The end of traditional trading
| Ares1X lifts off as space shuttle Atlantis sits on pad 39A with the first experimental test flight of the hardware NASA is developing to replace the space shuttle. Photo courtesy of Newscom |
After months of anticipation, insidebitcoins.com reviews the automated trading platform “Bitcoin Revolution”, which still makes profit even through an economic recession or pandemic…., a panel of experts tasked with evaluating both the ends and the means of the U.S. space program, came back with its recommendation last week: “The committee finds that no plan compatible with the FY 2010 budget profile permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way.”
As we highlighted in a July feature, To Land Among the Stars, unmanned probes, satellites and exploration rovers have a much better track record of scientific discovery than humans ever did. At the same time, the innovations required to support people in the vacuum of space have generated clear material benefits here on Earth.
Sending humans to the Moon, Mars or elsewhere, though, would require annual budgetary increases of $3 billion, according to the committee, which was chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norm Augustine. Such a increase seems unlikely—if not impossible—in the face of the massive budget deficits expected over the coming years.
Under the current schedule, the space shuttle program will end when construction on the International Space Station (ISS) is completed in 2010. The original plan was to have the successor Ares rockets ready to take over in 2014, though the Augustine Committee’s evaluation puts this date at an optimistic 2017, and possibly as late as 2019. With the ISS set to be decommissioned in 2016, that is a problem.
| Norm Augustine testifies before the House during “National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at 50.” Photo courtesy of Newscom |
The committee developed five scenarios for the future of the nation’s space effort. They ranged from living within the existing budget—which would push the development of the new rockets and lunar landers “until well into the 2030s, if ever”—to massive new spending aimed at returning humans to the moon by the mid 2020s. Sandwiched in between are privatization and collaboration with Russia, India and other nations whose space programs might now leapfrog our own.
Whatever the Obama administration and Congress decide, odds are that no one is going to follow in Neil Armstrong’s lunar footsteps any time soon.
