Word: stationed
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...near-Earth orbit to which the space agency has confined itself since the 1970s. Back on the table is human exploration of the moon; back on the table is human exploration of Mars. Swept to the floor--or at least to the side--is the overbudget, underproducing International Space Station and the increasingly creaky, increasingly lethal shuttle fleet...
...close to home, as two shuttle disasters have shown. That means a return to something closer to the capsule model that served the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs so well. Boeing Aerospace has already been designing a podlike crew transfer vehicle to get astronauts to and from the space station and to take a little of the load off the shuttle. The design won a lot of backing in Congress and the space community after the Columbia disaster grounded the entire shuttle fleet. The President's Mars-and-moon plan calls for the development of what is being called...
...bogged down on the moon and never get to Mars, at least not in this century," warns Murray. That kind of long-term detour, says Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars, is "the same swindle we fell for on the space station...
Perhaps the biggest hole in Bush's speech had to do not with technology but with bureaucracy. It's hard to overstate the stultifying impact the International Space Station has had on NASA since it was first proposed by Ronald Reagan in 1984. The project--advertised initially at $8 billion--is woefully behind schedule and nowhere near completion, and may well cross the $100 billion mark before it's done. No one realistically pretends that any commercial manufacturing will ever take place aboard the thing--a key selling point 20 years ago. Nor can there be much research...
...fact that the Bush proposal didn't kill the orbiting cash hog outright may be because it can't be killed. With contractors and subcontractors across 22 states and uncounted electoral constituencies, the station has long been a kind of cunningly planted political kudzu, impossible to pull out stem and root. If domestic commitments didn't lock the station in place, commitments to NASA's 15 international partners certainly do. And while the station thrives, so too must the three living shuttles, since they exist largely to ferry up parts and crews. "The space station is a failed dream...