I assume that is the F-35 being mentioned. I was under the impression that the F-35A works fine. The F-35C needed some more strength to be carrier qualified. The F-35B is a mechanical nightmare, but then it is trying to do a lot on a single airframe. It does work, but it is touchy from what I understand. The trouble with cancelling that project now is that it would be throwing away the money spent on it already and the airplanes that are already in service. They are suppose to replace a large number of 1970s designed airplanes and is being funded by a lot of countries around the world. Unlike the F-22, the F-35 is suppose to be in service with a dozen or so nations by the 2020s.
I am aware of that. The problem with the F-35 is that the number of issues are increasing. Now about the Orion. The Orion is scheduled for four flights - two unmanned, one manned, and one manned maybe. NASA hasn't decided on a target destination for the manned flight. If this spacecraft goes to Mars, and that is a big maybe, the crew won't be landing on the planet. The Orion will have a command module and a deep space habitat module, no landing module. So, the program will be doing an Apollo 8 around the moon. I haven't seen a lander for the Orion. (The Altair landing module was scrapped with the Constellation Program.) And, looking at the design of the Orion, I don't know how NASA would design a lander that could work with the configuration of the spacecraft. I haven't seen plans for the next space station and the ISS is scheduled for retirement in the 2020s.
NASA is sort of in a funding holding pattern. No one seem to know what to do next for their manned missions aside from finish the Orion Project because money had already been thrown at it. The other robotic missions seem to be doing fine. NASA seems to have lost interest in Near Earth Orbit altogether. They've left that to other countries and corperations. High Earth Orbit, Lunar, and Interplanetary missions seem to interest NASA, but they don't seem to move much on these until they can prove Orion works. Plus their effort to capture a small asteroid combined with corperations wanting to get into the prospecting business might go somewhere. If it doesn't get stopped by International Law involving ownership in Space and other issues.
Those same studies also strongly suggest that keeping the crew occupied and active is the primary remedy for that problem. It isn't isolation so much as prolonged periods of boredom and/or inactivity, which is actually the overall problem with space in general. If you can find a way to keep the crew active and engaged for 7 months, they'll be fine by the time they get to Mars. There have been a lot of theories about how to do this, but my favorite so far is to have the crew spend that entire 7 months training for the ground mission in VR simulations. My second favorite solution is to include a crew of introverts who would be perfectly happy spending seven months re-reading the entire Dune series and/or playing Call of Duty multiplayer between exercise sessions. That's a concern? I thought that was an occupational hazard? I'm puzzled as to why you think we are ready -- or should be ready by now -- to move beyond Low Earth Orbit AS A SPECIES. Even if commercial ventures were able to do that, the vast majority of the human race will see their grandchildren die of old age before they ever set foot inside of a spacecraft. We're simply not at that stage of development yet and we won't be for a VERY long time, centuries at least. We're in the age of near-space exploration. Commercial space stations are not yet even a novelty, private citizen space flight has only been experimented with. Some time before the end of this century we will probably start building manned installations on the surface of the moon and start thinking about ways of exploiting Near Earth Asteroids for profit. But we're not at that stage yet; we're discussing EXPEDITIONS, not colonization. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sunk cost fallacy: assuming that continuing to spend money on a deeply flawed project would "go to waste" if you switched to a different system. It's a fallacy because that money is wasted no matter what you do. You could spend 100$ billion correcting the flaws of the F-35, or 40$ billion developing an alternate system that works better. Since you can't get a refund on the money you already spent, the $40 billion system IS a better solution whether the F-35 develops into a mature system or not. Think of it this way: You spend $1000 on a computer that doesn't work because half the parts are faulty. Do you A) buy $900 worth of replacement parts to try and salvage your purchase or B) realize you got ripped off and buy a $700 computer from another company? Some of which already bailed when they realized they were being taken for a ride. The F-35, like most of the things built by American designers, is a solution desperately searching for a problem. It's not even a maybe. NASA has exactly NO plans to send that craft to Mars any time in the next five decades. "Orion can go to Mars" is a bit of fancy marketing and not much else. You haven't seen a service module either. NASA couldn't get their shit together to develop one so they borrowed one from the ATV. The only thing NASA has actually managed to get done in the past 7 years is the Orion capsule. The service module, the lander, the Senate Launch System, the Earth Departure Stage, even the Ares-I never got past powerpoint stage (Ares-I came close, if only because after 3 years they finally figured out how to launch a 5-segment SRB without blowing up the launch pad). China's on it. Coincidentally, they also have a pretty active lunar exploration program too, with manned landings in the near future.
Let's be charitable - Russia is a 2nd world country. The concept of the world being divided into three worlds is a creation of the Cold Ages. A new category, the Fourth World, came up later. it defines how developed a nation is. Russia has struggled to be a 1st world country - a developed nation like those in Europe and the United States and a small number of countries in Asia - for over a century. NASA has revealed that they don't plan to build the next space station with the Ruscosmos, when the ISS is retired in the 2020s. NASA will work with the private sector in building the next space station. (I was referring to a NASA space station in my last post. I am aware that China is building a space station.) I read a proposal at NASA Watch for a "real" test of astronauts' endurance. Have them spend in the ISS, then time at the Antartica, then return them to the ISS. Any mission to Mars will require a global effort. It's too expensive for any one nation to do.
By definition, yes. That's literally what the term "2nd world country" actually means: "Soviet Bloc." The term "3rd world country" originally referred to all of the developing countries that were not aligned with either the west or the soviet bloc during the Cold War; they were implicitly considered to be poor and under-developed mainly because neither of the major power blocs were able (or willing) to assimilate and develop them. And no, it's not really a description of "how developed" a country is. It's actually a jingoistic term that implies that any country that hasn't enjoyed the blessings of western patronage is either Soviet Bloc (the enemy) or under-developed and not worth the effort (peasants). That hasn't been the case for over 20 years now, which is why more formal discussion on such matters now refer to "developing countries" rather than "third world" as those categories no longer overlap and arguably never did. So no, Russia is not a "developing country" in the sense you're implying. Political intrigue aside, it's a major industrial power with a multi-trillion dollar economy. They also DO have the industrial capacity to completely leapfrop the United States in terms of space development, not to mention a lot more practical experience in that field than the U.S. currently has. There, as here, the only thing missing is the political will to do so. China HAS the political will, and is fast-tracking the tech development to get caught up. So as a tally: we have two countries with the means but not the will, a dozen countries with the will but not the means, and one country (China) with both the means and the will. Guess which one of them is going to get the moon first? Assuming it IS retired in the 2020s. Roskosmos has made it clear they plan to end their participation at that time; NASA has made no such commitment and will probably be encouraged to commercialize the station by leasing huge parts of it to private operators. Doubtful. It's more likely the private sector will do it themselves on their own timetable without NASA "working with" them, seeing how NASA currently has nothing useful to contribute to that effort except for technical knowledge which is already public domain. Though, again, the ISS will probably be leveraged for that purpose in some way. For the moment.
Nope, Musk wants to go to Mars, not the Moon. I have no doubt that when he dies, he will have his body sent there in a Red Dragon lander. As for the Moon? Other than some incredibly silly talk by Iran, the only other people who will be landing there within the next ten years will be the Chinese.