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Bush's Space Panel Seeks Public Input
brandido writes "Space.com is reporting that Bush's space panel is seeking public input on the effort to return to the Moon and then reach Mars. From the article: "President Bush's new space advisory commission for getting humans to the Moon and Mars has launched a web site seeking public input with the promise of reading all comments." The article provides a link to the website for Bush's Space Panel, but it does not provide a direct link to the site for sending comments. I personally think we should use a Martian Space Elevator to further our exploration of Mars."
I cheer Bush's decision to advance our space program. However, hasn't the current Mars program been pretty successful?
Let's use the money to build a shuttle replacement. Right now we are talking to Russia about transporting our guys up and down?
Pour the money into a more efficent, safer transport system... Considering the huge amount of debt we are in now, methinks that is a better use of our money.
We are kicking Mars's ass right now.
AC
You'd almost think this was an election year
Marvellous.
A real attempt to try and include people in the decision making by allowing them a way to comment.
Then it gets posted to Slashdot.
Then the trolls flood the comments mailbox with irrelevant drivel.
Then they stop reading the comments because the signal to noise ratio is too poor.
This is a real opportunity. Don't screw it up.
I know someone from the space programme in the 1960s - a man named Gene Kranz, who was (maybe still is) a member of the flying club I was a member of when I lived in Houston. Gene Kranz, if you don't remember, is the "Failure is not an option" man from the Apollo 13 mission when it all went pear-shaped.
He did a talk for the whole club about the Apollo programme, and why what's happening in today's NASA is happening. The talk was in 2000, so this was before the Columbia break-up. His analysis was basically society as a whole and by consequence NASA was now too risk averse to do anything exciting in space. The irony is that the risk aversion in NASA is actually a risk in itself, and contributed to the Challenger accident (and now the Columbia one as we've seen in the reports).
Bush's speech is all well and good, but I'm highly skeptical that anything will come of it. Going to Mars will be a very dangerous mission. Going to the Moon was very dangerous, and it's surprising that there were so few casualties in the Apollo programme. I don't think NASA has the guts to stomach these risks without a very serious shake-up in culture.
I hope I'm proven wrong, but I'm not particularly confident.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
There's already a serious deficit blow-out, government spending is increasing at an unsustainable rate, the US is still officially at war with someone - we're not quite sure who, but there's quite a few suspicious looking goatherds in north-western Pakistan - and to top it all off, no one is really sure if the economy is picking up or relocating to a happier country.
Who's gonna foot the bill?
Dont get me wrong I am not anti-NASA, I am just anti-mars right now. We could use that money for more important things.
Like what? The ISS? Shuttle?
You`ve hit the common misperception with this plan-- it does not increase the NASA budget drastically. Rather, it reassigns funds within the current budget, adding around 10% to the total.
This plan is good if only for the fact that it gives some focus and a destination for NASA. The ISS will be built and then funding will end; the shuttle will be retired.
Personally, I like the broad outlines, as it forces the bureaucratic nightmare that NASA has become to get some shit done-- which will eventually push them to privatizing (or at least allowing privatization) of many parts in the chain if only to accomplish what they need to do to reach their big goals.
davejenkins.com |
So spending money on space travel will help.
... you name it. So those directly employed by NASA and the contractors aren't the only beneficiaries - the others in the economy benefit.
After all, that money goes directly on jobs. Everyone who receives the money pays a healthy chunk of it straight back into government coffers. The remainder they spend on, say, cars, computers, clothes, food,
What else is there? Well, following large investment in aerospace related technology and computer technology in Apollo, surprisingly enough, the USA dominated those fields afterwards. The economy grew, so those slices handed out in benefits, health care etc grew bigger overall - the "pie" itself grew, so the amount in those "slices" grew.
So if this causes a doubling in NASAs manned spaceflight budget (at an annual cost equivalent to 3 days welfare spending (2 days, if you take into account the taxes paid directly back), or 6 days DoD spending), it would seem to be worthwhile.
So, yes. Employing more people (with a major focus on college grads) and expanding the economy (so that extra money would end up rolling into health care and unemployment benefits) would make a lot of sense.
Maybe something more modest, like a permanent moon base? Or more modest than that, wait a few years so we can fund this project with cash instead of Easy Credit Terms?
This is not my sandwich.
I'd love to have had NASA & the rest of the space programs working towards these ends since the moon landings. We might well be better off. The technology we use to discuss this today, along with the telemetry systems and materials science (to name a few) owe a debt to the Kennedy space program.
The support for the proposition that the current administration has ANY reason other than political gain for this proposal is lacking.
If we had 40 years of consistent manned spaceflight behind us, I'd expect that we would be able to assess the risks and costs of this "mandate". What we have is a group of really poor administrators at NASA who have killed two shuttle crews and the shuttle program through their gross errors in judgment.
We need an entirely new NASA-with an international mandate to cooperate and jointly budget new programs long before we start back to the moon.
It's not possible with the current NASA - all we will have will be bloated costs for proposals and a few happy contractors.
Space travel is monsterously expensive. At least with air travel there was something to see on the other side of the connection. Air was a logical extension to shipping and rail. Space travel isn't really taking you anywhere.
Until someone finds a pot of gold, space will only operate on the "Christopher Columbus" model. Crazy folks who have adventerous patrons.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It is the first nation that will prosper during both the good times and the bad. By trying new things and discovering new knowledge, they are better able to handle their existing problems as well. Going to Mars will not fix the economy of itself, but it may very well help the recovery. If anything, it isn't going to hurt the economy a lot: compared to the total budget, NASA doesn't take a lot, and much of the money goes towards useful jobs or research.
The second nation is doomed to forever live in caves or grass huts, never contemplating building houses of wood or stone, at least not before the leaks in the existing huts are fixed, the mammoth pen is repaired, Llugs broken leg is splinted and healed, or before the hungry children of the next village are properly fed. You will be able to forever find more 'pressing' problems looming behind the ones you just fixed; insisting to fix all of them will get you nowhere,
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You mean apart from China, India, Europe and Russia. Maybe you mean economically or militarily, but this is likely to change once someone develops the capability to exploit resources in space. Remember the story of the hare and the tortoise?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I realize that NASA's mission has become heavily weighted in symbolism and emotion and that this is the reality of 21st century politics.
But, as a member of the public, as a taxpayer, I would much rather that they pay for 50 select astronomers, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists and biologists to come to a conference and ask them what kinds of space missions would be valuable from their perspective. Put the ideas in a ranked order, with costs and risks, and then let the administrators decide what they'd like to do.
As it stands now, there are some interesting projects that have made it through the cracks, but all the big money goes towards various make-work manned missions meant to whip up patriotic fervor, demonstrate international cooperation, or keep the inertia going with some large project that everyone is afraid to let die because of its size.
There's nothing wrong with pride in one's country (except that the emotion is often used as a tool by less honourable men), or with international cooperation. But please let those things be incidental to defining NASA's mission and not central.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Put a series of telescopes on the moon.
Replace the Hubble and large quanities of the terristial radio telescopes with moon based ones. Get the benefits of the location for more science. When the Hubble goes it will be an extreme loss, replace it with something more grand as soon as possible.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Seriously, we could turn inward, we could spend every dime trying to cure every socital ailment, (which for the last fifty years hasn't worked)... or we could be bold and challenge the willpower and spirit of mankind by reaching further into the heavens.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Personally, I don't think the government should be funding space exploration (or health care, for that matter), so I'm not arguing in defense of NASA, just in defense of actually considering the numbers.
Also, I have enormous pride in my country. I feel very lucky to have been born in the US.
I really cannot understand your attitude, which unfortunately seems to be quite prevalent among the affluent in the US. Many people are unable to "take care of themselves", due to their financial circumstances or the cost of the ridiculously overpriced drugs & treatments that they require. Would you rather have those people who cannot meet these costs die quietly in their own homes, so that your Medicare bills are slightly reduced?
Health care, just like education, should be a right for all citizens, NOT just a luxury for the rich.
Further observation: Humans have evolved in a sub-tropical environment. They are not designed for cool temperate or sub-arctic conditions.
proposal: Send only robots to these latitudes on Earth
I don't think anyone is talking about permanent solutions. If we had robots advanced enough at the time we started trying to go to the South Pole, and it cost a huge amount to send someone to the South Pole, wouldn't it have been a better idea to have used robots, until we knew enought o send people?
A trained human is between dozens and hundreds of times as effective as any robot.
I'm not sure that a scalar metric makes sense. There are things that humans can do that robots cannot. Humans are adaptable, and pretty good at dealing with unexpected problems that might come up. They're useful if you're trying something that might fail in some unknown way and you're not sure ahead of time how to fix it (i.e. swapping out a circuit board would mean that you could just build in a redundant board ahead of time). With planetary probes, one major problem that relies on unknown data is dealing with the ground surrounding a landing site. Humans might be very handy, but we also have some clever robots these days.
A second benefit is that manned missions pretty much must be round-trip. Most robotic ones are one-way. Doing a round-trip is expensive and hard, but it lets you bring back samples for free.
In the past, successful manned missions (at least Glenn and Armstrong in the US) have had enormous PR benefits. I suspect that this is still true to a smaller extent, though frequent manned missions to places like the ISS may have worn down public facination with manned missions.
All that being said, humans have an enormous number of issues for space travel. Among others:
* Humans require life support. This means food, water, oxygen, and temperature control, plus much radiation shielding, and space to move around in. It means basic toilet facilities. It generally means safety mechanisms and escape systems. It means medical supplies. This is a *lot* of weight. Weight is a big deal, because for each pound you lift into space, you have to lift some quantity of fuel, which requires more fuel to lift.
* Humans place tough environment constraints on a mission. The Mars landers used a cheap, simple method of slowing down -- big airbags. Putting a human through this would pulp them. Putting someone on Mars probably means requiring a lander with retrorockets. This is more weight. You can't get the module very hot, or very cold, or very irradiated. You have to be really careful about chemicals being exuded into the environment.
* Humans have PR issues. If NASA loses a human, NASA catches a *lot* of flak and has to do investigations and shut down anything that might cause the problem again. If a robot gets lost, some money gets lost, but it doesn't mean a public outcry and the potential for NASA funding to be cut.
* Humans have risk factors. You can try some things with robots that you cannot do with humans. You can say "I wonder what's over here". Sure, there's some chance that the rock sheet that you're driving on might break and dump you into a deep pit, but ultimately, the robot is expendable. People are not.
You have to think -- suppose we could do a round-trip mission. Instead of carrying a human and all the associated support stuff, if we could just get a good robot, we could do the round trip with *masses* more samples for analysis back on Earth.
How long will it be before we can get a robot that can climb down lava pipes and into tunnels?
I have a friend who is in the robotics grad program at Carnegie Mellon University. He builds robots that entirely autonomously explore abandoned mines. Since many of these mines are not safe for a human (gasses, collapses, etc), if a robot fails in the thing, you cannot go in to get it out. The problem of crawling around in tunnels is pretty similar. If you can solve mine tunnels, you can probably handle lava pipes.
Spirit uses more conservative design because it needs to be mature tech -- there can't be a chance of it failing zillions of miles away.
May we never see th