NASA finally telling the truth...
[Attached presentation-slide:]
"We can only fly in Earth orbit: That is the farthest we can go."
[--]NASA Astronaut Terry Virts 2015
"
Truth"!? It's
disingenuous at best to ignore the obvious context given by the year shown:
2015. It's not as if there's any
biiig closet over in the Vertical Assembly Building at Canaveral that's crammed full of Saturn V stages (i.e.: S-IC, S-II, S-IVB), needing only a serious dusting off plus meticulous inspections of
o-rings, to move forward with reäsembly to take U.S. astronauts back to the Moon.
[Sheol], thanks to the former U.S.
Muslim-in-Chief (r. 2009--2017)[
☪], NASA doesn't even have the
less-powerful rockets that were used to launch the Space Shuttle any more [†]. So we must endure the national humiliation of getting our astronauts to-&-from space only when it's convenient for the
Russki cosmonauts to let
Amerikanskis tag along ("pretty please?"). You remember the Russkis, right? The superpower that failed in the Space Race because they couldn't get the final bugs out of their own Lunar-launch rockets, which exploded on their pads in Kazakhstan S.S.R.? The people who produced a copy-cat orbiter dubbled "
Shuttleski" (or somesuch), but never successfully launched it--at least not with any crew? But nowadays there's probably widespread snickering thro'out Mother Russia: "So
Amerikanskis won Space Race,
da? Can
Amerikanskis fly themselves into space now?
Nyet! Har, har, har! "
And the presentation-slide quotes a person identified as an "Astronaut", but his name will evoke a "
whodat?" from practically everyone who followed the achievements of NASA from Project Mercury thro' Project Apollo; has he even
been up yet? Be that as it may, it's disingenuous at best to make wild leaps of interpretation from his straightforward summary of the disappointingly low limit on U.S. national space-flight, as our Space-Shuttle program was wound down to its conclusion in 2011 [†]. The space-flight situation for the U.S.A. as a sovereign state was even
worse at the time of the quote in
2015, having deprived ourselves, 4 years earlier, of the capability to place even 1&#man into Earth-orbit.
DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM HERE?
I sure as
[Sheol] do!The
Baby Boomers who were once merely the "new kids on the block", with their fresh diplomas in
aerospace engineering still carrying its original sheep aroma, reässuring them that graduation and hiring into NASA Project Apollo as engineers wasn't just some recurring dream, began to
retire.
Then someone, by the grace of God, realized that the last people who understood the engineering drawings and descriptions of Project Apollo were in the process of disappearing. It wasn't just a matter of obtaining & archiving docuмents--predominately on paper, maybe surviving only as quaint blueprint copies--the crucial issue was understanding which docuмents are
important, and when the engineer-archivists have collected the complete set that would be necessary to reliably reconstruct the Saturn rocket stages, instrumentation, orbiter, and lander, including the necessary programming, and confirm
all that by launching them
beyond low-Earth orbit for a safe round-trip to the Moon. There's probably lots of important practical knowledge available
only in the brains of the otherwise-blue-collar assembly, testing, and transportation workers.
-------
Note †: The final launch being of
Atlantis as STS-135, surprisingly long ago, on July 08,
2011 [
☪],
per Dave Mosher "07.08.11 11:38 am": "The Last Space Shuttle Launches Safely Into Orbit".
Wired. <
https://www.wired.com/2011/07/final-space-shuttle-launch/>
Note
☪: Thus 2_1/2 years (nearly 30 months) into the
first term of the former U.S.
Muslim-in-Chief. Perversion of U.S. Constitutional role inferred
per Ben Shapiro 8 Jan 2015: "6 Times The Obama Administration Said Its Job Was to Promote Islam". <
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/01/08/6-times-the-obama-administration-said-its-job-was-to-promote-islam/>.