Dan Older's List: Current State of NASA

• October 1, 1958
• NASA's birth was directly related to the pressures of national defense
• the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War

• space exploration emerged as a major area of contest and became known as the space race.

   
• During the late 1940s, the Department of Defense pursued research and rocketry and upper atmospheric sciences
• President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) for the period, July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958
• The Soviet Union quickly followed suit, announcing plans to orbit its own satellite.
• October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik 1
• creating an illusion of a technological gap and provided the impetus for increased spending for aerospace endeavors, technical and scientific educational programs, and the chartering of new federal agencies to manage air and space research and development
• first Earth satellite on January 31, 1958, when Explorer 1
• It quickly incorporated other organizations into the new agency
• 1961-1963
• Human space flight initiatives
• Project Gemini
• 1965-1966
• Project Apollo
• 1968-1972
• Robotic missions to the Moon
• and the outer planets
• research to enhance air transport safety, reliability, efficiency, and speed
• satellites for information gatherin
• Applications satellites for communications
• A reusable spacecraft for traveling to and from Earth orbit, the Space Shuttle
• With six flights, Project Mercury achieved its goal of putting piloted spacecraft into Earth orbit and retrieving the astronauts safely
• Gemini's 10 flights also provided NASA scientists and engineers with more data on weightlessness, perfected reentry and splashdown procedures, and demonstrated rendezvous and docking in space
• May 25 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth
• demonstrate to the world its scientific and technological superiority over its cold war adversary
• The Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the Moon on December 24-25, 1968
• July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 mission fulfilled Kennedy's challenge
• The Apollo 13 mission of April 1970
• Five more successful lunar landing missions followed
• astronauts and ground crews had to improvise to end the mission safely after an oxygen tank burst midway through the journey to the Moon
• In 1975, NASA cooperated with the Soviet Union to achieve the first international human spaceflight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP)
• the Apollo and Soyuz crews met in space and conducted various experiments for two days
• STS-1, took off on April 12, 1981
• On January 28, 1986 a leak in the joints of one of two Solid Rocket Boosters attached to the Challenger orbiter caused the main liquid fuel tank to explode 73 seconds after launch,
• On September 29, 1988, the Shuttle successfully returned to flight
• Tragedy struck again on February 1, 2003, however. As the Columbia orbiter was returning to Earth on the STS-107 mission, it disintegrated about 15 minutes before it was to have landed
• In 1984, Congress authorized NASA to build a major new space station as a base for further exploration of space. By 1986, the design depicted a complex, large, and multipurpose facility
• joined with the U.S. and other international partners in 1993 to build a joint facility that became known formally as the International Space Station (ISS)
• To prepare for building the ISS starting in late 1998, NASA participated in a series of Shuttle missions to Mir and seven American astronauts lived aboard Mir for extended stays. Permanent habitation of the ISS began with the launch of the Expedition One crew on October 31 and the docking on November 2, 2000.
• On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush visited NASA Headquarters
• Vision entails sending humans back to the Moon and on to Mars by eventually retiring the Shuttle and developing a new, multipurpose Crew Exploration Vehicle.
• Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, launched on March 2, 1972 and April 5, 1973, respectively, traveled to Jupiter and Saturn to study the composition of interplanetary space
• Voyagers 1 and 2, launched on September 5, 1977 and August 20, 1977, respectively, conducted a "Grand Tour" of our solar system.
• In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit around the Earth
• has been in a Martian orbit mapping Mars since 1998
• Mars Global Surveyor
• Mars Pathfinder
• explored the surface of the planet with its miniature rover, Sojourner
• In 1975, NASA launched the two Viking spacecraft to look for basic signs of life on Mars
• radio astronomy to scan the heavens for potential signals from extraterrestrial intelligent life
• crop management and fault line detection, and to track many kinds of weather such as droughts, forest fires, and ice floes.
• tropical deforestation, global warming, and climate change.

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• Instead of continuing to develop the Ares 1 and Orion, the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial space taxi to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit
• What isn't in the budget is a specific target for exploration
• Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said Monday. "If this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be the agency of pipe dreams and fairy tales."

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• Some, including physicist Stephen Hawking, have argued that transplanet habitation is indeed the only way to ensure the long-term survival of our species
• Americans shuddered to think that a Soviet surrogate hovered over them in the night sky, and that anxiety drove them to up the ante and beat the Soviets to the moon in 1969
• Yet when the Soviet threat vanished, so, too, did the raison d’etre for the U.S. space program
• And debt driven by entitlement promises made in the 1930s and 1960s began to overwhelm the nation’s finances even as two presidents, one from each party, foolishly added to them. Now, in 2011, not only is there no reason for a space program, there is no money for one, either.

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• President Bush proposed on Wednesday to develop a new spacecraft to carry Americans back to the moon as early as 2015, and to establish a long-term base there as an eventual springboard to Mars and beyond.
• Although the president sketched out a time line that extended to 2020, he spelled out the financial details only through 2008
• roughly $1 billion in new spending over five years
• shift $11 billion in federal money from other NASA programs
• The Crew Exploration Vehicle would put humans on the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020
• spending related to the new initiative could amount to more than $150 billion through 2020
• NASA would turn its sights to a manned landing on Mars sometime after 2030
• "With today's dollars and today's technology, we're probably ultimately talking about half a trillion to a trillion dollars from a budget that is already trillions of dollars in deficit," Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Prioritie
• Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who flew on a space shuttle in 1986, questioned whether $1 billion in extra funding would be enough to do what Bush had in mind. "You can't go to the moon by 2014 on that," he said.

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• Bush's project, priced at $400 billion, was inspired by his desire to stay ahead of the Chinese in the new space race

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  Recently, Stephen Hawking has argued that we must colonise other planets to ensure mankind's long-term survival. Much as I admire Hawking, that's nonsense
• An expensive mission to the moon (especially at a time of global recession) seems like lunacy when terrestrial frontiers such as disease, starvation and drought cry out for cash
• But the final word goes to Eisenhower, who once vetoed Apollo. He reminded Americans that "every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed"

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