NASA chooses deep space travel vehicle, not everybody happy – Poll

The deep space travel vehicle that will be the future of America’s space program was announced by NASA this week. That’s good news for Lockheed-Martin who will develop it but some legendary astronauts disagree with the direction of the program.

“As we aggressively continue our work on a heavy-lift launch vehicle, we are moving forward with an existing contract to keep development of our new crew vehicle on track,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

The new capsule, now called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), will be based on the Orion space craft that had been part of the Constellation return-to-the-moon program, with landing on an asteroid by 2025 and on Mars by 2035 as a new goal. Effectively canceled by President Obama in 2009 when his proposed 2011 budget did not include funds for the inherited program, developer Lockheed-Martin calls it a New Era of Space Exploration.

In a highly-critical answer to the NASA announcement in USA Today, legendary astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan look back to the beginning of the U.S. space program for answers.”Obama’s advisers, in searching for a new and different NASA strategy with which the president could be favorably identified, ignored NASA’s operational mandate and strayed widely from President Kennedy’s vision and the will of the American people” the astronauts said in the USA Today post.

The former commanders of moon missions note diligent work by Congress to steer NASA’s program back towards Kennedy’s goals in spite of a reduced budget but question the reality of efforts to partner with industry for future development.

“Entrepreneurs in the space transportation business assert that they can offer such service at a very attractive price – conveniently not factoring in the NASA-funded development costs. These expenditures, including funds to insure safety and reliability, can be expected to be substantially larger and more time consuming than the entrepreneurs predict.”

Finally, noting the apparent demise of NASA’s human space flight program and what appears to be a lack of direction or a solid plan to maintain leadership in space exploration, the astronauts draw a sobering conclusion:

“Kennedy launched America on that new ocean. For 50 years we explored the waters to become the leader in space exploration. Today, under the announced objectives, the voyage is over. John F. Kennedy would have been sorely disappointed.”

Are you disappointed? Vote in our poll and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Flickr photo by Futurilla

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Expedition Review: On Board the MV Orion


Where do people go when they’ve already been everywhere? On a ship that goes to places nobody else can get to. The MV Orion is such a ship, custom-built for expedition-style travel that takes you to the world’s more inaccessible places–place like Papua New Guinea, Australia’s wild northwestern Kimberley coastline, the remote corners of Indonesia, the lesser-known side of Antarctica, and as was my good fortune, the uninhabited windswept islands of New Zealand’s sub-antarctic. In English, those islands are: Macquarie Island, Campbell Island, Auckland Islands, the Snares, and Stewart Island–all forgotten bits of rock and shrubs in the Southern Ocean. Places where birds outnumber humans by about a million to one and if it’s not raining, then it’s about to.

It takes a certain kind of traveler to embark on such a voyage. This is not your typical spring break cruise to St. Thomas. Yes, there is a lounge with a talented musical act that plays late into the night. Yes, there is a spiral staircase near the bow with shiny brass handrails and a glass elevator shooting up to the top deck. Yes, the cruise director makes announcements on the loudspeaker (“dress warmly “), and yes, one eats abundantly and well (the food is extraordinary), however . . . there are some key differences.
Perhaps most important is that the Orion experience is intimate. While the cruise ship industry is trending towards behemoth floating cities (population 6,000) the MV Orion carried only 75 passengers (during my expedition) along with a crew of 75 (not such a bad ratio). Over the course of two weeks I had the chance to get to know every single passenger on board and what’s more, we all liked each other.

Indeed, it’s not where you travel, but who you travel with that matters. The two weeks I spent on the MV Orion were blessedly asshole-free. In fact, my fellow shipmates were all really cool people–not the rich and famous or the kind of spoiled, pretentious passport-boaster you find flying first class–just passionate, smart travelers chasing their wanderlust down under. Enamored birdwatchers were in search of the rare species, retirees were living out their lifelong dreams, a honeymooning couple was being unconventional, map nerds like me kept checking the library’s atlas against our personal GPS, and everyone showed an authentic lust for life. (It helped that most of my fellow travelers were Aussies–who are just born cool.)

The Captain was equally fun and down to earth. He had no problem diverting the ship so that we could get a closer look at passing icebergs, and when the weather turned out to be nicer than normal, he sped ahead to grant us an extra day with the penguins.

Cliche as it may sound, every day was an adventure. After breakfast we suited up in our all-weather gear, then head out in rubber zodiacs to the shore of whichever island we were exploring. Surely, the real luxury was found in the abundance and proximity of wildlife we experienced. In the course of 12 days, I saw over 80 bird species, at least half of which were endemic to the islands we were visiting. We hiked through rare albatross nesting grounds, watched yellow-eyed penguins tiptoe through fields of flowers and competed for beach space with bellowing bull elephant seals. Each day ended with an in-depth review of the day’s experience in pictures followed by a briefing that detailed tomorrow’s plan. Lectures were offered for anyone wanting to learn the intricacies of everything we experienced, from the plants and geology to pressing conservation issues for each of the islands we were visiting. In short, imagine a two week-long field trip for grown-ups but with 9-course tasters’ menus instead of a brown bag lunch instead and chilled champagne instead of juice boxes.

Also, my room was really nice. In fact, it wasn’t so much a room as it was the largest suite on the ship, a huge suite that was larger than most Manhattan lofts, which made me the spoiled one on the ship. However, I loved having a big desk to work on (with satellite internet) and a starboard balcony from which I could watch a considerate flow of dramatic scenery (a seagull even flew into my room, once). I also appreciated my own private deep dish bathtub with a square picture window which allowed for one to enjoy a bubble bath at sea. Surely the first sailors to happen upon these far flung islands did not luxuriate so. I slept a blissful eight hours every night, rocked gently by the waves of the Tasman Sea.

The common caveat phrase that cruise-goers love to use is, “you only have to unpack one.” That was definitely my experience–I unpacked my bags in Hobart and within the first day, felt as if my private domain reached to the farthest horizon. The word “exclusive” fails to capture the notion that I developed of traveling on the only ship on the only sea in the world. We went more than a week without seeing another ship and even longer without seeing any other humans.

Nature is a luxury in today’s world. Being surrounded by it–having seals poke their noses up from the water and then do water ballet under your shadow, getting a glimpse of a little brown bird that was once thought to be extinct, witnessing the icebergs you only heard about in the news, visiting a map speck that most of the world will never see–all of this is the kind of luxury that matters on an expedition ship.

So yeah, it was really, really great, obviously, and totally my style of travel: adventurous, comfortable and extremely nice–but relaxed nice, not prissy nice. On the MV Orion, I was glad to see that the destination mattered more than the amenities, and yet we were all so well-provided for as to never need worry about amenities. In fact, my main critique is that the food was just too good. With a menu designed by Australia’s celebrity chef Serge Dansereau, the Orion broke cruise ship conventions by offering small portions of gourmet standard in as many or as few courses as you wished, served by professional waitstaff. Lunch was served buffet-style but in a tasteful way that never got dull. In the first week, we ate Spanish, Filipino, Mexican, French, and Lebanese cuisine.

Sailing to the ends of the earth while staying dry, well-fed and comfortable is not a cheap endeavor: we’re talking just under a thousand dollars a day. BUT (there’s always a but)–this trip was actually worth it. That’s my new measure of good commercial travel products–do you get out of it what you put into it? For me, at the end of the day, as I laid down to sleep with a mind filled with dancing baby penguins and dramatic seascapes and memories of the afternoon’s lemon meringue teatime, I had to confess that it was all worth the price tag. In fact, as our credit card company likes to remind us: some things, like getting kissed by a baby seal, are priceless.

Australia’s Macquarie Island

Have you ever had an obese, wild baby elephant seal drop its head in your lap and slobber nose love all over you? It melts a heart faster than a Snickers in a microwave, really.

Macquarie Island (pronounced mak-worry) is Australia’s southernmost point, a tiny spit of an island some 940 miles (1,500 km) southeast of Tasmania. For you mariners out there that’s a three-day sail from Hobart-past the roaring 40s and into the furious 50s. The island is only about twenty miles long and two miles across-a lonely scrap of sub-antarctic landscape consisting of pointed grassy slopes and rocky beaches where mist lingers all the day long.

Discovered in 1810 by wayward sealers, Macquarie was kept a secret in order that they get rich quick from the magnificent seal colonies living on the island. In 1811, the first ship to arrive in Sydney from Macquarie carried almost 57,000 seal skins. Today, the descendants of these piles of skins still tumble along the salt and pepper sand, bellowing out the unique throaty growl of the adult elephant seal. It’s quite a sight. Forget all your images of Australia’s man-eating crocodiles and creepy snakes and spiders. Here is a different kind of nature reserve where the local attraction grows to 20 feet long, weighs more than three tons, and spends most of the day sleeping on the beach.Macquarie is not your typical vacation destination–there is no permanent human population and there are no hotels or restaurants (though the chef at the Australian meteorological station bakes terrific scones). Also, it rains pretty much constantly and on most days, the wind blows hard enough to knock you down.

What Macquarie does have is wildlife and a lot of it. Thanks to extreme isolation, very little human contact and strict conservation rules, the animals on Macquarie harbor no fear of humans whatsoever. While guidelines instruct keeping at least 30 feet from any wild animal, the sheer abundance of living breathing cute cuddly things makes it impossible. You try hard not to touch or interfere, but if they come to you, then just let them. Sit down on the beach and the baby elephant seals will flop their way towards you, sniff you out, then curl up beside you begging to spoon. Likewise, brown fluffy balls of baby penguins come teetering up to check you out, then start screeching for mom and dad. The cuteness factor trumps a million sneezing panda vids.

Four kinds of penguin live on Macquarie. The largest and most vivid are the elegant King penguins who are the slightly smaller cousins to the iconic Emperor penguins (the ones you and your kids know and love from Happy Feet). As a self-certified, card-carrying member of the penguin craze, I went berserk on watching all the action that goes on in Macquarie’s penguin colony. Even more amusing were the royal penguins, who waddle to and from shore shaking their bushy yellow eyebrows. The species is only found on this island and number well over a million pairs.

We later traveled to Lusitania Bay, Australia’s largest protected penguin rookery. From out of the white fog, the shore appeared like a dream sequence. At first I saw nothing except a buzzing black and white screen beyond the mist. Suddenly our little boat lurched forward and the beach came into focus: not hundreds, not thousands, but a hundred thousand or more penguins. An unreal sight and an unreal sound, that of an infinite chorus of nasally seabirds calling out in almost-unison. Penguins were diving and swimming all around us as well, bulleting through the golden ripples of waves. I’ve never felt so outnumbered in my life.

In the distance, a pair of old-fashioned rusty steam cookers sat on the beach as an eerie reminder of the island’s exploitative past. Once upon a time, men gathered up penguins and threw them in the pot to boil up some penguin oil, used to make rope and twine back in the day. The penguins triumphed, thank goodness, and today the island is a vital breeding spot.

I sailed to Macquarie on the MV Orion, an Australian expedition ship which–in the spirit of Gadling’s motto, goes there–or in other words, goes to the places where few ships ever go. (If you’re going to travel to one of the least habitable islands in the world, it helps to be traveling on one of the world’s most habitable ships.) As tourist interest broadens, the government still limits visits to under twelve ships a year. Extraordinary bird life attracts all the gung ho bird nuts out there, while map nuts like me are eager to get to such a remote place and see what we can see.

I feel immensely lucky to have traveled to this forgotten map crumb of Australia. I loved the penguins and friendly elephant seals and the giant killer whales swimming in the shallows. The brown-green kelp and chunks of ice on the beach added an extra twinge of exoticism, however it was the island itself that attracted me-a rare and lonely place at the bottom of the world that few know and even fewer ever visit.%Gallery-79934%

Orion’s Belt and one of the best places for looking up

Orion’s Belt is a winter pleasure if you live in the Northern Hemisphere. These stars that tell the tale of the hunter Orion, the love object of Artemis, Apollo’s twin sister, are fairly easy to pick out once someone has shown you where to look.

Over at Jaunted, Kitts Peak National Observatory at Tohono O’odham Reservation in Arizona is given a heads up as being one fantastic place to see the night sky. The reservation is surrounded by desert, thus has one of the ingredients necessary for stellar star-gazing. No city lights.

Instead, there is a vast sky and a well-organized observatory where the experience is not just a matter of peering in a telescope to see what’s up there up close, but a lesson in how to read star charts and use binoculars to star-gaze as well. Since it’s an hour out of Tuscon, the included boxed dinner is a nice touch. The telescopes are powerful enough to see planets. If you go, one thing to check out is the Advanced Optical Program where you can take CCD images of what you see up there with the observatory’s equipment. [Click here for images.]