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NASA Asks the Public For Advice On Goals
JeremyYoung writes: "The National Academy of Science's National Research Council is conducting what is being called the Solar System Exploration Survey at NASA's request. In it they are including public opinion from a web-based survey on the direction of NASA through 2013. The survey itself can be found at this page on the Planetary Society website. The article with more detail in explaining this is here. The survey closes on January 31, so don't miss this chance to tell NASA what you think it should be doing. pssst ... Mars can be done cheaply."
how about going to pluto? it would cost $600 million to send a probe, but the new nasa budget failed to include funding for that. If we don't launch a probe in 2006, we will have to wait 150 years for another opportunity. $600 million is nothing compared to the billions being tossed around on stuff like missile defense, so why not spend it and take advantage of this unique oppurtunity?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
But please note that 1 is the MOST important and 10 is the LEAST important. I rated them all incorrectly and luckily just caught it one second before I hit send. I'm so used to K5 style (5=good, 1=bad) that I didn't stop and read the tiny tiny directions.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Two good things about this survey. One, it used SSL to moderately obscure the data being sent in.
Two, and most importantly, it was a form of multiple choice, with no space for free form answers. Had it been otherwise, the inundation of 'hax0r j00!' and 'go away alien fagz0rs' would have convinced them to start searching for intelligent life on Earth, first.
- billn
Funny retrograde orbit, dodgy orientation, nitrogen geysers, evidence that it was formed outside the solar system, but they include "Phobos Missions" but not Triton Missions?
Why go to yet another piece of inert rock when there are places like this? (ignoring for a second the small matter of cost, obviously).
First NASA's spacecraft then NASA's leadership. Not necessarily in that order.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
So, I can tell one of your govenment agencies what to I'd like them to do, and you the have to pay from your tax. Neat.
Is there anything like this for the CIA?
Schedule Apollo 18.
After my Sargeant was berated by the Platoon Leader for letting me run the platoon he had the gall to ask me if I was running the Platoon. I told him if he had to ask, then there was his answer.
NASA has needed some propper Purpose, Direction and Motivation for a while. Too bad the bright Slashdot geeks can't provide NASA with some real Wall to Wall Counceling.
Perhaps to get Carmack some real funding and engineer support. Or land a sterile probe on Europa. Or a radio telescope on the dark side of the moon.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
A while back I saw something on PBS where some guy from NASA showed a computer depiction of a space station which "created" gravity through centripetal motion. It seemed like a good idea because I know a lot of problems with space travel is the time limit due to atrophy of muscles from a zero gravity environment. The PBS guy dismissed this though by saying, "In fact, the US government knows little to nothing about making a station like this one."
Personally, I think this should be the top priority. This would solve many of our problems and would allow a manned mission to Mars be possible. Why isn't NASA working towards this? What is prohibiting them from doing it? Or are they making progress that I am not aware?
I don't think it's worth it to send a man to mars just for the sake of having said we've sent a man to mars. Nasa should focus more on new propulsion and technology research. Fusion propultion would be great for interstellar travel. Hydrogen fusion converts about 1% of its mass into energy, so theoretically a highly efficient fusion drive could get up to a maximum of 1% of the speed of light. Alternatively, a propulsion system that uses solar panels to power a system that ejects ions at 99% of the speed of light, (and maybe uses a ramscoop) could hypothetically get up to a very high percentage of the speed of light, although it would take centuries. The good thing about this is that it is infinitely replenishable. Another possible propulsion system involves using antimatter as a fuel. This would allow achieving a decent fraction of the speed of light, and with good acceleration, but antimatter is extremely difficult to manufacture in large quantities, and will probably remain as such for a long time.
Repeal the DMCA!
Enough with the shuttle and space station already, unless it's used as a stepping stone to space missions. The shuttle, which was supposed to be a space truck but turns out to be a space ferrari (in terms of cost, not performance) goes up a couple hundred km and then comes back. At least it has somewhere to go now, instead of just floating around, but still. It's boring.
Robots to everywhere.
Mine the asteroids.
Move industry into outer space where possible.
Men to Mars.
Science magazine had a news article on this in their 4 Jan. issue, if you want to see
- The established Saturn booster production line was scrapped to eliminate competition for the Space Shuttle and its lucrative R&D contracts.
- The various incarnations of the space station keep losing size, personnel and research capabilities, but the whole thing is never tossed out and re-done from scratch. Apparently it suits the entrenched interests more to have a white elephant in orbit sucking up every available dollar than to take the budget and see what can be accomplished with it. The effort to quash the Lawrence Livermore Labs "community space suit" space station is a case in point.
- The DC-1 project was on track to produce an SSTO launch vehicle which could fly far more frequently and cheaply than the Shuttle. Of course, it was developed by SDIO (it could never have been built at NASA). The established interests got it taken away from SDIO and handed over to NASA, which completed the test program and promptly crashed and destroyed the DC-X test vehicle.
- Rather than pursuing the development of the DC-Y using the results of the DC-X test program, NASA scratched it and instead decided to fund a completely new vehicle, the VentureStar (which promised a lot more development money). Of course, the VentureStar's future is now in doubt as its fuel tanks apparently cannot be built.
Unless we the public can get behind some program which demands results instead of pork, we are going to be dumping more billions and tens of billions on projects which leave us little or even nothing to show for them; meanwhile, all the cutting-edge stuff like DC-Y and Deep Space One will be done on a shoestring if they can be done at all. Our future in space depends on shouldering the pigs away from the money trough and demanding results.Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
The fact that NASA has been doing "science" based on polls is nothing new. However, I've never seen them be so open about it until now. Where do I check off "stay home and send me the money", because if they are going to let the general public pick the missions, I'd rather just keep my tax dollars.
Are you bored of brocolli experiments in space too?
Someone you trust is one of us.
Of course, for a small station or vehicle it's more difficult to have a large value of r. Fortunately, there are at least two ways around this:
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
And note that nowhere on their form is there an option to specify the development of space infrastructure like that. There are any number of possibilities; here's one of my fave examples:
Arbitrary "cheap" (by government standards - say, $1 million or $10 million a pop) prizes for the first N organzations to achieve certain milestones (for example, the X-Prize one of getting one vehicle to 100 or so miles up, twice within two weeks; next one is maybe a hypersonic transport, capable of getting a 100 kilogram payload from Los Angeles to Tokyo in under two hours, again twice within two weeks with the same craft; et cetera). Various limitations on the types of organizations, to discourage cheating (and maybe also limit to US orgs only, to help this get around national security concerns)...but, once the specs are out, they do not change. Boeing and Lockheed can maybe pick off a couple of the prizes then scrap development of their projects like they have in the past, but smaller entrants (not affiliated in any way with any other winners of the same prize, or with the US government) would pick up the rest...and then, out of (say) 5 prizes, there would be 3 viable cheap-to-orbit lauunch vehicles out there, ready for public use.
...fake some more evidence of life in outer space so as to increase public interest and get more money out of the government. Meanwhile they should spend the money on doing some real research.
-- SIGFPE