Obama apollo style program

But the presidential panel convened byObama to review NASA's plans determined that a human lunar return was unlikelybefore The panel favored thedevelopment of commercial crew transportation services, a move that would be aradical shift in national space policy. NASA since the late s has developedrockets and spacecraft flown by U.

Acompetition presumably would be held to select a company to provide commercialcrew transportation services, and it's almost certain that KSC and CapeCanaveral would be among the launch sites considered. Senioradministration officials said the commerciallaunch services?

Ahigher launch rate would be good for business throughout Brevard County whichincludes the Kennedy Space Center , particularly in the tourist industry. Shellenberger and Nordhaus declared themselves pro-technology, pro-economic growth and pro-environment. Their solution: the Apollo Alliance:.

Just two years old, Apollo offers a vision that can set the context for a myriad of national and local Apollo proposals, all of which will aim to treat labor unions, civil rights groups, and businesses not simply as means to an end but as true allies whose interests in economic development can be aligned with strong action on global warming. The paper angered many environmental group leaders. Instead, a new merger of equals was being proposed. Environmentalists could keep their special interest as long as they acknowledged the special interests of other powerful big government constituencies.

The implication was that somehow the core anti-economic development convictions of the environmental groups could be accommodated to the pro-economic development agenda of the industrial labor unions.

The solution? In , the Apollo Alliance became a project of the Tides Center and established its own board of directors. Ringo was named executive director and in president of the Apollo Alliance. As state treasurer, Angelides was responsible for investing billions of dollars in state pension funds.

His biography on the Apollo website boasts:. Apollo chairman Angelides was recently appointed by Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to chair a congressional commission looking into the causes of the financial meltdown. Formerly a self-described black nationalist, the Tennessee-born Jones earned a degree from Yale Law School, but he made his mark as an activist in Oakland, California.

The East Bay area city lacks the panache of San Francisco and the graduate degrees of Berkeley but makes up for it with a history of radical activism that goes back to , the year when Huey Newton met Bobby Seale to found the Black Panther Party. Exposed to the ideas of the Apollo Alliance, Jones appreciated the potential in uniting inner city social justice groups with the clout of organized labor and the wealth of the environmental movement.

He joined Apollo as a member of its steering committee at the same time that he was running the Ella Baker Center, a social justice group in Oakland, and Green for All, a national green jobs advocacy group. He founded both groups. You be the judge. As a consequence of this change, Jones adopted a far more pragmatic approach in his book, The Green Collar Economy, which touted private sector ventures to address environmental problems. The book also highlights government energy policies requiring mandates and subsidies, including carbon cap-and-trade and renewable electricity mandates.

To pursue his green jobs agenda, he created a new Apollo-partner organization called Green for All, as well as a new racial grievance group called Color of Change. As the White House green jobs czar, Jones was on track for a bright future. NASA was burdened with an essentially impossible-to-accomplish asteroid mission to replace the return-to-the-Moon mission and real plans for Mars.

Richard Shelby R-Ala. In February he said:. The cancelation of the Constellation program and the end of human space flight does represent change—but it is certainly not the change I believe in. Congress cannot and will not sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human space flight program. In , he posed for a photograph holding a book, The Post-American World, by left-wing serial plagiarist Fareed Zakaria.

To date, China has launched five manned missions to earth orbit, including two to its mini-space station. This, coupled with their moon rocket now in design stage, may allow China to conquer the Moon unless the U. Chinese officials recently unveiled plans to send a rover to Mars by and to build a manned lunar base to mine lunar minerals and Helium-3, a nuclear fusion fuel.

If China wants the world to believe it will not lay claim to the Moon, it is setting a poor example by trying to seize the South China Sea. If President Obama deliberately wanted to give China a head start of a decade or more, or to allow the Chinese to claim the Moon, it is hard to imagine he would have done anything differently during his administration.

As Obama killed the Constellation program, he made a false statement at the Kennedy Space Center on April 15, , calculated to destroy unity among space experts and advocates:. Once Obama torpedoed the Moon-then-Mars agreement as official policy, various minor but competing ideas spread fast: Go to Mars immediately.

Go to asteroids for a decade or longer, then look at Mars. Build a space station in deep space, perhaps to support Lunar and Martian expeditions in decades to come. Spend the next decade doing a few short missions in the vicinity of the Moon. Some plans were unworkable, while others would not inspire support from Congress or the public. By killing unity, Obama caused advocates of each different idea to fight each other.

This alone could prevent the next president from assembling the unity required to re-start space exploration. The Moon is far closer and easier to reach. Spacecraft can go to the Moon in 4 days, and be launched or returned at any time. Mars, by comparison is a 6 to 9 month journey and launches can only take place every 26 months.

In the event of an emergency on the Moon, astronauts can immediately evacuate and be home in 3 days. This is impossible on Mars because it could be many months until the next launch window allows a return. Mars has a deadly naturally occurring poison in its soil. Perchlorates make up about 1 percent of the soil in measured areas. Far better to develop and validate all the technology, habitats, and human factors on the Moon, rather than set course for an untested 1,day mission to Mars—with no early return possibility.

Deaths on early missions to Mars could cause humanity to shun Mars for generations. Barack Obama had just said we were going to space to Stay, and then amplified the statement with an invited guest to symbolize his commitment.

There is a lot here to discuss, including the many mistakes made to date. Instead I am going to focus on the word he used: He said Stay. He said we would be going into space to Stay. Now that can mean many things. We are so far Staying at the space station. We are Staying in Antarctica. Heck, we are Staying in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Never mind. To Stay in terms of a nation can mean anything from a lab to an outpost to a base, to a settlement — for forever or just until it is redefined by the next president. Again, I am going to skip over those discussions and simply declare that when he says Stay to me it means we are going to go into space to develop it, to settle, to create communities and to expand the domain of humanity and life.

At most he means we will build some small government outpost. And you will be right on both counts. Left to its own it will never happen.