Saturday, March 12, 2011

Bolden: NASA Can't Build a Heavy Lift Launcher and it Won't - Yahoo! News

Here's the whole thing in a nutshell: Obama wants to kill American manned spaceflight, period.

President Barack Obama canceled the Constellation program with the intent to end any hope of sending Americans beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future. The whole sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 is widely regarded as eye wash, not a serious proposal, more designed to have a pretend space exploration program than to actually have it...

By mandating that a heavy lift launcher and the Orion deep space craft be built by 2016, Congress is signaling that it wants to keep Constellation on life support. Why? Because Congress believes that a future President will reverse President Obama's cancellation of the space exploration program. By keeping a heavy lifter and the Orion alive, Congress is giving that future President the option to send astronauts back to the Moon or elsewhere quicker than otherwise might be the case.

President Obama realizes that too. That is why he has his NASA administrator insisting that a heavy lifter can't be done.

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