NASA was once the pride of the US. We were the leaders in space exploration and reached the moon 44 years ago. Sadly, America has turned its back on space exploration. Starting with Bill Clinton who gutted NASA for the peace dividend, Bush who was only interested in Islamic nation building and culminating in Obama’s turning NASA into some feel good outreach to Islam, both parties have turned their back on Space exploration.
Dr. Chris Kraft was one of the NASA original flight director laments the state of the once great Space program. He laments the lack of leadership and vision of the once great space agency.
The Houston Chronicle recently spent some time with NASA legend Dr. Chris Kraft, and the man who oversaw NASA’s first steps into space didn’t have many complimentary things to say about the things NASA has done lately—or the things it has on the drawing board.
Kraft, who will be 90 next February, is directly responsible for the initial shape and structure of NASA’s flight controller hierarchy, and he sat at the flight director’s console for all of Project Mercury. In 1982, he formally retired from his position as director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, but he has never been shy to speak his mind about manned space flight. Among the topics drawing fire in the Chronicle interview are NASA’s asteroid landing plans, the upcoming Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, and the eventual goal of landing on Mars.
he Space Launch System, or SLS, is currently one of NASA’s main priorities. It’s been derisively referred to as the “Senate Launch System” in a lot of places, because it’s being designed and built in a very distributed manner, with work being spread across many different contractors in many different states. “The problem with the SLS is that it’s so big—that makes it very expensive,” Kraft explained. “When they actually start to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They’re going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up… So what you’ve got is a beast of a rocket that would give you all of this capability, which you can’t build because you don’t have the money to build it in the first place, and you can’t operate it if you had it.”
Kraft is derisive of new heavy lift capability, stating that instead of focusing on the ability to lift cargo 120 tons at a time—one of SLS’ primary goals—NASA should use existing launch vehicles with lower payload capacities and lower operational costs, like Atlas, Delta, and the European Ariane. “We’ve got those smarts, we’ve learned that, we have that institutional knowledge, and yet we’re ignoring it,” he laments. “It’s a tragedy. It really is.”
This is a national disgrace and I blame both parties for what has occurred. The Democrats are only interested in expanding the welfare state to create more serfs. The Republicans have been hijacked by Nation Builders who want unlimited war or reactionaries that hate any new ideas or innovations. Our scrapping of NASA will go down as the biggest blunder since China scrapped its one mighty fleet in the 1430’s.
Tags: Dr. Chris Kraft, NASA, Space Exploration
