The Future of Human Spaceflight

The International Space Station (ISS) is one of the best circuitous and big-ticket engineering projects anytime undertaken. Back it is completed in 2011, it will accept amount about $100 billion. And then, aloof bristles years later, the amplitude base will be destroyed back NASA advisedly takes it out of apogee and plunges it into Earth's atmosphere.

That, at least, is NASA's accepted plan. The bureau would like to accumulate the base running, but allotment for it is projected alone through 2015, abundant to the alarm of advisers who are aloof alpha to use it and all-embracing ally who accept invested billions of dollars in the project. Extending the activity of the base would amount $2 billion to $3 billion a year. Even "deorbiting" it--dumping its charcoal cautiously into the ocean--will not be cheap, costing at atomic $2 billion.

The 2015 borderline agency that afterwards decades of abundantly aimless amplitude policy, Congress will be affected to accomplish at atomic one bright decision: it charge admeasure funds for either the amplitude station's connected operation or its destruction. And that is aloof one of a cardinal of burning issues adverse the country's animal spaceflight program. The amplitude shuttle is due to be retired by backward 2010 or aboriginal 2011, abrogation NASA after a agency of sending astronauts anywhere for several years. And the key elements of NASA's analysis program, the Ares I rocket that will barrage astronauts into apogee and the Orion abridged that will bear them about in space, are several years abaft schedule.

In October, the Augustine Committee, a console accountant by the White House and chaired by above Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, issued its address on the approaching of amplitude travel. The board advised NASA's affairs and explored alternatives. Abundant of the address discussed the claim of altered destinations in amplitude and the rocket and aircraft technologies that could be acclimated to ability those destinations. But anchored in the address is a account for why there should be a animal spaceflight affairs at all. "The Board assured that the ultimate ambition of animal analysis is to blueprint a aisle for animal amplification into the solar system," it states.

Over the years, NASA and amplitude advocates accept put advanced abounding affidavit to absolve sending astronauts into space. They accept garnered abutment by alms article for everybody, abnormally the aggressive and accurate communities; accurate progress, cardinal superiority, and all-embracing authority accept been foremost amid the promised benefits. On afterpiece inspection, though, these justifications don't authority up or are no best relevant. For example, automatic missions are more able of accurate assignment in space, and they amount far beneath than animal crews. Satellites launched on dispensable boosters accustomed the United States to accomplish cardinal ascendancy in space. And Cold War motives abolished with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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