Word: space
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...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...
...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...
Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who built the NASA-centric programs that were canceled on Monday, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, no fan of the new approach. "With this policy," he says, "the U.S. human space-flight program is grounded indefinitely, because no date for the availability of commercial human spaceflight can be reliably predicted...
...even if it could be predicted, Griffin's successor has been vague about where Americans will go once they do get back to space. Yes, there's the ISS. But after that? The best that Bolden could offer in his presentation Monday were vague promises of "people fanning out across the solar system," with the collaborative help of "nations around the world." Just which nations will join the U.S. and when we will all go Bolden didn't say. At several points, however, he did encourage his audience to "imagine" all of these things...