A 355-foot, $500 million new rocket launcher at Cape Canaveral, Fla., needs one thing, officials say: a rocket to use it.
The Washington Post Sunday said the new tower at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center has never been used, and the Obama administration’s budget for 2010 eliminates the Ares 1 rocket that was to use it, along with the entire Constellation program.
Constellation was the ambitious Bush administration program to get Americans back to the moon.
NASA employees view the cancellation with alarm, the Post said. The aging space shuttle fleet is about to be retired, and without Ares no NASA-owned spaceship is planned for the near future.
U.S. astronauts will have hitch rides into space on Russian rockets.
