With the last NASA space shuttle being shuffled into a museum, I am left with the question of what are our alternatives to get to our (some say International) space station that is still floating in space. I know we still can use the old Russian route into space utilizing their ships and crews to send our astronauts up…. but is that what we really want to do?
I mean the Russians only spend $7 Billion dollars a year and still are using rockets to get their guys into space. We can’t even keep something on the books to allow us to go into space when we want with a budget being $10 Billion more than that? Something just doesn’t seem right about that, with us being the most powerful country in the world. Without NASA in space where would we get space ice cream and velcro?! Even worse, we are attacked by robots and need to get into space in a Battlestar Galatica-esk manner?
How do you feel about not being able to get into space on our own? If we want to let everyone else get ahead in the space race shouldn’t we at least cut the funding to levels of other countries that can go to space any time they want?
I think that NASA will be far ahead by finally beginning to outsource the development of manned spaceflight to private companies. Government developed the science behind a lot of it, which was important especially when spaceflight was rather deadly.
Now we can utilize the innovation of the free market to have a flourishing human spaceflight industry here in the USA. While it might still be primarily funded by government, at least the dollars may begin to be even more efficiently spent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_(spacecraft)
Isn’t it a concern though that we by far spend the most on technology to get us into space, yet we depend on countries that spend fractions of what we do (with all of our expensive technology!) to get us into space?