Click here for the details at Space.com. Here's a photo-shopped pic of what the lifeboat would look like, in action, approaching the ISS (assuming there were survivors, otherwise, what's the point?).
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
OBAMA vs U.S. Manned Space Program: Lifeboat ORION
Well, well, well. And they said Stephen Colbert was just a comedian! Within days of Colbert's lamenting (with the help of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson) the death via Obama of US Manned Spaceflight , the Orion-part of the scrapped Constellation program has been revived ... as an unmanned lifeboat ... in case there's a disaster at the ISS or Bigelow space stations!
Click here for the details at Space.com. Here's a photo-shopped pic of what the lifeboat would look like, in action, approaching the ISS (assuming there were survivors, otherwise, what's the point?).
Click here for the details at Space.com. Here's a photo-shopped pic of what the lifeboat would look like, in action, approaching the ISS (assuming there were survivors, otherwise, what's the point?).
Neil Armstrong weighs in, here.
ReplyDeleteIt's not pretty.
Phil Platt of Bad Astronomy fame at the Discover Blogs has the following up regarding this business, here.
ReplyDeleteHere is my contribution:
Phil, what are the latest figures you have on the loss of permanent jobs at Cape Canaveral and in Houston regarding this policy change?
I believe America will be going to Mars and the asteroids as much as I believed Bush’s “pledge” to return us to the moon by 2020 (or Spiro Agnew’s “pledge” to have us on Mars in 2000). Politicians say all kinds of things once their “political capital” is spent, and I believe none of them.
Buzz Aldrin is pro-Obama on this and Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Eugene Cernan are against. Which of them has been dancing the most of late?
In the whole (yet horrible) “Robots vs. Humans” debate of which is more important regarding future space exploration, I come firmly down on the side that BOTH are important.
The next flag on the moon will be India’s or China’s.