Do the Chinese remember that particular irrigation project now? I doubt it? They do know for sure that their size, resources, and population they have not flourished as they might have or made the same impact upon the world as the West has made.

Humanity is notoriously short sighted, a lack of vision that this time may be fatal.

It’s about damn time:

Sept. 19, 2005, New York–With a plan reminiscent of the Apollo program, NASA is currently unveiling its architecture for a return to the moon by 2018. The plan calls for a series of new spaceships that borrow their designs from Apollo and their propulsion from the Space Shuttle.

For human flight, NASA plans on building a blunt-bodied Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV. By appearances, the CEV design is virtually identical to the Command Module from the Apollo mission — it will hold up to six astronauts (three for ISS missions, four on a trip to the moon and six for Mars) and will return to earth under parachute, greatly simplifying reentry. It will launch on top of a borrowed solid rocket booster and a main engine from the Space Shuttle, and it’s in-line launch stack design avoids the launch debris problems that plague NASA’s current manned spacecraft. (see images)

The CEV can also be flown robotically to ferry cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) or to stage supplies and equipment in Earth orbit, which allows the agency to perform routine launches without endangering a human crew.

But to get to the moon, astronauts will need much more equipment than the CEV launch stack can carry. For this, NASA’s plan calls for a second, nominally unmanned heavy-lift rocket powered by five shuttle main engines and two solid rocket boosters. The vehicle will be able to carry 106 metric tons into low earth orbit, and carry an earth departure rocket booster for a lunar mission. The CEV and the lunar rocket will mate in low earth orbit.

Now this is cool: (h/t DefenseTech)

After three years of being laughed out of meetings, the U.S. Marine Corps’ futuristic plans to deploy through space may finally be getting some traction. Although the chuckle factor hasn’t altogether disappeared, the Air Force Research Laboratory and Darpa are beginning a study of options for a reusable upper-stage space travel vehicle — the same kind of technology that the Marines might need for a ride halfway across the globe.

The effort is called “Hot Eagle,” and it could be the first step forward in the Marine Corps’ hopes for space travel. Within minutes of bursting into the atmosphere beyond the speed of sound — and dispatching that ominous sonic boom — a small squad of Marines could be on the ground and ready to take care of business within 2 hours. [One presentation muses that the capsule might later be picked up by a Osprey or by a "balloon cable and C-17" transport plane. Or, the Marines might "hike out," and "leave [the] crew capsule behind.” — ed.]

The Marine Corps calls the concept the Small Unit Space Transport and Insertion Capability (Sustain). This plan, a growing group of Marine supporters say, is the natural evolution of the service’s proclivity for expeditionary warfare that began decades ago with amphibious landings, quick hops on helicopters, flights on fixed-wing aircraft and - very soon - rides on the Osprey tiltrotor.

The concept is to deliver strategic equipment or a small squad of soldiers to any point on the globe — even the most hard-to-reach location — within hours of need. Once on the ground, those soldiers can carry out strategically critical missions like reconnaissance or destroying a specific target.

…briefing notes obtained by Defense Technology International show the vehicle could be designed for a variety of missions, including “affordable, reliable” spacelift, global or theater intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and personnel insertion. One exotic use listed is “space-to-space ISR,” or spying on other satellites.

…A variety of other options for Marine space travel are also under consideration. For example, Darpa is spearheading the Falcon program to demonstrate a $5-million small-launch capability and separate hypersonic cruise vehicle. Four contractors are working on launch-vehicle concepts and the hypersonic cruise vehicle is being designed by Lockheed Martin.

…USAF Brig. Gen. (ret) S. Pete Worden - a research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizon and former top Air Force space official- says the Marine concept has credibility.

…”What is it that would change the war on terrorism in a dramatic way?” he asks. “If you could get people into place in an hour or so, that changes the whole complexion of the war on terrorism.” Worden notes a handful of times the government knew where high-value targets like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were located, but was unable to act quickly.