His announcement of the cancellation of the Constellation program (as misguided as that was; for a better idea, look at Direct Launcher), with no suggestion of a real plan for a replacement for the program, means the end of the American manned space program. The idea of "repurposing" the Orion crew capsule as an escape capsule for the International Space Station is worse than a joke -- since it will be an escape capsule that could not be used; without the Ares I booster, we will have no way of getting Orion to the ISS. Ares I was just barely powerful enough to lift Orion, and then only after Orion's weight was substantially reduced. Does NASA have another booster that can lift that much mass into orbit? (If the answer to this is yes, then why did they need to design Ares I in the first place?)
Dear Leader tossed out a lifeline in the form of a new heavy launch vehicle. But with nothing but vague plans for when it might be built or used, he more or less forgot to hold on to the other end of the lifeline, letting it drift off into space. The minimal increase in NASA's budget, directed to the design of the new heavy launch vehicle and new robotic space probe missions (most of which are climate research satellites), is also another maneuver being used to destroy the American space program.
Why do I say this? Because I remember what happened after the Apollo program was discontinued in the 1970's. While we waited for the space shuttle to make its maiden voyage, NASA's plans for unmanned probes to the planets were slowly, one-by-one, pared down or canceled. The shuttle itself was pared down as well, in addition to being twisted from its original design to satisfy the military who then never used it, leading to some of the obvious difficulties that the STS system has demonstrated over the years -- its high operational cost and slow turn-around time being two of the more obvious ones. In fact, at one point, the entire shuttle program was in danger of being scrapped. (Of course, if that had happened and the technology had been diverted into something similar to Direct Launcher, we would likely be much farther along in space exploration and at a lower cost, but that's a 'what if' that can be endlessly debated for a long time.) I also recall that a number of different interplanetary probes were scaled back or canceled under Clinton; the New Horizons mission to Pluto would have been one of these if not for the public's outcry. For some reason, the American people are very curious about Pluto. Maybe because it's on the frontier, and the frontier spirit of America has yet to be extinguished.
And that's what's going to happen to all these proposals. The robotic missions will be designed and planned but never built or launched -- except, of course, the climate research satellites, which are unnecessary. The heavy launch vehicle will never get off the drawing boards before the budget funds are diverted (to the climate research satellites) or canceled. The ISS will eventually become a victim of the budget ax, all in the name of "deficit reduction" while the US government spends ever more money on union-supporting 'stimulus' bills, 'corporate' bailouts, the exponentially malignant costs of abominable ObamaCare program, and climate research satellites that will show what we already know, that AGW is a myth.
Why? Because the Democrats don't have any desire to explore space. It has been the goal of every Democratic President since Kennedy to kill the space program. (Except for Johnson, who begrudgingly continued the space program as tribute to Kennedy. If he had known that Kennedy's only reason for supporting the space program was its Cold War propaganda value, and that his real attitude was that if not for that reason "we shouldn't be spending this kind of money, because I'm not that interested in space", Johnson may have killed Apollo from the outset and mankind might even now not yet have set foot upon the Moon.)
This decision will also lead to significant increases in unemployment (at a time when jobs are already scarce) -- not just at NASA, but in all the companies that build the rockets and probes and support systems for the missions, and then cascading out into the companies that provide the parts for the other companies, then to the raw material providers, and finally out into the retail an service sectors which will no longer be getting the monies spent by all these newly unemployed workers. Government spending on the space program is the only place where that spending actually does create jobs. So naturally this is the program that Dear Leader wants to cut.
The other ridiculous part of Dear Leader's plans is the idea that we are going to let private companies take over the job of providing access to low earth orbit (where ISS resides). This ideas is bone headed in many ways. First off, only one company, Space Exploration Technologies (aka SpaceX) has ever launched anything into orbit, and they have a 40% success rate. You want to be an astronaut on top of that rocket? Didn't think so. Only the government can accept the liability of a manned space program, and without some kind of legal protection, probably the unmanned variety as well. Let just one of these private companies kill an astronaut or, God forbid, drop a booster onto a populated area, and the resulting court judgements will effectively kill the entire private space industry instantaneously. I live right along the path where the pieces of Columbia came to Earth after it disintegrated on reentry, and I can assure you it was only by the grace and mercy of God that no one on the ground was hurt or killed. So it can, and will, happen.
There are several commentaries on the Web praising Obama for his bold new plan. For example, look at The Martian Chronicles, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog, and at Quantum Rocketry. These are written by people who haven't seemed to learn that what Dear Leader promises and what he delivers are two very different things. (Transparency and bipartisanship ring any bells?) Other sites such as National Review Online and Gizmodo (here and here). I particularly agree with the opinions at the first Gizmodo link about the benefits from the technological investment in the manned space program that we will lose under this new program and the loss of any kind of inspiration for our society for anyone to want to go into this field. I also will direct you to the comments in this link, especially the one from "Stevox" who says:
Let me put it this way: to assume that private industry could properly step in and replace in any meaningful way the space-travel capabilities of NASA would be like saying that some dude in his basement could take over some of Google's cloud-computing needs with a broadband connection and a few networked VPS'es.
Go to the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport in D.C. and stand underneath the Enterprise in absolute awe of the sheer size of the Shuttle and you'll know exactly what "Stevox" is talking about.
We put men on the moon; we routinely hurl small skyscrapers into orbit; and soon, we'll be reduced to watching popguns toss little cargo packets into the air while the Russians carry up our astronauts. Yeah, I know, the process that led to this state of affairs began long before Dear Leader got involved. His new plan simply seals the deal for decades into the future.
