It's a shame that we are only two flights away from shelving our ability to keep adding to it...
Facing a federal deficit of $1.26 trillion in 2011, Obama is proposing a three-year freeze on most non-defense discretionary spending, a move the president believes will save $250 billion over the next 10 years, Orszag said. In addition, the White House is proposing more than 120 program terminations, reductions and efficiencies that together are expected to save $20 billion in 2011, Orszag said.
When the space shuttle got back from its last mission, wouldn't it have been hilarious if we were all dressed as apes?
Posted by raybond on :
That is great I never thought that it was that size.
Posted by CashCowMoo on :
quote:Originally posted by raybond: That is great I never thought that it was that size.
So what happens to NASA now?
Posted by jordanreed on :
it continues,,,the shuttle portion was scraped
Posted by The Bigfoot on :
Lean times for a decade under the guise of exploring mars and then the next generation shuttle craft comes out and pressure builds to put an international station on the moon would be my guess.
Posted by glassman on :
hmmmm, i just found a *possible* "private capital" reason to go the moon.... this stuff may be more valuble than gold soon:
Helium-3 (He-3, sometimes called tralphium[1]) is a light, non-radioactive isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. It is rare on Earth, and is sought for use in nuclear fusion research. The abundance of helium-3 is thought to be greater on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years) and the solar system's gas giants (left over from the original solar nebula), though still low in quantity (28 ppm of lunar regolith is helium-4 and from 1 ppb to 50 ppb is helium-3). An important property of helium-3, which distinguishes it from the more common helium-4, is that its nucleus is a fermion since it contains an odd number of spin 1/2 particles. Helium-4 nuclei are bosons, containing an even number of spin 1/2 particles. This is a direct result of the addition rules for quantized angular momentum. At low temperatures (about 2.17 K), helium-4 undergoes a phase transition: A fraction of it enters a superfluid phase that can be roughly understood as a type of Bose-Einstein condensate. Such a mechanism is not available for helium-3 atoms, which are fermions. However, it was widely speculated that helium-3 could also become a superfluid at much lower temperatures, if the atoms formed into pairs analogous to Cooper pairs in the BCS theory of superconductivity