Space Shuttle Capability
At one time, 60 percent of public supported shuttle. We flew it once & can get it going again. The USA needs this capability. The X37C per Abbey could get the capability back.
To do this, we must get the attention of Congress, so if you feel strongly, regarding this important capability, please spread the word any way you can--- blog, tweet, etc. Thanks
From: "Robert Hooi" <rwlh21@sbcglobal.net>
Date: February 17, 2016 at 11:26:23 PM CST
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: NASA Not Space Exploration
Reply-To: "Robert Hooi" <rwlh21@sbcglobal.net>
Obama's NASA About "Global Warming" Not Space Exploration
President Obama's cult-like devotion to the "Climate Change/Global Warming" scam has led to its interjection into just about all federal agencies.
In what was once America's premiere scientific agency, NASA under Obama has become just another huckster for the President's phony-science, "global warming" push.
In his proposed new budget for NASA, this fanaticism is reflected in just how taxpayer moneys are to be spent.
The Daily Caller explains:
The NASA budget President Barack Obama released Tuesday is far more concerned with spending cash on global warming research than supporting the agency's mission of space exploration.
The top scientific question the space agency claims it wants to answer in its budget justification is "How are Earth's climate and the environment changing?" The more typical space questions, such as "Are we alone?" and "How does the universe work?," were at the very bottom of the list.
"This administration cannot continue to tout plans to send astronauts to Mars while strangling the programs that will take us there," Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith , chairman of the House Science Committee, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. "President Obama's 2017 budget proposal shrinks our deep space exploration programs by more than $800 million. And the administration once more proposes cuts of more than $100 million to the Planetary Science accounts, which have previously funded missions like this past year's Pluto flyby."
The space agency's budget includes more than $2 billion for its Earth Science Mission Directorate for global warming science, which is specifically allocated to improve climate modeling, weather prediction and natural hazard mitigation. In comparison, NASA's other functions, such as astrophysics and space technology, are only getting a mere $781.5 and $826.7 million, respectively, in the budget proposal.
Well, lots of luck to them with that. They will only be added to the discredited hacks in the rest of the Obama Administration who are playing radical, left-wing politics instead of applying solid science to the mysteries of the universe.
The Daily Caller has more:
"At the same time this proposal shrinks space exploration priorities within NASA's budget,it disproportionately increases Earth Science accounts to more than $2 billion – a seventy percent increase since 2007," Smith continued. "This imbalanced proposal continues to tie our astronauts' feet to the ground and makes a Mars mission all but impossible. This is not the proposal of an administration that is serious about maintaining America's leadership in space."
Spending on NASA's Earth Science Mission Directorate has increased by 63 percent over the last eight years, making it the largest and fastest growing budget of any NASA science program. Over the same time period, the general NASA budget grew only by 10.6 percent — just enough to account for inflation.
The Directorate's goal is to help NASA "meet the challenges of climate and environmental change." The organization is also responsible for global warming models proven to be inaccurate when checked against actual temperature observations.
Obama and Democrats in Congress consider expanding the budget for global warming science to be a political imperative. Obama has repeatedly attempted to cut other NASA directorates, like space exploration, so money could be redirected to global warming science.
This is typical of Obama's "fundamental transformation" of America. Whereas, we used to lead the world in the exploration of space and the universe, now we are wasting billions to further lies that promote world socialism and destroy American private enterprise and affordable energy.
Obama may continue to put the imprimatur of NASA onto his phony agenda, but the facts will still scream out the truth eventually.
Let us hope NASA isn't all but destroyed by the time Obama and his raging socialists are forced out of town by the next election.
From: Kent Castle <kent.d.castle@hotmail.com>
Date: February 16, 2016 at 4:00:16 PM CST
To: Choban Peter <peter.s.choban@aero.org>, Patterson James <w8ljz@aol.com>, Martin Bobby <bobbygmartin1938@gmail.com>, Bentz Jerry <bentz@sbcglobal.net>, Bogan Carole <bcbogan@earthlink.net>, Reason Marilou <loganlou55@yahoo.com>, Astrology Valkyrie <astrogoddess@valkyrieastrology.com>, Carman Gilbert <gil77546@sbcglobal.net>, Chamberlain Sharon <sharon.m.chamberlain@saic.com>, Baird Darren <darren.t.baird@nasa.gov>, Heidel TQ <bheidel@highland.net>, Tetzloff Connie <owari567@comcast.net>, Leach Larry <ljleach@tds.net>, Haden Lee <dldhhaden@gmail.com>, Smith Harold <ke5gsk@gmail.com>, Williams Tom <gtomwill@att.net>, Castle Kerrick <kjcastle@hotmail.com>, Arnold Jenny <arnoldrj@bellsouth.net>, Grant Berl <berlgrant@frontier.com>, Brown Paul <paul.brown1@yahoo.com>, Books Mark <mebooks2012@gmail.com>, Bilger Boyd <boyd.bilger@suddenlink.net>, Madsen Ron <ronstar@pdq.net>
Subject: FW: My kind of place.
From:
To: ;
Subject: Fw: My kind of place.
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 09:33:43 -0600
My kind of place.
Take a look at this restaurant in CO.
Rifle is on I-70 in western Colorado.
Here's one place that will NEVER be robbed.
On February 15, 2011 a symposium entitled "U.S. Human Spaceflight: Continuity and Stability" was held at Rice University's James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy. Organized by George Abbey, the resident space expert at the Baker Institute, one might have suspected that it would be Shuttle-centric and indeed, it was. Many pertinent points relevant to the current discussion about NASA's human space program and its future (or lack thereof) came out of the presentations at this symposium.
The program featured several speakers, all of whom played major roles in the Shuttle program. I found comments by Robert F. "Bob" Thompson most interesting. Bob Thompson is one of the true "old guard" – an original member of Bob Gilruth's Space Task Group at NASA Langley, a group pre-dating the Mercury Program. Thompson was head of the Apollo Applications Program (Skylab) and the first manager of the Space Shuttle program. Many of his remarks resonate strongly with points I have made here and elsewhere about serious problems being dismissed or ignored in the unseemly rush to re-vamp NASA from an operational space flight agency into a check-writing bureaucracy for New Space endeavors.
Thompson's theme was a considered and educated look at what discarding the country's Space Shuttle Program means. Both his talk and the talk by Howard DeCastro (Shuttle Program Manager at the United Space Alliance, which operates the Shuttle system for NASA) carefully outlined the history of the Shuttle program and the possibility of flying the Shuttle commercially until a new system becomes available, thereby retaining our national spaceflight capability. They covered the many compromises made both in Shuttle's conception and in its execution, as well as its unique capabilities. The Shuttle can both deliver and retrieve payloads from space; it is a fully integrated transport and servicing system in low Earth orbit. The famous Hubble Space Telescope would be a useless piece of junk instead of a national treasure without the Shuttle missions that first allowed for the repair of its defective vision and then returned to service the instrument in space multiple times over the ensuing decade.
An often ignored but critically important issue is the supporting infrastructure for spaceflight. Thompson made the analogy that when people see a Shuttle Orbiter, they really are seeing just the "tip of an iceberg." The Shuttle is more than an orbiter vehicle; it is also the servicing facilities at the Cape that process and prepare the orbiter for launch. It is the ET fabrication facilities at Michoud and the SRB plant at Promontory as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that has performed flawlessly over the 133 flights to date. It is the mobile crawler and the launch towers at Pad 39-A. And it is the trained cadre of people that put all the pieces together and make them work in concert to deliver and return people and equipment from space. Thompson rhetorically encompassed his argument thusly: The Shuttle is a "dumb vehicle that cost too much" but is a "fully functional part of a space transportation system – an 18-wheel, extended cab work vehicle." He told the audience that Orion, Soyuz and Progress were more like "taxis" and "pickup trucks." He said that the Constellation vehicles (chosen to implement the 2004 Vision) were bad decisions, followed on now by an even worse decision.
Thompson used a familiar graphic, the chart showing NASA's fraction of the annual federal budget over decades (see above). The large spike centered around 1966 represents peak spending for the Apollo program. Thompson made two specific observations about this graph. First, Richard Nixon (who took office in 1969) is often damned as the President who "killed Apollo." But the graph shows that the ramp-down in spending for Apollo began two years earlier in 1967, in Lyndon Johnson's administration. The Vietnam War required some of NASA's money, so Apollo-Saturn production managers were told to build the equipment needed to fulfill Kennedy's decadal goal and shut down thereafter.
Additionally, Thompson made the very significant point (one usually ignored by many engaged in space policy debates) that the "Apollo spike" paid for the infrastructure – the buildings, laboratories, test and training facilities, and launch systems – that Apollo used and that the Shuttle uses to this day. By terminating the Shuttle with no follow-on, the fate of most of this infrastructure is the scrap heap. Note that the "Apollo spike" in funding happened forty years ago. To design and build the supporting infrastructure for human spaceflight in the mid-1960s, we annually spent ten times the fraction of the budget that we do now. Given the reality of the nation's finances, NASA will be lucky if they can continue to get one-half of one percent of federal spending per year. This does not seem to be a good time to throw away three functioning Shuttle orbiters, thereby discarding a working national space faring capability, one carefully built and paid for over the last 50 years.
Several New Space companies are working on vehicle designs, which, if successful in creating a replacement space "work vehicle," will need their own supporting infrastructure. These efforts will necessitate creating all the facilities mentioned above for their vehicles and systems. The cost of any given single launch is rolled into one number, but it must cover a multitude of expenses. Amortized over many decades, they may eventually pay for it all, but only if they can get enough business to fly their vehicles regularly and often. With NASA as their principal customer, will enough flights be purchased to take these New Space companies to the level they need in order to make a profit and survive?
Finally, Thompson asked, what is exploration if not living and working in space and contributing to the economy? He understands that exploration is more than going somewhere and planting a flag or collecting some rocks. Each time NASA launches a Shuttle, it puts 100 tons in space. By replacing the orbiter body with a cargo faring, we are creating a heavy lift launch vehicle. This Shuttle side-mount launch vehicle is something that fits the requirements placed on NASA for a new heavy lift vehicle. Its reliability has been consistently improved over the course of more than 30 years of flight experience and is more than adequate for many different kinds of missions throughout cislunar space. This is where the focus of our space program ought to be – and a zone of space specifically mentioned in the new agency authorization.
Preserving, adapting and using what we already have is smarter than destroying capability and starting again from scratch. We are putting faith in the emergence of space systems that will do what we want, when and where we want. We are told that to nurture and foster other providers of space access, we must throw away the bird in our hand and plant a revolutionary new bush, hopeful that it will grow and attract a variety of new birds. I leave it to you to decide the wisdom of such a restrictive course. Plant the bush but don't throw away the only bird we now hold. We must be fully conscious about the realities of non-existent systems and preserve the space transportation capability on which America can rely.
