News Cut: September 7, 2008 Archive

A moon too far

Posted at 5:54 PM on September 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)

Does the U.S. -- and either of the two presidential candidates -- have a vision for America's future in space? It doesn't sound like it, according to an e-mail that was leaked to the Orlando Sentinel today by the guy who wrote it.

"They will tell us to extend shuttle," NASA administration Mike Griffin says of the next administration. "There is no other politically tenable course. It will appear irrational -- heck, it will be irrational -- to say we've built a Space Station we cannot use, that we're throwing away a $100 billion investment, when the cost of saving it is merely to continue flying Shuttle."

Griffin was brought into NASA to help fulfill the Bush administration's goal of retiring the space shuttle program and return astronauts to the moon, as a first step of going to Mars.

But NASA and space proponents have had an increasingly difficult time answering a simple question about humans in space at a time when the country is a financial basket case: Why?

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