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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?
We've been there already, why not go back. We send people out in space stations all the time (relatively), so why not start building a station on the moon. At least we wouldn't have to worry about keeping it in orbit. Maybe sometime in the near future it oculd be liviable, and we could start making plans to actually develop the moon for habitation.
-Space for rent
I would take Stephen Hawking's advice and work on a Star Trek style "warp drive" so that we can colonize space before the human race is wiped out.
n g-dc
http://news.excite.com/news/r/011016/09/odd-hawki
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
The original note notes "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."
Ten years ago it was coming off the Challenger disaster and attempting to get funding for the space station. Morale sucked, and all the good science projects kept getting canned.
Today NASA has largely forgotten the Challenger disaster, to the point where it cut the space lifeboat. They continue to attempt to get funding for the hole-in-space station, but now they can't even justify why. Morale sucks, and all the good science projects keep getting canned.
Some change, indeed.
I don't know if Goldin is a good or bad guy, I don't think that's the point. The point is that he is definitely the WRONG guy. I don't know, making money at TRW during Star Wars doesn't really strike me as credentials for running NASA.
He did no good for NASA's image, and his hissy fit over Tito make him look like an ass. Congress doesn't seem to like him either. And he just can't seem to say no.
What NASA needs is Steve Jobs. A completely crazy git who will cancel a whole bunch of really great things and freak the crap out of everyone, but in the end leave a core with a vision and the bottom line to do it. You might not like the vision and be pissed off that he killed the Comet Smasher Express, but it would have died anyway, death of a thousand cuts.
Maury
I tend to agree: Moon first, then on to Mars. Mars is more important, but:
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.
Overall, I liked Dan Goldin. He was in love with new technology, and has been vigorously pushing innovation. The Space Station albatross could have dragged anyone down.
Helium balloons want to be free.
1) Faster propulsion, and if that means nuclear powered engines, so be it.
1a) Develop heavy lift capability.
2) Develop tech necessary for colonization, and use the moon as a testbed.
3) Do thorough study of the moon, manned study if necessary (probably is), in particular to find all water and mineable metals that may be there. Not to bring back to Earth, but so we won't need to transport them from Earth.
4) Especially if #3 allows for the construction of spacecraft hulls, when 1-3 are done, head to Mars. Use tech from #1a to transport the machinery to equip the craft.
According to the article, he slashed the budget by $40 billion, and increased productivity by 40 percent. IMHO, if he was really interested in furthering space exploration, he would have sought to keep the budget as is, or get it increased, and used the cost savings from productivity for more research and exploration.
A lot of those projects you mentioned might have seen completion in this case.
Heck, people in corporate America don't like slashing budgets. It's usually a sign of bad things to come.
Agreed.
I won't miss DG. He has become a government kissass in the last few years and that is not what NASA needed. NASA needs strong leadership with vision and balls to stand firm on the vision. It is a complete disgrace that at this point in time and entire generation has become 'Adult's' since the last time we landed a human on the moon.
A lunar launch base is absolutly essential to making a Mars program work yet we have nothing to show for progress other than the ISS... which isn't exactly progress at this point; under budgeted and now forever crippled by being understaffed.
Dan:: so long and thanks for the fish. I would loved to have seen you resign with the meter/feet incident. In the big picture that should never have happened; you guys are supposed to be rocket scientists.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
NASA's next move should be to dissolve itself, so that we can use much of the money that goes into the space program for important things like universal health care and sustainable agriculture research.
Space program spending may be fun for Slashdotters to drool over, but ethically, NASA spending is hard to justify. Instead of dropping probes on the moon, why not have a freely available communications satellite network for cheap global phone/internet/whatever? WHy not spend money toward public good?
Then start thinking space elevator. Once we've done that, we can start thinking about getting off this rock.
Then the future is here.
-- Support Ometz le-Serev.
...is one from Jerry Pournelle (who IIRC is/was the president of the citizen's space advisory council -- for a while they actually had people in Washington listening to them):
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
NASA should be more concerned not just about exploration of space, but the Explotation of space. There are tons of materials, tons of err.. space in space. How about start some sorta mining initiative to get raw materials mined and processed in outter space. How about some colonizations that are self-sustaining. There are lots of Lagrange points that can be used for perminant (meaning doesn't need a boost from fuel rockets every X months) space stations and possibly colonies. NASA has the means to do it. I mean, the biggest problem is getting the ships into space to begin with. If you start manufacturing materials in space, then what's the problem?... Hardly any.
...is privatize NASA, since the agency has been inexorably pushed in that direction for the last twenty years anyway.
I wouldn't say that what NASA has accomplished has been without value; rather, I'd like to see private industry take over, because they'd undoubtedly do it more effeciently.
There are others who can argue this position far better than I - for a taste, visit here:
http://www.cato.org/dailys/7-16-97.html
and here:
http://www.cato.org/events/space/index.html
The pomposity of the professor is inversely proportional to the difficulty and importance of the subject being taught.
I would whip up a PR corps.
We would make get a bunch of "Here's what's right around the corner (with $X million)!" videos and sell them to the Discovery Channel and schools and stuff. I'd try to get America excited about space and NASA. We'd sit around brainstorming about ways to get USA all hot and bothered for space. For a large profile / low cost project I'd look at dropping gengineered bacteria onto Venus to begin terreforming. Yeah yeah, it'd take like 500 years to do, but we can get started today! The final result is wildly difficult, but what about the first steps? I guess we'd have to make sure that there isn't any life already there though.
From there I'd look at extra-terra solar energy collection to start making us look cool. Then research into extended human habitation of low / no G environments. From there you're ready to have people live on the moon and you can start putting fabrication facilities up there. Think of the silicon chips you could make. You could mine the moon for a long time before it ceases to be economically feasable (presuming you got it feasable in the first place), according to my understanding. And what an astronomy base it would be. Now with your income you can start looking at Mars. And by this time we prolly got that fusion thing working a little better, we can start making models of drives which shoot high-momentum photons out the back so that we don't have to carry around all that reaction mass. When the moon runs out of minable materials there is always the asteroid belt. And then there's the Jovian moons... and how's that Venus thing coming along?
I would seriously give an arm to be director-for-life of NASA.
Adam Thorne