







Source: NASA

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RE: Just what we need
By US56 on 2/27/2013 11:25:59 AM , Rating: 2
Bolden's statement seems to suggest that they are establishing something analogous to DARPA within the DoD but in all likelihood it's just another funding channel to let the bureaucratic fun and games continue and give the appearance that they are doing something while not accomplishing much. The U.S. manned space program went off the rails during the Nixon administration. They shoved von Braun aside because he objected too strenuously to the premature termination of Project Apollo, a political embarrassment to the administration, and then made himself a further annoyance when he backed an alternative to the clunky/kludgie Space Shuttle vehicle architecture which ended up killing two astronaut crews and destroying two $1B+ orbiters. That architecture was essentially designed by an economist working as a consultant to the OMB in the Nixon administration using unrealistic flight rate predictions provided by NASA because they felt that a reusable orbiter was the logical next step and gamed the process to get what they thought was right. It would most likely have worked out much better had they built the system not originally conceived by von Braun and associates at Marshall but strongly backed by them.


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