Yes we can!

[Onkel Neal]

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/air-force-to-launch-mini-shuttle/6l5enu0

"I think it's a fine idea, I just hope the President sticks with it."

Amen.

[August]

That is pretty cool! Thanks for posting! :salute:

[CCIP]

Yeah, I think this needs to come back to NASA now that Constellation has been ahem... euthanized. Frankly I think backing out of reusable vehicles in Constellation was a fairly dumb idea too (not for the moon shot perhaps, but for LEO activity for sure) - the US needs a 2nd-generation shuttle, and I think that's the moral of the story here. Watch out or the Russians will beat you to that one again (they have similar mini-shuttle projects in development).

Still kind of sad that the 40-something year old Soyuz is again about to become the "premiere" system for keeping man in LEO. :down:

[SteamWake]

He had to come up with something after canning the NASA program(s) and thousands lose their jobs and raising holy hell.

[razark]

My only problem with this is that it is a military program. I have no problems with a military space program, but it should be separate from the civilian program. Of course, with two programs, there will always be some cross-over between them. I just think that the exploration aspects of spaceflight should occur under civilian control.


Still kind of sad that the 40-something year old Soyuz is again about to become the "premiere" system for keeping man in LEO. :down:

Don't worry, I'm sure the Chinese and the Indians are working on something.

[CCIP]

Yeah, but how much better will it be than Soyuz? Or even how much different it will be...

I know ESA is considering a manned vehicle based based on their ATV freighters. That wouldn't be too bad, but again, so much of the technology in those is just old and proven stuff that isn't pushing engineering forward and isn't, in the long run, making space more accessible.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the Soyuz and in fact the whole Russian program of vehicles based on the famous "7" ICBM - the Soyuz especially is a real achievement, being by far the safest space vehicle series ever flown. But it's technology that is fundamentally the same mid-50s rocket and mid-60s capsule. Engineering needs to move forward and BE moved forward by space exploration. If we sit on the same old smoky, expensive, one-use vehicles, we ain't gonna get very far in the near future. Just sit in LEO with cargo delivery costing more than its weight in gold. And in the long run, being stuck in LEO is kind of a danger to space exploration, at that...

[Oberon]

Actually, I suspect that it'd be better staying with the military, I'd say there was a slightly lower chance of it being axed under military jurisdiction than under civilian jurisdiction. Admittedly these days both are viable targets but it's slightly easier to eat into NASAs budget than it is to eat into the militarys budget. Eventually then the project will work its way back down to NASA at hopefully a reduced cost (since all the prototype and testing stages will have been conducted by the military) in a form that they can use for the civilian programs.