Health news,As NASA transitions, U.S. space politics in a state of flux

Health news,As NASA transitions,U.S. space politics in a state of flux-In outer space,as everyone knows,there’s no up or down. In space politics,there’s no left or right.It’s an ideologically unpredictable and non-linear universe,one that happens to be,at the moment,in a state of flux.
Consider that,as the space shuttle retires,a Democratic president wants the private sector to take over what used to be a Big Government responsibility — the job of ferrying astronauts to low Earth orbit.

The home of NASA stands to lose thousands of jobs after Atlantis goes on the last flight of the shuttle program

President Obama’s policy shift,announced in 2010,meant the cancellation of a government-owned rocket,the Ares 1.That move drew resistance from conservative Republicans such as Sen.Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Sen.Richard C. Shelby of Alabama.
Some Democrats also chafed at the administration’s policy pivot.What these Republicans and Democrats have in common is that they come from states where aerospace firms have benefited from traditional NASA contracts.
“Space has rarely been a partisan issue,” said Scott Pace,director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.
Although space policy has a bipartisan foundation, it’s in a moment of painful transition.The final shuttle flight occurs amid protest from former astronauts and retired NASA managers who think the Obama administration is letting the U.S.space program slide into disarray.

NASA’s top officials note that,in ending the shuttle program, NASA is carrying through on a decision made by the George W. Bush administration.The shuttle’s retirement creates a gap in human spaceflight capability —a period in which American astronauts will have to buy tickets on Russian rockets to reach the international space station —but the space community has known for years that there would be a gap of some duration. (Obama’s critics say he’s lengthened it rather than narrowed it.)

A commercial rocket capable of putting astronauts in orbit could be ready by the middle of this decade. The only sure-fire way to eliminate the gap would be to keep flying the shuttle. But there’s a general consensus that the shuttle has accomplished its mission now that the U.S. portion of the space station is complete. The shuttle costs billions of dollars a year to operate and has eaten up the bulk of the human spaceflight budget for decades. Only by ending the shuttle program could NASA free up money for new rockets and a more ambitious program of deep-space exploration.

The Constellation program, with the goal of a return to the moon, was the Bush administration’s effort to create a follow-up to the shuttle, but it did not survive for long after the change in administrations. Constellation’s funding never matched its aspirations, according to a presidential review committee. President Obama nixed the moon mission and has endorsed sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025.
NASA could announce any day the design of the new, government-owned, heavy-lift rocket that would make such deep-space exploration possible. Congress is impatient as it waits for NASA’s plans. Senators from both parties went so far recently as to threaten the agency with a subpoena if it didn’t hand over documents showing what it’s been up to regarding the new rocket.