Page 9 - Constellation Program News Today

♪ on the road again >> did you smoke a few joints, go on stage and sing. >> sure. oh, sure. >> did you smoke pot today? >> yeah. >> before you came here? >> yeah. >> cant wait to see that tomorrow night. larry king tomorrow night back in this chair with willie nelson. tonight, a few more minutes with buzz aldrin. we learned about your iphone app. how cool was it to be on "dancing with the stars," buzz? >> i think it was an honor to be selected to represent those people and because of the contr...

Lejunesse here from california because the government plans to stop production of a military plane and is canceling further moon missions by nasa. how much of your money would the government save by canceling those plans? william, youve broken down all the numbers for us thankfully. >> yeah. you know, balancing the budget isnt easy and everybody agrees we have to cut spending but like all cuts, they hurt and right now, the defense and space lobbies are squealing like a stuck pig. theyre complain...

Mission control, simulators, the training. it doesnt make sense to me. >> bret: president obama at the kennedy space center announcing increase in the nasa budget but also saying the constellation program in place will be canceled. to do that, that costs $2 billion. where are we in the space program? and what the president is talking about? were back with the panel. charles? >> we are seeing the abolition of the manned space program. when neil armstrong speaks out, that is an event. the most sel...

Am. we have to do it in a smart way. >> reporter: to visit asteroids and eventually land on mars by 2035 or so, the president believes nasa should begin development on heavy lift rocket technologies, build an orion space capsule for the space station and support space taxis like one he looked at today. in the meantime we hitch expensive ride with russians to the space station. it has supports like buzz aldrin the second man to set foot on the moon. he felt the constellation program was too much ...

You said that weve got to be exceptional. should it become more private? should we incentivize on the private side? im out free market ideas. >> sounds like a great idea. the tricky marketing thin. hes raising the budget of the space program while cutting the constellation program. look, the bottom line is, armstrong,ç lovell are all against it. i had pleasure of having christmas dinner at his restaurant outside chicago this is not a grandstanding guy. if he is speaking out on this, it is beca...

Kennedy space center in florida. >> table nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before the decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. >> reporter: to the moon we went, as j.f.k. promised, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. now the space program that gave us mercury, apollo, gemini is at a crossroads. shuttle program is coming to a close. follow on constellation program that was supposed to take to us the moon and mars canceled. so...

>> yeah, and you know what? weve already had a million people log on this week. bill: whoa! martha: a million? >> yes, a million. now, when we started this, i was really worried that everyone was going to say no to everything, because they are concerned about more government spending and higher taxes. i was wrong. yesterday, we had people ask about the presidents plan to end nasas constellation program, basically putting men back on the moon, $3.5 billion, and you know what, 75 percent of the vi...

Includes an optimal balance between robotic missions and humans on missions. megyn: how are we going to get up there? how are we going to get up there? >> right now, again, be careful between making a difference between constellation being canceled and not having capacity to get up there. constellation wasnt getting us up there. it was relying constellation program also relied on russians to go up. what this program does is say, lets build better vehicles. so there is commitment to build additio...

So we need a different vehicle to allow us to take this -- these heavier materials up that are going to build the spacecraft that take us out to the asteroids or take us on to mars. >> the other specific in here, the constellation program, it was behind schedule, it was overbudget. was it right to essentially abandon it and does that mean we are going to give up hope for, say, the millennium for returning to the moon? >> i dont think so at all. if you look at the program, lets ask the american t...

Beyond that the constellation program which was completely canceled, the orion, the capsule will be resurrected from that and&it will be taken to the international space station as an escape vehicle. it will be in the next couple of years and there will be $3 million thrown into the space agency for the re-training of the workers that will be displaced. so this vision is a far cry from what the original was, although commercial operations will still be largely responsible for getting astronauts ...