It's too bad that some legitimize the mob in the streets as the spokesperson for the nation.

bevus: It's the way all big expenditures are made. Form a plan and send it out for bid. At this point there is no private company that is going to do it all on its own. Space access costs around $10k per pound just to get to low Earth orbit. You are 'way too jacked up on the issue with seemingly no awareness of the real situation.

Alliant Technosystems makes the shuttle solid rocket boosters. The shuttle was built by North American Rockwell, and modified by many other companies in the last 30 years.

I hope the launch site is close to where you live.

Where is the heavy lift capability in the plan? To go to Mars you need to be able to orbit 100,000 plus pounds, not a little nut with five or six people catching a ride to low earth orbit.

I'm talking HEAVY lift, not the 4 or 5 ton capacity that the commercial developers will achieve. We, and a Mars mission, need something with around 100,000 pounds throw weight. I don't hear anything about anyone developing anything like that.

If you are a cling-on, you're there -

Guess you didn't read the article. So quick with the keyboard because of uninformed cerebral processes. This engine has been top news for some time. Get with the program, instead of looking like some guy that still moves his lips when he reads.

All well and good, but you cannot launch from Earth with this engine. You need that big, expensive Constellation heavy lifter to get your spaceship into orbit, and Obama just cancelled that avenue. So, forget it. I'm depressed by the sheer number of luddite conservatives' represented here. Where do you think the money is spent? We don't rocket it into the heart of the Sun. It pays for serious people to think about very complicated things, and pays for equipment to implement them. It is not a UAW bailout. Stimulus spending to this point has done nothing but prop up unions, either industrial, but mostly SEIA janitors, while people who actually create wealth are left to flip burgers. We are faced with a 23,000 person layoff in Florida and Texas as the shuttle gets retired. A lot of these people are thinkers and innovators, who have spent their life becoming highly specialized and key to human advancement and discovery in the future. What has your shuffling janitor done to improve your life lately?SpaceX and other commercial ventures can take up part of the slack, but they are stretching now to fly to the International Space Station. The aggregate of the commercial efforts cannot pay for the development of a true, heavy lift vehicle. Obama has managed to put out the light that John Kennedy lit so many years ago, and abandoned human discovery to the Russians, Chinese, and Indians so he could spend a few billion dollars buying off some other corrupt group or organization. For shame!