Or should it be "wither VSE and ESAS"?
My analysis on what the presidential election could mean for NASA's current plans for human spaceflight, over at Popular Mechanics.
Bottom line: don't expect "steady as you go..."
[Update late evening]
Mark Whittington has his usual (i.e., idiotic) response:
The problem here is that without a lot of those billions being spent not only on technology development, but operational experience, it will be a long time before private business gets us to the Moon, if at all. And we they do get there, they may have to have visas signed by the Chinese who will have beaten everyone there.
Yes, [rolling eyes] having to have visas signed by the Chinese to land on the moon should be our biggest concern. Not the fact that NASA has chosen an architecture that is fundamentally incapable of establishing a fully-fledged lunar presence and is unlikely to survive politically (and ignoring the fact that the Chinese are on a track to get a human on the moon sometime in the next century, at their current rate...).
Rand's retort was characteristic of him as always (g). By the way, I suspect that the Chinese will be ready for a manned lunar effort about 2020 or perhaps a little later. Not 2101.
Rand's retort was characteristic of him as always (g).
By that, I'll assume you mean, logical, and based in reality.
By the way, I suspect that the Chinese will be ready for a manned lunar effort about 2020 or perhaps a little later. Not 2101.
Mark, if there were some basis in reality for your "suspicions" we might be concerned. But since you've never been able to establish one, we remain amused. Please lay out a rational program schedule by which the Chinese would be on the moon a dozen years from now, and reconcile it with their progress to date.
For extra credit, demonstrate how they will have enough of a presence there to demand (and get) visa stamps for anywhere on the lunar surface.
If you can't, then please stop making a fool of yourself on the Internet. For what it's worth, I fully understand that the latter is a futile request.
Please lay out a rational program schedule by which the Chinese would be on the moon a dozen years from now, and reconcile it with their progress to date.
I'll bite on that one. :-)
The next US President appoints Pete Worden as administrator of NASA. Pete asks Congress to fund a $5 billion prize for the first American to establish a base on the Moon. Five years later, the prize is won by a Chinese-American billionaire -- to the dismay and astonishment of Mark Whittington who can't understand how free enterprise could possibly beat out centrally planned Marxist Socialism.
:-)