NASA / Jim Grossmann
OBAMA VISITS THE SPACE COAST... Earlier today, the President flew down to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to make a speech about his new plans for NASA. In his speech, Obama talked about how he wanted U.S. astronauts to visit an asteroid by 2025, finally get to Mars by the 2030s, continue to promote private companies like SpaceX to launch cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS), convert the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle into an ISS lifeboat instead (rather than canceling Orion as previously planned), and authorizing NASA to finalize a new design for a heavy-lift launch vehicle (HLV) by 2015.
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2015. What I find funny about this is that Obama wants NASA to finalize the design of the HLV a little more than one year before the President would complete a 2nd term in the Oval Office (assuming he got one). So even if NASA does design a new rocket that would efficiently and cheaply take astronauts out of low Earth orbit again, the space agency would be at the mercy of yet another White House administration that would make even more drastic (RE: crappy) changes to the U.S. space program by early 2017...and scrap the HLV and any other thing NASA will try to get done once the space shuttle program ends this year.
Awesome.
NASA / Jack Pfaller
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