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USA To Return To Moon By 2015, Then Mars
securitas writes "This afternoon George Bush announced space exploration plans for the USA to return to the Moon by 2015, the design and construction of a new space vehicle fleet by 2014 (called the Crew Exploration Vehicle) to replace the aging space shuttles which will be retired in 2010, and the construction of a permanent Moon base, followed by manned missions to Mars. The initiative begins with a $1 billion increase to NASA's budget and $12 billion in new space exploration money over next five years. However Congress is concerned about how to pay for the new space policy initiative in the face of a $500 billion national budget deficit. AP via Yahoo has a Moon/Mars/space policy FAQ, and there's more at NASA and the New York Times among others."
And if a married couple goes up together NASA gets $1.5 billion more!
This argument never fails to frustrate me and I'm sure it's going to come up in this discussion.
Here's the thing, the federal budget is well over a trillion dollars. NASA's budget is around 17 billion. It's roughly 1 percent of the national budget. People get so scared about the word billion that they forget the scale of cash that the US has to allocate.
Does anyone honestly think that putting that bit of money elsewhere would solve whatever domestic problems you want fixed? Have we yet cured hunger, poverty, or undereducation? No? Well, we've been throwing billions at them so far. If you're looking for funds to cut and inefficiencies to uproot, look in defense and welfare. Diverting funds from NASA to domestic programs will not change anything except to kneecap our development as a multi-planet species.
Another misassumption is that if money is cut from one department, it automatically gets redistributed to others. That's not the way it works. And yes, I know we're running a deficit but a 1 billion increase over the next 5 years isn't going to contribute significantly to it. And IIRC, every administration except for 1 (maybe 2) has run a deficit and the country has not yet fallen.
But won't this cost a trillion dollars? No, not if done right. Father Bush's plan was scrapped because the estimate he was given was based on an outmoded model for Mars exploration. On top of that, it was subjected to a committee that took it as a chance to write themselves a blank check with their 90-day report. Bust the first was ignorant to any alternatives so he abandoned it. Read up on Mars Direct. It's a plan to do Mars missions on the same budgetary scale as the Apollo missions. Those were done for about the same budget that NASA currently gets. NASA doesn't need more money, just proper direction and it looks like they're finally getting some of that.
See my other post for more on the case for Mars and space exploration.
Blaze a trail to the New World
I have seen price tags from NASA people and other space scientists for the whole expedition fluctating from $60-175 billion.
It's probably difficult or impossible to make an accurate estimate of total cost this early in the process but nevertheless the current estimates deviates much from each other.
$60 billion is one thing, but $175 billion?
Yes I know going to Mars might create some jobs and promote technology and development but I would like to know the price tag anyway.
And with a $450 Billion budget deficit already I'm not so sure that this is a good idea.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
"the design and construction of a new space vehicle fleet by 2014 (called the Crew Exploration Vehicle) to replace the aging space shuttles which will be retired in 2010"
Anyone else concerned about the 4 year break from the retirement of the shuttle to the *planned* launch of the new craft? The last time we'll have stayed out of space for so long is before the shuttle launch (assuming we get back there following Columbia anywhere near NASA's schedule). There are already problems with the ISS given the shuttle's current grounding...
I am a big proponent of the space program but i think money would be much better spent developing resources on the moon as opposed to going to mars. I am not saying mars should not be an eventual goal but im much more interested in the moon as a future energy resource.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
First lunacy: waste money bringing the space station up to snuff, then abandon our part in. That's one hell of a message to send to future prospective partners.
Second lunacy: only add $1B to NASA's budget. They will have to gut every other program to fund this return to the moon, and they appear to be eager to do so.
Third lunacy: nothing in this proposal has anything to do with making access to space cheaper.
What ought to happen is tell NASA to get out of the way of independent private companies who are trying to get into space for much less money than NASA spends just thinking about it. That's the key. Let NASA build satellites and telescopes and whatnot, but make it law that NASA has to go with the cheapest launcher of reasonable reliablity, and if that means going with some private company who can do it for 1/10th the cost of Lockheed or Boeing or Ariane, so be it.
Infuriate left and right
Or did President Bush say "Crew Expiration Vehicle" three times during his speech, and made reference to "expiration that will inspire today's students"?
I've been around Texas, and I tell you I've never heard a native Texan mispronounce a word like "exploration" so obviously, repeatedly, and to me, ominously.
Bleakness... Desolation... Plastic Forks...
IF we retire the shuttle fleet by 2010 and bring the new vehicle on by 2014, what exactly do we do for the grounded four year? Don't see any other option offered, and hitching a ride with the Russians only goes so far.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon
Well, stop bombing people would be a good start.
Let us not forget that the first President Bush suggested much the same thing: let's go back to the Moon, let's get ourselves to Mars, etc. He did it in the waning days of his presidency, to help boost his decreasing popularity, and to take attention away from the declining state of the economy.
Now, Bush II does the same thing. First, he tried the immigration proposal, and that went over like a lead balloon. Now, he's throwing the next shiny toy in front of us, hoping that we'll forget the issues that his administration are glossing over.
This is not a Kennedy-type announcement. We are not going back to the Moon, we will not be going to Mars, and more than likely, we will not be replacing the space shuttles.
Headline from 2012: President Jeb Bush announces that we're going back to Moon, and then on to Mars...
Hooray, if it happens. As many people pointed out when this announcement was, er, announced a couple weeks ago, this is basically a no-lose proposition for Dubya. Even if he actually does approve a massive increase in NASA's budget this term, and even if he does win a second term as President, there's no guarantee that the subsequent administrations (or Congresses) won't reduce NASA's budget or otherwise do something to kill the project.
So Bush gets to look good to everyone who like space exploration -- which is most people -- without having to necessarily live up to his promise. Given Bush's track record as president and as a human being, I'm inclined to believe that he doesn't personally give a rat's ass whether we get back to the moon or Mars -- he knows that this is a simple campaigning trick (make a fantastic promise that you can't be held accountable for).
Yeah, I hope it does happen -- but I'm still not voting for the guy.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
to try to (further) militarize space. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the actual proposed funding was much more linked to the Back From the Dead SDI 'peace sheild' Death Star that the Republicans have been creaming for ever since they first saw Star Wars.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
Whatever you may say Bush's motivation is or what you think of Bush, this is a great announcement! I don't care if we are in a deficit. I don't care how much this costs. We MUST boldly go where no one has gone before, for the rest of the time our species exists.
How many technologies we are using toady are based (somewhere in their roots) on the Apollo missions or shuttle missions? What a great advancement for mankind!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Jeez, just yesterday I read about how they were searching for water on Mars, now we're looking for Bushes on the Moon? They aughta start with that young one ... I bet Jenna's fallen over and seen stars a bunch of times...
Eh, in my opinion its all a ploy to get people hyped up for the elections. Sure, you may argue its a little early but I will just say "NO."
I'd say its pretty damn obvious he has no interest in the space program itself. Besides, it seems like a really bad time considering the economy + iraq + afghanistan. Then again, since most of the Iraq/Afghanistan money was conveniently left out of the budget, I could see how Bush plans to pay for this.
What saddens me is that, even though the majority of informed individuals can see right through this, there's not a damn thing we can do. There's no powerful candidate to oppose him. Odds are that he will win, and that'll serve as a pat on the back for all the stuff he's done since he entered office (in his mind and that of his administration).
Anyway, I would welcome a space program if it was sincerely intended. But I don't think this particular thing will amount to much - its very easy to plan something that'll cost hundreds of billions of dollars in the future, because you're not the one who's gonna be in office when the time comes to commit resources!
$12B is chicken scratch compared to all the revenue NASA's advances will create. If you compared NASA's budget from it's inception until 1980 againist the money made by all their advances. The price would be moot. The companies who NASA outsourced to are now using what they learned and discovered to create newer and better products.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
The way he pays for everything else ... by cutting taxes, of course!
Now, I'm strongly in favor of the program. However, about your statement " NASA's budget is around 17 billion. It's roughly 1 percent of the national budget."
The entire budget, and debt and defecit mess is made up of nothing but "oh, it's only a few billion. It won't matter." That's what everyone says about their favorite pet spending program.
It does make a difference.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
In the 1960's, it took us under 9 years from Kennedy's pledge to land on the moon.
Now we can do it in 11!
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
I propose that NASA be authorized to create a lottery for supplemental funding. It could either be a traditional cash lottery, or perhaps they could make the prizes NASA related, such as getting your name on a space probe, or give away some NASA merchandise. The "Big Jackpot" could be a trip to the International Space Station valued at $20 million. If the eligible person can't qualify for health reasons, he/she could sell the spot.
Has it occurred to anyone that this is just a way of diverting large quantities of money to Bush's corporate friends?
Not that I object to going to Mars, far from it. Just the 1 trillion estimates I see really make me wonder just how much is going directly into people's pockets.
We got the the moon the first time in less then 10 years. We have much more advanced rockets and computer technology then we did in 1969, so it doesnt make sense that it is going to take that long to work program back up.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
....put George Bush into space
Aparently congress unanimously voted to give the money to DIEBOLD instead.
I guess Europe will beat us to Mars.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
And people need to remeber how big the American economy is, even during a dip in the economy.
o k/geos/ us.html#Econ
$10.45 trillion (2002 est.)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbo
The money Bush is proposing, even if the amount goes up is minute compared to the Federal Budget and the GDP of the US.
In 1961, when shit wasn't invented yet and people fought bears for vital food, President Kennedy had the balls to give NASA less than nine years to get to the moon.
In this day and age, when there's metric shitloads of technology all over the place and the internet makes valuable porn as free as air, President Bush gives it twelve years. What a tool.
Now I am reading more, and the deadline is actually 2020. That's seventeen years.
See, Kennedy had the balls to lay a firm deadline down. "You bitches will put a man on the moon before January 1, 1970 or I will come back from the grave and kick your ass," he said. He knew he was going to get shot. That's how hardcore he was. He also got crazy laid by Marilyn Monroe.
President Bush says, "You ought to think about just possibly putting a man on the moon sometime during this five year period."
President Kennedy showed us that you have to slap NASA around a little bit to get them to do anything worthwhile with manned space exploration. You can't be all lovey-dovey and set long gradual timetables.
And Bush mentions "the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods." So we'll have another Skylab ISS, but on the moon. The only differences will be that it won't crash into Australia like Skylab (it will crash into the Moon instead - that might sound hard to acheive since it would already be on the surface of the moon, but they will find a way to do that), it will leak more than ISS, and since it won't even be international we won't be able to bum rides from the Russians.
If Kennedy was alive in this day and age he would have said, "Fucking NASA, I am still alive in this day and age so you assholes better have a self-sufficient Mars base by the year 2013. Also make me a space elevator. And resurrect Marilyn Monroe." Then NASA would complain that it is not their job to resurrect people and Kennedy would punch NASA in the eye.
I bet the "Crew Exploration Vehicle" is going to blow the fuck up about twenty times too. You can probably trace the suckiness of manned space exploration to the decision to switch from cool names like "Mercury" and "Apollo" to crappy names like "Skylab" and "STS." When the Apollo blew up they fucking fixed it and came home, but when the Space Shuttle gets fucked up they make Powerpoints about it and ignore the problem.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
OK. So here's the 86 billion dollar question: Who is going to pay for all of this? I'm as much for space exploration as the next guy (Heck, I *work* for NASA), but let's be honest: BUDGET DEFICIT
Here's the scariest part of Bush's speech: "NASA's current five-year budget is $86 billion. Most of the funding we need for the new endeavors will come from re-allocating $11 billion from within that budget." Hey other NASA folks out there, you know what this means: The return of the "ISS Tax".
Developing a new vehicle, returning to the Moon, going to Mars... This is all going to cost a lot of money, will it be fully funded? Part of the reason that the Space Shuttle is such a failure is the fact that it was not adequately funded*. One of the contributing factors to our ability to go to the moon the first time was that NASA had a blank check.
* This is addressed in the CAIB report, if you haven't read the section on the history of the politics of the STS, it's worth a glance.
Diverting funds from NASA to domestic programs will not change anything except to kneecap our development as a multi-planet species.
"multi-planet" species? We can't handle one planet.
IMHO the first attempt was just a 'hey! let's do this quick and dirty' kinda thing. This time, with the moon being only a rest stop, there'll probably be much more testing and thought going into everything (assuming all of this gets off the ground....).
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
...Bush's space exploration initiative is a deflection of media attention away from a steady diet of the overall cost of war and occupation.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
We can it's just that people don't want to live in the desert...no Starbucks or burger joints.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
remember, paying cable is a small part of my yearly budget but I still don't see a need to waste $59.95 a month on it... Amazingly enough I have the self-control not to needlessly waste $60 a month and I get to spend it on other things!
Yes, going to the moon again is a GREAT idea. Building a moon base is a GREAT idea. Going to Mars is a GREAT idea.
This is something that looks good in a 30 second spot, but falls apart when you look at it. How is Bush going to pay for it? Answer: He's not. The 5% increase is a joke - it's not going to get a man on the red planet. But we can pretend for the cameras.
See, he doesn't want to get caught like poppy lacking the "vision thing". So he comes up with this vision of a moon base that seemed cool when he was a kid and tells everyone we're going to do it.
Kind of like No Child Left Behind. All those reforms sounded pretty good too. Who knows, they might have been, but Bush didn't fund it. Still, it made him look good, just like this NASA announcement does.
I applaud the Bush for being the first President in a long time to get us excited about space exploration again. I just wish he really meant it.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Funding for welfare, etc., isn't designed to wipe out poverty. You can't wipe out poverty. It's designed to mitigate the damage caused by poverty, to wit, lawlessness, public health (poverty makes life dangerous for everybody) and human suffering (and it's no fun).
Taking money away from those programs to pay to go to space is dangerous. That's not to say we shouldn't pay to go to space - the question is which budget to cut, and my point is that cutting public service and public assistance budgets isn't likely to be cost effective.
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
We could also eliminate a lot of special-interest tax loopholes that Bush introduced in his "tax cut." But for some reason, it's always public services and public aid that get cut, not corporate welfare, and not military spending.
Sigh.
Exactly, funds removed from NASA won't necessarily be reallocated to fix "leaky school roofs."
Many say we just wasted at least 80 billion dollars on the Iraq War and what do we have to show from that besides several hundred dead American bodies. Now I'm expecting that we're also assuring ourselves a lot of oil so that 80 billion may not all be a waste.
But damn, it annoys me so much when people rat on the space program! Someone at work was saying about the Mars Spirit Panorama, "What, we paid 300 million bucks for a pikcha?" AH!!!
This moon proposal is space infrastructure. It is an investment in humanities future in this solar system.
Also, the Moon seems like a much better place to start. It's close, we can do a lot of equally inspiring stuff there that would just be more expensive, dangerous, and would take longer if attempted on Mars.
Moderation: +1 pwnage
And the dinosaurs couldn't handle one asteroid.
And did you conduct a study or have some data to back up your claim that most of us in the country don't have any desire to become a multi-planet species...?
Also, why spend money to determine if life can survive in a desert when we already know it can? I happen to live in a desert.. there's plenty of life here. There's life in the Sahara.. Antarctica, ocean vents.. The point is, getting life to survive on this planet is fuckin' easy.
Humans are an exloratory species.. always have been. We've spread across the entire planet, have we not? So to continue our exploration, we need to go into the Great Unknown.. space! And that starts with Mars.
What is your penile percentile?
look around you....tell me how many things you have and tell me the number of materials you have things made of that did NOT come from Nasa.
is manned space exploration worth it? yes.....when we want to go to Jupitor, the weight costs of the food alone would be emence....now just think what figuring out how to feed the astronaughts on a Jupitor trip with out packing the ship full of food would mean to world hunger.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Just give me $200,000 to help out my state and keep my public library open 7 days a week. Or how about just a few hundred thousand to keep my fire station open.
I mean that's nothing compared to the billion or trillion dollars right? Its chump change.
Why do I suddenly feel like a beggar asking for pennies....
Outdoor storage sheds and pet kennels
...you could have spent $100B on NASA, getting people back to the moon and to Mars and been remembered forever.
Instead you chose to spend $100B on bombing Iraq, to be reviled forever.
You know, I wonder if that had some kind of factor to this decision. That GWB took a look at how he would be remembered by future generations, especially if he lost this election, and realized he didn't like what he saw - First attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, erosion of constitutionally granted rights, 2 wars, an ugly occupation, an economy that just will not recover, and critics that grow louder as election time grows nearer. Maybe he saw a gambit like this as his only means of redeaming himself in the court of public opinion. That if he sets us out on a long term project, like going to Mars, then perhaps he will be remembered more favorably in the long term - even if he doesn't look so good in the short term.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
These guys didn't care about the deficit when in one year they gave the Pentagon $74 billion increase, $40 billion ($400 billion/10 years) to create a Medicare senior drug plan, or $12 billion in farm subsidies. Surely we can scrape together $1 billion this year to do some actual science... Incidentally, I happen to be a trickle-down believer, and any money we put towards NASA will only go to help provide jobs for scientists and engineers, something we really need to do to drive off what's left of the Dot-Bomb, and help rekindle the USA's technology drive.
I think if you read between lines, Bush is saying we need to invade the moon because it has WMDs
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
1989: President (George H.) Bush announces that we're going to Mars by 2020.
2004: President (George W.) Bush announces that we're going to the Moon by 2020. Then to Mars.
2013: President (Jeb) Bush announces that the Chinese have agreed to allow us to send an American astronaut to their new moonbase, but only if we abandon all remaining manufacturing efforts.
2022: President (Jenna) Bush sadly informs the country that the Moon has come to us - the Chinese are dropping asteroid sized chunks of lunar debris on us, a new weapon that even our not-yet-deployed Star Wars program can defend against.
2034: An American finally lands on Mars, although only symbolically. A statue of the last President of the United States, Jenna Bush, is erected in the new Martian People's Republic History Museum.
Go ahead call me a troll, mod me into next week, but the technologies needed to go to Mars are the same as needed to survive on the earth without oil. The attacks on Iraq was the first move, and now he's moving to get the technologies ready for when the oil to run out in 2010-2020. Remember kids, its not _IF_ the oil is going to run out, its when. With China and India getting fully addicted to the black gold, its going to go fast. I would guess that 2010 is probably the start of the "crash" curve and 2020 is the expected bottom. Just google on Peak Oil if you want to educate yourself and not sleep for week or two.
The program is the right thing to do.
It should have been started long ago, it's overdue.
Now is a bad time to do it, thanks to reckless spending and slashing revenue.
The motivation isn't purely political, it's because China and India are expressing interest and it 'looks bad' if the USA lets anyone get a leg up, in short it's for selfish pride.
This isn't the leader to kick it off, but he's the only one who has.
I feel the same frustration and exasperation, it comes with being educated.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Do I even want to think of the new positions thought up in zero gravity? *shudders*
Karma whorin' since 1999
Was anyone else horrified to read that this "$12 billion program" is only going to cause an increase in the NASA budget of $1 billion? As a strong supporter of all the recent advances in cosmology and observational data, this greatly concerns me and others in my field. Does this mean that $11 billion which would be otherwise spent on exploring the cosmos is now going to be redirected to funding a long-range plan that will need countless presidents and congresses to approve it?
So, in other words, Bush stopped talking about Iraq, and said, "Hey, look at that thing all the way over there!"
Beagle Discovers Life On Mars
Beagle Discovers Oil On Mars
Bush anounces "Operation Martian Freedom"
Martians wellcome troops but "alien terrorists" from Neptune skirmish with coalition troops.
President Yaxcbat ( Neptune ) announces "Operation Freedom Earth"
Neptunians arrive at Earth and kick some Dubya butt
Neptunians introduce foolproof ballot punching machines using superior alien technology
Republicans thrown out of the Green House ( As the aliens renamed it )
Earth is happy.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
I think Mars is premature until we have something like a space elevator going to get stuff into orbit. Or something to get the cost of getting to orbit under control.
With that, we can afford to take a big ship there. We can put in some infrastructure on Mars ahead of the astronauts getting there.
To send a person to Mars doesn't make sense to me. Spend the money on the space program, but not for this project please.
The Mars ship may not be made in America, and the crew will be Dynagen contractors, but we can take pride in the fact that exclusive broadcast rights of the landings will belong to American big media companies.
It is a bold initiative to announce a return to the moon and then go on to Mars, but it will be expensive. It might turn out to be too expensive for one nation alone.
To save costs, China, Russia and the ESA should also be involved in the missions. China has announced its own plans to go to the moon in a similar time frame. Russia has some lunar experience, especially with their robotic craft in the early 1970s and their sample return missions at about the same time.
Joint missions to the moon are not a new idea. The Soviet Premier Khrushchev proposed a joint effort to go to the moon with the Americans in 1961 and 1963. It was rejected by JFK in 1961, but JFK was more willing to consider the idea when it was proposed again in 1963. Had JFK not been assassinated a few weeks later, a Russian might have walked on the moon in 1969 with an American.
If Bush is talking about "humanity", he needs to involve more of humanity in this new space exploration initiative than just Americans.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
but we, on the other hand....
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
I'm all for space exploration, but this just strikes me as nothing more than a political game.
That $1 billion increase sounds good at first, but spread it out over 5 years, and you've got $200 million/year. On the other hand, increasing NASA's budget at a rate consistent even with November's unusually low inflation rate of 1.77% would give a yearly increase of $230 million. So, in the best case, they're treading water. (For comparison, NASA's 2004 budget received a roughly 3% increase over 2003.)
What about that other $12 billion in exploration money? It "will come from reallocation of $11 billion that is currently within the five-year total NASA budget of $86 billion". So, NASA just got 13% of their budget reallocated.
Aside from the apparent fiscal impotency of the plan, the thing is just dripping with political rhetoric. From the white house release: "From 1992 to 2000, NASA's budget decreased by a total of 5 percent. Since the year 2000, NASA's budget has increased by approximately 3 percent per year." What an interesting point to suddenly bring up! Why yes, it is an election year!
I was going to put a sig here, but I had already submitted the message.
As a comparison, 3.5 Billion dollars were spent on ring tones last year.. Personally, I think that money would be better spent by NASA.
Two scenarios:
1) Issue bonds with the return being first access to a space outpost at a later date or something like that. This would be like the Pan-Am sale of tickets to the moon, but these bonds have government backing as to avoid bankruptcy and gain interest when not used (2-3%?). If NASA gives up the initiative, the government bonds still have value. I'd buy quite a few and be happy to contribute to the program over the long term.
2) Lots of space technologies are dual-use for civilian and military, so why not get the DOD to help fund it? Insight into orbital mechanics and practical space vehicles would allow us a decent chance (better than 40%) to shoot down ICBMs and other long-range missles before they reached the US. Also, there is territory on the South Pole of the Moon that gives great visibility to most of the planet, so it is in their best interest to participate and lend a few billion to the plan.
(On the other hand we could always falsify reports that oil or Osama could be found on Mars/the Moon and get up there much sooner without having to worry about how it gets paid for...)
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Bush just tell the taxpayers that he was going to Uranus
I'm tired of us paying for science that gets exported all around the globe.
---------
That's complete crap. That's not how science works. Science is for the good of humanity, not one specific, transient country. Long after the US has gone the way of the Roman Republic (and it will, it is the nature of such things), its contribution to science and technology will endure.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'd rather see a couple small teams be organized to pull off incremental science missions. When their work looks promising, and we have the technology and reason to sit on Mars or the moon, great!
If we spend $1 billion this year on this goal, then I want SOMETHING that we can show for it. Either a fleet of moon landers that do real science, or a working, low-cost rocket system that can carry nice sized payloads outside of earth orbit, etc.
I just don't want to spend $1 billion for a bunch of soon-to-be-obsolete technical drawings of a prototype lander that'll bring 2 guys to poke around the moon for a few days and then call it quits.
In other words, this should be about the science of it FIRST. We need practical deliverables OTHER THAN just being able to watch TV on Mars or the Moon.
For instance, if we allocated a billion of those dollars to public education they'd probably waste it teaching kids to read and right.
You asked:
Has almost ANY NASA project survived intact 12 years?
The answer is that not even shuttle survived intact. Go back and look at the initial plans. It was for a flexible launch system that was fully reusable with a wide range of achievable orbits. What we got was a crippled alternative, with very high cost of turnaround, SRBs that must be almost completely rebuilt before reuse, and a maximum of Low Earth Orbit. Not much return on the dollar if you ask me.
I am also concerned that this announcement will drain all remaining funding from the current unmanned exploration programs. These are the programs that have been the greatest successes of NASA... and they are the ones learning to go with reusable designs, small and light, lots of flexibility. If we're being asked to drop those and pursue a single exploration strategy of manned missions, first to build a permanent presence on the moon and then a trip to Mars, it seems wrong. Let's not put all our eggs in this one basket.
Yes, in general this is a poor argument to use. However in this case the additional spending is far out weighed by the economic advantages of space exploration. Instead of building a bomb which has a negative economic impact (not to mention cost) we are building spacecraft that have the potential to generate huge economic benefits.
Not to mention the advances in science and technology that the program alone generates. One example of technology developed from the Apollo program is the circuit board which of course led to the personal computer.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Have you ever been to the desert southwest? It's already taxed and the water is about to run out (no fair trying to drain the Great Lakes or divert Mississippi river water.) Growth in the southwest has boomed in the past two decades. Las Vegas is over 1 million and litterally living off the Colorado River. You can drill wells, but the water still has to come from the same place.
Not too likely people will want to live on other planets, but you know industry is just itching to get a peek at any advantage to be gained by getting something somewhere else, cheaply and selling it here. Seems a long way off to get make money in space, but someone will find a way and take advantage of economy of scale. Then people will simply follow to live near work.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Like crack, the first hit is free.
Funding for welfare, etc, isn't designed to wipe out poverty or mitigate its effects. It's designed to perpetuate poverty, because a permanent underclass of non-producing food tubes dependent upon the government to steal wealth from the producing food-tubes can be relied upon to always support the government.
If you're at the top of the food chain, the more poor, and the worse off they are, and the faster they breed, the more power you have over producer and parasite alike.
Consider the relationship between shepherd, sheepdog, and sheep. Sure, the sheepdog gets to have lots of "fun" by running circles around the flock. The "fun" the sheepdog has is immaterial to the farmer's purpose for the sheepdog, namely to have a few animals running freely enough to keep the flock in a predictable state, grazing contentedly until harvest time.
He can make grandiose claims for plans all he likes, and this being an election year he will, but his "plans" will never come to fruition. Congress has to first approve the budget, and then approve the appropriations before NASA would see a dime. With a trillion dollar deficit staring us in the face, there's no way any congresscritter is going to paint themselves with the dark side of the paintbrush Bush is handing them.
And even if they DID pass it, a future president with more sense (one who can actually count and doesn't believe in imaginary money) will be forced to cut back or cancel this, unless the deficit is fixed first.
Bush has no more intention of seeing this carried out than his father did in 1989. Remember what Bush Sr. did to the space program. He put Dan "Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe" Quayle in charge of it. I'm still shocked over that blatant slap in the face, and the audacity it took to claim to be pro-space afterwards.
This is apparently obvious to a lot of people already. Stock in space program contractors dropped today.
It's an election year. Wait until December before you start the count down.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Build the biggest coolest shit you want, in the deserts or anywhere else, and one decent-sized asteroid will take it out at the same time it kills everything else above the level of the cockroach and creates long-term nuclear winter for the lucky roach..
If we don't get off this planet, then one simple day of cosmic bad luck is all it will take, and everything -- the $820 million dollars building cool desert shit, the wars fought, the ideas created, everything -- all of it will be for absolutely nothing. The only way we'll be able to leave then is if we start working on the problems now. The asteroid with your name on it does not give one single flying high-impact shit about your way of life, nor your fears of alien invasion, nor your "not giving a fuck".
Ever think of that? Apparently not.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"called the Crew Exploration Vehicle"
I am the only one would immediately thought of cavity searches..?
Consider the Galileo probe, which lasted for 3 times as long as it was designed for, taking several times as much radiation as it was designed to and was built with 1980s technology and was only crashed because they didn't want to chance it crashing into a potentially-inhabited moon. Or Magellan, which was also built with similar technology, used aerobraking (which it wasn't designed for), similarly had an extended mission using 1980s technology. Or Mars Global Surveyor, which was built with 1990s technology and has similarly been doing research beyond its design lifespan.
They do, in fact, build them just as good, if not better, than they did in the 1960s. The shuttle's problems are design and engineering issues, not anything to do with what generation of technology they are.
In fact, overall, the whole "they don't build them like they used to" is just a case of survivor bias. Everything from the 1940s that still works is on the mutant end of the MTBF curve and everything that didn't has been junked.
Gentoo Sucks
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
To perhaps put a more direct example in the light, the US has (by civilian knowledge) 21 plane B2 bomber bomber (mostly built in the last 3 years or so). While originally designed to fly long range missions to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, they now only have regular bombing duty, a role already filled by the enormous fleet of B1 and B52s. In fact the US General Accounting Office found the B2s actually have trouble doing even those missions; since they where originally designed to fly a single M.A.D. mission, they are not very sturdy. In fact every mission they fly causes extensive and expensive damage because of moisture in the air damaging the stealth covering.
The cost, as stated, for this space program is 13 billion. The cost for the handful of B2s was $45 billion (even if you exclude research costs and assume mass production, each plane costs over $1 billion to produce, let alone actually maintain). What worse is that the B2 is a somewhat cost efficent project as compared to others in the military industrial complex.
After Rome fell, much of its science and technology was preserved. It was not widespread, but mostly carried along by the scholars of the Church. This preserved knowledge was a major factor in the early Renaissance, when society was ready to accept these ideas again. Had Rome not preserved its knowledge and technology, the relatively rapid period of rediscovery during the Renaissance would have been much longer.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Another way to look at it is that this additional $1 Billion could come from pulling out of Iraq ONE week early. That's right the cost of operations in Iraq not including one time costs like moving the troops to and from the country is aprox $4 Billion per month. I am all for what we accomplished in overthrowing one of the most evil men of the last two generations but we should find a way to quickly return the country to self rule and withdraw our troops before it becomes a significant drag on the economy and the loss of troops becomes a long term weakener of military moral.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
No, the leader who kicked it off was JFK. The last White House resident who sort of made big mumbles about it was actually Poppy Bush--but most people don't even remember his Mars by 2035 mumble. Dubya is just trying to get it back on Daddy's schedule.
In terms of doing something useful in space, probably the strongest claim would be the international space station--but Dubya is destroying the international cooperation that depends on. Only natural, since Dubya's real motivation for supporting space flight is military dominance.
Actually, I'm a big supporter of real science, including the space program. However, you also have to deal with the economic realities, and if Dubya keeps losing 20% of the dollar's value every year, the US won't be able to afford anything remotely resembling a real space program.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
What the hell kind of name is the "Crew Exploration Vehicle"? At least the shuttle didn't have some crazy name; it was the shuttle. And it is a shuttle, so that was an OK name.
Then you had the Apollo landers. The name of a *god* who rode through the heavens in a flaming chariot. Now *there*'s an appropriate name. Or the "Saturn V". Named after another god (or a planet, but whatever). Still better than C.E.V.
Has anyone tried to *say* CEV? Chev? Chevy? How are we supposed to pronounce it? I swear, it sounds like a suppository.
This is a sign of bad leadership somewhere. It has to be. No one but a comittee would call a Mars craft the "Crew Exploration Vehicle". I don't want to explore the crew! Eck!
Oh well, I guess some old-timer there has some strange fetish... it is the end of all hope.
"Does anyone honestly think that putting that bit of money elsewhere would solve whatever domestic problems you want fixed? Have we yet cured hunger, poverty, or undereducation? No? Well, we've been throwing billions at them so far. If you're looking for funds to cut and inefficiencies to uproot, look in defense and welfare. Diverting funds from NASA to domestic programs will not change anything except to kneecap our development as a multi-planet species."
I've been saying this for years. The increasing expendature on domestic issues will increase exponentially untill there are no money and/or resources for any real space program. It's got to be done now. The 'public' might think that the money should be spent on domestic issues, but the 'public' is full of complete fucking morons.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
CNN has a poll for Yes or No on the moon $$$. www.cnn.com/360 Perhaps we can tip the polls the other way, its 1000+ for no and 500+ for yes...
i think that most of the debate here is a bit off point...
yes, 17 billion isn't a gigantic sum, and yes, nasa brings good to all people, but has anyone thought about comparing that measly sum to the proposed 15% increase in the defense budget, that will bring it up to an amazing 380 billion?
i don't think that those brand-new small-scale nuclear weapons bring good to people...
and remember the 'project for a new american century'-stuff, you know, the paper from the end of 2000 that, besides talking about the need to invade iraq, also talks about starting a new 'space' branch for the military. what could the plan be? turning the moon into some kind of death star?
h357
If living on Mars or the moon is the end goal, then sure, your argument has some merit. However, that isnt the end goal at all. To quote a popular TV show, our goal as a species has always been "...to go boldy forth where no man has gone before..". If we establish a presence on Mars, there will always be a rock further away that we will want to land on. And if we land on that rock too, there will be yet another rock further away. The reason to go into space is not because of tangible or intangible payoffs, or because we havent got anything better to do, but because it is our destiny.
Anyway, even if living on Mars was the end goal, there are still some issues with your argument. Today there are folks living in really harsh environments like the Sahara and the Arctic. They know about alternative places where the environment is much kinder to the human body, yet they choose to continue living there. While it is true that Mars is much more inhospitable than these environments, who is to say that future technological improvements wont make Mars so hospitable that people might actually want to call it "home".
As regards to your argument that "the money could be better spent elsewhere", that is your point of view and you are entitled to it. But the last I checked, the US has a democratic process, and your elected representatives are speaking for you. If you dont like how they spend the nations money, cast your vote accordingly. If the majority of the US voting population like the way they are spending money, you are SOL.
Those who dont vote, dont deserve to get their complaints listened to.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
A country that can't pay its bills; has millions of people without access to healthcare and has a substantal amount of money allocated to Defense spending is now going to spend a fortune on manned spaceflight.
I just graduated from college with a terrific debt and the first thing I thought of when this proposal came up was how we would spend money to go to space but not to assure college education to anyone who wanted it. Then I thought about how my generation was going to pay the bills to support the retiring baby-boomers. Then I thought about how many friends / family members are having trouble finding jobs in this economy.
I guess solving real problems doesn't get any attention in an election year.
I bet the "Crew Exploration Vehicle" is going to blow the fuck up about twenty times too. You can probably trace the suckiness of manned space exploration to the decision to switch from cool names like "Mercury" and "Apollo" to crappy names like "Skylab" and "STS."
If you really want to explain the difference between the successful Apollo days and the failed promises of the Space Shuttle, it's to your credit that you've identified the problem as psychological, but you've failed to understand the specific psychology.
What is the most distinctive difference between the Saturn V (and all it's successful kin, including the current ultra-cost-effective Russian rockets servicing the ISS) and the Space Shuttle? The Saturn V looks like a penis.
Come on, think about it. These are rocket scientists here. Many of them aren't getting laid, and the rest aren't getting laid very frequently. If you aren't even going to let them subconsciously work out their frustrations via overcompensating engineering, what reason do they have to get out of bed in the morning, much less reach for the stars?
Ladies and gentleman, one way or another we as a species are going to have to band together and figure out how to get off this lovely little rock we call Earth or our species will eventually go bye, bye. Granted we have billions of years before the sun engulfs the Earth in flames but it's eventually going to happen. The Sun won't last forever, all stars die. When the Sun enters it's latter stages it's going to expand and engulf the Earth, killing everything on it. That is, if we can even make it that long without a really big asteroid heading our way and colliding with our planet taking us all out first.
We've got to figure out a way to get people off of Earth and Mars is pretty good way to start. I mean just think of what a great accomplishment it would be for humanity. No human has ever set foot on another planet before and after hundreds of thousands of years humanity is finally very near the point where we are finally ready to do so. What an absolutely amazing accomplishment considering that a few hundred years ago the vast majority of us still though the Earth was flat.
We finally have a president that is going to set out a proposal for getting us to Mars and half of you poo poo it because you don't like the guy. While I'm no huge fan of Bush, I don't really care who the heck proposes the trip to Mars. At least it's out there now; at least it will be talked about. At least there is a possibility that it will happen. 10 years is a realistic goal considering how much it will cost. Even if it ultimately takes 15 - 20 years, so what? If NASA starts now and plans correctly, there will be plenty of money available. It just won't be there all at once. It will require careful planning and probably scaling back and eventually ditching the aging shuttle fleet, but again, so what? The current shuttle fleet has nearly outlived it's usefulness.
Perhaps many of you don't like the idea because we've already been to the moon. Well I was born in 1981 and there hasn't been anyone on the Moon in my lifetime, nor in the lifetimes of subsequent generations. I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why, after so many successful missions, we would stop sending people into space with the hopes of going father and farther and exploring more and more. Heck, I would be happy just to see us send someone back to the moon so I could witness it with my own eyes (via TV that is). Think of all the good things that could happen if we do send someone to Mars. Think of all the technological advances that are sure to arise as a result. Think of all of the children that might be inspired to become engineers and scientists.
American scientists and engineers are a dieing breed. There were very few from my graduating class in high school that planned on studying science or engineering when they went to college. A manned mission to Mars could provide an inspiration to all of the young kids out there to become interested in science and engineering. Hey, it happened during the space race in the 50's and 60's and it could certainly happen again.
In short, don't shoot down the idea because it comes from Bush. A manned mission to Mars wouldn't require a huge increase in funding if it is something that NASA starts planning for and funding now with the goal of getting someone there in say 10 - 20 years. We have absolutely nothing to lose by trying to go and we have quite a lot to gain. With all of the things that presently divide this great nation, a manned mission to Mars is something that almost every single American man, woman and child could get behind and be excited about regardless of who the president happens to be and regardless of what other circumstances we may find ourselves in. In my humble opinion, something like that is definitely worth pursuing, no matter the cost or the time it actually takes to get it done.
I think it's interesting that we'll spend almost, but not quite, as much money in the next FIVE years, as we spent fighting marijuana LAST year alone.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
To perhaps put a more direct example in the light, the US has (by civilian knowledge) 21 plane B2 bomber bomber (mostly built in the last 3 years or so).
uhh, not even close. bomber #21 was delivered in 1997.
In fact the US General Accounting Office found the B2s actually have trouble doing even those missions; since they where originally designed to fly a single M.A.D. mission, they are not very sturdy. In fact every mission they fly causes extensive and expensive damage because of moisture in the air damaging the stealth covering.
the issue w/ the stealth coating has nothing to do w/ how many missions it was designed to fly- it's simply the nature of the technology at the time.
The cost for the handful of B2s was $45 billion (even if you exclude research costs and assume mass production, each plane costs over $1 billion to produce, let alone actually maintain). What worse is that the B2 is a somewhat cost efficent project as compared to others in the military industrial complex.
the reason the per plane cost for the B2 was so high was that gov't approval kept shrinking regarding orders; the fewer the planes built, the higher the per unit cost (since you were wrong about the $45b figure- that cost *does* include development, as well as procurement and military construction costs). it's a fact of life that the gov't is fickle, constantly changing requirements, making it likely you'll run over cost. this is applicable to space programs, and social programs as well. it's funny how you keep saying "in fact" when you don't appear to know about the facts... =)
"Another day with Parasites!"
Problem: Incompetance
Solution: Use terrorist as a scare tactic to use Congress for his own personal agenda.
Problem: "War on terrorism" not working
Solution: Distract people by invading a country under false pretenses.
Problem: Occupation a complete failure
Solution: Distruct people with promises of space travel and extra terrestial habitats.
It's reassuring to know we have some real bright people governing this country.
What about the roads? Surely the roads go without saying. How about Public health? The aqueducts? The wine? Sanitation? Medicine? Education?
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
And before the Middle Ages, by the Arabs, used in a generic sense the way Europeans were classified as 'Latins' or 'Greeks' at that time.
The church had its history of book-burning as well, and let's not forget Galileo.
The existence of multiple civilizations make it possible for knowledge to survive the destruction of Rome, and later, the stagnation of the Arabic world. Makes one shudder to contemplate the consequences of having One Global Culture.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I rarely work up the energy to be funny anymore.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
First lunacy: waste money bringing the space station up to snuff, then abandon our part in. That's one hell of a message to send to future prospective partners.
Bush stated that we would fulfill our obligation to the international space station. That sends a very positive message to future prospective partners.
Second lunacy: only add $1B to NASA's budget. They will have to gut every other program to fund this return to the moon, and they appear to be eager to do so.
How is that lunacy? If a moon platform better serves NASA's research goals then cancel the obsolete platforms.
Third lunacy: nothing in this proposal has anything to do with making access to space cheaper.
Making it possible rather than impossible to get to the moon and then mars is clearly a cost reduction in space access. Any further reductions are in the domain of business, not government. Once we are on the moon, it is government's responsibility to manage our property claims.
What ought to happen is tell NASA to get out of the way of independent private companies
Would you care to name some independent private companies that NASA is standing in the way of? XPrize contestants seem to be making good progress. Lockheed and Boeing are both public corporations which owe a great deal of business to NASA.
NASA doesn't build any satellites or rockets, that work is typically contracted out.
Now is always a bad time to do it.
Do it anyway.
Is it fascism yet?
Remember the hydrogen infrastructure announcement a while back? That within 10 years we'd have a hydrogen based economy? Seen any progress towards that?
Lasers Controlled Games!
From the Associated Press story on abcnews.com:
"...outlining a costly new effort to return Americans to the moon..."
How wonderful. Someone at the AP has already done the math for us and determined that this effort is "costly."
Outfuckingstanding. Now how come all they do is whine about how we have a deficit rather than reporting on how we can eliminate it. They seem to have all the answers.
And then you have all the liberals bashing the plan because we need the money on the war for terror. Funny how they didn't support that war until we wanted to spend money on the space program.
Might as well give up now and call it a day. The AP says it's too costly so we aren't going to get enough benefit out of it.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
I'm waiting until the "State of the Union" speech to decide if the president actually intends to follow through on this plan. Actually, the fact that this announcement wasn't held back until the SotU address already has me wondering about the sincerity of it.
Somebody floated a trial balloon on this at least a couple weeks ago, I wonder why?
what could the plan be? turning the moon into some kind of death star?
hopefully.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Now he is going to look for WMD in the moon? Those evil terrorists!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
For much less money, a more exciting science and technology project would be to send a probe to the center of earth. If possible, we should even bring a sample of earth's core. The advances in material science, geology, volcanology, siesmic forcasting would be astronomical. And how can you equal the joy of understanding our own home planet so much more intimately.
" Funding for welfare, etc., isn't designed to wipe out poverty. You can't wipe out poverty. It's designed to mitigate the damage caused by poverty, to wit, lawlessness, public health (poverty makes life dangerous for everybody) and human suffering (and it's no fun)."
No, it's designed to purchase some people's votes with other people's money. The art of governmet consists of taking money from those who aren't going to vote for you anyway, and using those fund to purchase votes.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Will the initiative end when they discover that there is neither oil nor Al Quaeda operatives hiding on the Moon or Mars?
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
You are contradicting yourself. First you say taking money away from welfare type programs is bad for numerous ethical and practical reasons. Then you say we're wasting money in Iraq blowing up buildings, and that we should cut miltary spending. Now, removing Saddam from power allows a more humane govt. to be put in place in Iraq, which allows all the ethical and practical benefits for the people of Iraq that you claim we need domestically. So, by ignoring Iraq, we are doing the same thing as cutting the budget on domestic social programs, which you argued against. So either you're arguing the US should remain an isolationist nation that ignores world problems, or your arguements contradict each other to some extent.
Vote for Pedro
No, you have to build the space station seperate from the moon. How else can my grandchildren look at me strange when they point up and ask if that is the moon and I reply with a chuckle, "That's not a moon. That's a space station."
You think those explosions in the Australian outback are a coincidence? That ain't a fractionator mate, it's a launch tower! Those weren't gas explosions, they were rocket fuel!!! Think Dubya is being a mongrel by not signing Kyoto? It's not that he doesn't like it, just that it is irrelevant, 'cause he won't be here!!! Is he a bastard for tearing up the ABM treaty? He needs that gone so he can get his launch vehicles away! Dick's affilation with big business is just a front for the collection of global fatcats who will be riding the rocketship to freedom, away from environmental disaster.
Up until now the only bit we haven't been able to figure out has been the destination. Now we know! It's Mars!!! First stop will be the moon, from where Dubya and friends will move onto their new Martian Utopia while the rest of us fry back here on earth!!!
As I write this, I'm boucing through the outback, in a ute with my comrades, tinfoil akubra on my head. Our objective is to save civilisation from this menace . It's a tough mission, but someone's gotta do it. Wish us well and pray for us as we roll towards our destiny...
Played like a trout.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
OK maybe he wasn't that eloquent.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
not federal problems.
Every town in every city has problems like yours that just take "a little bit."
It's your city/state's job to bring in enough money to fund local problems like yours. The Federal government can't. If they help one city in such a way they have to help every city.
You're barking up the wrong money tree.
"It's a new budget-saving pattern for the Bay Area's fourth-largest city. Starting this month, whenever three firefighters can't work because of illness, the city will close one of four fire stations to save $400,000 in overtime costs and prevent firefighter layoffs."
So by closing one firestation because the people who work there are wasting money they save $400,000 they can use to fix other problems.
There's your money for the library.
Fix your city's budget problems before you start pretending it's the federal government's job.
You think Uncle Sam is going to bail out CA? What makes your problems more serious?
You're in the Bay Area. I'll willing to bet there's another library that's open 7 days a week. If not, get your stuff done when it is open. What's more important to you? The money that can be put towards more important things or convienence?
It's certainly not worth $200,000 to staff a library an extra day if nobody is visiting. That's generally why they close one day. It also allows for fewer full time staff (which allows for higher wages) while still giving them a day off every week to keep them sane and happy.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
You always hear this argument about space advancing technology but every time you hear it the advances cited seem to came from the Apollo era. I'd really like to see a list of advances, with earth bound applications, that have come from the space program in the last 10 years. I really doubt there are many. NASA simply hasn't done a whole lot worthwhile in a long time, especially in the context of the space shuttle and the space station.,
@de_machina
Frankly, I'd rather close half our libraries and me assured of men on Mars in six years (not that closing even all the libraries would probably pay for that).
If you were not talking about taking money away from Nasa to fund libaries, then I apologize - there are many other places money goes that are much lower on my priority than libraries. I just think that the boost in spirit of the people of the planet would do more to further public education than all the libraries put together. People only learn if they want to...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While the parent was marked funny, it is laughable that throwing more money at education might result in smarter kids.
Extra money seems to go to football stadiums, and condoms, and milk programs and extras and not to actual education.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
>Instead of building a bomb which has a negative economic impact (not to mention cost)
Nobody (who is rational) builds a bomb thinking about how it will make them poorer. People build bombs because they believe that having the bomb will benefit them by:
1. Preventing others from taking their stuff, and/or
2. Allowing them to take others stuff.
As a hypothetical, suppose the United States had not spent any money on nuclear weapons or missiles after WW2. Imagine that that as a result of a lack of deterrence (Mutual Assured Destruction), there was a WW3 fought between the totalitarian regimes of the Soviet Union and China and their puppets against the democracies of Western Europe, North America, and Australia. Do you think that the negative economic impacts of that war could have been worse that the costs of building the doomsday weapons?
I'm not a war monger, quite the opposite. I prefer butter to guns. But I am realistic and see that humanity has not passed the point where we can all throw down our weapons and just love each other.
What do you mean return to the moon? We've never been there.
Joe
All the guys at JPL have to do is fake some soil sample results from Spirit, claim to have found oil, and we'll be landing on Mars within 5 years.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
"So, guess where the money is going? To the kids that lack textbooks, healthcare and lobbyists or to the slick, plausible, verbose representatives of millions of dollars in campaign funds?" Well... As a recent student in the Arkansas school system, with my father being a teacher, i can assure you there is PLENTY of money out there for text books... The problem is how the schools are organized. We need reform, not more money. Before you mod me off topic, this applies to ALL areas of government. In the school instance, i was in a small rural school, and we borrowed math textbooks from a neighboring school because we "couldn't afford them". Yet, during that same year, the school began construction on a $2,000,000 Gym and put $45,000 of new sod on the baseball field. We need to restructure and reorganize most of the gov't. And o yeah - Go Bush! :) Flame away libs :)
Learn about Photography Basics.
A lot of that defense budget _does_ bring good to all people. Wasn't it just the other day that there was a slashdot article about USAF grants? Doesn't DARPA fund several open source projects, not to mention their role in creating the internet? Then you have cases where, like NASA, military funding leads to breakthroughs in technology that have multiple applications unrelated to weaponry. There is also the fact that a ton of money is spent on the non-military education of soldiers.. Just because the ultimate goal of the military is to kill people, doesn't mean everything associated with them is evil.
Speaking of bombs.. I have little doubt that it is in the interests of Bush (and friends) to create a distraction during election year and a way to make himself "famous" (does he really care about any of this stuff?) .. as well as part of a plan to enable military dominance in space for one country.
Just like the current Iraq campaign may be more about establishing the US as a "pro-active" military state, rather than primarily to do with oil (though a lot of Bush's friends are going to get incredibly rich if the dependency on oil is continued till the day the price HAS to go up).
It may be considered part of a gamble to provide certain people with a lot of power, all the while taking the rest of a country along without full disclosure, with truth distortion, and great risk.
Velcro? Swiss inventor, 1948.
Teflon? Ohio researcher, 1937.
Care to try a few more? Plastics, maybe? Nope, 1908!
Smoke detector? Nope
Computers? No. Night vision goggles? No. Cell phones? No. TV? No. Radio? No. Microwaves? NO. Tang?......NO! All of these things I have heard people mention as spinoffs, and NONE OF THEM ARE TRUE. Some even came from the 19th century!
Most of the advances they have contributed have been minor improvements on existing ideas. That's not to say that they havn't contributed anything, but it isn't vital to our current state of technology. The most important things they have come up with has been in the field of treating osteoporosis, on account of having to deal with it in astronaughts who had been in space for too long...
Oh, and data compression. They hold a whole whack of patents on various methods of compressing images and other data, and 40% of their funding comes from these royalties.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I'll probably get modded through the toilet or flamed in the replies for this, but oh well.
I'd like to lift a 2-paragraph or so quote from the CNN article on JFK somebody linked to earlier:
"Some derided the dream as lunacy. Others viewed it as just another strategic move in the Cold War chess match between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Kennedy had just been humiliated in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, a communist ally of Moscow. In his speech, he called for many measures to combat communism, requesting billions, for example, to stop red insurgencies in Southeast Asia."
Now granted, in this day and age it's going to be pretty damned easy to beat the terrorists (in place of Communists) to the moon if the terrorists have no intention of going there in the first place. But still, both administrations had a chosen enemy: Kennedy the Communists and Bush Muslim extremists. One could argue that Bush also has an enemy in red China (and that they are the space program's intended target), but that seems less likely considering our trade volume.
Also, both presidents were coming off a controversial military action. America had the need for the containment of Communism drilled into its collective skull ever since Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech (if not before), and America has had the "War on Terrorism" drilled into its collective head ever since late 2001. Both presidents were realizing that military action was losing popularity, and both needed something to invigorate the national imagination (to paraphrase the CNN article's title). Now, I'm too lazy and this forum is too casual for me to research specifics of federal budgets and electoral politics during the Kennedy administration, but there may well be some similarities there, too.
In summation, my basic point is that it's possible Bush's intentions may be no less pure than Kennedy's were. Bush is certainly a popular target now, but he's still a part of current events and we don't have 20/20 hindsight through which to evaluate his actions. Current politics taint (or add flavor) to any discussion of this space plan, but only time will tell how it will be remembered.
Unfrickin' believable. You want Star Trek to happen for real? It has to start somewhere, and here comes the best thing to help that along, and all you can do is bitch
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
As pointed out in the CNN article, the overall NASA budget would stay at about 1 percent of the federal budget. Yes, Bush is contributing an additional 1 billion, but that's chump change considering what the military gets ($379 billion in 2003 and growing). NASA's total budget is less than the cost of one attack aircraft. As far as I'm concerned, this is a ploy to make Bush Jr. look generous. While everyone is looking up at the sky thinking of how great it would be to land on the moon again, Dubya and his cronies will be busy manipulating things on earth for their own benefit.
Open your eyes people. While I think it would be great to return to the moon and visit Mars, this isn't anything more than a PR tactic for re-election. The numbers speak for themselves.
Eventually this planet will die
However, Eventually != soon.
I completely support space exploration, but I think that Bush's deadline is more about his reelection than about cosmic adventures. He's just trying to be a second JFK and that's laughable.
From my point of view, space exploration should be done carefully and I don't see in the immediate future the need of a manned mission to Mars. In the short term, it is dangerous, too costly and unnecesary. We should continue with unmanned missions for quite a while.
Setting these deadlines is just a proof of the political motives behind his speech.
GWB supposedly speaks to the President of Mexico in Spanish. Are we to believe that GWB's Spanish is better than his English? If not, why aren't we at war with Mexico?
I think your question is fundamentally flawed. You can't ask "What do we use *now* that NASA invented 10 years ago?" Most of the things they are using now won't be in serious commercial use for another twenty years. So most of the things we're using now were invented over 10 years ago.
But, to answer your question anyways, here is an article on Video Image Stabilization and 2D Barcodes. This is another on Superstrong Plastic Films/Strings and Lightweight Composite Actuators.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
In thinking about my own post I think the important point is that technology spinoff is not really a very good argument for a space program. Fact is we spend billions in defense and we also get technological returns. Look, for example, at GPS which was developed entirely for military purposes and is yielding huge civilian and economic benefits that surpass anything recent I can think of NASA has done.
Fact is if you spend billions of dollars on any technological endevour you might get spin offs of substantial value, and you might not. I really doubt the spinoffs from space exploration are certain to justify the spending versus investing in fusion research, nanotechnology, biotech, defense or any other technological endeavour
I wager Apollo was something of a fluke simply because they hade to make huge leaps in things like electronics just to do it. I doubt you are going to see any similar leaps when we go back to the moon, the same place we went 35 years ago. In fact it sounds like NASA is planning to avoid high risk technology and may well just attempt to reinvent and refine a lot of the stuff they did 35 years ago and that is not something conducive to big advances in technology.
Having said all that, I could see trying to put a self sustaining colony on Mars as a potential source of big advances and spin offs since it would compell major advances in things like energy, food production and terraforming. Putting a knock off of the ISS on the moon, supplied from earth isn't likely to lead to many breakthroughs.
@de_machina
"In terms of doing something useful in space,"
Why does it always have to be "useful?"
No, I'm serious. I've been really disturbed by some of the things I've read from people who are against the idea and words cannot describe the pity I feel for those that are incapable of understanding the "Because it's there" argument.
Are we that incapable, as either a nation or a species, of having big dreams and pursuing them every once in a while? Do we always have to wait for something to be practical before we get around to doing it? Yes, we have war, famine and pestilence. Yes, this will probably take away some funds from fighting those scourges. Whether or not that loss of funds will be noticable is another issue but ultimately the whole thing is a red herring. We're trying to feed people and save lives for... what exactly? So that future generations can also try to eliminate them better than us, feeding the cycle? What's the point in saving and lengthening lives when nobody's actually living?
Sure, there's the "practical" argument that we could always wait until all these problems were solved and then we could follow our dreams of going out there. So we wait and wait and wait and before you know it we're all pensioners in retirement communities still waiting "just another ten years..." If waiting until everything is "just so" isn't a vague, amorphous, intangible and ultimately hollow goal to work towards, I don't know what is.
The moon. Mars. They're right there. We can go there. Now. That stirs up passions even in me, and I'm a jaded, cynical bastard.
If we as a culture and a species are that incapable of dreaming, even about something so utterly attainable as the moon, then maybe we shouldn't be going up there. We deserve to chase our tails over "standards of living" until the sun goes nova. Heck, maybe that's the solution to the Fermi Paradox; they're not here because they had more important things to do or they simply couldn't be bothered...
Prersonally, I'd rather live in a country that bankrupts itself trying to get to Mars than what I seem to be living among today. Hell, set up a "Mars or bust!" fund at NASA and I'll gladly start tithing to them. Anything but this malaise.
The answer for that would take many hours to list. The ISS has generated a ton of new technology developments. I work for a NASA contractor with expertise in vision systems, from using 2D cameras for tracking and pose estimation for assembly to now 3D scanners for inspection, collision avoidance, and a variety of other tasks. We have just begun to spin this technology off into terrestrial applications and they are pouring in, from automated mining vehicles to geomaterial classification and automated plant growth monitoring, to name a few. And that's just one small company from one small component of the ISS. A study we'd previously done showed that every $1 invested in developing the technology has spun off into $40 for the economy.
A) There is a direct correlation between the health of the U.S. Economy and the budget of the U.S. Military. So, the more the DoD gets, the better.
B) We wouldn't be having this discusion right now if the DoD didn't get DARPA to figure out how to make a computer network work (Other than mainframes and dummy terminals).
C) There is no need for weapons on the Moon, if the UN even allowed them.
D) The first successful rocket launch NASA had was using a MILITARY ROCKET. The DoD and NASA have a nice good relationship, or have had ones at times.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
You know, I wonder if that had some kind of factor to this decision. That GWB took a look at how he would be remembered by future generations, especially if he lost this election, and realized he didn't like what he saw - First attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, erosion of constitutionally granted rights, 2 wars, an ugly occupation, an economy that just will not recover, and critics that grow louder as election time grows nearer. Maybe he saw a gambit like this as his only means of redeaming himself in the court of public opinion. That if he sets us out on a long term project, like going to Mars, then perhaps he will be remembered more favorably in the long term - even if he doesn't look so good in the short term.
COuld be, or also possible is that he has tried to do the right thing in all cases regardless of how people view him. Whatever way is true, we'll never know.
Don't be fooled. This is an election year ploy. If Bush gets re-elected, expect it to either quietly disappear from the media (like so many of his other lies) or get held up due to funding problems, insurmountable technical difficulties, and the like. Sure, it sounds good, but so did No Child Left Behind (which has rapidly become No Behind Left), all his "small government" talk (increasing the budget by over $300 billion from the height of the Clinton era is by no means small), individual rights...
Speaking of bringing "good to people", not only does the War on Terror bring such goods as new nukes, but your old-and-busted War on Drugs (remember that?)
How about funding a plan in Colombia to use an untested pathogenic fungus -- fusarium oxysporum -- to wipe out coca. Critics say the plan proposes illegal acts of biological warfare, poses major ecological risks to Colombia -- one of the world's most bio-diverse countries -- and will increase suffering, by wreaking havoc with human health, water quality and food crops.
But hell, what is one out-of-control war-on-%something% from our well-meaning leaders like the Good-ol USA?
"multi-planet" species? We can't handle one planet
I am sure we all agree that things aren't handled too well on earth. However, your argument goes one step further by saying that we should stay away from other planets, in order not to spoil them also.
I disagree with that view, because it assumes that pristine planets have value in themselves. IMHO other planets are just a bunch of rocks in space - they are valuable only when we enjoy them. If we stay away from Mars until a big rock falls onto our heads then Mars will be preserved in its original form. But what is the value of that if no one will ever see it?
Tor
I found an interesting link while looking for temperatures of the moon and mars called The Artemis Project. I didn't look at it much, but they seem to indicate we'd have to build an underground habitat in order to endure those cold temps for long perids. Another good point they bring up is how the cold temps will simply cause tools to break down with use more easily.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
That's weird - simoniker slightly different headline but the rest of it is identical to the submitted post.
I know this comment may be somewhat OT but I had to add a comment. Anyone know what's going on with this? Maybe related to the many 500-class errors I've been getting lately?
And this is the same president who appointed a fraud to lead our education infrastructure? Greaaaaaaaaaat.
Photos.
OK, you don't like deadlines? How about this. If we have a self-sustaining colony on the moon and some good ships for getting us there and back, we could sell several million dollar vacation packages there. The space program would be MORE than self-funding in 30 year's time. If you look at it that way, the sooner we do this, the more money we SAVE. And when I'm old, retired, and realizing my mortality, I think I would be more than willing to give my entire net worth just to be able lie down on the moon and watch the Earth spin by, framed by the blackness of space and the overwhelmingly bright and numerous stars.
Oh, and a place with really low gravity would make a great retirement community.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
nice twist. but he mentioned nothing about NASA inventing these things - improving upon them can make all the difference in the world. as a fellow nerd, you should realize the importance of space, and the industry that orbits above us. communication satellites, gps, dish tv, the stinkin' internet as we know it. you use this crap everyday. sure, nasa didn't launch most of these satellites. but do you suppose any technology was gleaned from them? say like, oh i don't know, rocket technology? radiation hardening? maintaining stable orbits?
i feel like i'm trolling, but damn. get a f'n clue. to dismiss what nasa has done as "minor improvements on existing ideas" is ludicrous.
Unfortunately, this seems to be what's happening.
My girlfriend works for the Space Telescope Science Institute (ie, the group that controls the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as planning for the James Webb Space Telescope, etc).
The 1 billion increase in NASA's overall budget is good thing. But this increase is totally dwarfed by 12 billion funding re-allocation that also accompanies the budget increase. And they're really worried that alot of that funding will be taken away from the hard science missions (Hubble, Chandra, etc).
This is what alot of people, even here on /., don't realize when they bash NASA. NASA doesn't only fund the space shuttle and ISS and Mars rovers. There's a whole slew of astrophysical observational experiments, both earthbound and in orbit, that are contributing hugely to scientific research.
This funding shift implies NASA will be shifting it's focus, away from science and towards engineering. While the budget increase is good for the space travel programs and probably ISS, it's not so good for the pure science and observational programs.
Just my two cents.
make world, not war
The only thing we know is how long until the oil we *know about* is going to run out.
We have no idea how much oil earth actually contains or even how exactly it's formed naturally. Which means we have no clue how long it takes for the Earth to generate oil.
We also know how to make synthetic oil out of waste in very reasonable amounts of time.
If it is about alternate and more effecient fuels then great.
That's sufficient without the doomsday mumbojumbo about running out of oil in X years.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Very simple: it can act as a test bed for technology to get the Mars effort going.
When we did Apollo, did we go straight to the fucking moon? No. Remember: the first to land was Apollo 11.
Now, the moon is a several day trip, so it's not a huge investment of time (by human scale), but Mars is. So how do you TEST a Mars ship?
The International Space Station.
Make the space station (or something like it) into a mock up/test bed for the Mars ship.
Need to grow dinner on your ship? Practice on the ISS. Need to figure out to survive MASSIVE solar flares? Do it on the ISS. Need to practice landings on Mars? Use the Moon and the ISS. Need to figure out how to lock a bunch of goody goody militarist fuckwits into a tin can for months on end without killing each other? do it on the ISS.
Ya dig?
If we ditch the ISS, we handicap our ability to test the things we need to test for the Mars Mission. Getting to Mars on top of a rocket would consist of a few minutes of takeoff and nerve wracking tension, followed by several months of interplanetary travel and boredom, followed by a few minutes of nerve wracking tension, followed by several months of nerve wracking tension leading to tension fatigue and a weird relaxation on Mars itself, and then reverse the process.
Getting rid of the OSS gets rid of the most testable and reducible phases of the mission: the several months spent in space travelling to Mars.
And while I know that EVERYONE on /. is a primo coder and doesn't REALLY need QA, I really do think that something like the first and following Mars Missions DO need QA, and the ISS is the most immediate and useful device for testing a Mars mission.
Canning the ISS is a BAD idea. A moon base is a GOOD idea (test bed for Mars colony). Canning the shuttle is a GOOD idea.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
What could 160 billion over two years buy you?
(a) A war in Iraq
(b) Fiberoptic network to every home in the USA
(c) Moon base in 3 years, manned Mars mission in 7
(d) Discount the cost of hybrid cars (air pollution)
(f) b, c, d and e
Have you looked at welfare in the past 10 years?
Most of the progams require you to a)get a job, b)being training for a job or C)looking for a job. Not exactly food-tubes, although it does say something about the wealth distribution in this country if the people working on the lowest rungneed government assistance in order to survive.
Also, welfare beifits 1) do not cover all of the cost of living, just some and b)often have cut off dates, so much for unending support of the government.
And just one question, how much does a secretary produce? or a storew clerk? or a CFO?
You tout the economic benefits of GPS yet doubt 2D barcodes have one? Believe me, the manpower saved using online postage stamp systems *alone* (both by users and by the postoffice) trumps any amount of GPS-enabled tractors that could possibly be in use.
I could be wrong, but I'm not seeing *any* productive uses for GPS, which, btw, wouldn't exist if it weren't for lots of technology that NASA pioneered to begin with. Prove me wrong.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...when we're still giving countries like Israel 6 billion dollars (75 percent of which is earmarked for military spending) yearly.
I say cut the fat, that includes first world buddy countries that can do just fine on their own.
?! NASA's annual budget is 17 billion AFAIK. Are you saying that 6.8 billion a year is generated from their royalties?
I'm glad you are in no sort of position to decide how funds are spent or what projects are worked on. People like you never bother working on anything that lacks immediate gratification - since that sort of behaviour is self limiting the people who actually create things with long term value can get on with getting things done.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
No. It isn't. Several other countries do develop technology, but for instance, take pharmeceuticals - who foots the bill for research and development? The good ol' USA.
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That's not the point. The US does a great deal of R&D now, but it didn't in the past, and it won't in the future. While we are at the top, it is our responsibility to contribute to the knowledge of humanity.
And besides, what did the space race do to the C.C.C.P? If you answered "Bankrupt" and or "cold" you iz just about right.
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The space race didn't do that to them, it was a mix of bad economic planning and the arms race.
I agree. Science (should be) is for the good of all, but have you ever heard of patents?
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Yes, and I also know that they are a temporary monopoly. Even if the patent lasts for decades, that's really a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. We're talking about the macro scale here.
How about gouging American customers for research and development. Spending on NASA DOES achieve stuff, no question, but we want the payoff, not some pie-in-the-sky promise about trickle-down science.
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That's not a great way to do science. If scientists were beancounters, we'd be fucked. Consider quantum mechanics. It was purely intellectual mastrubation for several decades after its invention in the early 20th century. Today, the practical applications of quantum mechanics underly 30% of the US GDP!
Again, I agree. We're still using fire and electricity and that is likely to continue. However, Rome had little more than brute strength, borrowing their logic and math and religion from Greece and the East.
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They made enormous original contributions to engineering and architecture. Concrete, for example, was a Roman invention. They scale of their architecture was unmatched in the West for more than a thousand years after the fall of the Empire. They were not original in the "pure" sciences, but they were in the applied fields.
I just think we have SO MUCH technology that we should slow down. A hundred and fifty years ago, and all time prior, you and I would most likely be farmers or hunter gatherer.
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Eh? There were almost no hunter-gatherers in the West (not counting the native Americans) 150 years ago. A 150 years ago, the world was quite modern. Maxwell completed his theory of electromagnatism precisely 149 years ago in 1855!
Not such a bad life except that it was only, on average, 35-50 years long.
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The average lifespan for a male in 1850 was 60 years old. The average lifespan overall was 47, but that was brought up by high child mortality. The decrease in child mortality was not completely due to technology. Much of it was just teaching people proper practices, and doing proper pre-natal and post-natal care.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How about a US MagLev transport system????
... How bout funding for those scramjet engines? How about the space inferometer project? How about funding for carbon nano-tubes that will enable a space elevator which will cut launch costs to a tenth of what they are now?
How about funding more mass transit systems that lower peoples need for cars and hence more interstates. Wouldn't be nice to be able to hop on trains and get pretty much ANYWHERE in the US. How about 400 MPH on the ground without the 2 hours to get in and out of airports. How bout wind farms on the Great Lakes that would provide a profound amount of green power (the really BIG ones turn slow and don't kill birds)?
How about a great new effort for PEDESTRIAN super-highways. If you've been on a rail-to-trail you know what a great concept this is. A safe place for kids and adults to get from one place to another on their bikes, skates, etc... Add lots of pedestrian bridges. After all, America is facing a crisis of obesity. A lot of this can be attributed that we spend profound amounts of time in cars on our asses instead of WALKING.
How about more money for border patrol to secure our nation from illegals of ALL kinds? How about more resources for first responders (the money Bush promised but didn't deliver) to deal with a chemical or biological attack?
How about universal preventative and emergency health insurance (this would benefit small business)? How about building more $5 million dollar schools instead of $750 million dollar stadiums? How about more cops to keep our cities safe, even the "bad" parts?
How about raises for our civic heroes: Cops, fireman and teachers. Yeah we revere them but we pay them DICK!!!
Mars is likely a trillion dollar mission. And what will it deliver to the US in return??? A new improved version of Tang?? Was teflon really that much better than an oiled iron pan??? Was there really any technology that NASA delivered that wouldn't be developed by private industry when they needed it???
Speaking of NASA technology
Oh yeah, and all that fiber-optics sounded really good too. Actually Kucinich is pimping free secondary education at a price of 27 billion annually. This is a gem of a bargain compared to a trillion of ten years.
So, there are some other things to spend money on besides "muddin" on mars.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I don't think that ANYONE would doubt that satellites are useful and helpful to human civilization. The debate seems to be whether HUMAN BEINGS personally launching satellites is beneficial.
;-)
Rather, robots seem to do a good job at pennies on the thousand dollars compared to manned space flight. There are very few things that robots CAN'T accomplish in space that humans can. For example, it would be difficult to make a robot that hits golf balls on the moon
I'm sure at some point in the future we will be a space-faring race. And by that time, we will have MUCH better robots that will be perfectly capable of hitting golf balls along with all those other HUMAN tasks besides eating.
If we ever DO colonize Mars, the VERY last delivery will be the humans. The robots will have built all the dwellings before humans arrive.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Conspiracy theories are great fun, of course, but I'm skeptical that there's any cohesive force acting to make anything like this happen. It sounds like there is from time to time, and I'm sure there are people who do actually make it their goal to make this happen. But they're isolated idiots, not a vast global conspiracy.
Military innovation is usually classified, non-exportable, insanely expensnive, etc, etc, for years...
NASA innovation is most often rapidly usable.
I'm guessing they see it as a source of funds, wereas the military see it as a potential weapon.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
A> The only correlation between "the" US economy health and the US military budget is how the military saps the strength of the economy. The minimal efficiency of the military in defense of the US and our economy are obviously correlated, but not the profligate waste beyond that.
B> If DARPA hadn't produced the Internet, someone else would have - it was an idea whose time had come. Even if your tired old saw were true, if we had spent the entire $4 trillion coldwar defense budget on the Internet, it would be a *lot* better.
C> The need for weapons (in US or even enemies hands), or the UN allowing them anywhere, has been proven to be a total nonissue for Bush/Cheney. As has "deficits", which according to Cheney, "don't matter".
D> NASA had always been R&D for ICBM research. Sensible capitalists (not "state capitalists", mafiosos indistinguishable from "communists") want to dissolve that vampiric relationship, and fund just the lucrative NASA.
Drop the rationalizations, back the drive to explore space, and leave the deathstar behind in favor of growth.
--
make install -not war
In the meantime, millions upon millions of dollars are being wasted on pseudoscientific programs such as space-based protein crystallography. This is all in order to justify the bloated ISS (and shuttle) budget, since most laymen don't know a thing about protein crystallography and wouldn't understand that it's much better done here on Earth.
My point is, the spinoffs from manned space exploration do not by themselves justify manned space exploration and its absurd budget. Why not try to invent these advanced technologies without spending billions attempting to shoot people into space? If they're useful here on Earth, odds are they'll be available soon anyway, without flushing all those tax dollars down the tubes.
I've always held the belief that the ISS shouldn't have been created, and instead a Lunar base of some sort should have been constructed.
The ISS has become a huge money sink. The Russians really need to get their act together money-wise (though in the delivery department they are currently better than us considering the shuttle fleet is grounded).
More money up to this point should have been put into low gravity (and zero-gravity) manufacturing.
In order to even conceive of building a lunar base at this point, a lot of money is going to have to be sunk into researching this. Manufacturing at low-G in hostile environments is not the same as manufacturing here on earth.
For any of these plans to succeed, NASA needs to get it through their heads that wings are a bad idea for orbital/lunar space flight. Why? The benefits are more negative than positive.
They are only used on landing - therefore on takeoff (where weight is a very important factor) they are the most inefficient waste of mass because they aren't used at all! I also believe that a reusuable, technologically sophisticated, recoverable capsule (similar to Apollo) will be cheaper to build, cheaper to launch, and cheaper to recover than any winged craft will be.
There needs to be a another X-prize, but this time its for building the cheapest, most efficient and economical manned reusable space (not near-space) vehicle. I think that if NASA licenses a technology developed in the private sector we actually have a chance of making some of these timetables that have been put forth, instead of new technology being bogged down by bureaucracy and stubbornness.
In this day and age, the part of NASA that manages manned space exploration is all about not taking risks but ducking their heads and making sure nothing disastrous goes wrong. The Apollo missions were a HUGE RISK undertaken by NASA. But since the last Apollo mission hardly any risks are taken any more because of fears of spending being cut, etc...
NASA needs to return to being able to take calculated risks for the good of exploration. I think this lack of any risk-taking has also stifled any new technology from going into current spacecraft.
That money is spent here, in the USA, on engineers and such - right on down to the guy who sweeps up the turnings from the lathes at Boeing.
At the very least, that money has a chance for spin-off benefits.
If you think of it as "welfare for the military industrial complex", at least it has a chance of a payback. I'd rather give hard-working engineers "welfare" rather than "poor" people.
Pure social spending of Gov't dollars is money down the drain (unless you are trying to create/reinforce a dependent class of "citizens").
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Compare last year's government revenue to this year's. Economic activity has a multiplying effect. Thus a tax cut can increase tax revenue, by increasing incomes. If the economy grows more than the rate is cut. The point isn't that most tax cuts pay for themselves, but a 6% tax cut doesn't result in 6% less money. Read up on some Keynes. Deficits aren't always bad, just that our debt should grow slower than the economy, on average.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Already we have a big schedule slip. That's so NASA.
I for one am thrilled at President Bush's announcement. One of the most serious problems that NASA faces is brain drain. A third of the workforce is said to be within five years of retirement. To make matters worse NASA hasn't been attracting "the best and brightest" as it once did. That's because there is nothing really cool and inspiring as during the Apollo era, when many of the current work force were attracted to NASA. The Shuttle is now old and has been in "maintenance" mode for a long time. Much of the space station development is also winding down and never was very inspiring. It certainly didn't break any new ground. Smart people are attracted to hard, interesting problems. If you don't provide them with hard, interesting problems, they'll go somewhere else to find them. So, if we really want a manned space program, then NASA (like all of us) must have some interesting goals. If we wait too long, and the critical mass of good people is lost, the point will become moot because they won't be capable of it. I grew up dreaming that the space travel of 2001 a Space Odyssey and so forth were inevitable. But since Apollo, it doesn't appear to me that we've really made much progress. I don't believe that I'll see what I dreamed of during my lifetime, but I'd at least like to see it get started.
I think that Earth is void of reason so naturally we seek it in space. I think we need to exhaust our search of the space between our ears before we inflict our brand of love on the universe at large. Once we have discovered ourselves, we will then be better suited to share with others we might find.
I think about our so-called Judeo-Christian values. The cognitive dissonance between our idealized values and our actual values are lightyears apart. We polute our water and land and it has now it full-circle accumulates in our bodies. We idle by and by while the fruit of our labors supports those who will efficiently (and honorably) KILL innocents in their sleep (eg. on an airplane flight) when told to do so. These same leaders presume holy relationships: praying, visiting churches, and "God Bless" a common phrase ending many a speech. I think we need to close the gap between what we say and what we do before we spend our billions exploring half-heartedly.
How many billions are spent the world over in all countries on doublespeek "defense" and "peacekeepers"? Why not brand these with words with real meaning "KILLing" and "KILLers".
We infight like Clark/Kubrick's 2001 hominid ancestors while the next asteroid, CME, errant black hole (or other as yet to be discovered nano-dna-phenom) comes to take us to be one with God.
Nature is a terrorist with superhuman powers! If this isn't a reason to fear God and love one another... well I don't know a better one.
Evolve! GROW UP!
We share 99.9%+ DNA. We are all related. We are all family. We are all brothers and sisters.
There is a message "Do not Kill!" it needs to be taught at birth and reinforced in childhood and enforced as law. Killing is senseless and stupid.
Solutions abound that cost no thing "do unto others as you would have others do unto you", "love thy neighbor", "be nice".
Happy Valentines Day!
If you send this post to a friend, you will increase the love in the world, if you send it to ten friends...
they will want to kill you.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Welfare is a *SAFETY NET* for *REAL PEOPLE* It's not the stereotype of cadillac driving welfare queens or the projects that has been forced in to your skull. If you think the tax burden of social programs is too great, imagine the nation without them. Imagine soup kitchens and Hooverville shantytowns.
Non-producing food tubes my ass. Eat shit and die. Please. Now.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Bush Mission to Mars: it's all about militarizing space
Excerpts from Bush's "space exploration" speech delivered earlier today:
America is proud of our space program. The risk-takers and visionaries of this agency have expanded human knowledge, have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and produced technological advances that have benefited all of humane's (sic) doing an excellent job.
Certainly, some of it has benefited people who live in affluent nations -- most notably, the aerospace industry, otherwise known as the "defense" industry. The vast majority of mankind, however, lives under conditions of grinding poverty and the advances gained from the space program do not benefit them in the least. In fact, many of the "technological advances" of the aerospace industry have resulted in widespread death and destruction -- for instance, the development and use of stealth bombers and cruise missiles. For untold numbers of Iraqis and Afghans, the American space program translates into GPS guided bombs killing their children.
Our investment in space exploration helped to create our satellite telecommunications network and the Global Positioning System.
See the previous comment.
Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started.
Bush's "first goal" is to realize plans spelled out by the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld in 2001. A report issued by the Commission demands the US "have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to and, if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests." In other words, the US will build a new generation of space-based weapons to further realize Pax Americana. Of course, this will motivate other countries (most notably China) to waste money and precious resouces on developing space weapons of their own, initiating an arms race.
In fact, China has already started its own space weapons program, according to a report released by the Department of Defense. "The report focuses on the current and probable future course of that country's growing military-technological prowess, including the use of space to assure military advantage," Leonard David writes for Space.com. "This year's report cites a comment from Captain Shen Zhongchang from the Chinese Navy Research Institute. He envisions, according to the DoD, a weaker military defeating a superior one by attacking its space-based communications and surveillance systems." For more on the strategic thinking of the Chinese, see Chinese Views of Future Warfare.
[Secretary of the Air Force Pete Aldrich] has tremendous experience in the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry. And he is going to begin this important work right away.
Aldrich does have "tremendous experience" -- he is the overseer of the Defense Departmenta(TM)s Missile Defense Support Group (MDSG) and reports to the DoD's Senior Executive Council (SEC) and the Missile Defense Agency. "The SEC, which is chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and includes the service secretaries and Aldridge, recently was assigned the task of considering whether elements of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) should move to production and deployment," writes Alaska Missile Defense Early Bird Weekly.
In other words, Reagan's Star Wars reinvented.
"[The] real scandal [of BMDS is] that the defense being developed won't work -- and few in Washington seem to know or ca
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
(*) extremely accurate clocks
(*) special waveforms with nice correlation properties
(*) ionospheric correction (dual frequency L1, L2)
(*) tropospheric correction (pressure, water vapor)
(*) general relativity correction
Look at the shadows! They are all pointing in the wrong direction! And the reflections on his head don't line up with the overhead lights! And if you analyze the echos of the applause, you can tell that the room it was recorded in has wood panelling and not the plaster that you see on tv! All of this proves the speech was faked!
Unfair...
First attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor
Bush being president had nothing to do with 9/11. Are you saying that had Al Gore won in 2000 Bin Laden would not have killed those 3,000 people? Right...
an economy that just will not recover
I believe the economy is much better than it was in 2001 when Bush took office. The Dow is now back to 10,000 range, unemployment is the lowest in years and economic growth is climbing...
I think Zubrin does a good job of prooving the moon a rather poor choice as a stepping stone to MARS.
Moon has almost no gravity, Mars is 1/3 earth normal which is a serious problem for long duration habitation. Moon has 28 day cycle of day/night, mars has almost a 24 hour day. Moon has no atmosphere to provide UV filtering Mars has a substantial atmosphere by comparison which significantly (along with greater distance from the sun ) reduces cosmic radiation exposure. Also mars atmosphere means suit designs for Lunar surface exploration and Martian surface exploration are very different. One similarity however may be longevity regarding dust wear and tear on the suit joints/seals.
One of the biggest fallacies is that the Moon is easier to reach. It is in some ways more difficult due to its lack of gravity/atmosphere. The moon offers little to help you slow down. The delta V needed from your engines to reach the lunar surface is actually more than that needed to reach the surface of mars thanks to gravity capture and aero breaking avaialble at mars. Thus total delta V to the surface is in the 6k/s. Hohman transfer delta V to mars is 4.5km/s and Mars slows you down, thus you actually have greater delta V on the mars mission but less of it is supplied by rockets which require fuel which is heavy.
In otherwords the reality of orbital mechanics and checmical rocket technology means it takes more gas to go from the earth to the moon than it does from the earth to mars. In simpler terms refuling on the moon is like driving from Atlanta to new york to get gas for a trip to D.C. Duration is longer, but energy expended is greater.
The other problem is the lunar refuling proposition still has not acounted for both elements of the rocket fuel. Oxygen is bound up in the regolith in large quantities.. 50% or more by mass in many cases. But you need something to burn with it and that is not as easily found. The best hope for this is finding ICE gathered in the craters. Otherwise you have to process regolith for elements found in the parts per million range rathere than signifigant portions. That takes some serious equipment, all of which takes more energy to land on the moon than it takes to land it on Mars directly from earth. Or of course you could lift it from earth. Thus if your reason for a lunar base is a staging point for Mars it dosn't make a whole hell of alot of sense. You could have put all that mass on Mars to begin with if you had enough energy to land it on the moon. Not to mention making rocket fuel on Mars is a hell of alot easier than making it on the Moon.
Don't get me wrong. The moon is a good destination for exploration in and of itself. I just want to point out the 'common sense' idea of using the Moon to get to mars is flawed.
Lets go to the moon to go to the moon and go to mars to go to mars. One does not require the other. I for one would love to see the plan of establishing an observatory ( a telescope or series of scopes ) on the moon. In such a mission there are some mission elements that would be germain to both ventures ( habitats, shielding, some elements of long duration mission suit design ). SO going to the moon could provide some insight for a mars mission but its not a pre-requisit by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
I'm sure there must be other posts pointing this out, but if you want a well researched look at what might work for living on Mars, try Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
Commentary on WSJ.com
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Yes and no. The X-prize contestants are working on much smaller budgets and competing for a 10 million dollar prize. I think in most cases the 10 million would be a profit. I am not so sure about the armadillo and rutan design efforts though.
In any case they are just going for altitude, 100 kilometers in this case. They never attain orbital velocities and thus never encounter the atmosphere at those velocities. I think the highest speed being proposed is over mach 2 which is roughly 1400mph. Orbital Velocity is roughly 17,500mph. Only prooven method for attaining that speed is a rocket and that means carrying a crap load of fuel, which means a BIG rocket. The rockets in that contest are not very big and scaling them gets tricky.
However, as you point out, We know how to make rockets But engines that produce in the 100klbs + range are still damned expensive and finiky bastards. Open sourcing the current designs and allowing anyone with the manufacturing capacity to have at it could make the larger scale designs already known cheaper... though for the most part to make them cheaper you need economy of scale and for that you need a large enough launch scehdule which people will pay for.
For a while it seemed commercial sattellites would provide such a demand but that all fell apart. Perhaps it will eventually provide such a schedule but right now it dosn't.
So private ventures have a problem.... we know how to make big rockets but they don't have access to the designs on the books so they currently would have to develop their own designs. No matter how you approach that its expensive.... thousands, possibly millions of man hours, high precision machining and equaly exacting construction. Building a house is easy, building a skyscraper is hard... But imagine building your first skyscraper after only having built a house. We are talking about a similar increase in difficulty from current smaller scale rocket designs to building rockets capable of accelerating manned mission mass levels to orbital velocity at an altitude higher than 100 kilometers ( the nominal boundary for 'space').
The other problem is the heat encounterd accelerating and returning. X-prize contestents are not encountering any heating that very mundane materials can not handle. Aluminum skin on airplanes has been surviving extended mach speeds for several decades and the x-prize flight profiles are pretty short. As you approach and pass mach 3 things get a little different. You either need an active cooling system or exotic materials like Titanium or carbon fibre composits. Machining Ti and carbon fibre is no easy task and machining them to exacting precise specifications is not a cheap process even at the most basic 'at cost level'.
Now having said all that my gut feeling is your right. 20 billion is a bit much... what really amazes me are the people that think its such a paltry sum and its insane to think we could ever even atempt a manned mission to mars/moon for that or less.
My guess is if a company with the needed expertise and access to existing design info could pull off a lunar mission mimicing apollo 'at cost' for less than 5 billion... possibly even less than a billion but that would be very slim and here is why.
Had we decided to keep saturn V production then a launch today is estimated at approximately 300 million based on our experiences with the delta and atlas lines. The problem is we don't have the tooling to make the bad boys anymore. Thus you have to re-tool for a heavy booster. Even if you manage to sidestep most of the experimental R&D cost incured in the initial design you have to keep in mind prototype cars and new factory line tooling are VERY expensive and they are generally incremental design improovements using equipment that exists. This would not be the case for a large booster... so not only do you re-tool for the stack, you have to re-tool the tools to re-tool for the stack with. And unless you have numerous launches the per launch cost of the system will ref
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Ah, let me fix this for you.
Well, stop liberating people would be a good start.
There you go.
While the cynical non American part of me thinks that this is very possibly an election year exercise in yahoo vote gathering, the other part of me wishes that it will come to pass, and for one reason only: Survival of the species.
While an American moon base and mars mission would be excellent for American morale, it would perhaps also serve as a stepping stone for the real colonisation of space by the human race. And I think it is vitally important that we as a species expand beyond our planet, but more on that later.
I don't think it will be possible to get the Bush programme working on the budget that he claims and even if the programme isn't cancelled by the next president after Bush (or by Bush himself after getting reelected) the costs will probably balloon into five or tens times the initial amount before it actually gets there. Simply taking a look at the ruinous costs of the American war effort in Iraq ($4 billion per month) and the way that massive cronyism led to connected companies such as Halliburton being able to charge what they wanted for gasoline, and companies such as Bechtel charging $10 million to repair a bridge where a local Iraqi competitor was offering to rebuild it for $500 000, and thereby blow costs in the war wildly out of proportion, I don't think, given the way that the current American administration is run, that it would be possible.
Even the so called spin offs from a space programme are mostly propaganda myths. It is true that space provides bountiful resources and the ability to develop whole new techniques in engineering, medicine and science, such as those advertised by Permanent.com, but obviously those things would primarily be of interest and value to colonists in space, not to people on earth.
But that doesn't mean it should be done. Even the tiny chance of an asteroid or comet hitting the earth could mean the extinction of our species, and given how humanity is incapable of living in peace with itself or even solving easier problems such as hunger, disease and the enironment on our own planet, it is not unthinkable that we might wipe ourselves out in the future. It's not like we haven't been close to that point in the past (Black death, the Cuba crisis).
Nothing has really changed much in human nature, really. We still fight and squabble, oppress and murder, cheat and steal, suffer from greed and egoism just like we have throughout history. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of those dark sides of our nature (The discovery and colonisation of America was mainly a commericial and political power venture) we have achieved great things. I think it is important that we as a species accept ourselves for what we are, intelligent primates but animals none the less, and expand off our planet to colonise the solar system.
I don't think anyone alive today will ever see the first true colonists making the first martian version of a homestead, and not even our great great grandchildren will see the terraforming of mars, but we as a species need to go, I think, simply because it's a part of what life is about.
Then you have cases where, like NASA, military funding leads to breakthroughs in technology that have multiple applications unrelated to weaponry.
I am not trolling. I am genuinly curious. What are these breakthroughs?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I disagreed with bushes election.
That said, Im not unhappy with his performance. I believe anyone who makes it to the presidence, sets out with the best of intentions. (even tho thats not where things always go) I think he knows, like the rest of us, that nasa has been in need of a clear mission for far too long.
The space industry has changed our lives more than any other in the last fifty years. It seems to me that investments in apollo have paid us back ten fold...
So why is nasa, this powerhouse of world change, sitting on its duff carrying out (seemingly) useless experiments?
Their new mission is clear even if the details are vague.
I think its a good thing.
I fail to understand how we are going to precisely fulfill our committments to our international partners...the cancellation of the X-33/34 project and the cancellation of the CRV mean (and have meant for what, two years now?) that yes, the ISS is not really able to accomplish alot. It was a little difficult for the 3 person crews to accomplish significant science with 1 science module attached to the ISS a year ago, and since the shuttle has been grounded, there's only two-person crews...for those that don't know, the ISS was designed for 7 full-time residents, and all those modules we let other countries build for us (which are still sitting in labs somewhere waiting there chance to go up in space) kind of rely on 7 people to staff all of them. No CRV (crew return vehicle) means that we'll have to indefinitely continue relying on the Soyuz capsule as the only escape method, which means that only a maximum of 3 people can be left onboard...so even IF all the modules are assembled in orbit, how can a crew of 2 to 3 people accomplish the same as 7 or more? The guys up there have hard enough a time already, just keeping the damn thing running. NASA has backed off of 'keeping up their commitments' to their international parters for some time now.
And if I were anyone employed (directly, once was contracted indirectly by them) by NASA NOT involved with men to moon/mars, I'd be terrified by the plan.
Was there any announcements made as to the status of the pluto/kupier probe that seemingly not even NASA wanted to build, or the next round of mars-bound probes at next launch window? I know robots are cheaper than humans, but those 11 billion dollars have to come from somewhere...hopefully they won't come from JWST or SIRTF/Spitzer or one of the other high-profile projects (and damn them all who want to just abandon Hubble...the original plan was to bring it back down and put it in the smithsonian, however now a) noone wants to send the shuttle after it and b) that'll likely be the first target for money re-allocation so c) it's sure to burn up over australia in 6 years...).
As to mr. bush's promises...yes I'm gung-ho about anything space, and fairly excited about the opportunities, but he's got a pretty bad track record when it comes to ACTUALLY funding big projects that sound great as sound bites (AIDS in africa, no child left behind, etc...), so when the money starts materializing under president dean next winter, i'll sigh relief...
Establishing a base at L5 rather than the moon for the pruprose of a permanent waystation to Mars would reduce the overall tons launched, and hence a significant cost savings. Can anyone hazard a guess as to how much? Seriously, what advantage does Luna offer over L5 that's worth this tradeoff? One side of a base that doesn't leak?
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
Like the X prize but with ever increasing goals. It'll encourage companies to find low cost ways to meet the goals.
...
... ...
Start small with half a dozen prizes very similar to the X prize for companies who can get manned and reusable craft into space twice in 2 weeks. 1st gets 100 million, second 75 million, 3rd 25 million, 4th 10 million, 5th 5 million, 6th 2 million. This seeds the market with a bunch of small efficient companies who now have a load of money and expertise to start on the bigger challenges.
1st 100% commercial company to orbit Earth with manned craft.
2nd gets 50 million
3rd gets 20 million
1st 100% commercial company to orbit the moon.
1st 100% commercial company to land on the moon and return.
2nd
3rd
1st 100% commercial company to build a permanently manned settlement on the moon. Make this one bigger, say half a billion.
etc etc.
And then you have a commercial space economy without the need for NASA and a 17 billion dollar per year budget. The government doesn't run the airlines, it doesn't run the ship lines, cars or busses why oh why does it insist on monopolising space?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Points:
This is the wrong way to go to space again. The nadir, the opposite, the way it shouldn't be.
I've been a space fanatic for 35 years. And emulating the Apollo model of spectaular and ultimately useless manned shots was proved a dead end thirty years ago. It is a dead end now.
We should go to the moon, but to establish mining and material processing plants. We should use mass drivers on the moon, rather than rockets, to move material into L2, L5, or earth orbit for contruction purposes. Using the moon for a launching platform for Mars is a terrible idea -- if you are in orbit, in zero G, you can use an ion engine to get to mars in weeks. But to launch from the moon, you have to use a high energy rocket, which actually gets you to Mars more slowly than the high-efficiency and always-on ion engine.
Build in space, not on the moon. Move lunar materials to Earth-moon space using an electric mass-driver on the surface, and make aluminum, steel, and titanium by the thousands of tons in lunar orbit or L5.
If you want to go to space as a nation, you go BIG, which means you proceed deliberately. No spectacular space shots of interest to geologists only. You build up industrial capacity in orbit and on the moon, and after that you can go anywhere at a much cheaper cost than lifting tons of miniaturized and fragile components from Earth, because you simply make what you need at the launching complex from raw materials. It's more expensive in the short term, but it the long term it pays for itself in materials and energy (powersats), AND you get the solar system as a bonus for cheap.
Additionally, if you industrialize near Earth, it means normal people could go and live off planet, because there would be enough resources to actually build habitats, regular shuttle services, make powersats for selling juice back home. Launching it all from Earth guarantees that although the "mission" of landing some miltary pilots on Mars would be accomplished, that no one else could go, and ultimately the whole program would be shut down because,and it pains me to say this, all we would have for our money would be some rocks, some video, and a small cadre of semi-military men who actually got to go to another world. It didn't work for Apollo, and it won't work here. This idea is pure Old NASA, and should be stopped immediately. Space should not be the province of ultrahealthy supermen who go up and come down. It should be about resources, economically sound exploitation, and the ability of a normal human to participate someday.
And finally, Bush's (Old NASA's) dream is a crock. The money will not be there after Supply Side 2, the Looting. The old dream will die again as the neocon party ball goes dim in the next ten years and all the bills come due.
Bush's grandstanding on space is pure plagiarism of the Space Exploration Act of 2003, (HR3057) by Rep. Lampson (D-TX), in September of 2003, and is
still in committee.
This bill calls for returning to lunar orbit within 8 years; to return to the Moon to stay within 15 years, and to Mars within 20 years. In addition, it would create an Office of Exploration in NASA to plan and manage future exploration for the long term.
Bush's discovery of space comes from Rove's discovery of the tech vote, and will, like No Child Left Behind, will leave behind funding and
commitment, once the election is passed.
I'm unbelievably mad about this, becase he really doesn't *care* about space, while some of us have been waiting our whole lives for the
promises of the sixties to be met. He's stealing The Dream for his goddamn political games.
mark
unemployment rate the lowest in years, eh?
Where do you get your data? The "Bush-is-good-no-matter-what economic report"? It's not even *close* to reality. Unemployment had been steadily decreasing since the early 90s, down to around 4%, and right after bush took office there was a sharp *increase* in unemployment, which has been hanging steadily around 6% since then.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
If we want to get humanity permanently into space, we need to stop thinking in purely engineering and short term economic terms.
One of the reasons North America got settled relatively quickly, IMO, was that kings passed out huge chunks of land to cronies so they could set up colonies to profit by shipping goods home.
With space it's harder. Information is the main thing valuable enough to ship to earth - and the value of scientific information will decline rapidly after the first few missions to any place. (He3 may be worth shipping from the moon to earth - we'll see.) So we need to quickly bootstrap space settlement off of the value of scientific exploration, but rapidly reduce the costs of getting there and staying there.
Zubrin's plan is elegant and far cheaper up front - and does establish some infrastructure on Mars. But the cycle time of growth is very slow, not concentrated in any one location, and doesn't do much to reduce the cost of subsequent Mars missions. Maybe we'd keep that up for 10 years before deciding we weren't learning enough to bother maintaining the program. On to Titan, abandon Mars!
But if we build up a base on Luna - whatever the up front cost - it will make economic sense to maintain and expand it - initially as a much cheaper source of LOX for rockets, later for other exports supporting space exploration and settlement.
So - call it a con job if you wish (well, please don't tell the politicians), but taking the slower, more costly Moon-first approach seems more likely to get us permanently into space. I prefer to think of it as an investment in humanity's future.
Is this rhetoric or reality? George Bush (the first one; Sr) also made similar proclamations and it went nowhere. George Bush Jr also makes similar gestures but it is questionable if this will amount to anything. My personal opinion is that nothing will come of this.
First of all, only $1b is new money being allocated. You cannot do anything for $1b. The increase just covers inflation. As Bob McDonald of CBC remarked on tv yesterday, the $11 billion is just reshuffling existing NASA money and this may damage other areas of NASA. Bob was concerned about sacrificing robotics at the expense of human missions. Even with that amount of money, nothing major will be accomplished.
You basically need hundreads of billions to do anything major. This money hasn't been allocated.
Secondly--and most importantly--the only major endeavours in the past have been due to political reasons. Let's face it: As long as there isn't a political threat (however bogus), the public isn't going to be too keen on supporting any major projects. Unless USA initiates some massive propaganda campaign and brainwashes people into thinking that China, Russia, India, Japan, Europe, or whoever else you can come up with is a threat, nothing is going to be done.
Lastly, USA is running a massive deficit. The deficit is around $500 billion this year and unless the economy picks up, it might even get worse. Granted, this isn't a big deal for a big country like USA (at least according to theory), but nevertheless it will have SOME impact. Getting to public to support a massive tax cut for the wealthy is easy (just initiate some propaganda and you'll be ok). It is also easy to increase the military budget by claiming the imminent threat of others. Similarly, increasing budgets for DEA, CIA, and others is pretty easy--you just have to claim you are fighting a very important "war" (in these cases, drugs, and terrorism). You can also get the public to support a missile shield (which in all likelihoods won't work (automatically, the effectiveness against terrorists is 0% since terrorists use asymettric covert techniques)). HOWEVER, getting the public to support a scientific mission is pretty tough.
So to summarize my thoughts... not enough money is allocated... there is no political will... US fiscal situation isn't good enough to get public support... All this can just mean one thing. This is political rhetoric before an election. Nothing more; nothing less!
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places