The sky is right there where we left it
February 3, 2010 - Reading time: ~1 minute
... and I'm actually kind of excited about the new direction that we're getting. There are two parts that bother me:
- We can't actually do anything yet. We just have to keep working on our same Constellation stuff, because Congressional fiat prevents us from doing otherwise; but nobody is really motivated to do that because everyone knows that the axe is falling. Keep working towards PDR? Yeah, right.
- There's a lack of milestones in the new direction. Sure, we're doing this great research and development, but for what? It would be good to have milestones and perhaps some specific destinations. Charlie Bolden addressed this, sort of, in his NASA Update today.
Overall I have good feelings about this. People keep asking the same questions to different people, and the answer is always "we don't know yet" ... I'm not sure when people are going to figure out that the answer won't change until congress decides to let it.