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Goldin to Retire from NASA
nervesmiffs writes: "Lots of people hated him. I believe he has been one of the truly
great leaders of our time. He has completely turned NASA around
during his 10 year tenure. Here's the retirement story." So if you were NASA's next director, what would you do with the agency? Men on Mars? Probes on Europa? Trans-warp drives?
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of NASA, you may want to check out the pseudo-fictional (historical fiction, real events, mostly real people, some author elaboration) book Space by James A. Meichner. It's a long read, but well worth it.
The article asks where the space program in the States should go next... perhaps a good way to start is to look at the past. Where have we gone seriously wrong, and what have we done right? What can we do better in this century is the real question, I suppose.
To the naysayers, I'm (1) not plugging this book for profit, (2) not associated with Amazon.com, (3) a definite literature geek. You may not like it, but at least give it a shot
According to http://ifmp.nasa.gov/codeb/budget2002/03_multiyear _budget.pdf, the proposed 2002 NASA budget is $5.584 billion. According to http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/usbudget/blueprint/ budx.html, the total outlays for the 2002 US Budget is $1.969 trillion. According to my math, that's less than 0.3%. And then, the shuttle budget is of course less than half the total NASA budget...
5% of the federal budget????
The shuttle's estimated annual cost is 2.98 billion according to nasa (for the year 2000). 1999 total budget outlays were 1.7 Trillion dollars according to government records. So in reality the shuttle program is roughly 1/10th of 1 percent of the entire federal budget. Now if you took the total budget of NASA for 2001 it comes to approximately 14 billion according to NASA.
If you take that number the budget is still a mere 4/5ths of 1 percent of the overall budget.
It's merely a drop in the bucket in the grand schem of things, and frankly we've gained a lot from having it. We've gained amazing advances in materials science, aeronautics, and life sciences. Also, where would be without Tang?!? So if you're gonna try to save money, how about finding something truely useless to cut.
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Well, at first glance at http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/spinoffs2.htm, my two favorites are the space pen and the football helmet, though you may prefer the medical imaging, plastic packaging, and fire fighting equipment.
Yeah, it's a kiddie page, but there are plenty of sources for real valuable spin-offs...
The Space Station will probably die with the Goldin admin. This will be bad and sad, but it's a long term good thing, since the beast is poorly conceived, massively expensive, and doesn't do enough to forward long-term goals.
I work at NASA Goddard in Maryland, and the ISS is alive and kicking. There are tons and tons of resources working on the project, and it would be a huge reversal for the ISS to die. It's a massive undertaking, and it's projects like the ISS that will begin to enable further things, like ISS-originating spaceflight which would eliminate the need for costly and difficult ground launches to get space vehicles in the air. The focus here at NASA IS to get things like Moon bases and Mars landings...but we need decent tools to do it first.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
There are several inaccuracies in this post that need correction:
The moon surface is comprised mainly by tholiitic basalt - the same stuff that the Hawiian Islands are made of. It is extremely dense, hard rock.
The moon dust is just a surface veneer, just like blow sand in the Western US. Bore deep enough and you have a structurally stable environment to build habitable shelters.
As for geologic stability, the moon is tectonically dead (no seismic hazards), has no liquid water on its surface, and has no atmosphere to form winds. In short, there is no erosional capability other than by meteors.
As I said before, dig it deep enough (50 - 100 m), and your pretty safe.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
The overriding philosophy that must be adopted is to start building an infrastructure for human outposts that can "live off the land."
The failing of the Apollo program was that each mission was self-contained. The missions should have left behind pieces of infrastructure that could be re-used in future missions; instead, junk and toys like single-use moon buggies are strewn all over the lunar surface.
I'm talking about power units (solar or nuclear); units that extract oxygen or turn the lunar soil into cement, metal, or glass building materials; and with the discovery of polar ice, water-extraction units. These are the things that will make largely self-sufficient outposts possible.
Not everything needs to be made off-planet. Microprocessors are light and easy to ship; it wouldn't make sense for Intel to build a fab on the moon anytime soon. But at $10,000 per pound to low earth orbit, we'll never get anywhere until the high-mass needs of our astronauts are met with resources that don't have to be lifted out of the earth's massive gravity well.
This is why de-orbiting Mir frustrated me so greatly. Everyone though of it as an either/or situation: either burn it in, or find money to maintain it and keep it manned. No one seemed to consider the third and best option: boost it into a non-decaying orbit, and leave it there unmanned as a resource to exploit in the future. Because, you see, it contained hundreds of tons of aerospace-grade steel, titanium, and aluminum. Someday (10 years from now? 80? it doesn't matter!) we'll have foundries in orbit which could have melted it down into components for future space structures. Structures which will now be vastly more expensive because we have to re-boost all that mass at $10,000 per pound, instead of using a resource that had already been put in orbit.
Another example: the original Reagan-era plans for the Space Station included a large hangar where interplanetary vehicles could be assembled. That's forward-thinking INFRASTRUCTURE, folks! Oh, and the Station was projected to cost only $6 billion at that time. Now, after innumerable Congressionally-mandated redesigns to "save money," all the cool features like the hangar have been eliminated.
By the way, asteroids have an even shallower gravity well than the moon. We need to be prospecting those puppies yesterday. Especially given Steven Hawking's warning about space colonies being necessary for mankind's survival.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Mars is absolutly within our grasp. We can get there with Apollo era rocketry and when we get there we can live off the land. Robert Zubrin has been writing about this for years and has built prototypes of the equipment we'll need to generate rocket fuel, oxygen, and water out of native materials.
The big issue is that we can't go for a month. For a Mars trip to be worthwhile, in scientific terms, we've got to stay for a year.
For anyone that needs convicing check out the The Mars Scociety. Mars awaits us. Its our next step.
There is nothing for us on the Moon. It's not a good lauch pad for future missions, or fuel depot. It might be a good place to put a telescope but we could do that with an unmanned mission. Save the moon for the tourist, at least not until we can build fusion reactors that depend on all the helium-3 up there.
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." -- Marx