by Robert Freeman

Created on: May 15, 2009   Last Updated: September 19, 2010

Many people have heard the phrase, "You need to take one step back in order to move to steps forward." It seems that the administrator's located in the confines of the dark hallways of the NASA administration building have taken this phrase to heart and have embraced it completely at the urging of the national government.

A Little Background

If you are not aware the

Space Shuttle program is reaching its end and NASA is planing on replacing it with the Constellation Program which is slated to get humans back to the Moon but is also the space craft of the future for the United States. Of course this is all fine and dandy if a new program at NASA ever ran smoothly; which as the history of the space agency shows, this is far from the truth.

One would think that because the Constellation Program is the new and best thing coming out of NASA the public would get to see a much improved version of Apollo, but unfortunately that will not be happening. NASA decided to take a large step back and dust off some old technology....really old. Combining Space Shuttle materials with Apollo-like design is the big plan of the future down in Florida, Texas, and Alabama which leaves much of the American public wondering what ever happened to the Third Generation Spacecraft we were promised.

NASA designers scrapped the X-Plane concepts from Lockheed and its competitors for one they had already on their shelves, the design used in the famed Apollo program. Remember the massive Saturn-V rocket and the small capsule on top that took astronauts like Neil Armstrong to the Moon? The early promise of the X-Plane and other Third Generation Spacecraft has all but disappeared within the governmental space program but perhaps the American public will see them rise from the ashes in the future.

A True Step Backwards

Well if you do remember the Apollo program of old, get ready to see it again in the Constellation Program. That's right folks, NASA decided to take a step back into the 1960s in order to move the United States space program into the future. Of course NASA engineers will be making major improvements on the original design and the billions of dollars going into the development can attest to that, but it is still the basic concept.

The current program calls for using old 1960s technology that is beafed-up and coupled with exisiting Space Shuttle components, but once again it is till based on the old concept. While other space agencies across the globe continue to perfect and refine

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