Every NASA manned space mission program since it's inception has had GROSS cost over runs. This is NASA's game to get the project approved. The ISS has been a huge white elephant in orbit. How fitting they now want to dump it out of orbit in less than 10 years because they don't want to keep it up. It is time to dump NASA. If we go back to the moon it really will be for Helium-3 (Harrison Schmidt, Apollo 17 moonwalker) for fusion reactors (thank you Philo T. Farnsworth) that can be harvested with robotic systems (e.g. Soviet Lunkhod), or it will be to occupy the military high ground.

LOL @ DPawlowski. Just utterly...wrong.

Anyways, they can cut costs in other areas and just shift funds. Foreign aid for example. Screw helping people that don't like us anyway. You don't like us then I guess you don't like our food. Problem solved.

Dump NASA & the Cost Overrun Coverup:

http://www.comspacewatch.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1312

Nuff said. Go drink your Jim Jones Tang 4 to 6 guy or ask mommy for some more crackers.

The future of moon exploration may end up in the hands of private entrepreneurs who can build cost effective space craft like Rhutan and the French are doing now. Or the Chinese who can tap nearly slave labor to build cheap space craft.

Seriously, I don't see how they expect to run a space program with such a meager budget anyway.

I am pretty sure we are going to regret letting go of space dominance to foreign powers and the private sector. It won't take long for someone to get the bright idea to weaponize space, the ultimate high ground, and lock others out.

Really, do we expect China to NOT do that?

Come now, Thrishmal. I'm sure everyone will be nice to us and not harm us if we simply offer them platitudes and apologize for being arrogant.

Remember, WE'RE the only evil imperialists. Everyone else in the world is just a victim of our evil. If we disban our space program and promise not to weaponize space,

I'm sure the other world powers will do the same.

I always think it's funny when people throw about big numbers to complain about money issues, it's always out of context.

The 2009 budget gives NASA 17.5 billion dollars! Thats awfull! (Lets not mention that the department of defence is planned to get 515.5 billion)

No kidding...
The Stimulus could have set them up for years and actually been useful instead of being wasted on studying the affects of alcohol on filipino prostitutes.

Hopefully the DofD will be putting some of that 515.5 billion into more drones. The sooner we get our soldiers our of "there," the better.

That's funny! Didn't the prez just say he wanted to put NINE HUNDRED BILLION into his health care plan that he hasn't even read?

Let's all let the blind guy drive the bus, eh?

Duncan - whats your point?

Nothing is more important then National Security.
military's are expensive.

as for Nasa, I hope they stop shuttle flights in 2010, and focus on their next step (permanent moon settlement), but not so much so, that they toss the ISS to the wayside.

I think that NASA has just lost it's touch with it's goals and with the support of the American people. We raced for space. We raced for the moon. But now we've put so many dang probes on Mars that it won't be enough of a surpise when we get there. The real limitation isn't the budget, it's the technology. NASA or whatever NASA becomes needs some serious breakthroughs in technology, because at our current technological level a trip to Mars, much less a sustainable Lunar colony, just isn't feasible.

Let's quit screwing around and do some real space travel. We could have done nuclear pulse rockets for years, which just leave our current crappy rockets in the dust (they make a solar-system spanning economy feasible is how awesome they are, very high speeds for relatively low cost). Heck, even nuclear exhaust rockets (where you use the core to heat your propellant rather than detonating bomblets) could blow chemical rockets out of the water. And if you're worried about one accidentally blowing up in the atmosphere or managing the radiation you'd get from even a well thought out pulse ship launch, we've been capable for quite a while of building magnetic launchers that could put lots of material in space at low costs. Sure, the things cost $10 to $40 billion to build, but that number is easily balanced by the fact that you could grab pretty much the whole of the satelite industry (which I think is in the hundreds of billions) by undercutting the guys using rockets.

A magnetic launcher (preferably w/ your own personal nuclear plant to run the thing to reduce the cost of operation even further) would be a heck of an investment right now. It really is a massive project, but it would have the potential to not only take most of the current market for space launches but expand the market greatly with reduced pricing. Dunno how well they work for human freight, I think the acceleration would be too high (though you could get around that, or perhaps turn the power down to whatever accel the user could take then use a secondary stage booster to complete the necessary energy requirement) but most of the money is in launching sats anyway. Now if only I had forty billion dollars.... :D

Miami has a nuclear power plant (Turkey Point) on the coast surrounded by cooling canals. Retrofitting it for magnetic launches is a possiblity with trajectories over the ocean. It would sure stimulate the economy. Of course, naysayers and government red tape will put the kabosh on anything like that.

The way they borrow and spend, I don't believe money is the problem. We went to the moon before they say. Did we really go the first time?

It is becoming very obvious that there are strong powers at work here who do not want cheap space travel at all! If space travel ever became cheap, then the value of Earth land and property would plumit as we all go and live off world!

I am sure that there are people who hate the idea of mankind expanding into space, and that they are the ones funding the nutjobs who claim that we haven't even gone to the Moon!

"I am sure that there are people who hate the idea of mankind expanding into space, and that they are the ones funding the nutjobs who claim that we haven't even gone to the Moon!"

You mean religious nutjobs who are afraid of what we'll find out there or who, according to the whole Intelligent Design fantasy, think the planets and stars were only put there for us to look at.

I am not from the X-gen like most of the bloggers' on here I lived through the space race. Thanks to most of the liberal presidents from 1970 on Nasa was cut back and cut back, most of the great minds left and nothing new was coming in. I have watched it go from hay day to nay say. I will be the first to agree they don't always have the best goals in mind, and thanks to Clinton we don't have a shuttle replacement (which was already designed and testing by the way, talk about money wasted). Nasa need a strong leader to set goals that challenge us to go further than we think we can today. That is what Nasa was all about. If any of you even have a concept of what it took to get the rovers on Mars, you would be staggered. The space station is another item that got cut and budgeted don to something that was just a novelty not the structure it was suppose to be. It was to be our first space port for building ships and a launch site, the research part was just gravy. Now that talk like they just want to trash it, boy that makes sense to me. I was involved in the original design and I can tell it was a lot different than what we have today. Sad that people are so short sighted when it comes to what we learn in space exploration and where we need to be putting our efforts. I wait to see what happens next but I am very sadden by current event. You talk about money waste, don't even get me started on Bail outs and cash for clunker programs that have done nothing to help our country as a whole.

In the early 2020's when the Chinese land on the moon ahead of us I think it'll be a moment like Sputnik was in the late 50's. It will shake this country and education and scientific efforts will race to catch up. The question is, will we have the resources to actually catch up, or will we have fallen so far behind that we can't.

If we switched to hydrogen from water, we would produce heavy water. Heavy water allows you to run un-enriched uranium in nuclear reactors (lower cost). If we use recycled solar pannels from city trash, use them in a special 20ft cealing for the highways (more jobs temperary and perminant), and sell the cheap electricity to the feul stations that produce them theirselves providing low cost feul and good priced heavy water.
We can work on mass production of carbon nanotubes. carbon nanotubes can be used in conjunction with metal and other matirials to build a space elevator including massive ammounts of the electroactive contracting matirials.
we can then use a mix of chemical rocketry, nuclear rocketry and veriable thrust ion engines(first second and third gears) as needed to go from earth to the training centers on the moon (easily constructed after elevator finished) then on to mars and venus. venus has oxygen but it needs to be separated out (well worth it).
use the ferisoxide on mars and a bunch of powdered aluminum to melt into mars hopefully creating a path for a high power nuclear bomb to further heat up the inside of mars and speeding up the movement of the moltencenter increasing the magnetic field.

The stronger magnetic field helps the new atmosphere (taken from abundant venus) stay.

why not pay up that way?

Every piece of technology that we have today comes from the efforts of the space program and the goal to land a man on the moon. It was a time of unsurpassed ability and optimism during the height of the Vietnam War. It was our greatest achievement and for that matter the worlds greatest achievement. This can do attitude has for some reason been lost to the new generations. The things I see today amaze me as to how far we have declined, we have people who are just as intelligent as ever but they don’t focus or are unmotivated, this is what the instant communication of twitter and my space have given us the inability to focus as a group to achieve the seemingly unachievable. The space program focused the most brilliant people that probably to date have ever existed into completing a goal many people thought could not be achieved in twice the time that was set aside. Not only did we have to invent everything that got us to the moon, we had to build it, and make sure it didn’t fail. This with the technology of a slide rule and a mans mind. Do yourselves a favor and study what was done and see how it was done then make your observations don’t assume anything anyone tells you is correct. There are many sources to look over this archival information and if you haven’t I believe you will amazed as to what was accomplished. I think the shuttle program has taken a lot of heat over its failure or success, I believe that this comes from the misconception because it seems to be routine and ordinary that it is without its’ risks. The similarity of boarding an airliner and boarding a shuttle seems to be what the general public thinks is happening. Nothing could be further from the truth to put it simply you are accelerating and object to over 25,000 miles and hour taking it into an absolute vacuum and extreme temperature variations and then re-entering at many of the same speeds and adverse thermal temperatures, and at the same time making sure crew and equipment aren’t destroyed all this with a zero tolerance for error. Every shuttle flight is a subset of our moon program, it is an amazing thing. Why do you think no one else except the Soviet Union has come close. The Chinese are using old but proven technology. I am very optimistic that we have the talent to do anything still, we just need to work together and set some goals. Without goals we will accomplish nothing. We of all generations have to understand and respect old ways but be open to new ones. If we are to conquer the problems we have on earth it is critical that we develop the same type of attitude and goals that the space program has given us, a time and a date for instance to solve our power problem. You would find that who ever the president was if he or she got on a national broadcast and said within 10 years the United States would no longer be dependent on outside energy sources that the world would sit up and take notice. The prices of oil would plummet because the world knows that when we as a people set a goal nothing will stop us from achieving that goal. That in my mind is what aerospace has given us all the can do attitude that can overcome any adversity.

Every piece of technology that we have today comes from the efforts of the space program and the goal to land a man on the moon. It was a time of unsurpassed ability and optimism during the height of the Vietnam War. It was our greatest achievement and for that matter the worlds greatest achievement. This can do attitude has for some reason been lost to the new generations. The things I see today amaze me as to how far we have declined, we have people who are just as intelligent as ever but they don’t focus or are unmotivated, this is what the instant communication of twitter and my space have given us the inability to focus as a group to achieve the seemingly unachievable. The space program focused the most brilliant people that probably to date have ever existed into completing a goal many people thought could not be achieved in twice the time that was set aside. Not only did we have to invent everything that got us to the moon, we had to build it, and make sure it didn’t fail. This with the technology of a slide rule and a mans mind. Do yourselves a favor and study what was done and see how it was done then make your observations don’t assume anything anyone tells you is correct. There are many sources to look over this archival information and if you haven’t I believe you will amazed as to what was accomplished. I think the shuttle program has taken a lot of heat over its failure or success, I believe that this comes from the misconception because it seems to be routine and ordinary that it is without its’ risks. The similarity of boarding an airliner and boarding a shuttle seems to be what the general public thinks is happening. Nothing could be further from the truth to put it simply you are accelerating and object to over 25,000 miles and hour taking it into an absolute vacuum and extreme temperature variations and then re-entering at many of the same speeds and adverse thermal temperatures, and at the same time making sure crew and equipment aren’t destroyed all this with a zero tolerance for error. Every shuttle flight is a subset of our moon program, it is an amazing thing. Why do you think no one else except the Soviet Union has come close. The Chinese are using old but proven technology. I am very optimistic that we have the talent to do anything still, we just need to work together and set some goals. Without goals we will accomplish nothing. We of all generations have to understand and respect old ways but be open to new ones. If we are to conquer the problems we have on earth it is critical that we develop the same type of attitude and goals that the space program has given us, a time and a date for instance to solve our power problem. You would find that who ever the president was if he or she got on a national broadcast and said within 10 years the United States would no longer be dependent on outside energy sources that the world would sit up and take notice. The prices of oil would plummet because the world knows that when we as a people set a goal nothing will stop us from achieving that goal. That in my mind is what aerospace has given us all the can do attitude that can overcome any adversity.