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Neil Armstrong: Obama's New Space Plan 'Poorly Advised' 

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, blasted NASA's new plans for future space exploration Wednesday, adding that President Barack Obama was poorly advised when he canceled the space agency's previous course for U.S. human spaceflight earlier this year.

Armstrong, who commanded the historic Apollo 11 moon landing mission in July 1969, criticized what he billed as an air of secrecy that preceded Obama's February announcement which cancelled NASA's Constellation program aiming for the moon. That plan, he told a Senate subcommittee, was a surprise to many among NASA, academia and the military... 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100512/sc_space/neilarmstrongobamasnewspaceplanpoorlyadvised  (http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100512/sc_space/neilarmstrongobamasnewspaceplanpoorlyadvised) 

Space missions take so long to plan and execute that it seems that a President should honor the plans a previous adminstration made.  It doesn't seem practical to change our space policy every 4 or 8 years when a new regime comes into office.  I believe Obama should have honored Bush's plans to go back to the moon, not decide to race off to some asteroid instead.  The next President will probably cancel those plans and decide to go to Mars...

Good comments. 
I have an enormous amount of respect for Astronauts, grew up wondering at their deeds, and admiring their daring and bravery... for NEIL ARMSTRONG, the most private public figure I can think of, to speak up publicly... ??  :question: :buggedout: 

I don't understand how it is that we are  past the 40th anniversary of going to the moon, and we haven't set foot on Mars yet.  Come on already!  Let's make it so these Apollo veterans can see their work improved on before they die!

This is a very short-sided policy and I concur with Neil that this is trip to nowhere. 

The main problem is that it will mean giving up our dominance in space flight.  Hell, the Chinese are already getting ready to land someone on the moon and even India is getting in on the act.

What the heck has happened to us. We put guys on the moon in midst or one of the most tumultuous decades of our history.  We were in the middle of ten year long war, there was great racial strife, as sexual revolution, and we still managed this great feat.

And look at the technology we were using. The computer on Apollo 11 didn't come near the computing power of the average cell phone of today.

We need to go back to the moon and establish a permanent presence there, then we need to go to work getting ready to go to Mars.


If you really care about this subject I invite you to join The National Space Society,which I have been a member for 21 years.    NSS.org (http://NSS.org)

This is why these slow, long-term space exploration plans are a crock. Long before anything gets off the ground, the next guy comes into office and does something else. Two terms in office is eight years, and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs showed us how much can be done in that much time, if you're serious about doing it.

Kennedy was smart. If he hadn't been shot, and served a second term, his goal would have been nearly achieved by the time he left office. As it was, the Johnson administration stayed the course, but it could have gone differently. Had Kennedy set a goal somewhere in the 70s or the early 80s, the plug would have been pulled before it was achieved.

I've said it many times, the only way to do it is the way it was done in the 60s. Getting to the moon was deemed important. They looked at what they needed to get to the moon in relative safety with contemporary technology, and they built the Saturn Vs, the infrastructure necessary to support the big rockets, and all of the other necessary hardware to get people there and back. And they took chances to save time, like testing all three Saturn V stages in one shot. Nobody would do any of that today.

Would it be a huge expense in the short term to do things that way? Yes. But it would yield better value for the money than a lot of smaller projects that get canceled before they achieve anything.

It sounds to me like all Obama needed to do was get behind Constellation and see that it got more funding. I don't see how anybody can conclude that the program is flawed because they're not giving it the money it needs to yield results. And then they go and replace it with a plan that sets the goals even farther ahead. Seems like expensive procrastination to me.