Space Center after his assassination in 1963, prior to thatit was known as NASA’s Launch Operation Center. Before his death President Kennedy intended to move a second command centre to his home State of Massachusetts. His successor in the White House however hailed from Houston, Texas, the rest of that story requires little explanation.
Future plans for NASA
Only 2 more shuttle launches will be funded by October 10th, 2010. After 2010 when the last shuttle is scheduled to fly and Government funding for the Shuttle ceases - the Space Program returns to the more conventional method of astronauts atop rockets to launch them skywards. It seems that the era of the Shuttle has gone the same way as Concorde – too advanced for its time and overly hazardous. A simplistic view would be that there are essentially 2 problems regarding going into Space. Namely, the first is getting there and the second coming back again. The
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too dangerous and indeed the tragedies of the Discovery and Columbia have confirmed that. Carrying humans on rockets filled with explosive propellants was not the ultimate ambition of Werner Von Braun. Instead the technologies that will eventually allow us a safer transport seem just as incredible now as the Shuttle did the first time it landed.
There are essentially two technologies that hold the greatest promise for the advent of truly sustainable space travel. The first is the scram-jet technology which will open up the supersonic, indeed hypersonic means of propulsion in the upper atmosphere – the gateway to ascending into orbit. This technology on test at NASA uses an air intake profile to compress the air rather than a conventional turbine blade. The result is massive thrust at high altitude and therefore high speeds. Anecdotally it is suggested that a journey onboard a ‘hypersonic’ or ‘scramjet’ plane from London to Sydney would take 2 hours.
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