07.22
You know i don’t post anything often, but I’m really disgusted by the space industry lately (double wammy I work in the aerospace industry) with the shuttle retirement and various cancellations throughout NASA that may be pending ::cough, cough:: JWST.
I find some things very frustratating…
Here was the x-33 prototype:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-33
It was supposed to pave the way for the Venture star:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
So NASA wasted ~1 billion dollars in tax dollars… They had it 85% complete and the launch facility 100% complete and all the parts to make the craft complete, back in 2001!
LM even solved the fuel tank issue after it was cancelled… I don’t understand!?
LM decided it wasn’t profitable to complete?! Are they nuts?!! That’s assuming that they owned the craft after it was cancelled which usually isn’t the case, NASA should still own it and all the hardware, because they paid to have it built.
If LM was smart, they would have purchased the craft, finished and then could have sold space to private companies and NASA for half the cost, it would normally cost for a shuttle launch and at 1/10th the operating cost, LM would have made a killing.
It just doesn’t make any sense, I haven’t seen the Aerospike thruster technology on anything else, so either the government and LM are that defunct or they put a black cloak on the whole project and anything since to have come from it is not publicly known.
The same thing happened with the Constellation program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program which was the program to go back to the moon make a base and eventually pave the way for a mars mission and a mining mission to an asteroid…over budget and late yes…worth it? Probably if this was going to be the vehicle to be used for the next 30 years.
and its predecessor the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program which was supposed to have a manned mission to Mars back in 1985! And a Moon base already established in the late 70’s.
Meanwhile China, is still going full bore on their moon mission and lately have been posting outstanding scientific achievements in nanotechnology and Quantum entanglement and other various high profile research projects.
I think we are really positioning ourselves to get passed up in advancement of science and tech… or something sneaky is going on, which I hope is the case instead of nothing which looks more like actuality.
The only thing on the table is for SpaceX to maybe keep NASA in space, by using the Constellation program’s Orion crew module.
If these guys succeed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEAT_1X_Tycho_Brahe in launching people and cargo into space for $50,000 total cost using polyurethane fuel, I think this will put everything else to shame…now granted it’s a single seater and completely on a shoe string budget with many failures, but at least they are trying a bottom up approach to spaceflight, which may eventually pay off.
That’s all rant over.
