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Comment by Avshalom | Hacker News Reader

Also seeing as it's the Russians that are still launching humans into space--with no US spacecraft in sight--Russia seems to have won the space-marathon.

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The US retiring the Space Shuttle was a cost saving choice. It's cheaper to pay the Russians for transport while we are developing a replacement that's meant for longer range manned missions (Mars and the Moon).[1]

[1]http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2011-05-15...

Understood but we've been "developing a replacement" for as long as I've been alive and near as I can tell we're farther from having a replacement than when we started.

That's correct and even the private companies are not as far along as they predicted in 2011 when the article I linked was published. They said they'd be ready in 3 years for people. I get the feeling NASA isnt concerned with getting people in LEO anymore and they are developing something stronger.

>Q: Is there any other way to get into space?

A: Not from U.S. soil once the shuttles retire. NASA could eventually use the commercial rockets and capsules being developed by private companies. Two companies predict they could fly astronauts to the space station within three years. NASA is under orders to build a giant rocket to go beyond Earth orbit.

NASA's concerns aren't really relevant. Their priorities are set by the geniuses in Congress. Said geniuses think NASA should prioritize using spare Shuttle parts to build a massive rocket that will cost $2 billion/launch and fly once every couple of years, so that's what NASA is doing, even though it's stupid.

And they still try to do everything in their power to sneak in some real progress in the Senate Launch System project and hide it from changing political winds. I feel both saddened by this situation and impressed by NASA engineers.

I would think that the budgets show that NASA doesn't quite have the funding.

https://leadingspace.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/budget1.png

What strikes me is the area under this curve: funding was very high in the space race, but total dollars spent from 1980-2010 are huge too even after inflation.

However, % of federal budget paints a grimmer picture on what the feds value. http://c85c7a.medialib.glogster.com/paulsoma/media/e8/e87670...

And also a life-saving one.

There are two US spacecraft in sight: SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner. That's what the article is about.

(Well, there is a third US human spacecraft in sight, but I suspect it will be irrelevant compared with the other two.)

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