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Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) — President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China.
Obama’s transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015, according to people who’ve discussed the idea with the Obama team.
The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China’s space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty battlefield eyes of the military.
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Interesting. I had not heard this. The thing is that NASA has always had a lot of input from the Pentagon. All or most of the early astronauts were military “on loan” to NASA. And one of the reasons that the space shuttle had such a clunky design was to accommodate military satellites. The Pentagon then bailed on the shuttle but the design was already locked in.