Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Guess what 424 Million will Get Ya....



What WILL $424 million get you if you are NASA?  Well this pretty chunk of change will get you, according to a recent AP article: 
  • training and transporting of six astronauts to and from the ISS in 2016 and the first half of 2017 in Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
hummm something tells me that the Russians are not as desperate for Uncle Sam script as they once might have once been.....

Oh and look, I know NASA would have a MUCH larger bill if a country came to us and said hey we would like to send six of our spacemen to the ISS aboard the Shuttle....what is the charges?   But really I am going to do a NETWORK here and I encourage others to do the same! 
 
Now I could turn this into a big rant....but I won't, but if this is not a case of just not looking ahead and planning for the future.....mumble mumble mumble

I am pulling my punches here a bit but NASA chief Charles Bolden is pointing a finger right at congress, blaming our present dilemma on Congress' failure to support the President's call for a program that would have more co-operation between the government and private industry calling the initiative the "Commercial Crew Program"  which may in fact allowed the US' lifting program to flourish instead of forcing NASA to extend its' contract with Russia. 

There is more that I think you will find interesting in this recent AFP article

4 comments:

kallamis said...

Well, I'm sure I don't have to say a word here for everyone to know where I stand. We keep forcing the making of tanks even when the army doesn't want them,or need them, and has specifically requested not to have more, but we refuse to fund our own freaking space program which should already have newer shuttles in place and running, or be using the private sector here for our needs.
And I'm shutting up now before I go on one of my tirades.

Beam Me Up said...

you dont know how many times I had to stop and edit...many many many times....

kallamis said...

LOL, I bet. Kind of like me with the book banning I bet. I finally gave up and went on a complete vulgar tirade, then erased it all and rewrote it. It turned out to be the only way.

Beam Me Up said...

I dont know how many times I have had to do just that...! I can remember the last time I wrote an article about space junk. It was like two pages long before I called halt. Basically a don't s..t what you eat kind of thing. It is pretty easy to do if you are passionate.