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."

Comments

This may seem silly...

[gnovos]

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.

The public has no say on the most important things

[Spamalamadingdong]

Unfortunately, NASA is tied to established projects with established constituencies; without the lobbying of those interests, NASA does not get its budget. Moving money from today's cash cows to tomorrow's research projects is like pulling teeth, and this only seems to change when there is some issue of national prestige at stake (between 1957 and 1969, it was showing that we were better than the Russians on the stage of international grandstanding). Don't believe me? Consider the following:

1. The established Saturn booster production line was scrapped to eliminate competition for the Space Shuttle and its lucrative R&D contracts.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.