Monday, February 1, 2010

Politicians fight to keep America's moon mission alive

Richard Luscombe in Miami
guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 February 2010 21.23 GMT

Buzz Aldrin on moon
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon. It is now more than 40 years since mankind first went there. Photograph: NASA/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The announcement of an end to immediate ambitions for an American to again reach the moon, on the seventh anniversary of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, sets the stage for a furious battle in Congress over US manned space exploration.

Politicians from Florida, Texas and Alabama, three states that have lost thousands of jobs in the space industry from this year's planned retirement of the ageing shuttle fleet, promised a fight to keep the moon programme, Constellation, alive.

"They are replacing lost shuttle jobs too slowly, risking US leadership in space to China and Russia, and relying too heavily on unproven companies," said Bill Nelson, a Democratic Senator for Florida and former astronaut who flew one mission in 1986.

Michael Griffin, who resigned as Nasa chief when Obama took office, branded the plan "disastrous", likening it to Richard Nixon's cancellation of the Apollo programme in the 1970s. "It means that essentially the US has decided that they're not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future," he told The Washington Post...

More

3 comments:

belinda said...

Whew !!
No naked women reflections on the moon gear. All systems go.


*remember Mr.Chaney and the sunglasses? oopsie.

Vincenzo said...

lol - I vaguely remember something like that..
Here it is:

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=6075389

"This two-picture combination photo provided by the White House shows Vice President Cheney, and a close-up of his sunglasses during a fishing trip on the Snake River in Idaho. That is not a naked woman reflected in Vice President Dick Cheney's sunglasses. Although it kind of appears to be. It you blow up the picture, you can see it is Cheney's hand gripping the handle of a fishing rod. The picture was posted on the White House Web site as one in a series of photos of Cheney outdoors. It created a buzz on the Internet on Friday and some cable television shows. (AP Photo/White House, David Bohrer)"

belinda said...

Sounds like a fishy story. hahahaha


I'm just being silly.