If you are wondering whether or not Rick Perry is running, I think this is pretty good evidence — he’s slamming Obama for something he didn’t do:

The Obama administration has left “American astronauts with no alternative but to hitchhike into space,” Perry said in a press release.

…Perry criticized the lack of a clear path forward for NASA.

“Unfortunately, with the final landing of the Shuttle Atlantis and no indication of plans for future missions, this administration has set a significantly different milestone by shutting down our nation’s legacy of leadership in human spaceflight and exploration,” Perry said.

There are plenty of plans for future missions — people either remain blind to them, or are pretending they don’t exist for political reasons. And to blame Obama for shutting down the Shuttle with no immediate replacement is absurd. This is one of the few things that he really can blame on George Bush. There was nothing that Obama could have done, coming into office two and a half years ago, that would have had anything flying right now (at least nothing that Congress would have found politically acceptable), and it was really even too late to keep the Shuttle going. If he’s made a decision to do that then, they might have been able to start flying again in a year or so from now, but there would have been no consensus for spending the money necessary to do so. Space policy was a mess then, and it still is, but that’s mostly due to the porkers in Congress, and at least we’re not wasting as much money on Constellation, and particularly Ares I.

Anyway, I don’t know if Perry believes this, and is just ignorant of space policy (likely) or if he’s just cynically mistating to take advantage of an opportunity to bash his potential future opponent on an historic day. I do hope that he can be educated on the policy, but I fear that he will be “educated” by the likes of Kay Bailey Hutchis…

Hmmmmmmm….

This could present an interesting opportunity…

And interesting end-of-Shuttle post from Karl Schroeder (at Charles Stross’s blog):

A couple of years ago I sat down to lunch with a prominent astronaut, a Shuttle commander and space station veteran. We talked about space development and alternative paths to what NASA has actually done since 1970. I told him that what I’d been waiting for ever since Skylab was a variable-gravity research station, because it hadn’t taken us long to accumulate lots of evidence that lack of gravity is bad for the human body, and because lower gravity was the only physiological variable for the Moon, Mars and other possible destinations that we couldn’t currently test for. It’s also one of the most important; a variable-gravity station could tell us whether unaltered humans could live long-term on Mars, for instance. The astronaut asked me how I would be build this station, and I said, “Rotate two booster modules, one habitable, linked by tethers.” Much like Skylab, and very simple to construct.

He shook his head. “Tethers in space,” he said, “break.”

I blinked at him. “Well, if they break, you build ’em stronger, make ’em out of something else, or you use a number of them.” I didn’t quite say, “This isn’t rocket science,” but really, it’s basic engineering.

He shook his head even more vehemently. “Tethers in space,” he snapped past gritted teeth, “break.”

I had no reply. I had been watching him; he became visibly tense every time the conversation moved away from strict NASA doctrine.

If accurate, it does sound like a strange exchange. It’s like saying “rocket engines blow up” in response to a proposal to launch a rocket. Clearly, tethers have broken in space, but it’s a bizarre logic to thereby infer that all tethers in space will break. If you put in the proper structural safety factor (and aren’t heating it up by running a current through it electrodynamically), of course there is no reason that a tether need break. Being an astronaut is no guarantee of being a good engineer (or even necessarily logical). And many of them, of course, don’t have an engineering background.

[Via Chris Gerrib]

There’s a pretty good article on the history and the future over at Wired. This isn’t right, though:

It took the crash of Challenger in 1986, after which all surviving space shuttles were grounded for three years, to convince the military that it could not rely on the huge, complex craft for all its orbital missions. That was the beginning of the end of the Pentagon’s love affair with the shuttle, and in its autumn years, it did very little military work that we know of.

The Pentagon never had a love affair with the Shuttle to end — it always felt like it had been forced to use it, and (fortunately) fought to keep Titan, Delta and Atlas alive, despite the national policy that all was going to be launched on the Shuttle. This paid off after Challenger (though the other vehicles had failures as well — 1986 was probably the worst year for the space program since the early days).

POGO has filed a FOIA on NASA’s heavy-lift program.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a story on the SLS by NPR. I found this comment by Bill Nelson interesting:

Congress recently told NASA to build that system by 2016, and to use existing industry contracts as much as possible. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew on space shuttle Columbia, thinks building the big new rocket is what NASA needs to do, no matter where it’s going next.

“Maybe it’s going to be an asteroid, as the president suggested, for 2025,” Nelson says. “It’s possible we may go back to the moon. There may be other destinations. All of these are going to develop as we develop technology. But the first thing we have to have is a big rocket that can get all of these different components and refueling up into Earth orbit.”

So, my question is, Senator, if we’re going to be refueling in earth orbit, why do we need the big rocket? Fuel can go up on small rockets.