Shuttle's Last Flight Leaves Russia With Space Monopoly

Source: Wall Street Journal Business

Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, the International Space Station is the most expensive project ever assembled in space. Within days, it will hang by a single, costly thread. And Russia, the U.S.'s historic rival in space, is holding it.

The last U.S. space shuttle is scheduled to blast off Friday. After that, the U.S. and other nations will rely on vintage Russian spacecraft to ferry their astronauts to the $100 billion station. Russia will hold a monopoly over manned spaceflight, and tensions already are rising. The Russians are in the process of nearly tripling the cost of using their ...

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While one has to pay to finish reading the entire story I was hoping that those with a subscription could post more.. Thanks...

USA! USA! We're number 3!

$100B for unmanned exploration. The Mars Rover mission (2 Rovers) cost about $1B. The Space Station represents 100 such missions, and now we don't even have lift capacity to reach it on our own.

Who is running the railroad?

triumph of capitalism, not so much.

What else can you say?

The bright, shining, progressive, future-looking United States of America, the country of the space age ... now reduced to hitching rides on Russian space taxis.

Why? Because there isn't any vision in our national government.

I even saw in the newspaper this morning that the House appropriations committee is trying to kill the new James Webb space telescope.

Tragic.

to the media. They beat it over our heads every chance they get. But I don't see them framing their stories on all the various wars in the same manner. We get way more back in practical information and technology from space exploration spending than we get from the military and all their endeavors.

I do not care what it costs to explore space. We need to do it, no matter what.

"Then all of this was for nothing."

else. We've been reduced to 3rd world debtor status.

for our country -- who remember the intensity of the space race culminating in one of America's finest moments just a few years after his death -- I say this will not do!


It breaks my heart, but then, I do realize so much has changed over the years.

It's just another bitter pill to swallow, but I do believe future generations may not be forgiving... for this and for so many other lost dreams.

They will say we just didn't fight hard enough.

I first became aware of it around 1965 or so, around the time that Lost In Space was debuting on the TV, and for a while space was the big thing. I had a solar system map on the wall of my bedroom and a "rocket launcher" that I got from a Malt-O-Meal box, while neighborhood kids were trying to shoot for the moon with their Estes rocket kits. I remember the fire in the space capsule and the somber voices of the news people discussing it, back when there were real, honest-to-goodness journalists. And I remember the Christmas Eve 1968 broadcast from Apollo 8 and the moon landing just 7 months later. It was a real exciting time for us kids. And people were talking like we were going to have a colony on the moon by 2000, or maybe even Mars, which seemed even more of a possibility after the Viking missions of the 1970s.

And now... Like you said, just another bitter pill to swallow :cry:

$14Billion NASA
$10Billion Coast Guard

Despite how much they get dissed by the other members of the military, they perform one of the most thankless jobs out there: protecting the stupid from themselves (clueless boaters, etc.) Thousands and thousands of coastline covered, out to International waters, for a measly 10-billion.

Of course, I'd love to see the Drug War stopped, and the CG has a big hand in "enforcing" it. They'd probably love to dump that, too, and go back to their three primary missions.

for our soldiers in the war than the entire NASA budget.

And soon.