Frank White says that the Obama space policy is the second most important in history after JFK’s. I agree. Not sufficient reason to give him a second term, though.
9 thoughts on “One Giant Step”
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Frank White says that the Obama space policy is the second most important in history after JFK’s. I agree. Not sufficient reason to give him a second term, though.
Comments are closed.
White misses the fact that President Kennedy made the wrong decision – going to the moon vice establishing a space station. Imagine an alternative history where “Overview Effect” occurred, and multiplied due to a space station, 50 years ago.
But he is absolutely right that President Obama’s space policy may survive as the single shining star of his single term a hundred years from now. Thank God he isn’t interested in space.
White misses the fact that President Kennedy made the wrong decision – going to the moon vice establishing a space station.
No, he made exactly the right decision. Proof: We won the Cold War.
Are you arguing that, had Kennedy built a space station, we would have lost?
It’s very likely we would have. The reason Kennedy made the moon decision is that he asked von Braun which goal we’d be more likely to beat the Soviets at. They were ahead of us at the time in terms of lift capability, and probably could have had a station up sooner.
It’s kinda hard to see how “coming in second” in the space race, regardless of if the painted goal would have been a space station or a moon landing would have seriously affected the eventual outcome of the Cold War. Soviets were on economically unsustainable trajectory no matter what …
And of course this has nothing to do with JFK or Obama but IF ONLY they had chosen EOR vs LOR …
I think it’s Pournelle who makes the point that since we had demonstrated the ability to reach the impossible dream, it made Reagan’s SDI plans seem imminently achievable. And the Soviet push for SDI was what tipped the government over in the Gorbachev era, what with the coup by the Polyus supporters.
Obama doesn’t seem to have much of a policy. Events out of his control have been driving our space program. Does anyone even know if we are going to an asteroid, the Moon, or Mars? Or are people still saying that we will go anywhere and everywhere but nowhere first?
I’m glad Obama didn’t cancel COTS and even expanded it into CCDEV and he deserves some credit for the success of those programs but the rest of our space program seems to be adrift without any clear focus or direction.
If Obama’s space policy really is the best since JFK, it just shows how terrible our space program has been run by people who think they are the smartest people in the country.
Agree with Wodun. I can’t really say Obama has a coherent policy. He shut some things down, and to that extent, he had a policy. But then he allowed other foolish programs. The best he’s done is, as Wodun points out, allow COTS to continue. Well, maybe the best was ending the programs, but I think if it was up to him, he’d cancelled everything.
I also liked the enableing technology research that was initially proposed by Obama. I know that part of the program has faced some shake ups and not really sure where it stands today. But they are testing refueling satellites that were never designed to be on the ISS right now.