NASA is hiring astronauts; applications due next week

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph from the International Space Station on October 7, 2015.

“We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can”, said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, at NASA’s advisory council meeting last week at Johnson Space Center. The new plan is to get humans to the cislunar orbit.

This decision to drop involvement in the ISS is mostly a cost-cutting move.

NASA first flew missions to the ISS and later paid private companies such as SpaceX and Orbital ATK among others to fly resupply missions out there, but it seems it is now time for the general public to make the best use of the ISS if they are well able to.

NASA will not fund the current space station beyond 2028 as its new main goal is to bring astronauts to the moon’s orbit also known as cislunar space.

The program’s budget, now about $3 billion annually, is projected to rise to about $4 billion by 2020.

NASA plans to leave the ISS behind, while hoping at the same time that the private sector fills in the empty space. Further science, tourism and maybe even manufacturing or mining operations may be possible within Low-Earth-Orbit, but they will likely be far smaller operations than the monstrous $140 billion (£93 billion) venture that the ISS is, with its 15 contributing nations. “We really want to open up low-Earth orbit to the terrestrial markets, and I want the private sector to explore”, he said. The comments are striking because, while the remarks reflect NASA’s desire to see U.S. commercial industries thrive in the space around Earth, it is not the agency’s top priority to ensure that happens.

Tax incentives from the government will hopefully be rewarded to private space companies when they decide to conduct experiments on materials or products in zero gravity aboard the space station according to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

MORE than 10 astronauts from the International Space Station joined in the fight to see a positive outcome from the COP21 meeting in Paris.

There remains uncertainty but he made it clear that NASA must at some point move on if the USA ever wants to make it into deep space. A move to cislunar space is, however, expected. To afford this, however, NASA needs to get the space station costs off its books. “The chances of this are low, but it’s worth a try”. The next attempt to leaving the low-Earth-orbit will be the Orion capsule, which is very similar to Apollo spacecraft.