Word: nasa
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...initiative, for now at least, is more about what NASA plans to cancel than what it plans to pursue. The six-year-old Constellation program, which had been focused on developing new boosters, Apollo-like orbiters and a 21st century lunar lander, all with the goal of making long-term stays on the moon possible, will be scrapped, after $9 billion and a single flight of the Ares 1 booster last October. The longer-term goal of venturing out to Mars is being tabled along with it. (See pictures of the Ares rocket...
...place of that program, NASA will tackle a grab bag of other projects: extending the life of the so-far unfinished International Space Station (ISS) until 2020, and spending $4.9 billion to develop better robotics, $7.8 billion to develop new flight techniques such as in-orbit fuel depots and closed-loop life-support systems, and $3 billion to develop new unmanned ships. There are no entirely unworthy objectives in that list (with the possible exception of the ISS), but there's also no clear way of getting humans back into space after 2010, once the shuttles are mothballed. What...
...International Space Station is one of the only major stakes NASA has left in the manned space game, and postshuttle it will be the only one. For a while the U.S. won't even have a way to go back and forth between the ISS and earth without hitching a ride on a Russian ship. The station was proposed in 1984 and has been under construction since 1998, and so far not a lick of truly valuable science has come from it. Its intended mission has changed and changed and changed again over the years, from materials manufacturing to zero...
More problematic is NASA's planned abdication of its role as a developer of manned boosters and spacecraft. Instead, it will become a shopper, and leave the designing and metal-cutting to the private sector. To an extent, this has always been the case. The first Americans to orbit the earth blasted off aboard Atlas and Titan rockets - both built by commercial companies as missile launchers and later adapted to human flight. The Saturn moon rockets were the first designed and built exclusively for humans, but even those were contracted out. Still, it was NASA minds that drove the designs...
...most intriguing new addition to the private rocket game is Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), founded by Elon Musk, better known as the man who created PayPal. SpaceX has impressed and indeed charmed NASA, and not without reason. Its Falcon 1 rocket has been launched five times; the last two successfully reached earth orbit and the last one lofted a commercial payload. What's more, the operation - with 800 employees working principally in Los Angeles and central Texas - has something of the young, hyper-caffeinated energy of the old NASA. The space agency has already inked a deal for 15 Falcon...