A quote for John F Kennedy: The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. SO what happened to this line of thinking?
Honestly, althgough Kennedy was a great politician of his time, but I have my problems whenever statesmen talk about being the leader of other nations. Be it Kennedy (who was not only a little innocent as told by the Pentagon Papers, i.e. Vietnam story etc.) or somebody else. This exactly was what kept the cold war alive for decades. But it did on both sides of the the pond, in the "evil" west and the "evil" east. The US and European propaganda against the Soviet Union back then was not less misleading of the public opinion than the Soviet propaganda against the west. Not to mention secret US submarine meneuvers in the European sea etc. to pretend a Soviet threat even more...
Seriously, I'm glad that the world is different these days. What Europe, Russia and the USA has accomplished in space together within the last two decades is an amazing step forward. In comparison, Apollo, as amazing as and as big a it was within the media, just was a small step for a few men with a little scientific outcome. It was a political program in the first hand. Of course technologically it was a giant leap in humans history. But on the scientific side and talking about sustainability it was nothing more than a program of Pomp and Circumstance just to demonstrate US superiority. If one thinks that politicans were ever interested in the Moon and the related sciences, that's a big fallacy. It was all about authority and saber-rattling. The big show already ended after only 3 years, with Nixon in the office and many NASA people leaving the agency disappointedly because they did not see promising future. Even inlcuding Wernher von Braun etc. The STS program only took place by luck. It would have been canceled pretty neigh. Only the promising military benefit kept it alive, but the Air Force quite soon withdraw from NASA contracts as soon as one realised that the program won't be what the estimations were promising.
In the context of Apollo, Constellation would have been nothing more than "Apollo on steorids". What is happening right now is what already would have happened after Apollo if the Congress did not pass STS through. Actually this is a big chance for politicians and NASA to restructure what has to be restructured. But one does not see it happening sadly, beside commercial sectors taking over access to space.
I figured that at least we were making a capsule that held 8 people so that was a start. Then came the news (because of cost) we would have to make it smaller.
It was basically because of weight issues, i.e. design issues of Ares 1. The problem was, which a lot of rocket engineers did criticize, that they did design Ares 1 and tried to fit Orion to it. It would have been wiser to first design Orion and then chose/design the launch vehicle. It was for sure very early, that Orion will shrink and change significantly.
Billions down the drain with NO plans for the future except to pay the Russians $50+ million per astronaut. Awesome plan NASA!
That was what Constellation exactly was about. There never was any funding for more than Ares 1 and a shrinked earth orbit version of Orion. No Moon rocket (Ares V) and less than ever any serious Moon hardware. Constellation did not offer any serious strategies, less than ever true science and innvoation which was what made many many people disappointed right from the beginning, even including NASA people. You could read it in blogs and forums. But you never heared anything in interviews of course. But they never were optimistic if one listens carefully. Program managers always were busy to defend what was going on in the media, caused by many sceptical voices. "Moon, Mars and beyond" was nothing more than just an empty political slogan announced by G.W. Bush to encourage NASA after the second loss of a Shuttle.
How the future of NASAs manned program looks is quite uncertain. But I think that the future of manned space flight still is promising. Russia is working on a new Soyuz version which would be able to be operated beyond low earth orbit. Europe may man-rate the ATV for manned flights to the ISS. Then we have SpaceX which is also quite promising right now. And then there are HLV concepts at NASA going on. We might see Orion still lifting off manned, but I guess at the end of the decade... Although NASA is in s..t curently, there were never that many space flight activities in history which is happening since the Shuttle-Mir missions and now ISS
Actually, if you compare what we had with Apollo, a small 3-men capsule, today we have a lot of big hardware in space.
