June 24 News Items

A Waste of Taxpayer Money (Source: The Conservative Voice)
In the last several years the American space program has been working on "finding life" throughout the universe by starting with Mars. Last week the announcement came that the Mars Rover had captured photos of a material on Mars that had characteristics of ice. This announcement was not shocking since that was what NASA sent the craft there to do in the first place. Ice, or frozen water, according to NASA and other scientists is the essential ingredient for life. Well, I agree and at the same time, disagree. Sure water is necessary to sustain life, but life does not come from water, hence the wastefulness of the money for this program.

NASA has an enormous budget to run the space program and some programs are needed, but this is not one of them. I have four year old kids in my church that could tell you where life originated. If people would bother to accept the fact that everything in existence is created by an omnipotent God then, we would not need to waste money searching for an answer that even small children already know. Mars is a desert planet and perhaps there is ice and maybe even water there. So what? Who cares? It's water! That doesn't mean a thing. Life originated on Earth when God spoke it into existence and there is no need in wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money searching for an answer that is based upon faulty evolutionary ideas. (6/24)

France Eyes Milspace Push (Source: Aerospace Daily)
France plans to greatly expand its military space capabilities in its first major strategic shift since the end of the Cold War. The move is part of a major reinforcement of reconnaissance/intelligence, ballistic missile protection, force projection and ground force capabilities planned over the next 15 years to allow the country to combat terrorism and other evolving global threats.

The move, outlined in a white paper presented last week by President Nicolas Sarkozy, is to be paid for by stretching out conventional big-ticket weapons programs, shuttering unneeded bases and equipment and eliminating 54,000 defense jobs. Sarkozy said annual space spending would more than double, to nearly 800 million euros ($1.24 billion) per year, as recommended by military space leaders, with an eye to bringing most of the new systems into operation by 2015. The bulk of the undertakings would be conducted in cooperation with European partners. Much of the new space hardware will have to wait until the white paper recommendations are transformed into a new five-year spending plan for 2009-13, to be decided in the autumn. (6/24)

KSC Tries to Salvage Some Jobs (Source: Florida Today)
NASA aims to locate new engineering work at Kennedy Space Center after shuttle retirement in 2010 to offset a significant drop in launch jobs, the agency's chief said Monday. That work, along with jobs tied to the heavy-lift Ares 5 rocket and Altair lunar lander, will enable KSC to gain back a considerable number of 6,400 shuttle job cuts NASA forecast earlier this year. "I continue to believe that we are facing an actual reduction of three to four thousand workers at KSC," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said at a Senate field hearing on impending KSC job losses. "We are working every day to reduce even this, but there is no simple solution within the resources provided. There is no silver bullet."

The workforce at KSC, now 14,500, is expected to plummet almost immediately after the last shuttle flight. NASA earlier this year projected job losses of about 6,400. But Griffin said those estimates did not include gains anticipated from new work such as the assembly and integration of Ares 5 rockets and Altair landers. (6/24)

Russian Businessmen Book Spaceship Rides (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
A Russian businessman has paid 200,000 dollars to take his parents miles above Earth on a ride in a space ship, the Interfax news agency reported Monday. "When I told my mother we were going to fly in space, she asked me just one question: 'When?'," the man, Igor Kutsenko, was quoted as saying. (6/23)

For Alien Life Seekers, New Reason to Hope (Source: New York Times)
For those of us who still mourn the demise of the “Star Trek” franchise and its vision of the cosmos as a thrillingly multicultural if occasionally lethal nightclub, the announcement last week that many Sun-size stars in our galaxy are girdled with Earth-size planets was, frankly, transporting. The newly detected worlds are far too close to their stellar parents to have much chance of harboring even microbial life. Nevertheless, the discovery gave astronomers and alien life-seekers heart. For one thing, the planets are encouragingly compact.

In the past decade, astronomers have found some 250 extrasolar planets, but most have been forbiddingly Jovian: celestial gas bags presumed to have no solid surface and hundreds of times the mass of Earth. Roughly one in three stars surveyed showed signs of harboring stony planets, and other researchers performing similar studies said the figure might be more like one in two. And though the 45 planets on the Geneva list are all “star-huggers,” as one astronomer put it, with orbital periods of 2 to 50 days — even Mercury needs nearly three months to circumnavigate the Sun — researchers are confident that other rocky planets remain to be found at Earthier distances from their suns. (6/24)

NASA: Layoffs Not as Dire as Worst-Case Scenario (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
About 1,000 space workers -- worried about losing their jobs when the shuttle stops flying in 2010 -- came in buses and cars and on foot Monday, carrying signs and pamphlets demanding job security and a vibrant space program. What they got for their efforts was in some ways better than what they had hoped for, but hardly comforting: NASA chief Mike Griffin said that an agency estimate that 6,400 Kennedy Space Center workers could lose their jobs by 2011 was overstated. "Our best guess has been 3,000 to 4,000, not 6,000 to 7,000," he told a Senate space subcommittee hearing. (6/24)

NASA Expects to Eliminate up to 4,000 Shuttle Jobs (Sources: AIA, ERAU)
NASA officials said they expect to lose up to 4,000 jobs at the shuttle launching site when the program ends in two years. The agency expects to eliminate as many as 7,000 shuttle jobs but said a new exploration program will create about 3,000 positions. The 4,000 figure does not include a multiplier effect that will ripple through the Florida economy. For every KSC job eliminated, over two other indirect jobs could be lost through the supply chain and among non-space-related businesses surrounding Kennedy Space Center. The KSC jobs lost will also be at wage rates significantly above the statewide average, amid a national recession and a depressed housing market. (6/24)

Study Finds U.S. Export Controls Hinder Space Industrial Base (Source: AIA)
Policies governing the export of commercial satellites and their components are hurting the U.S. space industrial base, according to a report released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The study recommends removing commercial communications satellites, subsystems and components from the U.S. Munitions List and suggested further study to determine whether other nonmilitary systems should be available for export. Click here for more information. (6/24)