Space Forum / Space Policy / January 2004

Shuttle keeps flying until 2010, that's 6 more years of agony and a huge
budgetary black hole.
$1billion over 5 years (i.e. $200 million a year) extra is not going to get
anyone anywhere.

It is far worse than I thought.  NASA's budget sees a slight
increase, but one that is clearly not enough to fund a
return humans to the Moon program (let alone a Mars effort).  
Shuttle and ISS appear to be toast in short order.  The U.S.

One of the first thing that strikes you in the face when you look at
Bush's Mars plan is that everything it proposes happens at least five
years into the future, that is, after Bush will be out of office. That
should raise immediate skepticism as to whether this is a serious plan

I'm skeptical.
http://www.interglobal.org/weblog/archives/003365.html#003365

What do you think a minimum cost of a manned plant the flag mission to
Mars would be.
This would be one way. No need for an elaborate base on Mars.  The
astronaut is assummed expendible. The glory for them and their family

Can we afford it?
How much manned vs. unmanned?  What will the scientists, who so often
prefer unmanned missions (more bang for the buck), have to say?
We can assume the contractors will like it, along with the people in

What form will it take?
I think it's pretty likely that it will launch on top of a medium-sized
expendable rocket, in the old-fashioned way.  But how will it return?
,------------------------------------------------------------------.

I just now had a probably-goofy idea I'll offer for your flaming
pleasure:
Might it be practical to have a system for launching from the Moon
(to Earth and elsewhere) that is based on the old rail-launch scheme,

Henry Spencer wrote:

Please rank these chronologically (earliest to latest):
A) Space Shuttle Return to Flight
B) ATV launch
C) Spaceship One Space Flight Attempt

Hi. I was wondering if Mitchell Burnside Clapp's paper
on dense-hydrocarbon-fueled launch vehicles is available
online anywhere?

Ok, so the following seem to be teams moving towards usable
hardware and a launch:
    * Armadillo
    * Scaled Composites

That's Fox News' title for my column.  I just called it "Daring."
The third in a trilogy, and I think that I'm overwraught, or at least
overWrighted...  
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,106062,00.html

Come to think of it, this new plan of Bush's reminds me quite a bit of his
fathers SEI - the Space Exploration Initiative from 1989.
The most prominent difference is that the manned spacecraft bound for Mars
are no longer to be assembled in LEO, but on the surface of the Moon. Which