Marathon Pundit: ObamaFail: Russia can deny USA access to space

Thursday, March 06, 2014

ObamaFail: Russia can deny USA access to space

Space shuttle exhibit, Cape Canaveral

The Ukrainian crisis might end up turning into our biggest foreign policy failure ever.

Yes, even worse than Jimmy Carter's Iranian fiasco.

When America's Space Shuttle fleet was retired three years ago--it was replaced with nothing.

Now our astronauts are compelled to hitch rides on Russian spacecraft.

From Investor's Business Daily:

Leadership: Putting an economic and political squeeze on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis could bring another Obama chicken home to roost — our president killed the U.S. space program and made us dependent on Putin.

Since 2011, when America's space shuttle fleet was retired and our space program was dispersed to various museums, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which proudly put the first human beings, Americans, on the moon some 45 years ago, has largely been fixated on things like monitoring nonexistent climate change and Muslim outreach.

There have been the occasional Mars rover and plans to conduct unmanned chases of comets and asteroids, but our manned presence in space has been limited to hitching rides on Russian spacecraft to fix toilets on the International Space Station (ISS). With the crisis in Ukraine, that might be in jeopardy.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin, currently impaling Ukraine, hasn't indicated he might do this in response to the Obama administration suddenly developing a foreign policy backbone, the unfortunate fact is we've made ourselves dependent on the Russians for manned access to space for the next two or three years.