The long-term benefits of an off-world colony to our lives would be enormous. Not only would such a colony open the solar system to commercialization, reaping unimaginable wealth from the development of vast resources and energy; it would also establish a new frontier with new possibilities for human liberty. Both in terms of industrial development and political innovation, a colony on Mars could be as important as were the British colonies in America. The future of human progress, and possibly even the future of true freedom, may depend on off-world colonization. In any event, human life certainly will be greatly enhanced by it.
Sigh. I wonder who will be the chairman of the space subcommittee?
Someone should point out to him that the SLS is eating the budget for a lot of JSC programs, and that it isn’t needed to launch Orion or to go beyond LEO.
I’ve raised almost $2400 on the Kickstarter project, with a little over a week to go. By the way, I don’t know if people noticed, but if you click on the video, you’ll see an endorsement from the space-policy teddy bears. Or dogs. Or whatever they are.
The Boeing and SpaceX spacecraft both ranked high on their technical merits. But NASA raised concerns about Boeing’s financial commitment to the public-private sector partnership.
Ferguson said Boeing is thinking about upping its corporate ante, aiming to advance the date of its first piloted test flight.
“We’re looking heavily into getting some additional Boeing investment to move that (late 2016) date to the left significantly, which we think we need to do to keep pace with SpaceX,” Ferguson said.
To me, at this point, their real problem is Atlas prices. They’ll just have to hope that NASA wants to have redundancy in providers, because they can’t compete with Hawthorne on price.