Administration Confusion Over NASA’s Future Affects Other Nations

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Nothing better illustrates the debate over ending the national human space flight program in place of a new, as-yet-non-existing commercial crew launch market that the following quote from ULA’s George Sowers, “Launch is the easy part. The greater challenge involves business and programmatic issues. . . . Getting the private sector to put skin in the game will be hard.”, as reported by Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Frank Mooring and Michael Taverna in NASA Confusion Reverberates Throughout Globe.

As reported by Mooring and Taverna, “Boeing and Lockheed Martin invested $5 billion between them to develop the EELV vehicle—five times what the government put in. Most of that eventually had to be written off when the launch market failed to develop as predicted. ‘That was a much more certain business case than commercial crew launch,’ Sowers says.” Yet, the upending of Americas HSF program has put more than a bit of a kink into the planning by other nations of their space activities.

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