EDWARD REID Tallahassee, Fla., July 27, 2011 President Obama's manned spaceflight plans, while far from audacious, reflect an unfortunate reality: There is little political will in Congress to adequately finance a return to the Moon in 10 years and land on Mars shortly thereafter.
During a time when NASA's budget is especially tenuous and after the Obama administration essentially put the agency's human spaceflight plans on hold, I am bewildered by NASA's plan to squander nearly $2 million in taxpayer money on radiation experiments on monkeys.
This week, there are signs that it might be about to.At the behest of the president, NASA has been undergoing an independent review of its human-spaceflight plans.
At the behest of Barack Obama's newly empowered Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), NASA, America's space agency, is submitting to an independent review of its human-spaceflight plans in order to determine their future.In truth, NASA has never really recovered its direction since the triumph of the Apollo project.
Unimaginable wealth has brought Elon Musk a lot of benefits, from being able to build a private spaceflight company to planning a magnet-powered vacuum tube supersonic transport system between LA and San Francisco – and be taken seriously.
In planning for spaceflight, the goal should be to make the launching system as robust as possible, and then launch rockets frequently so you can experiment and improve on the spacecraft and payloads that carry out missions.
For example, the private spaceflight company SpaceX plans to build a rocket so big it would "make the Apollo moon rocket look small," as stated by the company's CEO, Elon Musk, on "CBS This Morning on Feb. 3, 2014.
For human spaceflight, the plan lays out a continuation of China's steady but unrushed efforts to develop technologies and extend its capacities.
In planning for long-duration spaceflight, it will be important to accurately model the exposure of astronauts to heavy ions in the galactic cosmic rays (GCR).
