Page 22 - Constellation Program News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Event. bill: and that would be. if i may, here, just to ber ject for a moment here, if we go this route, there will be a prd of years where the united states of america's relying on the russians to get us to the international space station. are you comfortable with that? >> no, i'm not comfortable with it, but when that decision was made in january of 2004, we had six years to appropriately prepare for retiring the shuttle in 2010. i don't believe we took the appropriate actions by designing two rockets to take us to the moon, when one rocket would have been much better. but we're now reevalua...

Underneath his fingernails. the records did not sell at auction, good news for sir tom who will be 70 in june. he was knighted about four years ago. jon: and guess who we've got now? tom jones! not the singer, this guy is an astronaut and very smart guy. dr. tom jones is with us to talk about president obama. he's enroute to the kennedy space center in florida to unveil his administration's plans for the future of the u.s. space program. so far the white house has axed the constellation program that would have sent astronauts back to the moon. the president wants to put private companies at th...

Center today. on the other hand, former apollo astronaut buzz aldrin and the first woman in space, sally ride, getting behind the president's plans. so let's talk about it with former nasa astronaut, fox news contributor as well tom jones. do you sing, tom? [laughter] >> only in the shower, jon. jon: all right. so sum up what the president is saying here. what's he planning, why is he canceling that one program and why are so many people so upset about it? >> well, back in february he did cancel the constellation program to put astronauts beyond the space station towards the moon, and he also ...

Is going to privatize the space program and that didn't work too well when we tried to privatize the war in iraq, the war in afghanistan. in general, we have a bad experience with there for the past two decades and i don't think this is going to be any different. there is no reason to believe that commercial entities can launch people or mass amounts of cargo into space. there is no evidence of that, no history of that, and we can't have the space program continue on a hope or a dream or a matter of faith. we can't turn nasa into a face-bathface faith-based initiative. >> why did we get to thi...

So the point is what we're looking for is not just to continue on the same path, we want to leap into the future. we want major breakthroughs. a transformative agenda for nasa. now, yes, pursuing that new strategy will require we revise the old strategy. in part this is because the old strategy including the constellation program was not fulfilling its promise. that's not just my assessment. it's the assessment of a panel of respected nonpartisan experts charged with looking at these issues closely. despite this, some had harsh words for the decisions we've made. including some individuals who...