raisinbran20 asked
The United States is planning to replace its ageing fleet of space shuttles with a powerful new craft modelled on the Apollo vehicles that took US astronauts to the moon 30 years ago. The new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) will be designed to ferry crew and cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS), take men and women to the moon, and to Mars. At present NASA is committed to the construction of a light spaceplane for carrying astronauts to and from the ISS — now manned by an emergency crew of two. That plan will now be scrapped and the space agency will be ordered to construct instead a heavy-duty rocket system able to carry large cargoes into orbit, a prerequisite for any manned mission to deep space. As part of the Bush plan, the US space shuttle fleet — now grounded and reduced to three craft following the Columbia disaster — would be completely phased out within the next four or five years. And according to Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the House Science Committee's subcommittee on space, test flights of unmanned versions of the CEV could begin by 2007. However, in reordering NASA priorities so the agency is committed even more to manned space flight, Bush is likely to infuriate many space scientists. They believe that robot spacecraft like the Spirit rover now standing on Mars represent far better value for money than human missions. The money spent on the ISS — its total bill is likely to reach almost $100 billion — has already siphoned money away from key science projects, they say.
367 answers · 0 comments
Answer this yourself in the app
See how this splits by age, gender, and region in the app.
