OK, now to get off of the blame the president game, let’s figure out who the real culprits were. Well, that’s easy. Congress. You know, the folks who actually fund space programs and launch vehicles. And NASA.
It was Congress that cut back the funding of launch vehicles. NASA, in order to keep humans in the space business, wanted the Space Shuttle. So too many launch eggs got placed in the Shuttle basket. With the huge cost of that, getting another big launch vehicle was not going to happen. So large payloads had to fly on the Titan IIIs. Which were pretty heavily subscribed for spy satellite launches.
We’re still paying for short-sightedness in launch vehicles because we have to use Russian launch vehicles and capsules to get people to the space station. At least Musk, Bezos and others are working on fixing that.
And it doesn’t really sound like China has been falling all over itself to help the NKs with their launches. If they had been, there would probably be fewer NK failures.
So too much blame game, not enough thinking from the peanut gallery.
OK, now to get off of the blame the president game, let’s figure out who the real culprits were. Well, that’s easy. Congress. You know, the folks who actually fund space programs and launch vehicles. And NASA.
It was Congress that cut back the funding of launch vehicles. NASA, in order to keep humans in the space business, wanted the Space Shuttle. So too many launch eggs got placed in the Shuttle basket. With the huge cost of that, getting another big launch vehicle was not going to happen. So large payloads had to fly on the Titan IIIs. Which were pretty heavily subscribed for spy satellite launches.
We’re still paying for short-sightedness in launch vehicles because we have to use Russian launch vehicles and capsules to get people to the space station. At least Musk, Bezos and others are working on fixing that.
And it doesn’t really sound like China has been falling all over itself to help the NKs with their launches. If they had been, there would probably be fewer NK failures.
So too much blame game, not enough thinking from the peanut gallery.