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Triana Mothballed
jessemckinney writes "Apparently, the US congress of last year cut the funding of this great satellite project after it was finished. It will now take millions of dollars (us) to refuel and recalibrate the instruments. Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?"
> "The idea that the vice president had was
> philosophical. He wanted schoolchildren to look at
> our planet and appreciate our environment," said
> Francisco P. J. Valero, the mission's principal
> scientist.
It should never been allowed to be a vehicle for a vice president's promotion. His wholescale destruction of the economy in order to gain a few brownie vote points with environmentalists wouldn't hurt the Nasa scientists, who are fed cash taken by threat of jail from the general population anyway.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
And I saw the exibit in the big-ass museum (whatever it was) in Toronto! It sure looked cool.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Now congress figures "If we can understand it, it must be stupid"
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Is the way I like to look at this.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Just because Algore has an idea for a satellite doesn't mean it's a good idea. Questioning the scientific credentials of a wooden political hack is not necessarily politically inspired.
This does tell us something profoundly bad about state-sponsored research. 1) it can be misallocated to satisfy political dogmas (e.g. Hitler's eugeneics, and Stalin's Lysenko biology). 2) it perpetuates errors, demonizing attempts by scientists to pull the plug as politically motivated.
What's a vandetta?
(Filling in for the grammar nazi.)
I think P.J. O'Rourke is the biggest know-nothing loudmouth windbag in the world next to Rush Limbaugh. Man, oh man, talk about somebody who aggresively refuses to understand his subject matter! I'm not speaking from brief or surface experience. I've read whole books, and listened to whole interviews. He's just . . . so . . .fucking . . . IGNORANT .
Then again, that's just my opinion. But at least I took the trouble to check out his writings in depth before I made my decision. It was kind of like loitering at the scene of a car wreck. Watching someone descend into their intellectual, self-important, delusionary snobbery was kind of fascinating, in a sick way.
The article says they were going to put Triana about a million miles out, but it also says they were going to put it at L5, which is equidistant from both Earth and Luna (more like a quarter million miles away)
They have spent 125 megabux on the poor little Triana already. If they don't launch it,that money will go to waste. What does a shuttle launch cost? About a thousand megabux (8 times what they have already spent on Triana).
Rather than storing it, they should sell it as surplus. Those of you who think it should be launched can buy it and then find your own damn launch vehicle. I'll be willing to pay ten bucks a year for a subscription to the video feed once it is in place.
Of course I think the best thing that those incredibly wise and intelligent Cogresscritters could do would be to cut NASA's budget to zero effective 12/31/2001. They could use the savings to buy everybody the latest Brittany Spears album. And without NASA in the way, we'd soon have those aforementioned launch vehicles available. cheap.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
If we incite another arms race, the chance that another nuke will be deployed will be increased significantly. Spend billions of dollars in designing and building a missile defense system, and it only takes small modifications to the existing nuclear vehicles to counter that.
It's worth the money just to have a window to click on next time you want to say "Cambot, get me rocket number 9."
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Canada had the most brilliant fighter plane design, something like 20 years in advance of his time, but when the "Parti Conservateur" took place instead of Liberal party, they cut the Avro Arrow project just because it came from another political party. Frnace and many other country were waiting in line to buy either the engine or complete planes. It didn't count. Instead, Canada bought crappy outdated missiles from US and also paid for manpower to have them deployed in the great north. It finally came out it was a big financial disaster, but they completely dismantled the Arrow plane project (destroying planes thet were completed and ready to fly) so everything was lost and they could not go back. (sorry for my bad english!)
There's a fair amount of history- this was a waste and even adding "legitimate science" (which just duplicates what SOHO does) isn't enough to consider it a reasonable project.
It was merely a means to deliver a daylight side webcam of earth.
Sheesh
Check out NASA Watch
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
Why we paid even a dime for Al's dream screen saver is beyond me.
Few people, even hardcore Libertarians have noted a small fight that's been going on in the LP.
You see, the Space Exploration part of the party's Comprehensive Platform mentions Lagrange Libration Points. There is a movement in the party to have that part removed, since no one ever talks about Lagrange points anyway. The fact that cnn.com mentions it is actually may give this part of the platform a bit more life.
vandettas?
Don't know about those, but vendettas have been a way of life in most political circles since we can remember. People hate other people, and they don't care about consequences beyond their own emotions. Hence, stuff happens that shouldn't.
I'm curious about these vandettas, though. Is that like vendetta version 2.0? The new, improved vendetta?
(Ordinarily I would let it slide, but since it's the title of an excellent Star Trek book...)
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Item 1:
In March 2000, a National Academy committee reported that Triana had "the potential to make unique scientific contributions," even though the mission had "higher than usual risks."
What are the risks they are talking about?
Item 2:
Craig Tooley, the deputy project manager, said that when Triana was first proposed, there were enough flights and cargo space for it to fit into the space shuttle schedule.
But now, the shuttle is limited to six flights a year and is heavily loaded with higher priority missions.
The International Space Station has higher priority. This is no surprise.
This quote confuses me:
instruments on Triana would have a unique perspective for studying the Earth's atmosphere, climate and seasonal changes.
I thought there were some weather satellites. What functionality does this satellite possess over the others?
Visit their website. Check out their photo collections in the making as well.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Second, the SSC would have cost a lot more than $2billion to complete in the first place. Try closer to $8billion, plus the running costs.
Third CERN have already started building the LHC which does the same science at a fraction of the cost and will certainly be completed first. The SSC had nothing to do with science, it was putting the US flag on the thing that was the whole point of the exercise
Fourth, the site chosen was a dump, a redneck dry county where the most intelligent natives are the numerous fireants.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
They only ran with it because he was the VP and he had the most clout in the administration when it came to NASA funding. There was zero scientific value in the original concept. A few token instruments were added to the plan later to give the people who voted for it some political cover.
yeah, make fun of him, i'm sure he's sitting in front of his computer right now reading slashdot... oh, wait - even al gore has better things to do than you or i...
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
From everything I've heard about the project and the satelite, I simply don't really think it was anything I would consider worthwhile anyway. Even after reading that pro-go article I still come away with a sense that this would be a kind of worthless mission.
Yes, I believe NASA needs more money and more shuttleflights, but at the same time I wish the money would not be spent on this.
But what do I know? Just because noone's proven the worth of the project to me doesn't mean it's not there, right?
Just because a lot of money has been spent on a project, that is not reason enough to continue to spend money on that project.
;)
It was a political toy that needed to go on the scrap heap.
I for one am glad to hear Nasa have the sense to stop dumping money into at least some of the useless projects.
Maybe they'll put it up for auction some day and Gore can buy it and put it on his front lawn.
Can someone please try to clear this up for all of us? I could not easily find any information about this on the web.
"I have made the tough moral and ethical decision that the federal government can only fund direct and untainted descendants from the original Apollo spacecraft. Al(l) Gore's base belong to us."
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
my little girl died cause some jerkoff had to race a red light. you and dick can rot in hell.
Why don't they just stick it out there one of these days when they are going to the ISS? Combine missions, save money, do a bit more...
Most people I know couldn't care less about their tax rebates. I consider myself fairly conservative, in favor of tax cuts, but not like this. More science, more space, IMHO. In fact, what we could have done with a tiny part of an extra $125B a year is resurrect the damed Super-Conducting Super-Collider. It was $2B short, and was cut in a time of tight budgets. We're not under those restrictions, anymore, so PUT THE WORKERS BACK ON SITE.
Ahem.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Do you think all of the Soviet Union's nukes were scrapped when that country collapsed? China has been expanding its military and has recently allied itself with Russia in order to counteract the US. All its bitching about how the proposed missle shield would violate the ABM treay, Russia certainly doesn't have a problem with their extensive network of SAMs. Sure, they might not be good enough to knock down a missle as designed, but they could at least _try_ and get lucky. That's a big lead over what the US has, which is nothing.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
To take pictures of the Earth.
...*sniff*
*sniff* that's so.... Oprah
Al Gore could have downloaded openuniverse and saved us alot of money.
Who says they did? My understanding of the article is that no funding was actually cut from the Triana project itself -- the satelite is done. In fact,
Moan all you want about NASA being underfunded, but this doesn't sound at all like a matter of anyone taking "political revenge" at Al Gore's project. NASA has to prioritize, and they have.
Personally, I question why the space station (a run-down tenement in orbit! whoo hoo!) is more important than this climate-research vessel. But I don't smell a political attack here.
Well, because you cannot have a decent vendetta without some significant killing, ofcourse! :)
Oh.. sorry, rethorical...
karma capped
Triana was originally built as a political favor. I won't mention to whom, but you might guess by the nickname it was given of "Goresat".
There was originally no science planned. Only when scrutiny increased to it were some basic instruments added to make the excuse of it being a research tool float.
Just a heads up, the only thing Triana would have really done was take pictures of the earth for posting on a website to 'make people feel better about the earth'. For a working alternative, please visit the NOAA website where legions of weather satellites already do this 24x7.
Triana was a waste of a rocket launch. Hopefully the chassis can be adapted to perform some real science.
Hush. Don't fuck up a perfectly good W bashing session with silly things like facts.
So? He suggested something to NASA, someone there apparently liked it, and they ran with it. Just because he's not an aeronautical engineer he can't possibly come up with an idea?
First he invented the Internet, now this! :)
Just raise the taxes on crack.
So did Slashdot. Yesterday.
Frankly, If we want to see the earth from space 'cuz it looks k00l, we should do it ourselves
Amateur Satellite geeks rule. And can do it a hell of a lot cheaper than Triana.
Heh...not even close. And unlike most technology, don't expect this price to go down over the years...
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Do you really think NASA is outside the scope of politics?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Why do we need two links to the article? I would think one link would be enough. At first I thought they were different articles, but I guess not. Oh well
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
At least as I understand the term, having looked it up after seeing The Big Lebowski. You have to realize that Congressmen are only there for their own gain. They don't represent you, they represent the money interests who pay to get them elected, and literally NOTHING else means anything to them. We (Americans) live under an institutionalized bribery system marketed as democracy. Once you understand that, you can stop wondering why so many things are wrong.
...the world's most expensive web cam
maybe if we had a day where we all took our cloths off... we could see, from space, what ding-dongs we are.
Sorry to say it, but this species is already on the engangered list and it doesn't even know.
This sounds cool, but I have to agree with what congress did on this one. What a waste of time and money.
Exactly.
And for that matter, if you wanna get kids interested in geography, hook it up with Terraserver. Sure, the pics aren't live, but high-resolution satellite photos of damn near everywhere on earth are a seriously-cool idea. Imagine a "globe" you could render in 3-D and "zoom in" to your home town. Sweeeeet.
(And but for the data storage requirements, pretty doable on today's tech.)
If the "Vandellas" find out you called them "Vandettas" (sounds like a Volkswagen), you're liable to find yourself with "Nowhere to Run", and worried about something worse than the current "Heatwave", perhaps finding yourself sinking in "Quicksand".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The money was later restored in a conference committee, but Congress delayed the launch until January 2001, when Gore was to leave the vice presidency, and required that the project first be analyzed by the National Academy of Sciences.
In March 2000, a National Academy committee reported that Triana had "the potential to make unique scientific contributions," even though the mission had "higher than usual risks."
With the Academy endorsement and money from Congress, NASA kicked the project into high gear. The spacecraft, bristling with science instruments and Gore's camera, was built in record time--- but by then it was too late.
You'd know that congress gave them the money, there just isn't room on the shuttle for it. You know with the space station and all.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Global warming is a scientifically proven fact. Anyone who says it is not has a politically motivated agenda. What is not scientifically proven yet is whether or not the warming trend we are undergoing now is a result of human interference or simply natural processes that would have happened anyway.
Maybe we can get the Europeans to launch Triana.
Maybe that's what Gore is doing in Europe besides growing a beard: trying to talk the EU into sending his pet sat into orbit.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Here's the original posting.
D.S.
Nothing like Pascal's Wager to boost innocent victims of nuclear war's confidence in American know-how. They have to cheat to make the friggin' thing work. One test has worked and might not that be attributed to dumb luck? What the world needs is the absence of nuclear weapons, not fear of boogeymen dreamed up to line the pockets of the American Military Industrial Complex. Europe is right to be pissed that America insists on building an unnecessary defensive shield. Where is the threat? China is not scaling up to meet us on the battlefield and North Korea is such a horrible mess economically that the only way you can say that they are a military threat is that they might be spoiling for a fight to eliminate some mouths to feed. The mere fact that you consider CNN (the War News Network) a place to get news makes your commentary suspect.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I wonder if this was some representative's attempt at illustration of a point through use of irony.
Though as I think about it, what it really reminds me of is the kind of interactions I have with my 2-year-old son:
Speaking of military intervention... I think I figured out how to get Triana launched.
Send it up as a test-target for the proposed missile defense system. But "accidentally" disable it's GPS beacon.
But then, I guess that knowing ahead of time that it's going to be headed for the Lagrange 1 point pretty much gives it as big a "Kick Me" sign as the first test-target had. Hrm. I got it! Make Triana one of the unconvincing decoys that the next test-target throws out. Disguise it as a mylar baloon. That'd work.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
The underlying problem is not the satellite, it's the limited launch options. For (various, political) reasons, they built the Space Shuttle - a space truck which turned out to be a space ferrari. Sure, it's "reusable", but at enormous cost. I started to figure this out when I used to read the USENET postings about Shuttle servicing - I don't know if they still do it, but they used to completely disassemble and then reassemble the engine after every launch.
It costs like $500 million to a billion per launch.
They already had a cool, huge space station, Skylab, but for (various, political) reasons, they let it fall out of the sky.
So having built this space ferrari, the problem was, there was no place for it to go. So eventually for (various, political) reasons they finally built the new space station (ISS).
Meanwhile, with all the eggs in the Space Shuttle basket, we have not achieved the goal of having a diverse range of launch systems with a range of prices and capabilities.
I still don't understand why they don't use the Russian Energia to get usefully large payloads into orbit.
YOur point is true, but this particular item is a 'screw everything ever associated with Gore' from the republicans. The housing cost will cost more(eventually) then sending it up.
Not to mention how little of a percentage the nasa budget is, but it still gets cut
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
According to someone I know on the project, they might have a launch opportunity for Triana if they send the shuttle up to recover UARS.
("Beware of the red-light camera scam!")
If you could bestill your jerking knee long enough to investigate what you're ranting about, you'd see that traffic-enforcement cameras are, in fact, a pretty amazing scam.
But then I guess there's plenty of other stuff on Armey's page that doesn't fit your totalitarian-liberal mindset. Bummer, man, I guess you were just born 80 years too late and on the wrong side of the world.
Considering the history of terrorist activity (whether by foreign nationals or US citezens) within the national boundaries of the United States of America, it would be more appropriate to stop the sale of fertilizer.
IT MATTERS WHO YOU VOTE FOR. SO VOTE. AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE DOING WHEN YOU DO IT.
It is by Gore and it is now sitting and sitting. Although "Gore-cam" was funny too.
Table-ized A.I.
I am gonna keep this brief, I am on a laptop and I hate the keyboard. GoreSAT was a waste of money from the get-go. It should sit and stew. Everyone here who has worked on a scientific satelite raise your hand...i thought so. I have worked on both HESSE, SWIFT, and did a bit of work on the COR-1 lens for STEREO. These are true scientific satelites. They do shit.
Read a previous post of mine for the history of HESSI's problems. Things like GoreSAT waste money on stuff that could have been used to accelerate HESSI's launch. Also, HESSI was bumped back in the lanch schedule again. It was supposed to launch before MAP. Why waste space in a tight launch schedule on useless satelites, not to mention mission control space and money. Read a previous post of mine for links. BTW, I have stood 10 feet from GoreSAT as it sat in bld 29(?) at GSFC awaiting some testing. The scientists tehre explained its uselessness.
I worked at GSFC for a year as a student, so you know my background.
Thank you. I was wondering the same thing.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
No, This has absolutely NO SCIENTIFIC VALUE. Its essentially the worlds most expensive Web cam! The whole idea was dreamed up by a politican. How about leaving the dreaming of projects in the hands of scientists!
Now there's a wave of destruction that's easy on the eyes!
In the meantime, NASA will be spending about a million dollars a year to store Triana. The craft's solid rocket propellant, which chemically degrades, expires in 2003 and will have to be replaced, at the cost of about $3 million, before Triana can fly. It would also take $5 to $10 million to recalibrate the instruments after the craft comes out of mothballs.
So, we're talking about $13 million bucks here. What's it cost to launch the shuttle? Seems like it would make more sense to just use the $13 mil to get that bad boy up into space right now instead of wasting it all...
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
I still think I wrote the summary better. :D
Great job on the repost. Boneheads.
Naji's Holistic Auto Repair. A commercial for Midas, I think.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I totally disagree here. Yes there would be radiactive waste. No it would not be a large concern (it would be a larger concern from a heavy metals chemical poisoning perspective than a radioactive one). The waste would most likely be concentrated on a small area around the impact zone, maybe a few tens of meters. But think, how much radioactive waste would be generated if a nuke actually detonated? IF there was a detonation, then EMP would be a concern. It sounds to me like you believe the warhead would detonate on impact with an ABM interceptor. That is simply not going to happen. Nuclear warheads are HARD to make detonate with more than a trivial nuclear flash. They are designed that way. An external impact of more than modest force (let alone the forces of a kinetic kill) would ruin them. Theses things are *delicate*. And the idea is that they would only have to hit "a missile or two", or three or four. We are talking launches by a rogue state here, not China or Russia. Or a launch by a rogue commander in Russia or China, still only a small number of missiles.
The article discusses all the money burned on the project up til now, arguing that more money should be expended to finish the job. While a 24x7 view of the rotating Earth might promote world peace, I don't think we'd be seeing anything new science wise.
:^).
So campers, if Al, Oprah, and enough people want to see this bird fly, then I suggest they start by setting up a Paypal account and get the cash to launch it themselves. The Russians will do it for less than $100 million. Heck, maybe they can take a loan for the Democratic Soft Money account (ok, the Republican one too - amybe you can pitch it as a missle defense component
Seriously, we have the means, willingly provided by a number of countries, to make our space exploration dreams come true. We need the will to make them happen.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
It wasn't so much a "weather satellite" as it was a tool to make everyone in the world aware of our Gaia-ity. We see one blue world with swirling clouds and suddenly everyone realizes that we are one big family and all wars end and we have a huge harmonic convergence.
If that doesn't convince them to do it, we can always say it will track weather or something...
D.S.
Face it, from a million miles away, it ain't gonna analyze any global events. It's only gonna send back pretty pictures. We already have satellites in sunsynchronous and geosynchronous orbits that are much closer and much better instrumented for measuring (alleged) global warming and monitoring pollution. 120 million for another NOAA weather satellite would be a much better investment.
"Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?" The same reason they fund great science projects for their own political vendettas.
I have no interest in political bias here, if you want tax cuts then no problem, but please leave out the hypocrisy, you totally contradict yourself
Sometimes we have to do something, no matter the 'cost'. It's human ...
As such it would cost a very small amount to develop software to integrate those pictures to generate an image of what the planet would look like from any point,
That's been done many years ago. I did something similar as an intern in 89 to make a video of the Earth rotating using satellite images.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
On tenews th otherday I spotted a normal rocket taking off (titan? arianne? - The sound wasoff). Why cant his be launched on one of these?
s pace-ariane-dc)
Hmm... Was is this recent launch? (http://news.excite.com/news/r/010807/09/science-
Might not be your best bet for getting a something safely into orbit. =)
Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?
Don't forget that this project has also been known as "Goresat", because Al Gore -- I am not making this up -- woke up in the middle of the night and thought it would be a neat idea to point a satellite at the earth so we could all see the view. Millions of dollars later, they were able to put together something of scientific value and make Triana palatable to NASA.
In other words, this project began because of an individual politician's personal "vendetta."
Anonymous cowards invented Goresat.
Here's a copy of the article text, for those who do not wish to see pop-up-ad-hell. :)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A science spacecraft dreamed up by Al Gore, built by NASA and delayed by a Republican Congress is now going into mothballs, grounded for lack of a ride into orbit.
The $120 million spacecraft, called Triana, will complete its final ground tests this month, but instead of going to a Florida launch pad, it will be crated and stored indefinitely at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Officials said that for the next few years there is no room in the space shuttle schedule to launch Triana. NASA is limited by a budget pinch to just six space shuttle flights a year and most of them are being taken up with building the international space station, re-servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and other projects with a higher priority than Triana.
Triana evolved from a 1998 suggestion by then-Vice President Gore that NASA park a camera-toting satellite some 1 million miles out in space so it could constantly beam down a picture of the sunlighted Earth. The picture, updated every 15 minutes and carried on the Internet, was to be similar to the famed "whole Earth" photo taken by Apollo astronauts in 1968.
The spacecraft was to be placed at the Lagrange 1 point, a spot in space where scientists say the gravity of Earth and the gravity of the sun are balanced. The sunnyside of the Earth would be in constant view. Besides capturing the planetary picture suggested by Gore, instruments on Triana would have a unique perspective for studying the Earth's atmosphere, climate and seasonal changes. It would be the first time that such a whole Earth analysis would be possible, scientists said.
Officials named the project after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor on Columbus' voyage of discovery who first sighted the New World.
"The idea that the vice president had was philosophical. He wanted schoolchildren to look at our planet and appreciate our environment," said Francisco P. J. Valero, the mission's principal scientist. "We realized that there was a lot of science that could be done with such a spacecraft."
Valero, head of an atmospheric research lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and other researchers devised the instruments to be carried on Triana.
But on the way to the launch pad, Triana got ambushed by the Republican-led House of Representatives.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, called the spacecraft "a far-out boondoggle." Others ridiculed Triana as the "GoreCam" or "GoreSat." In a partisan vote in May 1999, a House committee cut funds for Triana from NASA's budget.
The money was later restored in a conference committee, but Congress delayed the launch until January 2001, when Gore was to leave the vice presidency, and required that the project first be analyzed by the National Academy of Sciences.
In March 2000, a National Academy committee reported that Triana had "the potential to make unique scientific contributions," even though the mission had "higher than usual risks."
With the Academy endorsement and money from Congress, NASA kicked the project into high gear. The spacecraft, bristling with science instruments and Gore's camera, was built in record time--- but by then it was too late.
Craig Tooley, the deputy project manager, said that when Triana was first proposed, there were enough flights and cargo space for it to fit into the space shuttle schedule.
But now, the shuttle is limited to six flights a year and is heavily loaded with higher priority missions.
After its final ground tests are complete, Triana will be put into an aluminum crate filled with dry nitrogen and stored at Goddard as sort of an air-sealed, space age hanger queen. For how long, nobody knows.
"NASA is committed to flying it and I believe it will get off the ground eventually," said Tooley. He said it is unlikely that Triana could fly before 2004.
In the meantime, NASA will be spending about a million dollars a year to store Triana. The craft's solid rocket propellant, which chemically degrades, expires in 2003 and will have to be replaced, at the cost of about $3 million, before Triana can fly. It would also take $5 to $10 million to recalibrate the instruments after the craft comes out of mothballs. That job alone could take months, said Tooley.
"We've already spent $120 million on Triana," said Valero. "That will all go to waste unless we fly the thing."
Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
If you read the article, you might notice that the Republican Congress funded this thing in the first place and put it on a fast track to completion. This wasn't a "screw everything ever associated with Gore" move from Congress, since they didn't make the decision to mothball it. It was NASA that decided to delay the launch because all their shuttle payloads were allocated to the ISS and Hubble.
But the silly rhetoric in the referenced article aside, the comments on the SA-10's missile and such were quite interesting.
Question: Where does the definition of a high performance, high altitude SAM end, and the definition of an ABM begin?
That was my point. I should have been more clear, oh well.
Well, you won't be getting it. The tax rebate is a fraud. You're getting a big chunk of your return from next year. Planning on having a couple of grand after taxes next may or so? Cut it in half, 'cause if you got your check already, it's cashed and spent. And the "lower taxes" won't apply for long either. Those are mostly temporary measures. I saw a huge chart detailing how all the cuts were accomplished. It looked like it was designed by Wile E. Coyote, it had so many strings attached to it. Most of the cuts will expire by 2010, and most of them are in areas you won't benefit from for more than a couple of years, if at all. Ha ha. By that time, Bush will be in Presidential retirement, and probably in a Witness Protection Program. He's definitely burning the candle of public opinion at both ends . . .
where is the sig from? Its really familiar, but i can't place it...Zen/Moto-maintenence?
Come on, spending $200M to have "Picture of the whole Earth" "dreamed by Al Gore (inventor of the Internet)" ? This is much less important than Hubble telescope or even International Cosmic Station. If something has to be cut - that is certainly projects like this. Jubo
Actually, from having talked to the people working on the Triana project, one important function would be to gather global warming data. As long as we still have people who "don't believe in global warming" and refer to scientists as "environweenies," I think it's important to gather enough information to prove that it's a real problem.
If the government has more money than it can spend at the moment, why did they need that huge loan to cover the checks?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Women are from Venus,
Men are from Mars,
Politicians are from Uranus.
BTW, since you mention ad hominem statements, I notice that most of your reply also qualifies as conversational terrorism. :)
Not only does shuttle cost too much it has severe limitations. Let's just take a look at Triana. The bloody shuttle can only fly to a few hundred miles above the earth surface and Triana needs to get all the way to the one of the lagrange's points?? This certainly sounds like a monumental waste. Why did NASA even consider using the space shuttle mission as a REALLY expensive booster rocket for delivery of a really expensive webcam? Indeed, if Energia or Ariane are unacceptable, why not build themselves? For Pete's sakem NASA built SaturnV rockets... On a tangent, NASA really should consider using unmanned rockets for some of their projects. Heck, if they just did away with one shuttle launch they could field several 'traditional' rocket launches and by using them be able to reach much higher orbits above the earth... ah well, maybe one day. Darn it, if idiot Gore would not have had his stupid dream maybe I'd be getting a few extra dollars on my 'tax relief' refund check :-)
I heard on the radio this morning (KCBS) that there was a proposal under consideration in the House to mothball two carrier fleets(!) to divert money to Missle Defense. The Joint Chiefs were not amused. I wouldn't be, either. That's the House for you.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Way way bigger lead over what we have. The USSR (gone now - but not forgotten) has had an operational national ABM system since 1980. Read this.
I see.... 120 million on a satelite that can analyze global events for civilians and possibly prove global warming and monitor pollution offenders is too much, but 300 billion on butt plugs for people wearing gas masks in the army is OK. Oh well. I guess they are really snazzy butt plugs.
Take this personaility test.
This is a feel good enviroweenie type of project. It's a frigging NASA-built webcam! We need to spend our money on more important projects, like sending Lego robots to Mars, and huge expensive lasers in orbit. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Spend the NASA budget where it's use will better serve the advancement of science and knowledge. Raise the budget for the ISS. More Mars exploration missions. Christ, let's send a mission to the Moon to verify the existence of subsurface ice.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
NOAA-NCAR-CIMSS -ask someone that does anything sorta kinda related to satellite meteorology and works for one of those acronyms and they'd tell you all about it. Millions of dollars spent for some half-ass idea Al Gore had. Money that could have been spent on real science.
What kind of evidence? You mean like consistently rising global atmospheric and oceanic temperatures?
Get your head out of that whole in the sand you people seem to live in and realize that it is in fact a problem.
Not the funding that would allow NASA to launch enough shuttle missions to do all the things they would like or had planned to do. They can only do 6 a year, and I'm sure they could find good uses for an additional 6.
if global warming was REALLY going on don't you think they'd have some evidence by now? WITH OUT Al's FEEL GOOD waste of money and resources?
how about we put Al Gore in ORBIT and get back with him in 2004 and see if he noticed any climate changes from up there!
We can call him ALPHA GORE, give him a little radio so he can still INVENT things...
Why do dogs lick their own balls?
A: Because they can.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
"Vandettas" aside, (they sang back-up for Martha, right?), this project doesn't inspire a huge amount of confidence in me. It started out as a stunt by Al Gore, and while scientists may have come up with useful uses for it (which I'm not qualified to judge), I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about a project that was designed to do something useful in the first place.
My sense this is like the biology experiments they do on the space shuttle, something I am qualified to judge. They're worth doing, given that the shuttle is already going but they're hardly a justification for the shuttle program.
As an aside, which may make you feel better, I heard a talk recently by one of the leaders of the Chandra telescope project. Asked about the security of funding, he said that while legislators aren't going to give more money, they pretty much all appreciate astronomy and space and the stream of money isn't in jeopardy at all.
We already saw this, btw.
As for the project, there was clearly nothing vaguely scientific in the original plan but it was subsequently expanded to include a whole host of "scientific" things to encourage its approval. Of course, with the increase in things it needed to accomplish, the price went up. It's hardly surprising that a pet project like this got cut.
Dancin Santa
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Most politicians aren't thinking of the greater good first. Number one.
Then, the rest of your taxdollars are spent covering it up.
Leaving out "New Zealand" was not an error in that movie. New Zealand is a rediculous liberal myth.
For anyone who finds themselves even faintly in opposition to the thesis of the essay's statement, to be instantly put on the outside of those three circles is almost like being called a racist epithet (at least that's what it feels like). "A majority of non-dumbfucks who don't have giant supperating genital warts and whose mothers are not whores agree . . . ". And my response to statements like that is usually just to quit reading before I rupture a vessel.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
It was another crap science project that was a waste of money. For its extra cost, it did not accomplish much that could not be done in other ways that were cheaper and already exist.
This project was being done for the "gee whizz, neato" factor. Not sound science. I am glad to see it mothballed. Give me a project like Genesis anyday over pieces of crap like Triana.
I figured it might have been done. Of course, I'm presumign it's done with real time weather, and mapping to simulate the fact you are viewing some parts of the iamge through more atmosphere (with weather) and at a different angle? Work, but surely it can be done. If you have't seen some region for a while (particularly the regions near the terminator where the light is changing rapidly) you could extrapolate from earlier images.
Like I said it should be possible to get one that really shows you what the earth looks like from L1, which is the point, not to actually have a $120M plus launch camera there.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Holy shit, were spending tax payer dollars to put a bird in space to just sit there and put a nice picture of earth on some web page. It will be a cold day in hell if I ever vote for another crat who would be so stupidly bold to waste US tax dollars on something so wasteful. Jeez, and you wonder why it is being mothballed. How on earth did this get approved in the first place. If you want one, spend you own damn money and stare at earth all day.
why not read the article.. all the funding was
restored.. DUH!
Well, I tried. I stopped cold at this sentence: one of President Bush's top priorities in his election campaign and one that enjoys widespread public support from clear-thinking Americans.
A badly disguised ad-hominem attack, only two paragraphs in! I didn't bother with the rest of it.
Bush has other options. Where this missile defense shit always heads is to the fantasy-land of False Alternative.
In the real world there are usually more than two options, and they usually do not stand in direct opposition to each other. But with the Missile Defense Salesmen, there are only two ways. Missile Defense, or Horrible Death! Panic!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
HAHAHA. Yeah. Thanks a lot Gore for even suggesting such an idea and costing us an already 120 million. Gore was an idiot and I wish this got stopped earlier and that money could have gone towards cleaning the environment instead of framing one that's 120 million dollars dirtier. Way to go hippy!
Putin has said that he would rather not have the damn things because his poor ass country has to maintain them. But as long as Bush and Cheney keeping fingering their Doctor Strangelove Decoder rings and wringing hands over Russia, which can't keep the friggin' lights on (I been there, I know) and China, is not escalating their military preparedness in any great degree (they are not building huge stockpiles of nuke; Shit, they don't even have a credible sub force or, golly, an aircraft carrier). Do you blame China for teaming up with Russia? If the US weren't rattling the saber all the damn time, for no reason, then they might just get down to business rather than making alliances against us. Most Americans would be shocked to find out that many of our close allies consider us a bigger threat to world peace because of the rampant militarism in America (See the History Channel's never ending homage to guns, tanks and bombs) and incompetent (Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield), dicredited (Condeleeza Rice) and evil (Kissinger, who has reared his war criminal head lately) leadership. We're going to hell in a handbasket, walking down a road paved with Republicans.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
It's a space luxury car. What we really need is a spacecraft version of my 1978 Chevy K-body pickup: a cheap, workhorse vehicle that doesn't look cool but at least gets a cargo to where a cargo needs to go.
Is there some technical flaw with the Energia rockets, or is it politics that keep us from using them?
And even if Energia or Ariane is unacceptable, why the hell haven't we built our own? I mean, jeez, there HAS to be a better way.
Personally, though, I think the money would have been better spent on another Mars probe. A little help for NASA: 454 grams to the pound, 2.54 centimeters to the inch, 1.609 kilometers to the mile: come on, guys, it can't be THAT hard.
It's not much of a cut, that's true. But it's better than nothing.
I don't know if you're aware, but NASA isn't exactly an organization that's leadership is flavored by the current political environment. If the executive branch and House happen to be Republican, it doesn't matter. Most decisions made regarding NASA are general in nature. The house subcommittee doesn't get together and say, "Self-portraits of the frigging planet that have no military intell purpose? Fucking lunacy. What was Gore thinking? No dice!"
Instead, they say "We hate you pansy asses wasting resources on peaceful ventures in space. This ISS? Crap. Hubble? Crap. We don't want you flying more than 8 missions per year. You don't like it, too bad."
It's an internal NASA decision as to what missions to cut. They decided building the ISS is more important than this camera. Their small budget is obviously bad from a scientific viewpoint, but to blame the cut of this mission on Republican vendettas is incorrect.
Pax Digitalia
Aren't the current weather satellites better suited to measure global warming and pollution? They're much closer and better instrumented.
Al gore said "Hey, dude! No seriously. I want to put a sate... hahahaha. Pass that to me fucker. Ok what were we talking about? Oh yeah, so anyway, this satellite will take pictures of the earth! Isn't that fan-fucking-tastic? HAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh man I am so messed up."
Some of the other uses sound like they may be of some scientific use but a few years until budget has availability for it isn't really a big deal. Sorry we can't launch everyone's ideas into space. How about just pay the russians to launch it. They will suck your dick for a price.
Then they tell them to mothball a $120 million dollar project, which will take $1 million to refuel and another $3 million to recalibrate, not to mention the costs to store the thing till 2004 (I believe the article said .5 million a year).
Does this seem ironic to anyone else or what?But we all share some responsibility here. We've let national politics become dominated by sound-byte politicians, each with a political agenda that's a mindless list of hot button issues. Look at the web page of Dick Armey, the politico quoted in the CNN piece. His politics are hodpodge of simple-minded reactions. ("Beware of the red-light camera scam!") This is the House Majority Leader, one of the most powerful positions in DC!
Here's an interesting political experiment: call Mister Armey (phone number on his web site) and give him a piece of your mind. Or write your own congressperson.
Really - It was Al Gore's "legacy" project, especially the idea of having a full-time live photo of the Earth available on the net. Ick. If you want that, grab a weather satellite photo... That having been said, it has not been killed, but rather reshuffled in the launch order...
Is it better to only be able to watch CNN broadcast the countdown until a missile hits its target? These arguments against missile defense are like saying bullet-proof vests are stupid because the wearer could still get shot in the face. If a missle defense system worked even .00001% of the time, guess what, it's still better than what we have now, which is nothing...
The General Accounting Office says a shuttle launch costs about $512 million. Or at least it did as of last autumn. There's a line about two-thirds through this Houston Chronicle article mentioning that cost.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Does anyone else get the Nasa Channel?
All day long, shots of the earth from orbit.
I think eliminating launching that redundant piece of space junk was a good idea.
Ariane 5 has only failed once before, on its maiden test flight in 1996, the Ariane programme has quite a good record actually, only eight of its 141 missions have ended in failure since its start in 1979. Not too bad a track record considering they lead the commercial launching sector.
The last Arine mission put the birds into too low an orbit, they recovered one but with the result of shortening its life span (had to use up fuel to get it back into acceptable orbit), the other Japanese Bsat-2B bird was a lost cause. Lets just hope they get the Beagle 2 into orbit ok next year.
I'm not French, or colonially French, if I were I'd be bitch about them setting of huge fireworks in French Guiana.
Maybe we can get the Europeans to launch Triana... the House would love that.
Building a $120M satellite just to get a constantly updating view of the earth? Couldn't they save a ton by buying one of those very detailed 3D models of the Earth they use in sci-fi flicks and hooking it up to a giant renderfarm? They'd just need make sure they chose a model that doesn't leave out New Zealand.
Sure, it wouldn't be "the real thing," but I say, no harm, no foul. The populace would be happy because they could tune into "The Planet Channel" any time, and be filled with that warm fuzzy "I am a speck of dust" feeling. The Democrats and Republicans would be happy because they could spend their half of the 120 mil on whatever they wanted (the former on supplying clean needles to welfare mothers, the latter on black ops research to create a clone army of genetically-enhanced Richard Nixons.)
And nobody would be any the wiser.
I don't know the value of the other projects they put on this bird, but Gore's picture from space was sentimental but stupid.
I stll think we should do it, but we should never have spent $120M on the satellite and more on the now scrubbed launch.
We already have cameras taking pictures of the earth all the time. The weather sats and other instruments are constantly recording the earth.
As such it would cost a very small amount to develop software to integrate those pictures to generate an image of what the planet would look like from any point, including L1. With enough work you could get it so you could not tell the difference.
Yes, it wouldn't be "real" to some people. But it would be true, and that's real enough for me.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I wonder if the above (with which I can't say that I particularly agree, but that's irrelevant) was moderated as a troll just because the moderator didn't agree with the opinion expressed and/or didn't like the way in which it was expressed.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You can always get another nation to launch the satellite... and pride be damned. Of course, with the recent failures of Ariane 5...
no more graden gnomes, only jenna and barbara! gnome liberation front, like the earth liberation front, only real..
Oh please, there was a tax reduction and rebate because the government has more money than it can spend at the moment, as incredulous as that sounds. Yes I think they should find a way to get that thing into orbit, maybe as one of the few good things that Al Gore did. But don't say it can't be done because they are giving me my money back, there's been a BUDGET SURPLUS for the last two years. It's politics, not money.
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
You, sir, obviously have a problem with priorities.
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$ chown -R us:us yourbase
Jeez...Just because some moron politician has a wet dream, we all have to pay to pursue his dream? If you want a current picture of the earth, any of a large number of weather satellites can produce any composite view you'd want. Al, being the Luddite disguised as "visionary" that he is, couldn't accept the equivalence of this imagery. The starvation death of good programs (like Fast Pluto Flyby) to fund boondoggles like this was a primary reason why I voted for Bush. Yes he's a moron, but a man's got to know his limitations.
Of course, this mothballing comes at the behest of the same political party (of the US of A) that thinks those crack US rocket scientists should be a-cipherin' on how to make a bullet hit a bullet everytime. In this case, we really could have Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clowns. The Triana project is no more asinine than protecting a country (that probably could use a mass death event to clean up all the stupid people) with a cockamamie missile shield that the developers have to cheat to make work. I would rather live in a country that comes up with a kooky but probably beneficial project like Triana than one than thinks all you commie European fags are trying to invade with your little cars and techno music. Get out, you say? I have.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Just out of interest, how much is a shuttle launch? It'll take over $10 million minimum to launch it in 5 years time.
On tenews th otherday I spotted a normal rocket taking off (titan? arianne? - The sound wasoff). Why cant his be launched on one of these?
This is frickin' terrible Politics has killed off far too many good ideas. Every time a new government gets in it seems they spend half their time rolling back what the previous one did. Why is this? I can understand the problem if there are plenty of complaints or if something just plain doesn't work, but most of the time it's done with little thought as to what it has accomplished, what it's intended to accomplish, and what the costs involved are. That's what was done when the idea was first proposed and accepted, and looked over by plenty of highly-paid professionals.
Half (warning : made up stat) the projects a government starts never get the chance to become what they were intended because they aren't given the chance to mature. Rome wasn't built in a day, fellas. Think before you cut.
</rant>
Last post!
It kinda makes you wonder how many other projects are sitting mothballed costing the taxpayers millions every year and wasting away their scientific potential but which we never hear about because they have nothing to do with Al Gore. (Thanks for the internet Al...).
Chances are, for the cost of keeping this satellite mothballed until a launch vehicle is available and the cost of recalibrating the instruments it could be launched by another space agency (yes, apparently there are other countries outside our borders who have progressed far enough from the stone age to be capable of space launches) and be lurking about Lagrange Point 1 taking pretty pictures far earlier than the earliest possible estimate of 2004.
I found this site3 00439
http://www.scienceunderground.net/space/?topic=10
that might answer a couple of things
Why do politicians have to kill great science projects for their own political vandettas?
:)
Sometimes a question just answers itself.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
...because those pesky scientists would most likely use it to gather evidence about inconvenient issues like global warming and pollution. In the mean time, the money is much better spent on that trillion dollar orbiting erector set.
It would require an eight-inch telescope on the satellite, which would be 1.6 million Km from Earth, rather than the 36 thousand Km of geostationary weather satellites. Those existing weather satellites already let us see global weather 24 hours a day.
The Washington Post had a story on this a while ago.
It seems the US goverment is cutting back on everything. They have to mothball the craft because they can't squeeze in another shuttle mission.
Sure, we'd all like to have them support all these science missions, but the fact is most people just want their tax rebates and lower taxes in the future.
Can't have it both ways. I just hope it isn't forgotten forever.
He did not say he created the internet, he said he helped create the internet, and some reporters made the sound byte twist his words....how many of the people here who say 'al gore (who created the internet)' or 'al gore (thanks for the internet...)' actually have HEARD the ENTIRE speech??
Anyone who hasn't and says stuff like that should be fined or something....and for everyone who says it: GET OVER IT! IT STOPPED BEING FUNNY A LONG TIME AGO! Just like 'all your base are belong to us' stopped being funny a long time ago too (but everyone realized that...notice the lack of AYBABTU posts....)
--AC