It seems only fitting on the day that President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget officially killed NASA’s Constellation program to return to the Moon that I post a link to a website I discovered today:

Beyond Apollo—Plans for the Exploration of Space from the Age of Apollo, 1959-1979

I’d always considered myself to be something of a space buff in general and NASA fanboy in particular—my best friend is a former mid-level executive at NASA and I myself used to work for a NASA subcontractor years ago—but I just finished the better part of this evening reading article after fascinating article at David Portree’s website on missions and space vehicles that I had never even heard rumors of before. (Did you know that at one point there were plans to soft-land spent Saturn S-IVB stages on the lunar surface for use as shelters instead of smacking them into the Moon? Or that as late as 1967 NASA was planning manned flyby missions of Venus and Mars after the Moon landings as a logical next step towards a manned Mars landing mission in the early 1980s?)

David Portree’s blog is a must-bookmark site for diehard space geeks and promises endless hours of fascinating (and depressing) reading, and interestingly enough, has helped me put Obama’s NASA budget cuts into stark perspective. When you step back for a second and consider the scope of audacious proposals like the NERVA Electric Mars Ship (see below) and compare those big-thinking plans to the relatively puny ambitions of the anemically underfunded Constellation program, it really makes you stop and realize something: we didn’t lose the Moon today. We lost it over forty years ago.

NERVA Electric Mars Probe (1966)

How did we get to this point? How did our dreams become so small and timid?

Tags: Blogroll, Mars, Moon, NASA, Space Exploration