BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com
When I was a teenager, Space Invaders was one of most popular video games. The premise, for those who have recently arrived from space, was pretty simple: Shoot down incoming missiles that descended from the sky before they landed on your missile silos.
We seem to live increasingly in a space invader world.
Things keep coming down from the sky and it is getting harder and harder to shoot them down. Continue reading
BY ROBERT WALKER AND CHARLES MILLER
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal
During his first term, President Obama set out to transform NASA’s relationship with the private sector, announcing a plan in February 2010 to make technology, innovation and commercial space travel and exploration the centerpiece of his administration’s space strategy. Despite great resistance from special interests, the president proposed to cancel NASA’s programs to build government-designed rockets, leaving that to the private sector.
Unfortunately, Congress wouldn’t go along. Now that Mr. Obama has started a second term, however, he is well positioned to recommit himself to a vision that in the long run will benefit every American and may be remembered as a 30-year arc of Reagan-Bush-Obama space policy. Continue reading
BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com
Fifty years ago, Marine Col. John Glenn lifted off (NASA never used the phrase “blast off”) from a Cape Canaveral launching pad and America was in the space business.
Glenn’s was the fourth American flight into space. Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom road Redstone rockets just under 120,000 miles above the Earth’s surface in what were called “sub-orbital” flights.
Enos, a chimpanzee, flew in the first American spacecraft with a living mammal into orbit when he went around the Earth twice on November 29, 1961. Enos survived the flight, but died less than a year later of dysentery which did nothing to ease the minds of engineers, physicians and astronauts about the hazards of space flight.
I am old enough to remember the early days of spaceflight. I can remember, and I still get chills every time I hear, the voice of fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter saying, as the count reached zero, “Godspeed, John Glenn.” Continue reading