Kennedy Space Center will face challenges in the coming years, but will emerge stronger than ever, center director Robert Cabana said Thursday morning."This is a really challenging time we have in front of us," Cabana said. "None of this is for the faint-hearted."
Cabana was speaking to a couple hundred community leaders, business executives and educators at the Debus Conference Facility at the KSC Visitor Complex as part of the center's annual Community Leaders Breakfast.
-By John McCarthy
IMAGE: Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana today at the KSC Visitor Complex. Credit: Mike Brown, Florida Today.
7 comments:
Bob is trying to keep people working while they fly the next couple of Shuttle flights, but after two (or maybe three??) flights - what else will ever fly from KSC??? Atlas, Delta, Falcon - all fly from the Air Force side. So the Cape will still be in business, but the fate of KSC is to become a tourist attraction from which we used to fly people to the Moon, etc.
CharlesHouston
I was hoping John Glenn's white paper would change Obama, Senate and House of Representatives minds and extend the Space Shuttle until a replacement vehicle is available.
Obama, Senate and House of Representative are laying off 1000 people at KSC. They do not care about U.S skilled workers.
KSC could do a lot. It could be a leader in fields from fully reusable launch vehicle development to medical research. But KSC's leadership has to step up to the plate and support people who have ideas in any field that can provide practical benefits for America, not just tell them to bring money if they want to do R&D at KSC.
If they are considering throwing away the VAB and LC-39A/B complexes it would be an incredible blunder in my opinion. They are the only facilities that can handle the kind of HLV (Heavy Lift Vehicles) we will need to finally leave LEO and GO SOMEWHERE!!
KSC should become OSC. I'm sure JFK will be rolling in his grave when our manned space program is dead, killing the dream he started in 1961. KSC will be a wasteland, so we might as well rename it for the guy who killed it. The Obama Space Center: your gateway to nowhere.
It might be informative to read what JFK actually said and wrote. Apollo wasn't a plan to settle the solar system, it was a substitute for nuclear war. When Apollo 11 landed back on earth its mission was complete. Nixon cancelled it in 1074 because sending people into space with expendable rockets was, and is, much too expensive to have any practical value. That's why we built the Shuttle, which George Bush canceled, and Musk, Rutan, and everyone else who reallyunderstands the problem is developing fully reusable systems.
The Ares costs roughly ten times as much to launchas the Falcon for the same payload, and you just have to walk the processing flow to see why. The VAB, MLPs, crawlers, and LC-39 are incredibly expensive to maintain. As long as we had Shuttle it made sense to maintain them. With Shuttle gone (thanks to Bush) there is no reason to keep them operating.
JFK would be disappointed how KSC's leadership failed to continue manned space flights from making progress and therfore becoming redundant. Their leaders became overconfident in their positions to the necessary changes required to continue space exploration. Sure, there will be challenges for making advancements but the private companies won’t be sitting around idle like KSC leaders had for the last decade. Bob is just trying to hold on to his own job by trying to extend a couple more space flights.
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