Slashdot Mirror
NASA Engineers Dispute Hubble Safety Claim
Zeinfeld writes "According to the administration, the Hubble space telescope is going to be allowed to die in the next three years because the shuttle mission required to save it would be too risky. Meanwhile the public plans say shuttle missions to the space station will resume. Papers leaked to the New York Times say hogwash. The article (free subscription required) reports claims that money and politics, not safety are the reason. The public NASA story is clearly nonsense, and if the science from Hubble does not justify a shuttle mission, then it's time to pull the plug on the space station. I suspect that is exactly what will happen after the November election."
Currently this story links to the second page of the article.
So register to NYTimes... what's the big fuss?
4Z5TX
Use "slashdot_coward" as both username and password.
slash2004 twice
Does the hubble really count as a space station? Or is the author implying that if the Hubble is dangerous, so is the ISS? Just what is the problem.
Oh yeah, I second the "no more NYT" opinion.
...differently? Lets face it, the tax cuts served two purposes for the Bush administration, buy off support of the richest in America and to run the finances of the nation into the ground so far that we would have to cut spending. This Mars crap is just that, a canard to distract the populace and make Bush look like a visionary. Given it was unfunded I would imagine he does not have any serious desire to see the US travel to Mars, although I would imagine he would like Terry McCauliffe get sent there...
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
These safety issues are just plain silly. It's the same thing as to why we are allowing our privacy and dignity to be invaded when taking a plane somewhere. The columbia crash sucks, yes, but when did a couple of human deaths ever stop human invention. There are still 6 billion people on this planet I don't think we should stop our science because a couple people died. The next telescope to be put in space won't happen until 2012 and it can't even see the same spectrum that hubble can. The new one is going to be infrared, hubble on the other hand uses human visible spectrum. This is a loss that can't be imagined. Stop playing your silly little games NASA and let us use hubble!
wow that works, nice tip
just changed the password
So does that mean Bush is going to make a campaign pledge to stop "wasting money" on NASA?
I'll vote for the first president who promises to fund research in Lofstrom Loops or the like...
"The amount of intelligence on this planet is a constant. The population is growing." -Cole's Axiom
It's all about the advertising. I'm tired of it. Slashdot does JUST FINE without knowing who I am. So why can't NY TIMES figure out how to advertise to people without collecting 4,000,000 pieces of data?
Well it was great while it lasted and can never truly be replaced because it was a great achievment during its time period. As technology grows their will be a new and improved telescope that will take its place but the Hubble will never be forgoten. Hubble RIS (Rest In Space)
MonkeysKickAss
Lets face it, the tax cuts served two purposes for the Bush administration, buy off support of the richest in America and to run the finances of the nation into the ground so far that we would have to cut spending. This Mars crap is just that, a canard to distract the populace and make Bush look like a visionary. Given it was unfunded I would imagine he does not have any serious desire to see the US travel to Mars, although I would imagine he would like Terry McCauliffe get sent there...
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
I will probably get modded down as a troll here but no one who supports tax cuts really understand that service cuts must follow.
This being just one example of them.
As voters you chose bush and must live with that untill Novemember.
If you care about Hubble then vote for someone who will raise your taxes. One or the other.
Many americans are upset about the deficit but they keep voting for tax cuts again and again every couple of years after things are paid off.
http://saveie6.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/07/science/07HUBB.h tml?ex=1076734800&en=f74fc93d9204bbee&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
The astronaughts on board Columbia and all the other NASA astronaughts who're being kept grounded now understand that going into space is risky. They're interested in what they do, they've chosen to take the risks and they're interested in the science.
If the adminstration were to let the astronaughts decide whether to go up to fix Hubble when required, I doubt they would have a shortage of them volunteering to do that. The last thing the late astronaughts aboard Columbia would have wanted was to see their deaths result in the grounding of the space program and the premature death of Hubble.
nope no longer works
maybe someone changed a password?
Engineer's Papers Dispute Hubble Decision
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: February 7, 2004
ASA's decision to abandon its crown scientific jewel, the Hubble Space Telescope, cannot be justified on safety grounds, according to a pair of reports by a NASA engineer that have been circulating in scientific and political circles in the last few days.
The unsigned documents are attracting attention on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House Science Committee, which is expected to discuss the Hubble decision at a meeting on Thursday.
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"We're reviewing the Hubble decision, looking at it very closely," said a spokesman for Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York and chairman of the committee. "We're going to be examining the views in this particular document as well as a whole host of others."
The documents have also created a buzz among astronomers, who hope that their wider distribution will help spark a larger debate about the telescope's fate. The reports have deepened astronomers' skepticism that safety and not politics and money was the issue last month when Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, announced the cancellation of the space shuttle's planned 2006 maintenance visit to the telescope. As a result, the telescope will probably die in orbit within three years, astronomers say, instead of lasting into the early part of the next decade as originally planned.
In explaining his decision, Mr. O'Keefe had cited a recommendation of the board that investigated the Columbia space shuttle disaster last year that NASA must develop a way to inspect and repair damage to the shuttle's thermal protection system.
While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was committed to developing this ability for missions to the International Space Station, which could serve as a "safe haven" for the astronauts if the shuttle was damaged, Mr. O'Keefe said it was too risky and expensive to develop an "autonomous" inspection and repair capability for a single mission to the telescope.
The new reports challenge Mr. O'Keefe's conclusion, citing data and references from NASA documents in arguing that the administrator's statement "cannot be supported."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommendations and NASA's plans for "return to flight" include ultimately developing just such an ability to inspect and repair the tiles independently of the station. That autonomous ability is needed because the shuttle might fail to make it to the space station, or the space station may become too big and complex to serve as a repair base, according to the papers.
One of the reports concludes that missions to the telescope "are as safe as or perhaps safer than" space station missions "conducted in the same time frame."
The author is a NASA engineer who wrote the reports based on internal data and who declined to be identified for fear of losing his job. Copies of the documents were provided to The New York Times by an astronomer who is not part of NASA and opposes the decision to let the telescope die.
"Those documents certainly undercut the public position of the agency," said Dr. Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of a committee that advises NASA on space science.
Dr. Illingworth added that it was important to open up debate on these issues. "We need to get real information out there, and not just have a few people in NASA saying we know what's best," he said.
A Congressional staff member who was given the documents said they appeared to be credible. "We are taking them seriously," he said. Referring to the requirement of an autonomous repair capability, he said, "NASA's going to have to spend the money to do this" if the agency follows the accident board's recommendations.
The documents also argue that missions to the space station might actually be riskier than going to the space telescope for several reasons. Because of the space
No point in maintaining an old telescope up there especially since its successor is going to be in the orbit soon.
The owls are not what they seem
Given that this change in the US space program is occuring during an election year, it's very likely that we'll get the good news now, and the bad news after the elections. The ISS is already in serious trouble since from what I've read of the new policy, it appears that we'll eventually discontinue involvement in the ISS after it's completed. That may mean that everyone will bail on the project confirming Zeinfeld's suspicions.
try this
What the hell is the space station doing for research? Anyone know any science coming out of it? I'm sure there might be some life sciences, but is it any more than the Russians have already learned? I'm asking if any Slashdotters know of anything useful the space station has done. I know Hubble has been historic in what it has delivered. The space station seems to be a goose egg if you ask me.
And it's not just the NYT -- other newspapers do it, too, and I refuse to register with them as well.
And yes, I don't register at my grocery store, either. I did register at Albertsons, because they explicitly have a box to check that says something along the lines of "I don't want to give you my personal information."
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
er why?! wtf was the point of posting working info (it did work at first, i checked) and then changing it? or did someone else change it.
Hence Hubble. Its taken some pretty pictures dont get me wrong, but has it saved humanity? Do we owe our lives or some pretty pictures to hubble? I think its time to let it die and wait until we get the time to put a newer better space satellite in orbit.
I say don't intentionally kill it, but let it die on its own. AND if you get around to it, see if maybe there isn't a cost effective means to do a little repair work on it. I know I'd rather my tax dollars went to puting a base on the moon where a larger more powerful telescope can be placed on the darkside. Or a roundtrip to mars to begin the study of sustaining life there.
So yes, I'm in favor of killing the hubble if it means more advancement in space science, which it undoubtedly does. Out with the old and in with the new!!! (no comment on voyager though)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The last few Apollo missions were quietly turned into expensive scrap.
Viking landers where the budget to listen to them was cut before they stopped sending.
Skylab which was allowed to die while waiting for the shuttle to make it better.
Various of shuttle replacement projects that given a half-hearted try and dropped.
And with the amount of continuous program and budget changes, it's a miracle that the shuttle and ISS ever got off the ground. (The slow morph from Freedom to the ISS and now to this is extremely sickening.)
The cut-backs so that manned Mars exploration and a Moon base can go forward are a joke. After the cut-backs have been done, the new programs will never go forward.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Seen this before?
Are you trying extra hard to get your point across?
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
Google link here
That's why "public" anonymous accounts don't work. Some asshole always pees in the pool.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Every time I hear someone bragging about how he/she won't vote "because one vote won't make a difference" I get this almost uncontrollable urge to slap them around.
Now is the time to vote.
You know, I'm burning 4 mod points I spent on this thread, but that is just BS. It's not the fucking Bush administration's descision. It's NASA's descision. i know that a good many people here probably hate bush, but that doesn't make him responsible for every single fucking thing that happens in the government. At least blame him for things he's fucked up, I'm sure you could find plenty of things without having to encroach on someone else's mistakes.
urghh...
-Bucky
So lie about it. The NYT thinks I'm a 70 year old female CEO living in Afghanistan pulling down less than $20K per year.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Nothing anyone writes is worth reporting on Slashdot if we can't read it. If clicking on the link brings up anything other than the article intended, then we can't read the article.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
But in the mean time, humanity really needs a frontier. Our systems have a tendency to slowly but surely become slower and more mired as time passes, in part because power tends to be gravitational; it gets concentrated in the hands of smaller groups of people, who in turn often become more cautious and inflexible with regards to things that would rock the boat. Bureaucracy gets bigger, not smaller, and it becomes harder to try radically new ways of doing things. The best way for change to take place is often for it to be experimented with somewhere else, and then filter back; this is what happened in the past with America. These people, coming to a new place without any entrenched baggage, got to try to start a system from scratch, and when it was successful, other countries could observe and then emulate and improve on it as it filtered back. But there is no frontier to experiment with anymore. The whole world (the oceans don't count, they are too hard/expensive to colonize for now) has people living in it. I think it is important for our development as a species to move on to new places, where new laws can be tried (including new ways of thinking about stuff like IP and citizen participation), and so that no single entity will ever be able to easily control everyone.
For many people, I believe that the excitement, opportunity, etc. are worth the risk and sacrifice that it will take. The Hubble has been one of our most successful and productive projects, and one that wouldn't have been possible without astronauts; the space station, in contrast, has in fact been sort of a waste from the point of view of both science and exploration. But neither should be the sole reason to keep or get rid of the shuttle, or the concept of manned space flight. A certain amount of capital is needed to prime things, so to speak, before enough momentum can develop for space exploration to become self-sustaining without government aid. This large up front cost has been and will be difficult for many to swallow, especially in our notoriously money hungry Congress. But as a country, and a species, we need this, and it will pay back many times over. I apologize for my long windedness, but I am hopeful that eventually some politicians will try to get votes from people with some large vision and dream instead of simply the usual issues.
I am pretty sure I read somewhere that the cost of saving hubble was a major factor, not just safety, so this is no major surprise to me. But a quick glance through the archives here didn't turn up too many money related articles so maybe I didn't read it here. I did however find some other references in the past that relate to the story now.
NASA to Reconsider Hubble Decision
Saving Hubble
Space Tug to Save the Hubble?
Iam glad people are starting to wake up when they realise that they personally are the ones losing out from all these funding cuts (and you ain't seen nuthin yet, trillion $ debts ring any bells ?), never mind mankind reaching out for his destiny in space for the goodwill of all men, Bush and his $ bum-chum buddies dont give a shit what things you lose, they are so rich from the scam they pulled on the American public their future family tree will never have to work again ever.
"look he has no clothes"
and we are wasting time
I tried and it said:
Couldn't find your Member ID or Password. Please re-enter them.
These funding cuts will happen with or without George Bush. The raw truth is that the public, as foolish as it may be, don't have alot of support for a serious government funded space program. Thus it will likely die on the vine. Isn't that the idea of "by the people, for the people"?
Furthermore, we're really fooling ourselves badly to think that NASA is going to do any real advances in the near future. Unless old George goes against the edict of the people and dumps cash into the space program NASA is going to continue to spend it's budget sending out failure after failure instead of working with what we have in our hands and what's on our doorstep. And since NASA really doesn't answer to anyone there will be no recourse for the blatent waste of taxpayer cash.
I've said it before ad I'll say it again, there will be no serious movement into space without the large backing of private enterprise. Give corporations a reason to get to the moon/mars and it'll be done in a third of the time of NASA's best estimates.
As for Hubble? If NASA is saying no than guess what... you're SOL and frankly I doubt this decision was based on anything that George Bush does or says.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
...since conservatives are homophobic bigots anyway.
right mod grandparent down, some arse changed the pass. thanks arse.
The public story is hogwash. O'keefe is playing the safety card, to block the scientists from playing the "keep hubble alive forever" card.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Who listens to the engineers anyway?
Come on! This is the new new new economy! All we need is marketing!
</sarcasm>
(This is funny because it's true)
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
To me, this report doesn't really make sense. The current policy is that the shuttle will always go to the space station. There it will be inspected to make sure that the tiles are good before it goes back for reentry. Such an inspection would have detected the Columbia problem. Then in the unlikely case that there is damage, the crew could stay at the station on an emergency basis while another shuttle is launched.
No such actions are possible on a mission to the Hubble. Because of the orbital parameters, it is impossible for the shuttle to be able to go to both places on one mission. So any inspection, repair or wait-for-rescue would have to occur right there at the telescope.
Now, the report claims that NASA plans "eventually" to create additional facilities for these operations, other than at the space station. But that's obviously going to take a great deal of time. For one thing, just consider building the docking mechanism to allow two shuttles to connect and transfer crews from one to the other. No such thing has ever been designed, while such facilities already exist at the space station. Plus, the space station has additional supplies and space to let the crew wait safely for rescue. And it can hold inspection and repair equipment.
So while NASA may eventually create off-station repair facilities, that won't happen for a long time. Their initial efforts will be very properly focused on getting these abilities set up at the space station itself. And that means that no such facilities can be available by 2006, when the mission to Hubble is needed.
nt
Since when is strapping your ass to a huge controlled explosion - to propell yourself into an airless, sub zero free fall around a planet (for any reason) SAFE?
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
At least you're taking the honorable route of debate, rather than mere censorship of statements with which you disagree.
NASA works for Bush. NASA is Alice in the Wonderland of Bush's budget. Bush's job is to get NASA to work for America. Why do you hate America?
The few, the proud, the conservative.
There are far too many "conservatives" like you, opportunists in denial. What are you so proud of? And how/what do you "conserve"? All you do is mimic slogans like the time-honored Marines motto, as you posture in the limelight earned by those who actually sacrificed to give the words meaning. Are you a Marine? What are you actually, other than a propaganda construct?
--
make install -not war
Oh, and by the way, they were just kidding about the WMD in Iraq.
Is anybody really surprised that we were lied to?
The reason that the shuttle program will be allowed to
die is that its true justification was deployment and maintenance of intelligence gathering satellites. Deployment of VERY LARGE array antennas in orbit required a vehicle like the shuttle. The science benefits from the shuttle program were just a cover story to allow congress to justify the expenditures. With the end of the cold war and recent repeated intelligence failures, it will be harder to justify the black budget support of the shuttle program. Not to mention the fact, that our current adversaries are relatively low tech, making technical spaceborn collection programs less valuable.
I'm glad these leaks are coming out. NASA is just another government bureaucracy that has outlived its usefulness, but if they're going to stay around and spend taxpayer money, they should spend it on existing programs with a low boondoggle-to-payoff ratio. Hubble is one such program. You can't say the same thing for the space station or the shuttle program.
Correction: The Electoral College of the United States elected President Bush over former Vice President Gore, 271 to 266. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of the US Constitution so you may properly understand the method that a President is elected in the United States. The public is never involved in directly electing a President. The public only votes for a slate of electors from their state.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I worked on STS as test engineer for several years until the mid 80's. The estimated catastrophic failure rates were then about 1/25 launches, based upon the 5 fleet. We're in the realm of physics here (well within an order of magnitude/factor of two or so.)
The politics has always overwhelmed the science; my pals in the spacelab DESPISED the scientists as eggheads, the scientists loathed the silliness of manned flight programs which bled the fundpot dry, without any real result. As physicist working in an engineering area, I got shot at by both sides. (A former NASA historian wrote a good treatise on that a few years back; can't recall the particulars.) Here we go again, except that this administration goes WAY further with it's hatred of science. In fact, I'll wager to say that it's his faith-based baloney which is behind this move, along with a goodly dose of wanting only manned programs, for the politics of it, and all science be damned.
http://thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6
BTW, I was asked to lecture to our entire department (about 400 engineers and technicians) when I left in mid-'85. The topic: what can we do to improve. Here's what I said: GET SERIOUS ABOUT SAFETY OR SOMEBODY'S GONNA DIE. And STAND UP AND SAY NO TO THE BOSS WHEN HE SAYS IT'S OK, AND YOU KNOW BETTER.
The ISS has always struck me as a politically correct invention by politicians. You know, just a feel-good project, to let us hold our neighbors hands.
Well, screw it. I think we need to get serious about space. GUNDAM style....
SCO: 800-726-8649
Verisign: 800-361-8319, 888-642-9675
Diebold: 800-433-VOTE (8683)
If such a mission, close to home, is considered too much of a risk to astronaut lives, then I have to wonder about plans for a manned Mars expedition.
Ames should be cut back to a wind tunnel operation. Slidell (now "the Stennis Space Center", a "multi-agency center for 30 resident agencies"), should be sold off to a private developer. The "Independent Verification and Validation Facility" in West Virginia should be consolidated with some NASA facility that needs its services. Goddard needs some major cutbacks. (Goddard just awarded a $34 million contract for "conference support, duplicating, computer graphics, publication, and documentation" on a cost plus award fee basis. Then they issued a press release about it.)
NASA's non-flight research should be funded through the National Science Foundation. Environmental resarch should be moved to the EPA. In fact, even space science should go through NSF. NASA's job should be limited to flight hardware and support systems.
If NASA got rid of about half its organization, and insisted that the remaining half build stuff that flies, they might get somewhere.
No, the WMDs do not count as lying. If you can't distinguish honest mistakes from actual lying, then you're hopeless.
Remember this?
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman". That is a lie.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
First the tax cuts have improved the economy and that can be proven. Every time they have been tried the economy has improved. It first was shown under JFK! Yeah, JFK drastically cut taxes and the economy took off.
.... UH NASA!
What is killing the budget is that neither Republicans or Democrats will stop spending. It used to be that Republicans didn't spend as freely as Democrats. That all changed with the new "Compassionate Republicans". They are simply the "old Democrats" whereas the Deomcrats moved onto to Socialist.
NASA budget wise, the Shuttle and The Space Station are both colossal wastes of money based on ideas from the 70s. Yeah I know, the space station was only recently approved, but its inherently based in 70s think.
If you keep using half assed solutions you will be paying to keep them afloat, more than doing it right.
If it comes down to taxes or the Hubble I will keep my tax money, THANK YOU. There are many other areas of waste that need to be corrected first. Entitlement programs will break the bank and some already are. Hate Bush all you want but we have a society more concerned with what government will do for them than they are with what they can do for themselves. As long as that "gimme" attitude exist we won't have a real space program. Hell we won't have much at all soon. Entitlements will eat the majority of the budget leaving nothing for frills like a Space Station.
Don't think that Kerry or whomever the Democrats nominate will be any better. They want to raise taxes AND spend EVEN MORE MONEY! Guess what, you won't have much of a space program then either. You might get lucky and have them "placate the nerds" by saving the Hubble and long term hobbling NASA.
Repeat after me, tax cuts don't increase the deficit. Out of control spending does. If they had not kept raising the budge the tax cuts would not have been noticable.
Also, the tax cuts if revoked would put back less than 150B of the money that isn't there. However it would certainly tank the stock market, lead to higher unemployment, and probably a serious reduction in items like
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The guy who makes a pro-bush comment gets labeled as flamebait. But the guy who blames America for voting for Bush and for "tax cuts" (which has 0 to do with the topic at hand) gets rated as 5 insightful.
It's not the personnel, it's the spacecraft. The program can't afford to lose another shuttle or it will be scrapped. Congress will never approve building another one of these old birds and we are a decade away from having a replacement. We have barely started the basic R&D for a suitable replacement. Even with unlimited resources it would take 6 years to get a test flight on a new vehicle.
People landed on the moon a few years before I was born. I grew up to the early space shuttle program and fantastic photos from Voyager. Back then, I figured we be back to the moon by 2000 and to mars by 2010. Surely the common man would have been able to experience earth orbit by then.
Here we are in 2004 and basically nothing new has happened with manned space exploration. It's depressing to think that it'll take until 2020 just to get back to the moon! Will humans even reach Mars in my lifetime now?
All those dollars wasted on blowing up Iraq that could've been put toward much grander goals in space!
I guess I need to start building a Mars transport in my garage since nobody else is going to bother.
They aren't launched on the shuttle anymore, but in the late 80s, the Magnum sigint satellites were. (source)
So was the Lacrosse-1 radar surveillance bird. However, current strategy is based around smaller satellites launched on medium-lift rockets. (source) So there likely won't be any more inelligence satellites carried by the shuttle.
0 1 - just my two bits
Is all this NASA stuff really science? You people just don't get it.
Space is not the new frontier, creating new technology that can slice onions and potatoes into neat shapes, the ability to organize large quantities of neckties utilizing a single closet hanger, a hard taco wrapped inside a flour tortilla with ranch-flavored "Rio Grande Sauce", a chocolate-covered candy bar that will make you lose weight, a light beer "that doesn't taste like a light beer", now THAT'S science!
Why, why, why? Why do we insist on exploring the heavens when we have so many challenging frontiers upon us here in the real world?
What we should do is ASK those who have to fly the shuttle. We have heard a great deal from the leadership at NASA and everyone else. What do the rank and file Astronauts think? Is it worth the risk do they want to fly on the Shuttle?
I grew up in the Fulda Gap, where did you?
voters chose Gore. he won the popular vote. Gore would also have won the vote in Florida (and thus the presidency) had Jeb Bush not disqualified several tens of thousands of legal registered voters (the vast majority of them democrats) because their names happened to resemble those of convicted felons from other states.
it's certainly true that we can't expect the government to spend more money while collecting less taxes. but let's not pretend that the voters chose the government currently occupying the White House. because they didn't. (and let's not pretend either that the huge deficit that the Bush administration has built up is because of the tax cut. some rather expensive foreign adventures had something to do with it also)
(and yes, this is off topic. but it's correcting misinformation from another off topic post. if you mod this post down you should mod the one it's referring to down also.)
You dont have to give your real name you stupid piece of trash! I've got fake accouns all over the place for things like:
..
sun Java
intel
nytimes
latimes
yahoo
safeway
.
I would be stupid to give real info for these, I would be equally stupid not to use them because I was scared to enter random data.
Hubble has produced some wonderful marvelous pictures. But that doesn't justify the fact that it's a multi-billion dollar project funded by stealing from the tax-payer. If private individuals and organizations want to fund projects to peer deep into space -- using money voluntarily acquired -- fine. Otherwise, it's just theft with the excuse of stargazing.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"But the oceans, Antarctica and numerous deserts across the world are surely all cheaper than space to colonize, no? Why are people not moving there?"
Because the oceans and deserts are already claimed by other governments, and Antartica is going to be a US territory the minute soeone finds salable resources there.
The only way to create a new country on Earth is through decades of bloodshed, guerilla warfare, and econimic ruin, followed by years of UN/US peacekeeping and international debt (a.k.a. more economic ruin), followed by a period of limited autonomy during which all the neighboring nations are going to do their best to topple you new government. Decades of chaos and poverty, thousands dead, all just to be independant of one dictator. And this is supposed to be the cheap solution?
The oceans are even worse. Either your vessel (and artificial islands are considered vessels) flies the flag of a recognized nation (thus agreeing be bound by their laws), or you are considered a pirate, and any navy in the world is permitted to sink your vessel and claim your property as salvage.
On Mars, you can stitch up a flag, declare everything between your landing site and the south pole to be your new country, and be pretty much done with it.
0 1 - just my two bits
It sounds like it's destined to come back down but why should we just splash it down in the ocean somewhere? To bring it down the current plan is to send a U.S. $300 million space tug that would launch on a Delta2, grab Hubble and trash the telescope into the Pacific. But if they're going to go to all the trouble of sending up a Delta2 why not send up a payload that could bring the Hubble back in one piece so it could go on display? Maybe wrap it in an aerogel blanket and outfit with some parachutes. And then gently bring it back down. Then have it on display at the West Coast Smithsonian. This would be a much more suitble fate to a telescope that has done so much to bring space back to Earth and turned a lot of people on to all the amazing things the lie out there.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
In case you need to be reminded, the 2000 election did not work out as smoothly or as straight-forward as you describe. With Florida having 25 electoral votes, and with lots of dangling chads hanging about, the 271/266 electoral vote count you mention was entirely in question. One can only hope that 2004 isn't 2000 all over again.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
that the ISS and DOD had all missions available up to the
point where NASA would need to *recertify* the shuttle fleet.
NASA has no plans to do this due to the multi billion $ cost
over the necessary overhauls.
Heh. Dumbass.
Hundreds to thousands of people die in airplane crashes every year and there is never any talks about grounding all airline fleets...
Thousands maybe millions die in car crashes every year and there is never talks about stopping the sales and usage of all cars...
3000 people died in the WTC and do we stop building skyscrapers? Nope!
7 people die in a space shuttle accident and hell is litterally raised about it?!?!?!?
Yeah it was an expensive machine but that's not why they were grounded for a year.
Draw conclusions?
...but I really think that Bush is simply providing a way for the US Gov't to get out of the space business except for commercial and military satellite launches.
He has proposed eliminating the shuttle before a replacement is ready. People right now are saying the economics of manned space are unjustified given starving and homeless people, bad schools, etc. Will we be able to justify the economics after our manned program is in mothballs for even just the planned four years?
We have treaty-level obligations to the ISS. Our requirements to the ISS are equivalent to our requirements to NATO and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation. So we may well meet those obligations. Unless we somehow manage to convince the other members of the ISS program to let it go...
I am not surprised that the truth about Hubble is a financial and political issue, and not really safety. I will be really surprised if anything that is merely gathering knowledge for its own sake gets lobbed into space after the next few years...without a subscription fee to access the data, anyway.
What?
I'll vote for the first president who promises to fund research in Lofstrom Loops or the like...
If I understand them correctly, Lofstrom Loops are active systems. If the ground station control (or power) fails, the circulating mass impacts in the vicinity of the ground station (i.e. the spaceport) over the period of one loop cycle. Something between a large bomb and an extinction event, depending on the size of the device. Damage can be mitigated somewhat by dumping the upbound part of the mass into space, but the downbound part is already going to toast somebody. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
I prefer the Rotovator - though I prefer the form where it only dips into the stratosphere to rendevous with an aircraft. Much less mass, and only an ill-timed cable break dumps any of it on an earth-intersection orbit. Total control failure just means the orbit starts to decay very slowly, and I think you can arrange it so the decay takes the device UP rather than impacting the atmosphere and or ground.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Try this:
Rotovator
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The war and reconstruction is pushing $120 billion for the first year. That could have funded NASA for ten years. That $120B could have gone to fighting terrorism instead of some right-wing fantasy.
If NASA called me up and said, we're going to launch you on the shuttle, are you willing to go. You have a 1 in 50 chance in being killed during the mission, but, you'll get to go to space if you live. I would bet there are easily 100,000 people that would do this. Astronauts know the risks they are taking, and, there are plenty of people willing to take those risks.
It's my understanding that we are going to return to the moon by having NASA join in the military on the costs of an updated EELV. The new Atlas and Delta rockets already can do payload into GEO and LEO orbits for less than a 1/10th cost of the shuttle.
This is my sig.
The construction of the ISS is one of the worst boondoggles the US government has ever gotten involved with. ISS will be less functional than Skylab, which cost far less and which was launched in an afternoon. In the early '90s there was a proposal to build the ISS on the ground and launch it into orbit on a Shuttle derived vehicle. It would have cost about 2 billion to build this vehicle and would have put ISS into orbit in a day. But NASA killed this because it would have provided competition for the Shuttle in the form of an unmanned heavy booster and it also would have obviated the need for all of those Shuttle missions. This is documented in Robert Zubrin's book Entering Space
The shuttle employes about 20,000 people, even when it is not flying, it is a huge cash cow for Boeing and Lockheed who run United Space Alliance, the company that provides support services. This is documented in James Klerckx book Lost In Space which also documents how NASA has done its level best to sabotage any alternatives to the Shuttle, such as it did in the early 1980s when NASA lobbied to require use of the Shuttle for launching all commercial and military payloads. The Challenger disaster put paid to this monumentally stupid idea and fortunately there was still time to rebuild the infrastructure for building expendables such as the Delta series.
If NASA is given the choice between spending money to do good science, which based upon Hubble's record, extending its life would probably be, or pissing it down the Shuttle/ISS rathole it is going to do the latter, and justify it however it can.
Perhaps some better acronyms for NASA might be:
Not About Space Anymore
No Access to Space for Americans
Needed, Another Seven Astronauts
Or, given the inefficiency of the large aerospace contractors it deals with:
National Aerospace Socialism Administration
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Oh, come on, the safety issues are NOT nonsense. In order to go to Hubble, they would need to have two shuttles ready to launch at the same time so they can go up and rescue the first shuttle if it has a problem. If they both have problems, then they are both screwed. And no, you can't get to the space station from Hubble's orbit. Now, if they go to the space station, they can at least live up there until other launch vehicles come and rescue them. The safety concerns are completely valid.
After Challenger and Columbia, your words are so right and sickeningly precient about the problems that arose.
As a large bureacracy, the DoD is cursed by many of the problems that plagued the administration of Soviet Russia. There are few dividing lines between supplier and customer, with a revolving door and job gurantees. Thank heavens that at least Boeing hast started doing things about it.
Here's the deal.
For the past 25 years engineers, scientists and others have been making a career from Hubble. Vendors, operations personnel, repair mission personnel and layers of management have been comfortably carving out domains and cashing paychecks.
Hubble has run its course and the Next Generation Space Telescope is in the on-deck circle. But, the money for NGST can't start to really flow until the Hubble spigot is turned off. So Hubble people wanted "one more" repair mission to stave off the inevitable.
The public probably doesn't even know that NGST is waiting in the wings so it appears that NASA is simply throwing away a valuable asset.
So the real problem is that Group X paychecks will be replaced with Group Y paychecks and Group X is not too thrilled. Leaked memos, Sen. Milkulski riding in to save the day are all tactics that I've seen before at NASA (and I imagine many other government institutions.)
Occams razor question: Which is more likely - Bush cronyism, evil Republicans, wastful government, or a group of people complaining that their paychecks are in danger?
Google Cache
At least you're taking the honorable route of debate, rather than mere censorship of statements with which you disagree.
NASA works for Bush. NASA is Alice in the Wonderland of Bush's budget. Bush's job is to get NASA to work for America. Why do you hate America?
A) Thanks, I always find it better to reply than just mod flamebait
B) I never said that I hated America anywhere in my post. Stop trying to start something that isnt't there.
C) The NASA officials who originally made that descision aren't (afaik) chosen by the president. I understand that there is some argument about whether or not their worries are justified, but the current or any president doesn't usually put their hands in matters like this because they clearly aren't qualified to make descisions like this.
And for the good stuff:
The few, the proud, the conservative.
There are far too many "conservatives" like you, opportunists in denial. What are you so proud of?
I am proud of the fact that while I understand there are circumstances which warrent help for some people, I don't rely on handouts to sustain my living. I'm proud of the fact that when life throws me a curveball, I am able to step out of the way and get my bat ready for the next swing. In general, I'm proud of my beliefs(otherwise, why would I hold them?)
And how/what do you "conserve"? All you do is mimic slogans like the time-honored Marines motto, as you posture in the limelight earned by those who actually sacrificed to give the words meaning.
It's a sig. My sig, like many people's sigs is a succinct expression of an ideal I hold. I'm not trying to disparage any member of our armed forces.
Are you a Marine? What are you actually, other than a propaganda construct?
No, I'm not a marine. I'm a brazillian guy studying computer science and math in the hopes that I can make something out of myself someday.
My turn:
Why did you get so off topic? What about my post was so abrasive to your self esteem that you felt it necessary to lash out at me like this?
-Bucky
I'm working on the return to flight effort at NASA, so I've seen a lot of the internal working documents and pitches. I'd sure like to see this engineer's analysis that shows we could repair a shuttle away from station. All of the presentations I've seen, including one for a NASA internal safety panel, show that it will be difficult to do any repairs at the station and nobody has a good way of doing the repairs without use of the station robot arm. There are still quite a few unknowns about ISS-based repair that are being analyzed right now, and margins fo all kind are quite thin.
Oh, and it pains me that that O'Keefe had to take a Hubble mission off the manifest, as I have an astronomy degree.......
This is just a flight of fantasy.
If perchance I wanted to heavily invest in military space operations in as much secrecy as reasonably possible I would want to have a civilian but governmental program running.
Now ideally this civilian operation should serve some useful purpose in the military program in addition to being a helpful smokescreen.
Developing plans and assets that are designed for rescue type operations or other operations with a heavy investment in the ability to provide for rescue operations seems to meet that objective. Consider the requirements of rescue craft and operations.
Ability to operate with minimum warning. Designed to operate at extreme ranges or speeds. Designed to be very flexible and able to interface with various and/or new equipment.
BTW what would be the design criteria for a set of space fighter craft?
Ok back to my thorazin drip... mmmm
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Except the decision was made EXCLUSIVELY by O'Keefe. And O'Keefe was appointed as NASA Administator by Bush.
Even if O'Keefe doesn't want to do what Bush asks, he still knows that it was Bush that gave him his current position. That thought will always be in the back of O'Keefe's mind, and is likely to interfere politics into his managemenet decicions.
So the call to cancel Hubble was made by O'Keefe and O'Keefe alone. Only after Sen. Mikulski of Maryland hounded him about it did he reluctantly agree to form a committee. That's crap, he should have formed a damn committee in the beginning before solely making the decision to cut NASA's most successful program since Apollo.
make world, not war
The problem is that you have to register to a million websites. I mean, it's not just the New York Times that you are trying to read. There are others, including Washington Post, etc. I want an easily accessible way to access many websites. Registering for each one gets lame after a while.
So if you just read one paper, that's cool. But otherwise, it gets tiresome.
Perhaps a better way is for them to show an ad on the first page for those that don't register, and then let them go to regular articles (kind of like Salon.com).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
With that line of logic, why not link to articles that require subscription (like Wall Street Journal). Perhaps Slashdot should start listing more WSJ links. :(
The point is... if the general audience can't read it, it's useless. Yes, you can ask them to go and register but most--including me--don't. If one only reads NYT then registering isn't a big deal, but if one reads many sources then you have to register at many places (eg. if you want Washington Post, you have to register too--although not all articles it seems).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Let's face it. Bush's new plan is nothing more than militarization of space. Any space mission is to achieve this goal. Everything else is totally worthless. So, it should not come as a surprise that the US govt is ditching its Hubble Telescope, possibly the Station Station in the future, and maybe even the Mars missions (who cares about Mars when putting weapons in space is a higher priority?).
Here is an editorial on the recently announced space plan by Bush. Conservatives might want to stay away since its from a socialist web site but if you are open, check it out.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Woah! Wait! Stop! Say that again?! Only the rich have the capital recequired to create jobs therefore we should give more to the rich? Have you considered the posibility that if the poor weren't so poor that maybe they would have the capital to make jobs too. Aren't self-employed people more productive, more efficient and a lot less likely to hold government hostage with threats of leaving/closing than those who command legions of wage-slaves?
Thanks for the clarification. That wasn't my impression of the situation, but assuming that you're right... What motivation would Bush have to shut the Hubble down? It's things like Hubble and the Mars rovers which give NASA pretty pictures to show the public. Other missions without pretty pictures(I can't think any off the top of my head, but one studying gravity waves or something) aren't things that the public respects as much as a picture of a nebulae(sp?) or the landscape of mars.
I don't know, and I don't think that anyone else does yet. *shrug*
-Bucky
Uh, the NYT pays /. to post its articles. Major revenue stream for Commander Dickless
> Give corporations a reason to get to the
> moon/mars and it'll be done in a third of
> the time of NASA's best estimates.
Great, just another place where jobs will be
outsourced. I can already see the Indians quaking
in their slippers...
I don't think Bush wants to be associated with the end of the Hubble program directly, and O'Keefe gives him a buffer layer. Since Bush is now rather known for skyrocketing deficit spending, he needs to cut costs somewhere. And for his agenda, Hubble takes a back seat to other programs.
make world, not war
And I bet a lot of fellow /.ers would too. Viva Hubble!
You must think in Russian.
That doesn't make complete sense to me though. You're arguing that he's scrapping hubble to cut costs, while at the same time he doesn't care about spending money like a mad man elsewhere. It could be possible that he see is trying to cut costs, but like you said...$500 million is a drop in the bucket.
I do kind of find it depressing that it costs 500 million dollars to send a repair crew to hubble orbit(which isn't very high up, if I understand correctly). What we need(and will probably never see) is a ship that can ferry a crew and their luggage into orbit and back for a tenth the price.
Oh well...
-Bucky
This seems to be a very confusing issue. It IS a copyright violation to list the full article without permission. But I see people doing it. For instance, the popular left-wing site, Common Dreams, does it under fair-use. People on message boards do it too. And of course, some anarchists* do it. So I don't know what the deal is. I think it is a violation but the laws aren't enforced it seems...
(* Some (or maybe many) anarchists don't recognize copyrights. They claim it is a government instituted control).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
why oh why can't the original article submitters just link to this? This (free registration, blah blah)stuff should be rejected upon receipt by C. Neal et al.
In reality, though, I don't think they're that serious about the Mars mission and were trying to capitalize off the recent Mars success. And by claiming to re-organize NASA it'll make it look like some winds of change are blowing.
Anyway, regarding Hubble, I do hope the money can be found from somewhere. Even if the geek collective grovels to Bill Gates to fund it. Astronauts have volunteered to service it (ie John Grunsfeld), so all that's needed is a 'relatively' small amount of cash and an 'approval' stamp by NASA's bureaucracy.
make world, not war
"Look at me! Look at me! I'm a liberal extremist and noone will listen to my stories about evil Bush. Waaah!"
I think the NASA brass is correct when they say that the risk is too great, in light of recent events. The POLITICAL risk is too great. I'm not saying they don't care about the astronauts, they obviously do, very much. But the risk is no greater now than it was 2 years ago, and only a complete moron would think that spaceflight isn't going to kill people occasionally. They just don't feel that they can get egg on their faces again.
The truth is, I think that every astronaut in the country would get on the shuttle tomorrow if asked. If we're going to stop doing manned spaceflight unless every mission is as safe as any mission can possibly be made, we might as well crawl back into the oceans right now, because we're done.
There's no need to study weightlessness if we work out the fairly straightforward engineering involved in rotating our cruise vehicles. If we spin them up fast enough to simulate Mars gravity then the crew are pre-adapted to their working environment.
This idea is explored to the Robert Zubrin book "Mars Direct" and in other places. You let out a very strong cable from the cruise module. It has a weight at the end of it. This could be something like the nuclear power supply and its shield but there are many possibilities. Spin it up and centripetal forces create artificial gravity in the cruise vehicle. At the pivot point you have your antenna poiting toward Earth... this is engineering shit.. they love this sort of problem. :-)
Presto. No need to worry about all sorts of biological problems stemming from weightlessness
Back on-topic; go to http://www.marssociety.org/news/2004/0202.asp for a strong argument for keeping Hubble.
Bush is not Reagan. Reagan cut spending to pay for his tax cuts.
Not quite. When Reagan came into office, Carter had just moved the deficit to 50B/year. By the time Reagan left office, he had it at about 300B/year. Reagan never did any real spending cuts. In fact, spending under Reagan went way up as did man other Taxes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
NAFTA caused jobs to move to Canada? Jeez, the antiNafta nutbars up here were warning about all the jobs moving to the USA and later Mexico. Minimum wage of less than two bucks in Arkansas and all that crap. Yeah right, our minimum wages are for service industries. We'ew going to close our Walmart and Burger Kings and move them to Little Rock! Some jobs have moved to Mexico. Meanwhile nowadays Mexico is complaining that it's losing those low-pay, mobile jobs to China and other places that are so cheap that it doesn't matter they're not free trade enabled...
"So? Why only a tax break for the rich?" I don't think anyone is suggesting that, least I'm not. What they are suggesting is that anyone who is paying taxes should get a break, whether rich or poor. Because all of them, to some degree or another, contribute to the economic picture in some way. I'm basically saying "unbalanced" tax cuts, to select individuals, just further distorts the incentives. The tax code is not the best way to help those who are not as well off, nor is it the best way to change the incentives.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Actually, the US government's current position on global warming is that the best scientific evidence says that it is happening. What the disagreement entails is exactly is the nature and timing of the problems it would cause, and how much of this warming is caused by human activity, vs. natural climatic change and "data pollution". Also, what are the costs and benefits of action and inaction. Of course no one really has a good answer to these questions, which is why the US govt has taken the "we need more research" position.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
The risk from the close-to-home mission comes from using the Space Shuttle. Those risks disappear when going to Mars, to be replaced by entirely new ones.
Stick Men
lamest attempt at a troll I've ever seen!
you should continue sucking on my balls, may be you'll learn something!
- your dad.
I'm curious as to your "self reliant conservative" credentials. When in Brazil, who paid for your education, healthcare, the wellbeing of your neighbors? In which state do you live in the US, one with a positive or negative federal tax/spending ratio? Who is financing your education there? What subsidies do you depend on while you pretend you're free from the interdependence that makes us all stronger?
You're kind of disingenuous, asking what was so abrasive about your post in which 3/6 of your sentences use the word "fuck" in a nonsexual meaning, another calls my post "BS" (while warming up to actually use a naughty word) in some kind of moderation threat, and the final sentence is actually a subhuman grunt. The only rational sentence in your post is "It's NASA's decision.", which is wrong: they have to abide by the Bush (and the Bush Congress) decision.
When people defend Bush with angry lies, instead blaming the victims of his incompetence and cynical lies, like the American heroes at NASA, their hatred of the real America becomes apparent. Examine your "ideals" against your actions, and you might see through them as transparent labels you use to cozy up to power. Meanwhile, don't expect me to have patience for your foulmouthed willful ignorance and perverse inversion of American politics, or your disrespect towards me, personally.
--
make install -not war
OK, so you don't know that NASA is run by the Bush appointee, yet you deny Bush's creation of this Hubble travesty. And you obviously don't know that Bush Sr. floated the same fake Mars program in 1991, right on schedule for his reelection campaign. You're too naive to understand that killing the Hubble frees money for the aerospace contractors who didn't get their missile defense system budget, or to realize that Hubble doesn't have much military application, but the Mars program does. Or even that the $10T debt Bush is running up feeds his banker buddies while starving the people.
What do you think people do before they post something serious? Pick the political brand that's on top, and apply some propaganda formula to bash their opposition? If you cared about space, you'd help get rid of the dumbest menace to science in the White House ever. You might even realize that the Mars program whose coattails Bush is riding was a Clinton program, still bearing fruit, much like the Hubble, which is probably the best cheerleading for space research in America since the Moon landings.
--
make install -not war