Lawmakers Voice Support For NASA Moon Program 206
Matt_dk writes "Members of a key Congressional committee on Tuesday voiced support for NASA's Constellation program, designed to get astronauts back to the moon. The comments came a week after an expert panel said NASA's plans were not possible, given its current budget. The occasion was an appearance by Norman Augustine, head of a committee formed to consider the future of human space exploration. The Augustine committee sent a summary report to the White House last week saying NASA needs at least an extra $3 billion a year to implement the Constellation moon program. The report also included several alternatives to that program. At a feisty session on Tuesday, Congress was having none of those alternatives, starting just minutes into the two-hour hearing."
Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
"Voicing support" doesn't mean jack squat. Put your money where your mouth is or sit down. For WAY too many years now, Congress and various presidential administrations have "voiced supprt for NASA and made grand promises about building moon bases, going to Mars, etc. But they've turned around and quietly kept the same anemic budget that's been in place since Nixon axed their budget after Apollo. And, for all the grand promises, all NASA has actually delivered were a few probes, a low orbit space station, and a "reusable" spacecraft that can only go into low orbit and has to be rebuilt after each mission. Politicians have coasted on bullshit promises for decades now, and NASA has been all too willing to go along with it.
This committee report is the first time that someone has so publicly pointed out what should have been obvious for a long time now--that NASA isn't going ANYWHERE on the current budget. So either give them the budget they need or own up to the fact that the era of manned space exploration is over. Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that:
1) The ISS is an international cooperation, an important starting point for manned deep space exploration as the cost will be prohibitive for any single nation? The PR it's worth isn't in the public eye, it's in the eyes of the nations that the US will have to ally itself with in space if it has any hope of getting a more permanent place in space.
2) The shuttle program is done, with the shuttles expected to be retired in 2010, and that they've been working on a replacement for the shuttle for 10 years, though the short-term solution seems to be to use Soyuz capsules for manned launches? Suggesting that they get rid of the shuttle because it's a load of bullshit promises and tired old technology is a bit redundant when the shuttle has less than a year left before it's permanently grounded.
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance. Take every precaution to avoid losing people, but understand and accept that every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space, you're taking risks with your life. It's that 2nd part that the people at large don't seem to understand, and that's why every time there's an accident and somebody dies, the space program loses support.
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
I agree that most Americans don't care about the loss of life. What we do care about is "wasting" money. It sounds horrible but that's America. And, so, I think many, many people in America think human space exploration is a waste of money at this time. Of course, I'm sure the general contractors in these congressional districts feel differently and that's why you are hearing so much noise about it in Congress right now. As usual what happens in Congress has nothing to do with what the people that elec
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Interesting)
The oceans are also a hostile environment. Yet we designed a submarine for about $6B and currently buy new ones (1 a year at the moment) for under $3B each. When was the last time the nuclear Navy has had an accident? That would be the USS Scorpion in 1968. Only twice in the history of the nuclear Navy has there been accidents resulting in the loss of life, both in the '60's. The Navy also has many more platforms, operate far more frequently, and are designed and built (nuclear construction too) for less than NASA wants to go to the moon. NASA needs to trim the fat and improve safety if that want to keep support levels high.
You also say that you take a risk every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space. Well you also take a risk every time you strap your self to a car, get on a bike, bus, train, etc. But you have to trust that things have been designed properly and the operator is paying attention to what they're doing. If you want a life without risk, good luck finding it. The key is to make sure the proper steps are taken to mitigate those risks.
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
But there's an important difference between space and the deep ocean. The energetic cost of getting a kilo of payload into space are several orders of magnitude larger than they are for getting the equivalent payload size into the deep ocean. Because of this we can afford to overbuild and over-engineer submersibles in a way that we cannot possibly hope to do for space vehicles where every gram costs us dearly. As a result, any space vehicle of a reasonable cost (read billions rather than trillions) will be inherently more risky, because it will be, by comparison with the submersible, built to the absolute minimum engineering tolerances for strength, durability, etc., Basically, anything that adds weight will be built to the absolute minimum tolerance on a space vehicle. A submersible will be significantly overbuilt for hull strength, resistance to pressure, etc. because the cost of moving this extra weight around under water is much, much lower, than the cost of sending the equivalent extra weight into orbit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And the buoyancy counteracts..... the weight. I did say that if you add weight you need to add length to give enough volume to float that weight, meaning you need to add buoyancy. Anyways the point was, subs could be made a lot smaller and cheaper if they didn't have to worry about coming up, because weight (read:buoyancy) will not matter, thus all those ballast and trim tanks (and associated pumps and piping) can go, the machinery can be packed in different to cut volume.
To relate it back to NASA, it tak
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Emphasize the danger.
Right on. The American public really isn't anti-danger, look at NASCAR.
It's good for society to have dangerous hobbies and send their bravest souls into danger. That way the rest of the population can live vicariously through them. It's either that, or start a war or two every now and then. Imagine the resource of the latest war were spent on space exploration. We'd have a space elevator by now.
Re: (Score:2)
Emphasize the danger.
Right on. The American public really isn't anti-danger, look at NASCAR.
Screw NASCAR. It should be more like "The Deadliest Catch... In SPACE!"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine the resource of the latest war were spent on space exploration. We'd have a space elevator by now.
Or, for the cost of 57 days of the war, we could have had a launch loop [wikipedia.org], which would be cheaper, wouldn't expose passengers to anywhere near as much radiation, and wouldn't require unobtanium.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Drat -- forgot to click "Plain Old text". Let's try again.
You equate "space exploration" with "manned space exploration". That's not very insightful. Human beings are a really, really, lousy information detection and collection device. Supporting them in space is very difficult and costs a fortune. Any sensible engineer would instantly reject a robot design for space exploration that resembled a human being. And people are unlikely to be able to explore Venus, Jupiter, etc for many decades -- maybe not eve
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a very good reason to think in terms of manned deep space exploration: manned deep space colonization. Something about putting all your eggs in one basket. If something happens to this planet, or this solar system, we're screwed. Now, we're a long way away from being interstellar, but we should at least start trying to be interplanetary now.
Manned space exploration isn't about the human gathering inf
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
That's extremely unfair. The shuttle hasn't lived up to it's original billing (cheap, reusable) or flown as many flights as was envisioned but to claim it's nothing more than a giant PR program is rather dismissive of everything that it has accomplished. No shuttle == no hubble repair mission == no hubble for the last 15 years.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not using them to justify the "entire" program. I picked one accomplishment out of many to highlight. Do you honestly believe that the whole shuttle and ISS program is nothing more than a PR campaign?
Re: (Score:2)
The science return for the expense has been incredibly low. We have been "exploring" low-earth orbit for forty years now. There's not much more to find.
Maybe. But the engineering returns have been much greater. There are ISS parts up there made in many different countries of the world, and it is now being supplied by craft from four different directions, with more to follow.
This kind of co-operation is essential before we can do much more that involves humans in space.
Re: (Score:2)
Stopping such programs will make them that much harder to start again. If you say Lets stop the ISS and shuttle program then when it come back to a point where Man space travel looks more promising then they will go well look at earlier 21st century we canceled Man Space Flight because it was a wast of resources why should we start it again. Vs keeping it on life support right now so when if/when interest kicks back up it will be an easier sell to just raise the budget.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It looks like there's more international interest in the ISS these days. If it continues then just having that continued presence there will allow us to learn lessons, especially if the fantasies of NASA buying modules from Bigelow ever come true. Cheap at twice the price — we need to get off this rock!
Re: (Score:2)
there is very little the space shuttle or ISS can teach us about going to the moon or Mars (that we haven't already learned many years ago anyway).
Excuse me,
Just what was the 1960's "Apollo Engineering Mindset" for getting 2 years worth of fresh water to Mars for each crewmember? How about 2 years worth of Fresh Air? What would you do about bone loss, muscle atrophy for that same time? I leave as an exercise for the reader what the longest time in space was in the 60's but it wasn't anywhere near 2 years a Mars trip would take.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, and the backlash [csmonitor.com] has already started.
Re: (Score:2)
*golfclap*
These politicians insist on making that classic bungle of project management, the sunk cost fallacy:
"NASA has been working for more than four years on the Constellation program, a development program in support of which Congress has invested billions of dollars over that same period," said Science Committee chairman Bart Gordon. "As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years."
If they want to continue Constellation, that's fine, but it needs to:
The ISS already has a lot of sunk costs behind it, too. The argument here should be what it can achieve if the project is extended out. If we knew how the project would unfold back in 1995, I don't think the ISS would have continued past a conceptual ph
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
I know its in vogue to bash the Shuttle and ISS but you really need to do some research. They both have their problems but they are far from being pointless. At the most basic level the ISS has taught us how to design and build a large structure that needs to be assembled in space. Future long term missions require this domain knowledge. The most Apollo era technology achieved was very basic two-craft docking (Apollo CM-LM, Apollo-Soyuz, Apollo CM-Skylab). The ISS is also what has enabled the private manned launch industry. SpaceX would have nowhere to go and nothing to do if it weren't for the ISS. The ISS can house and bus experiments that aren't tied to a single manned mission meaning extremely long term experiments can be run without needing to design and build a new long duration spacecraft. The Space Shuttle despite its flaws can lift twenty tons of cargo the size of a school bus along with seven astronauts in a single launch. No other current or past spacecraft can boast that capability. This capability allowed the Shuttle to launch satellites, perform five Hubble servicing missions, perform dozens of SpaceLab missions, and build the ISS.
You talk about LEO like getting there is a bad thing. LEO is a great place to do space science without getting your crew killed. LEO has the benefit of Earth's magnetic field which protects astronauts from heavy doses of solar radiation. The presence of the magnetic field obviates some amount of shielding a manned mission might otherwise need which means more spacecraft mass can be dedicated to experimentation. It's also much cheaper (relatively speaking) to get a lot of mass into LEO than it is into other orbits. Getting something the size of the Space Shuttle into a MEO or GEO would be extremely difficult to do with a single launch. The LEO environment is then a great place to perform long duration manned missions to figure out how the hell to keep a crew alive and sane on a mission to Mars or a NEO. LEO is also a good place to learn and practice techniques for building things reliably in space. We're learning how to get a crew to Mars or a NEO by orbiting "pointlessly" in LEO, the skills learned in orbit will be useful on NEO and Mars missions. The altitude of the orbit isn't quite as important as the skills learned while you were there.
"support" is an interesting term (Score:3, Interesting)
mismatch between the task to be performed and the funds that are available to support those tasks
And congress reject this. They call this "voicing support?" Sounds like a death sentence to the higher-ups at NASA to me...
Re: (Score:2)
Its just more of the same. Congress won't kill the program, but they'll just whittle the budget down every time its possible until its just a token effort, if it hasn't become that already.
If that's the way it has to be, I'd rather see NASA dismantled. Take the $3 bil budget, save half of it and make the other half into grants for private space exploration companies. 3 billion may be chicken scratch for a big gov't agency like NASA, but 1.5 billion is a buttload for Scaled Composites, or even Virgin. NASA c
Bush mandated a moon shot (Score:5, Informative)
and utterly failed to provide funding for it. Its no wonder that NASA does not have enough money to complete the project. If this results in a funding increase for NASA, it will be a start. Even if it is only a tiny baby step.
Re: (Score:3)
To be fair, there is that little matter of paying for the invasion and occupation of a foreign country for political purposes.
After all, if you're going to spend a trillion dollars sending troops overseas to nation build, that does tend to put a crimp in the budgets of other projects.
Re: (Score:2)
To be even fairer, the President doesn't do the budget, Congress does.
And if you're spending a trillion dollars sending troops overseas to nation build, then an extra 0.3% is peanuts.
"the future of human space exploration" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Earth is a Single Point of Failure for the human race.
Even a dinosaur killer plus wouldn't take out the human race - more people would survive in deep bunkers here on Earth and with better chances of long-time survival than on an off-planet colony, same with a gamma ray burst. Which by the way would probably be wide enough to take out Mars too. And while humanity can be pretty destructive, I don't think we'd manage to kill off everyone. The only SPOF-threat is really a rock big enough to destroy earth, which is of course possible we could just as easily have s
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately, private ventures only make sense when theres a strong chance of profit. In those cases where exploration involved more than walking a little bit further (at which point a motivated individual could do it), it has always initially relied on government funding and support.
The great age of exploration in Europe was all initially government funded*. Only after routes were discovered and the land scouted out did for-profit groups begin to take charge -- even then they tended to be mercantilist p
Just get on with it (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I'm glad they said it. We can frig around with this platform or that platform based on the merits of xyz and sure direct is probably a better launcher and solid fuel launchers are probably bad but haven't we learned the lessons from scraping the Saturn V launchers yet?
Pick a platform, with all it warts, short of fundamental design flaws, and keep developing it.
I think the 747 was being developed around the same time as the Saturn V launchers, look how far it has come. Imagine if Boeing decided to chuck all that development work away and start again - they'd be bankrupt.
Time to get on with it.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>Boeing [would] be bankrupt.
No they wouldn't. If Boeing was like government they'd have a monopoly on your wallet, and be able to sustain themselves by sucking dollars out of it, even when they are producing an old obsolete 1960s product. Kinda like how Amtrak operates now. Or how the Government-Tribant monopoly operated in East Germany (smelly belchy oil-burning cars).
Where there is no competition, and you have direct access to funds, there is no need to innovate.
Re: (Score:2)
Pick a platform, with all it warts, short of fundamental design flaws, and keep developing it.
I especially like the way VADM Joe Dyer, Chairman of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) put it:
We note that the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report compares current plans for the Constellation program with a number of conceptual alternatives. Here, we offer a word of caution -- PowerPoint presentations addressing future programs will always out shine current programs of record. Why is that the case? It is because current programs have garnered the professional peer and public review during the accomplishment of real work. Technical challenges will have been discovered, cost stress will have been revealed, and the reality of conducting high risk business in an unforgiving environment will have been highlighted and publicized. Future concepts do not yet have the benefit of this reality testing. This experience led to one of the ASAP's prime recommendations presented to the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee. Specifically, the ASAP believes that if Constellation is not the optimum answer, then any other new design must be substantially superior to justify starting over.
Military budget is... (Score:5, Informative)
$636B. [wikipedia.org] More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
Re: (Score:2)
That's sort of irrelevant. (Score:3, Insightful)
and it has no real effect on NASA's budget (Score:2)
if anything it furthers space technology more than it hinders it.
We also spend more on new buildings/bridges/parks named after living government officials than on NASA.
Does NASA get votes?
Answer that and you have found the real reason.
Re: (Score:2)
More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
So NASA is a homeless bum in your world view? Maybe we should tell them to get a job ;)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
Yes. Because a) the US stepping in to other countries in order to stabilize things has worked so very well so far, and b) no other nations could possibly work together with the US to address international issues in a multilateral way.
And this is ignoring the fact that the US military blows obscene amounts of money on poi
Re:Military budget is... (Score:5, Informative)
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways?
The Apollo program was nothing more than a pissing match. We tossed 13 years we dumped $145B (in 2008 $). That's $11B a year, or $8B more than we're spending now.
Imagine if we spent $600B PER YEAR on finding alternative energy. Imagine if we spent $600B in one year on NASA. We'd be at Mars within 5 years. We slapsticked the Moon mission together in, what now looks like record time.
Universal health care would cost an estimate $70B. $70. For ~1/10th of what we spend blowing people up we could give every man woman and child in America full health care.
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if we spent $600B PER YEAR on finding alternative energy. Imagine if we spent $600B in one year on NASA. We'd be at Mars within 5 years. We slapsticked the Moon mission together in, what now looks like record time.
You must be a Democrat if you think that merely throwing large amounts of money at a problem is all that is required to solve it. You could write NASA a blank check tomorrow and it would still take more than 5 years to get to Mars. You think you can design, build and test a spacecraft overnight? You think you can train the guys who will fly it overnight?
Universal health care would cost an estimate $70B. $70. For ~1/10th of what we spend blowing people up we could give every man woman and child in America full health care.
The problem with our health care system isn't a lack of money. The problem with our health care system is that large bureaucracies (Governmental and co
Re:Military budget is... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not debating that health care in this country is a cluster fuck. I'm not debating that it's over priced and that it's being fucked up by bureaucracies.
I'm just saying. Even with all those problems we could easily toss a fraction of spending we spend on the military and do it.
And they went from 0 to the moon in 8 years. 8 years. Before the internet. Before CAD/CAM. Before software simulation. It used to take my company almost a decade to design a new product. You'd have to draft everything by hand. I guess we used to employ a courier service to go between our buildings and do nothing but carry drawings. Even then it'd take a day or two sometimes for another division to get them and change them and send them back.
I don't think 5 years is unreasonable if we threw our unconditional support behind it.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think 5 years is unreasonable if we threw our unconditional support behind it.
I disagree, though I'd love to be proven wrong. How long did it take from conception to completion to design, build and test the A380? Presumably with the full benefit of the internet, CAD/CAM and everything else that you mentioned. Do you think that a space craft capable of going to Mars and returning would be less complicated than the A380?
Ten years is probably more reasonable though I think we'd both agree that neither timeline is realistic with the current amount of funding that NASA receives.
Re: (Score:2)
Well that was my point. The "current amount of funding" isn't enough. With 600B, I think it could be done.
Second, my company takes 10 years to design new engines. It's an engine, how hard could that be? Problem is both us and Airbus are public companies. We have to deal with 'profit' and we can't throw everyone behind one project, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We've already found lots of alternative energy. It's capturing that energy, then overhauling our entire infrastructure to best use it, that we haven't managed to do well yet.
Re:Military budget is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not quite. You need to give that bum on the street some more credentials... he's living from meal to meal, and sometimes goes 2 or 3 days between chances to eat. Oh, and he's a former Nobel laureate, and invented things like Velcro and Kevlar, without which the military's equipment wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as it is....
Re: (Score:2)
Money wasted on only one step of the "bailout" - $787 billion.
Brett
Re: (Score:2)
no, it's like having a $600 credit card balance (Score:2)
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
No, it's like having a $600 credit card balance at the end of the month after your paycheck has come in and you've paid all your bills, and saying "well, I'm $600 in debt from fighting my neighbor and giving gifts to all my roommates. What's another $3 on this scifi movie?"
It's another $3 you don't have, that's what.
Re: (Score:2)
I've given money to panhandlers plenty of times
I don't carry cash. I bet the advent of widespread debit/credit card use has really put a crimp in the panhandler lifestyle. I keep waiting to run into one with a credit card machine.
In any event, it's much more fun to tell them to get a job when they beg for money. This will generate a reaction ranging from "fuck you" to just walking away. If you are lucky they will try to take a swing at you and you can test out your new taser ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, forget the bleeding heart, giving money to panhandlers is simply the wrong thing to do. Around here, the city has put up numerous signs discouraging the behaviour, as it reinforces the behaviour, rather than encouraging them to seek out alternatives that don't involve begging on the street.
But we're getting a little off-topic, here. The real point is that 3B for NASA is absolutely a drop in the bucket compare to US military expenditures. If the US really is focused on going back to the moon, it
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously (Score:2, Insightful)
But doesn't the federal government have more pressing issues at this time than building a Motel 6 on the moon?
P.S. Don't take the last sentence literally, please.
$12 trillion (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Because the US has no constitutional fiscal mandate, its government will continue to spend as much as it can borrow until an eventual currency collapse. This is an inherent property of democracies: everybody wants something from their government, and they all want different things.
Since your hope that the public debt might revers is false, your conclusion is false. We will continue to deficit spend, so we might as well get a moon base as well as those multi-billion war machines.
on a related note (Score:3, Interesting)
Could the ISS use excess electricity from the solar panels along with a tether to maintain altitude?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_propulsion [wikipedia.org]
The basic idea is you drag the tether through earth's magnetic field. If you pull power off of it, your orbit lowers. If you run energy back through it, your orbit rises.
My only guess is they don't have a lot of excess capacity on the ISS and so lack the power to run with this.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They have the spare power - they don't have the luxury of being able to remain in one attitude long enough for the tether to make a difference. (Not to mention that many of the engineering aspects of tether propulsion remain elusive and unsolved.)
Why don't people listen to experts? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years.
Compelling? Like an expert panel saying 'this won't work'? What's the point of assembling experts to make recommendations if we're not going to listen to them. I can't say I didn't expect it, but I think it's just pathetic that there apparently wasn't any serious discussion of the alternatives. There may be benefits to going back to the moon, but most of what I've read lately leans toward "I want to relive the glory days when space was new."
If this finally gets somebody to throw NASA some more funding, then I suppose that's something, but the cost of manned missions is staggering. There's so much interesting and useful science that could be done without having to spend (waste?) resources on consumables and redundant systems for supporting life.
I actually had high hopes that someone would listen to the recommendations... Reminds me of a poker player that doesn't know how to fold a hand. Sure, we have a chance to get something out of it, but I don't see that the pot odds [wikipedia.org] are not worth it for manned missions right now.
(Sorry for the poker stuff... no car analogy came to mind)
Terrible timing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
You've got that right. What really pisses me off is that of all those things, if it were up to me, I'd fund NASA first.
Also, the other thing that pisses me off is that NASA's only looking for and extra $3 billion a year. All these other programs have hundreds of billions of dollar pricetags.....
By the way, it is my sincere belief that if NASA whithers away and dies, there will be no amount of money that can be spent by the government that will be enough to encourage students to be more interested in scien
We do not have the money (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWWPT8cAUpUCsmOZoABze-6XhwTAD9ALBNU00
We're in the deepest recession since 1930, and have run up $1.38 Trillion in debt, people- and that's not all from the two wars we're fighting.
The administration is forecasting a $9 Trillion budget deficit [nytimes.com] within ten years, a figure the Congressional Budget Office agrees with.
"Only $3BN more" you say? That's a +15% increase of NASA's budget. "Oh, only 15%", you say. Well, guess what happens after 1000 federal agencies and projects have come to you asking for "only 15% more"? I can't even find a figure for the number of items in the federal budget, but I'm guessing it falls around 10,000 or more.
Yes, military spending is an order of magnitude larger. That is not an excuse to increase spending for another agency; it is a reason to reduce military spending. That is something that is not easily done, given how dependent our country has become on military spending to employ people, and congresscritters are very allergic to "defense" cuts in their district.
We need to be trimming from the federal budget, not adding to it any more, except for the most critical needs. Space exploration, while fascinating and a great boost for nationalism, is not a critical need.
Re: (Score:2)
Lets take the NHS (not popular in the US I know) our biggest problem is the amount of management layers that have been injected into hospitals over the years and
Re: (Score:2)
Your knee jerk response is typical of whats gotten us into this mess. If America's budget is anywhere near as messed up as the UK's there are places that desperately need trimming and area's which should have increased funding. Ignoring the fact that massive sweeping cuts to public services will only cause the economy to fall back into recession.
Huh? Aren't we saying the same thing? Your post was so full of wandering gibberish and bad grammar & punctuation that I couldn't tell.
Re: (Score:2)
That is something that is not easily done, given how dependent our country has become on military spending to employ people
In case you hadn't noticed, all of that military spending also keeps your ass safe from the multitude of violent people who would like nothing better than to have what you have...by whatever means necessary. If it costs a few extra bucks to smoke Ali Kaboom's ass in Waziristan before he shows up over here in a shopping mall with an AK-47 and an explosive belt then I say so be it. Remember that Ali Kaboom doesn't want to negotiate with you. He doesn't want you to understand his problems or reasoning. You are
Stay rational (Score:3, Insightful)
A reasonable military budget keeps us safe. A massive military budget makes us look for reasons to us it, involves us in foreign wars, and sinks our economy under a burden of debt.
What you really want, if you're frightened "Ali Kaboom", as you put it, is a massive intelligence budget and an intelligence system run by practical people willing to include talent wherever it exists. Then you add on top of that a military with enough punch to make people hurt if we find out something we don't like.
That's a lot
I grew up with the space program, but... (Score:2)
Frankly, it's gotten dumb and narrow. There's nothing on the moon that *matters.*
.
How about making long-term livable space environments (i.e. containing viable organic ecologies) and not some dimwitted ground-dependent space station? How about making economically viable solar power in near earth orbit and selling it at a profit? How about setting up a few thousand square miles of adjustable mirrors to reversibly control global temperature?
.
Uses for space like these *matter*. F*** the moon. F*** all that gra
Oink! (Score:2)
You don't understand - this isn't about science, or space travel, this is about pork, pure and simple. NASA has turned into a jobs program, and easy cash for contractors based in the states of these key congressmen - to the point where now, despite their huge budget, they really can't do anything useful in terms of launch.
The Augustine commission pointed out that the whole current setup is an expensive disaster, but Congress doesn't want to hear it, because they're only interested in keeping the cash flowi
What about private ownership of NASA (Score:2)
I recognize that this is possibly an extremely naive thing to suggest, but what if NASA were to be either co-owned by private investors, or sold outright to a private company?
Is there a reason that NASA still needs to be a Government operation?
Given that the key inhibitor to NASA being taken seriously as a "space exploration" organization has been the dire lack of funding over the past three decades, wouldn't it make sense to turn it into a seaparately operated, non-national, extremely well-funded company,
Some More Information: (Score:2)
I can understand that Congress doesn't want to scrap a current
Ok... WHY!?!?? (Score:2)
I understand that we want people on the moon. I personally want to go, though I know I never will. But shouldn't we be doing a decade of remote controlled devices and even autonomous ones first?
What's the point of sending people to the moon when we can do most stuff by robot, until we have a habitation base up there and it's largely self-supporting? Such a base should be built by robots before we send people to live in it, anyway.
OK, if we could send an inflatable home that would last for many years, I c
If we could only get the gov't out of the way... (Score:2)
... we'd be on our way to the libertarian paradise in space. Riiight. Dude, don't you understand how this works? The reason we're not doing "long-term settlement" on the moon is that there's absolutely, positively no way to make money at it. If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects would just buy themselves some senators, get the government out of their way, and go do it. But the fact is that getting to the moon at all is astronomically (pun intended) expensive. Get
Re:If we could only get the gov't out of the way.. (Score:4, Insightful)
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
Re:If we could only get the gov't out of the way.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And who was developing the Internet until the 1990's? The government. Specifically, DARPA and NSF. And a bunch of universities, probably funded by government grants.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
>>>There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
The people who sold me my first modem in 1987, which allowed me to get online and access the primitive internet, would have disagreed with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CommodoreVICModem.jpg [wikipedia.org] - So too would America Online which was born in the mid-80s. No money? There was lots of money to be collected from the internet prior to the 1990s.
Re: (Score:2)
It should also be clear even to a jackass such as yourself that you can't predict whether or not space exploration will be economically profitable in the mid to long term.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, do you hear yourself? "Well, *maybe* space will be profitable some day! We just don't know yet!" Well that's a great pitch proposal when you're trying to get funding for your new moon base! Brilliant!
Again, constrast this with the Internet: a) The cost to deploy were *much* lower, b) it could be done incrementally, and c) it was clear right from the outset why it was useful. *None* of these things is true of a moon landing. You're either in it for billions, or you're not in it at all. And
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I don't think business will jump in with both feet. I never said anything of the sort. All I think is that gutting the manned space program is incredibly short-sighted. There will come a day when spaceflight is profitable. That could be tomorrow if we discover some rare and profitable material (not likely), it could be within our lifetimes (somewhat more likely) or it could come afterwards. Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologi
Re: (Score:2)
Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologies and to study the effect that space flight has on the human body.
Wait... so you *do* think government should be involved in space flight? Because your original post in this thread suggested precisely the opposite.
Re: (Score:2)
Which post would that be?
Re: (Score:2)
The OP said this:
The point, here, was to argue against the idea that government should get out of the space industry and let business take over. You followed up with:
Re: (Score:2)
If, however, your position is that the government should fund and develop space travel until such time as profitability can be established, then I absolutely agree with you.
That was my point. The internet wasn't really profitable until the 90s (though there were a few exceptions, as others pointed out). That doesn't mean that building it was a waste of time or money though.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
>>>If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects...
They can't. These companies are BANNED from creating interplanetary ventures. The law allows them to send-up satellites, but it's illegal for them to do any other space-based entrepreneurship. The government has assigned that market to NASA as a monopoly, just like the old East India Trading Company had been granted a monopoly by the crown.
What we need to do is repeal that law, open Moon and Mars development
Re: (Score:2)
What we need to do is repeal that law, open Moon and Mars development to private business, and we'll see colonies on both those bodies before we die.
Uhuh.
Why? What reason could any business *possibly* have for spending billions to go to the Moon or Mars? Where's the profit motive?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes... and how does the main character do it? By lying and pretending there's something on the moon worth going there for (in this case, diamonds).
The lesson: The only way you'll convince people or businesses that going to the moon is even remotely worth the trouble is by lying through your teeth.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>by lying through your teeth.
I thought we were discussing a story called "Man Who Sold the Moon," not our United States Congress. Yes I know they lie through their teeth, promising to fund moon exploration, but please stay on topic. I don't trust the congress. They're just going to do the same thing they did in 1972 - cut the funds and kill the program. Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me. It's time to try something new
Re: (Score:2)
Good try, shifting the discussion onto a topic where you feel you might have a stronger footing, but it's a pretty weak tactic when you can't win an argument.
Once again: In Heinlein's book, the only way the main character could convince business to fund a space venture was to *lie to them*, telling them there were diamonds on the moon when he new full well that there wasn't.
Once again, the lesson is simple: going to the moon is completely, utterly pointless as far as businesses are concerned, as there's n
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
He also used a number of other tricks, such as leaking the fact that he was going to draw the Coco-Cola logo on the moon and then getting Pepsi to pay him not to (and, thus, win a lot of free publicity over the fact that they'd bought the advertising rights to the moon and were not usi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
When it comes to actually landing stuff on the surface, Mars is cheaper than the Moon, because you can use atmospheric breaking to slow you down instead of using more fuel.
However, once you have the necessary infrastructure on the surface, the Moon is a better place for launching stuff for use around Earth. So basically, Mars is better for colonizing people, while the Moon is better for space-based industry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The rockets produced initially for the manned program made unmanned launches less accident prone, allowing commercial use of satellites to be done with less risk of losing the payload, therefore making it easier to find investors. The benefits to the telecommunications industry alone have more than made up for the manned program.
I view the manned program as an end goal of its own. Like America's westward expansion, there are likely to be untold benefits that are not apparent from the start, except this time