Back to the Drawing Board for NASA
PIGEON FLATS, UTAH — A new vision of human space flight is being sketched upon the blackboards at NASA. Its smaller and less ambitious outlines are beginning to take form atop the chalk dust and eraser strokes that are all that remains of a previous era. And those outlines look a lot like the ones that were there before we started putting wings on the things were were shooting into space.
“It’s increasingly apparent that we’re not going to have Hilton Hotels in space where you can pad down the hallway to the ice machine in your Velcro sneaks anytime soon,” said former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Contrary to what you may have been lead to believe by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, this space stuff is hard!”
Looking back on the brazen optimism of the Shuttle and similar programs, NASA appears to have realized the proverbial error of its ways.
“What we’ve learned with the Shuttle and other scrapped efforts like the X-33 and the Orbital Space Plane,” Bolden continued, “is that outer space is an inherently different environment from our atmosphere, at least where flying is concerned. You see, there’s just no air out there at all, which our scientists now believe somehow or other affects the performance of the wings.”
In the wake of the Shuttle program, NASA’s precious funding was funneled first into a series of spectacular robotic missions and then toward a deeply sentimental, expensive, and now way over-budget effort to recapture the swagger associated with the Apollo program. While engineers on lesser known projects continued to tinker, they likely knew what was coming.
“Big rockets with little capsules on the top; that’s the future,” said newly appointed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine earlier this week. “It worked for Neil Armstrong, and it’ll damn well work for whichever space monkey we decide to fling at the moon next.”
Bridenstine then went on to announce that a sweeping restructure of the administration was under way. “If it flies, it dies,” he said.
Workers at the NASA Space Blimp Assembly Building (or SBAB) in Pigeon Flats were among the first to receive notice of the dramatic cutbacks in NASA’s already hobbled human spaceflight agenda.
“The future of mankind is at stake, and that’s what people don’t seem to understand,” said Director of Space Blimp Operations Denton Welbent. “If we don’t learn to travel into space, to live there and work there; if we don’t get up off of this rock, we’ll still be groundhogs when the sun eventually fries Earth to a crisp. What I have a hard time understanding is why our project was cut. The Space Blimp doesn’t even have wings. Hello! It’s a balloon.”
NASA’s official stance is that the axing of the Space Blimp program was not at all related to the findings that led to the retirement of the Things That Fly In Space Initiative (or TTFISI), but rather sited the inherent dangers of operating a blimp around the International Space Station, which is known to have many sharp pokey things that stick out at weird angles.
