NASA’s recent woes took root with loss of space shuttle program

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by  Alex Stuckey Oct. 19, 2018

When the Hubble Space Telescope’s mechanics got finicky 25 years ago, NASA scientists didn’t worry too much — they sent astronauts aboard a space shuttle to service the groundbreaking observatory.

Even 10 or 15 years ago, crews made regular trips on a shuttle to the International Space Station to conduct research, learn about life in space, and build and repair the orbiting laboratory that they shared with international partners.

But NASA is much different today than it was back then, faced with a new reality driven home by a series of unfortunate events earlier this month that left the Hubble darkened, a much-anticipated modern moon trip mired in questions and an American astronaut grounded after a Russian spacecraft took a terrifying tumble through the sky.

The incidents may seem unrelated, but experts say they can be traced back to the early 2000s as the end of the space shuttle program neared and the agency started trying to do too much with too little.

“The sudden finality of the shuttle program is what leads to this, but the root cause of that is not having enough money to do all the things we wanted to,” said Herb Baker, a former NASA manager who retired last year after 42 years.

The decision to end the shuttle program came in 2004 as President George W. Bush’s administration shifted its focus to frontiers beyond Earth’s orbit. But with too few coins to divvy up amongst its many projects and a lack of political direction, the history-making agency instead has been forced to change course virtually every four years as political winds change.

“NASA’s budget and policy seem to be based on Twitter,” said Keith Cowing, editor of NASA Watch, a website devoted to space news. “It’s like, ‘How can I come up with something in 280 characters?’ We can’t think long term. We can’t think multi-administrations.”

That leaves space agency leaders wondering what will happen after the 2020 election. President Donald Trump has pushed to bolster human exploration — with an eye toward the moon and then onto Mars — but what happens if he isn’t re-elected is anyone’s guess.

Policy fluctuations “can be difficult to weather,” Mark Geyer, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, previously told the Houston Chronicle. “It can cause fluctuations in the space program and that’s hard if you’re trying to move the country forward. But that’s life, so you need to develop strategies to navigate that.”

Changing priorities

Bush’s decision to end the shuttle program followed the loss of the entire crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, when the spacecraft disintegrated over northeast Texas and Louisiana as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

The gargantuan shuttles were perfect for carting modules into low Earth orbit for the space station’s construction, but that work would be finished in 2010, he said during a 2004 speech at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The expensive shuttle fleet, in essence, would be rendered unnecessary.

It was time, Bush said, to explore again.

“In the past 30 years, no human being has set foot on another world or ventured farther up into space than 386 miles, roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Boston, Massachusetts,” Bush said. “America has not developed a new vehicle to advance human exploration in space in nearly a quarter century. It is time for America to take the next steps.”

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/NASA-s-recent-woes-took-root-with-loss-of-space-13319032.php

[Cyber Liberty]

FTA:

President Barack Obama axed the Constellation Program in 2010 — a year before the last shuttle flight — saying it was too costly and inefficient. He chose instead to fund the construction of NASA’s most powerful rocket ever built, the Space Launch System, to send a crewed Orion spacecraft to an asteroid by 2025 and then near Mars by the 2030s.

The decision stunned NASA personnel, who had already spent five years and about $9 billion on Constellation. Bolden equated the move to “a death in the family,” according to Space.com.

IOW, Obastard sabotaged the program, which would have been flying by now, with a program that guaranteed we would not have any manned space program for the foreseeable future.  I wonder why a Moslem President would do that?

[Wingnut]

FTA:
IOW, Obastard sabotaged the program, which would have been flying by now, with a program that guaranteed we would not have any manned space program for the foreseeable future.  I wonder why a Moslem President would do that?

The man was an enigma.  /s