The US Space Program: One Small Step - Into a Brick Wall

I share the US birth State and birthday, although not the year, of Korean War Vet of 78 missions, Lunar Landing Astronaut, and Aerospace Engineering Professor Neil Armstrong. Born on August 5, 1930 he deserves honor and best wishes as a US Veteran and US Space Hero, as well as for being a humble and productive man, a great dad and husband, and an effective teacher. I would be proud to call him Dad or Grandad myself, but enjoy respectfully calling him a fellow American and one of the best sort.

Mr. Armstrong is also an advocate for continuing the US Lunar Exploration Program and he deserves at least an honest answer for its demolition or the continuance of federal funding to make it so.

Redirecting federal focus to future Mars landings and settlement will make the operators of The Mars Society, which I also respect, happy. However, it lengthens both the funding period of the life of NASA and that may be one point in favor of focusing federal funding further into the distance and the future.

Is the International Space Station, then, to be the stop-off point between Earth and Mars? Pretty tiny facility for that . However, private space ventures may travel to the Moon and set up bases and spaceports that the government can then lease. That makes more sense and that could be a suitable present of sorts to Neil Armstrong and his spacegoing fellows of the 1950s - 1970s. I hope that happens.

Why the Moon? -- Through investigations and a large survey, NASA found 200 things that can benefit humanity on the Moon. See the embedded link.

Videos have surfaced that illustrate a spacecraft already sitting on the moon before Apollo 11 Landing and Neil Armstrong took the first small step. Some believe it is the reason for discontinuing the US Space Program - to cover up the identity and nature of the structure. However, the poster of this video, NAlexo, feels that the structure was bombed after the Lunar missions ended, in order to elminate it.

Perhaps the US was launching UFOs from the moon during the Cold War? More realistically, perhaps USA and USSR were testing various unmanned spacecraft that were left on the lunar surface, either crashed or successfully landed. If military dominance was behind these testings, then it is reasonable for both nations to cover this infomation as top secret. Then why land on the moon and uncover it all?

The possibilities open up a line of fiction and historical fiction, along with speculative fiction for human space endeavors in the 21st Century.

On August 5, 2010 only 67 job listings for the Space Shuttle program in America could be found from all sources online. Leading job testings in these job listings are:

• Senior Coordinators
• Capture Team Leaders
• Controller - Armed Forces Services Corporation
• Server Software Developers
• Purchasing Managers
• Subcontract Administrators
• Crew Exploration Vehicle Software Test and Verification Systems Engineers
• Market Development Managers
• Fabrication Specialists
• Earn up to $240 an hour in Texas - Aerospace jobs, re: Space Shuttle
• Records and Data Management Techs
• Electricians
• Senior Design Engineers
• Project Element Support-Technical positions

Intestingly, over 800 jobs that mentioned the Space Shuttle on one major job search engine had nothing to do with either the shuttle or aerospace work. These employer listed such phrases as "Watch the Space Shuttle launches from your office..."

At the same time, over 30,000 real aerospace jobs are listed across the Interent, the leaders being:

• Online Aerospace Marketplace
• Sales
• Management
• Executive
• Manufacturing Engineers
• Mechanical Engineers
• Quality Engineers
• CNC Lathe and Mill Machinists
• Mechanical Engineers
• Software Engineers
• Systems Engineers
• Program Managers
• Project Engineers
• Electrical Engineers
• Assemblers and Techs

The leading companies posting these job listings are:

1. Bae Systems
2. PDS Technical Services
3. Goodrich Corporation
4. Tyco Electronics
5. Aerotek
6. Honeywell
7. Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems
8. EPBM
9. QinetiQ North America
10. Eaton Corporation
11. Raytheon
12. Hamilton Sundstrand
13. Gulfstream Aerospace

Some of these major companies act as government contractors, while others are private companies. This fact speaks to the point that private space flight is imminent and may be planned for lunar colonization and resource extraction.

It might be a good birthday present to offer Apollo 11 Mission Commander Neil Armstrong and his crew and any surviving astronauts of the 1950s - 1970s a ride in space to the International Space Station, despite the expense. They'd rather the funds went into prolonging the US Lunar Exploration Program and the US Space Shuttle replacement design and operations. Michael Collins, who stayed aboard the ship orbiting the Moon while the Eagle sat on the lunar surface, never wanted to return to space, according to publications of newscasts and a children's book on Apollo 11. Perhaps others do not want to return to space.

Despite program and funding cuts, possibilities still exist for the US to continue into space, to extract resources from the Moon and from the asteroid belt beyond Mars. Privatized space flight brought to the fore by the X-Prize and spaceports going up around America, along with robot avatars controlled on the moon from Earth, and other ideas and projects can bring down the brick wall that our veteran astronauts advocate for demolition.

Happy Birthday, Neil Armstrong, and best wishes for America's future in space.