Obama to pop down to Endeavour launch Barack Obama will pop down to Kennedy Space Center for next week's launch of space shuttle Endeavour, Reuters reports. The president may be joined by Gabrielle Giffords, wife of Endeavour commander Mark Kelly. She's still recovering from the head wound she received in the 8 January Tuscon shooting, and doctors will need to …
> $1.121 Trillion has been spent on the war Iraq / Afghanistan to date which has a few down sides as far as domestic programs like the space program are concerned.
President Obama's spending programs are estimated to be running roughly $1.6 Trillion in the Red for this year alone!!!!!!
HA HA HA HA HA !!!
If the United States ELIMINATED the ENTIRE DEFENSE BUDGET - INCLUDING THE WARS - fired them all and left everyone stranded where they are at, allowed the ships to sink, planes to drop out of the sky, the nuclear waste to degrade, the budget would still not be in balance !!!
LOL!
Suggesting that Iraq and Afghanistan spending is large is so completely silly, it makes me wonder where people are getting ANY of their information!!!
Right now, in the U.S. - war spending is such a tiny portion of the budget - they are fly turds. Those are the only things in the budget, which are actually the clear-cut constitutional obligation of the American Federal Government.
Americans and Western media are so incredibly ill informed - they actually BELIEVE that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and military expenditures are the core of the American budget problems. They are not, it was the increased in domestic spending, for politician vote-buying programs.
These vote-buying domestic programs are what politicians are burdening the children of the next generation with.
If I could only leave about 1000 FAIL signs on the top of this article
As if the traffic won't be crap enough with all the "fair-weather" space gawkers.
Actually, Obama has done the only positive thing since Kennedy and get incentives and a coherent government policy in place favoring commercial space ventures. Otherwise it was very very difficult to get any monetary investment, because nobody knew if the gov't would step on things.
Then of course Congress has to screw that up and try to force "business as usual" with huge gov't supported pork-barrel projects. Unfortunately they then turn around and DON'T support the projects they force on NASA. - "you will go back to the moon and build a huge ARES rocket to support ATK, Lockmart & Boeing... BUT we won't give you any money to do that..."
AIUI from discussions on sci.space.history, where there's still a few people that know their stuff in amongst the nutjobs, Obama didn't have much of a choice by the time he got his dibs on things: the end-of-life process was well under way, with e.g. the external tank production line already stood down, and so on. Reversing it would have been enormously expensive, and as has already been noted, would rely on Congress producing the funds.
On top of that, Shuttle is enormously expensive: ~500M per flight, or about 70M per seat, while the Russians were able to sell seats at ~20M (and presumably make a profit on that).
Meanwhile, all its marvelous and unique capabilities have become obsolete. Nobody's interested in returning satellites from LEO - it's cheaper to build a new one. Micro-g experiments? That's what the ISS is for. Hubble servicing? Hubble is about to be out-stripped by ground-based telescopes, thanks to advances in active optics and computation. And so on.
I'm sorry to see it go, and I'll be looking out for it on the final flights, but it's time to move on.
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