One aspect of the President’s administration that mystifies me, and which I don’t think gets as much press as it really should is his opinion on the Space Program and/or NASA (Arguably, the two are not the same).

This is a mistake that our children will still be paying for thirty years from now.

If you're in early middle age like me, you can probably remember NASA and the government making a huge deal over abandoning "Wasteful" rockets like the Saturn V in favor of a more "Economical" system they called "The Space Shuttle." Development started in 1973, and it was expected to go into service in 1978, but as *NO ONE* could manage to do anything right in the '70s, and as Jimmy Carter had some kind of pathological hatred of the space program, it got postponed to 1981.

Back in 1978, I read in Starlog or Future magazine an announcement that the French Space Agency were building their own space shuttle, called "Hermes." Development began the next year, and ran until 1994 or so, when the project was finally abandoned. In that time, it never flew, never even hit a finalized design. It remains fascinating, however.

Ok, I've been slamming Von Braun pretty hard, calling him an Nazi Party Member and a Major in the SS, and some people have complained to me about dissing the guy who put us on the moon, and that none of that stuff doesn't matter any more than the current Pope having been an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth.

Have The Democrats Resigned America To Third Place Status In Space?

Over the last couple weeks, we've been looking at Von Braun's space shuttle obsession, and Disney's eventual enthusiastic support of such a thing. So, ok, you've got a space shuttle. The obvious problem then becomes one we in the present face: "So you can get to orbit. Big deal. What do you do next?" Well, you go on to the moon, obviously, and here's former Nazi party member and SS Major Werner von Braun himself explaining his plan and how it'll all work, followed by a dramatization of a lunar mission. Part 1:

Last week we talked about Von Braun's space shuttle obsession and our glorious dreams of a 1950s future in space. This week we'll look at some actual visualizations of that future, as seen by Disney studios.