China's Rocket , America's problem.

It might not be a giant step for mankind, but Saturday's launch of a piloted space capsule known as Shenzhou-9 marks China's breakthrough into the exclusive club once made up only of the United States and Russia. Sure enough it makes America look vary bad in terms of keeping up with scientific achievements. While America's space shuttle program ended . Leaving the Nation without a replacement program on launching payloads into orbit . America has begun a slow decade of sending humans into space via Russia . Again Here President Obama has plowed into the thinking that private companies eventually  will  handle most development  ... o rockets and capsules. The  President requested $830 million for Commercial Crew programs, which is America's single most important near-term civil space project.  But cutting the Technology budget while increasing the Earth Science budget – a function that doesn't even belong in a space exploration agency – and continuing to shovel resources into the SLS money pit is a travesty. Before long we are going to see China do bigger things while America takes a back seat . Mind you space exploration is expensive , but it creates jobs in the the technical field . The loss of  Constellation program  In his April 15, 2010 space policy speech at Kennedy Space Center announcing the administration's plans for NASA, none of the 3 plans outlined in the Committees final report were completely selected.^[14] The President rejected immediate plans to return to the Moon on the premise that the current plan had become nonviable. NASA had a vision for space exploration and it was tossed in the dumpster by the current administration. You can only envision what budgets allow. That’s what NASA is faced with. That plus no documented vision from the administration, which we’ll never get from this president. All talk and no money to back it up. And commercial is a farce … won’t work with no market (other than ISS resupply) and without federal funding.NASA has said its long-term goal is Mars, and President Obama has said he would like the space program to send humans to an asteroid in the interim. But there are no budgets or timelines for either of these missions.

NOTES& COMMENTS:

• "When President Obama recently released his budget for NASA, he proposed a slight increase in total funding...the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating."
• "It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded."
• "For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature. While the President's plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years."

• "Under the Obama plan, NASA will spend $100 billion on human spaceflight over the next 10 years in order to accomplish nothing"
• "Obama called for sending a crew to a near Earth asteroid by 2025. ... Had Obama not canceled the Ares 5, we could have used it to perform an asteroid mission by 2016. But the President, while calling for such a flight, actually is terminating the programs that would make it possible."
• "With current in-space propulsion technology, we can do a round-trip mission to a near-Earth asteroid or a one-way transit to Mars in six months ... Holdren claims that he wants to develop a new electrically powered space thruster to speed up such trips. But without gigantic space nuclear power reactors to provide them with juice, such thrusters are useless, and the administration has no intention of developing such reactors."^[19]
• "Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity."