With Obama's evisceration of NASA, America reduced to hitching rides into space from... Putin

Guest post by 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.

America's final space shuttle mission ended July 21, 2011, when Atlantis landed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Since then NASA has relied on the Russian Federal Space Agency and its Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the ISS.

The Atlantis is there still, on display and out of commission. A prototype shuttle Enterprise is on display in New York at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum after having been towed there on a barge up the Hudson River.

"We don't have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do," said Eugene Cerban, the last man and last American to walk on the moon.

As Popular Mechanics notes, most of NASA's human spaceflight resources are focused on the government-owned Space Launch System, or SLS. SLS won't be ready to fly crew until 2021. After that, it will be able to fly missions only once every four years under the current development schedule.

Private enterprise has tried to pick up the slack.

SpaceX is currently the leader, having already sent cargo to the ISS. SpaceX engineers designed the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule with crew in mind from the beginning. Manned missions in near-Earth space may start by 2017.

How did we get in this fix, hitching rides on Russian spacecraft while the Chinese plan to take our place on the moon? An administration obsessed with green energy and high-speed trains to nowhere abandoned the promising Constellation program that included the Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle and the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies to take Americans back to the moon.

President Obama has deliberately presided over the demise of a great symbol of American leadership and exceptionalism. As in so many other areas, we'll no longer be the leader, just one of many. That's according to plan.

We once planted our flag on the moon. Now we'll be lucky to continue hitching rides on Russian spacecraft and paying for the privilege as NASA is reduced to Muslim outreach, monitoring Earth's climate and looking for endangered species in the Mojave desert.

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