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Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination
marcel-jan.nl writes "There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money. The Voyagers alone need $4.2 million a year for daily operation and data analysis. Scientist say this cut is "an extremely foolish thing to do": the Voyagers are approaching the edge of the Solar System and Ulysses is observing the Sun coming to the end of a 22-year magnetic cycle."
I think there are very few intelligent people who would argue with collecting data from Voyager 1 and 2 as long as they are still in operation. After all, these craft have (boldly?) gone where no manmade object has ever gone before. Out into deep space. Considering that it took 30 years for the darn things to get out there, do we really want to blow this opportunity over a mesely few million bucks? I mean, 30 years is some people's entire professional career!
That being said, I think this is an area where scientists tend to underestimate the value of manned space travel. You'll notice that as long as manned space travel exists, it generates excitement in the general population. And as it advances, young people dream of one day visiting the stars themselves. Remove manned space travel, and the funding to ALL space ventures will be cut. Joe Smith really has no idea of the significance of the Voyager program. To him it's just a piece of junk that the Klingons will blast out of space in a few centuries. But give him dreams of visiting the moon, Mars, or other interesting places, and he'll happily support funding for all forms of space travel.
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Do not look into the sun with your remaining $4.2 million.
liqbase
Okay, so NASA spends $15 billion of our money each year, and the Pentagon spends another $20 billion on satellites and rockets. It costs a billion to launch a shuttle, and there used to be four launches a year, before they started losing things so often. They even canceled development of the X-33, and sold it for scrap metal, after spending 912 million dollars on it.
But we can't afford to spend a measly $4 million to maintain three projects that are still returning useful, interesting data, and haven't disappeared behind Mars or killed anyone?
I guess they have PHBs at NASA too! Maybe it's just about PR...making things look good to the average guy on the street, who thinks going to Mars is way cooler.
(I have to admit, the headline "Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination" made me wonder the Aliens had finally taked over ISS...)
Once the probes are built and launched, and the bulk of the diagnosis and repair of early malfunctions is taken care of, the rest of the probe is cheap to operate by comparison. By contrast, how much does the U.S. spend on gasoline or diesel for military vehicles within the borders of the U.S.? How much does the U.S. spend to allow congressmen to use government-paid-for television studios to film whatever they decide?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Doesn't our government spend that much money like, every tenth of a second? Geeze, Congress should be able to find that much money in the seat cushions of their couch.
We must continue to monitor V_y_ger's progress so that we aren't taken by suprise when he returns.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
Will the money saved enable NASA to save the Hubble Space Telescope?
If not, then what is NASA planning to study after everything shuts down? I mean the shuttles arent flying, Hubble's about to be scrapped...
Hey here's an idea, let's fake another landing on another solar system body!
We could use the money we save on scrapping these to help develop Iraq's space program! But seriously there are tons of other programs that the government should cut that are pretty absurd before they even think of scrapping a space program that is truly beneficial?
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
4 million for one year? IMHO that is cheap.
How about setting up a foundation that operates them?
I am sure there are enough people who would donate the required amount of money.
give us more money or else we will be forced to close / stop / retire this important / necessary / historic person / place / program
Essentially it's the same old story, give us more money for salaries and positions or else.
I'll bet this never happens.
(... and no, I didn't RTFA)
The Voyagers alone need $4.2 million a year for daily operation and data analysis.
Maybe we should start using FedEx.
While I'm not railing against the war, and I believe we should be spending whatever money is necessary to protect the troops, I find it interesting that it's science that gets shoved aside...
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The money needed to pay for that additional season of enterprise would pay to keep these running for quite a while.
So... THIS is how one of the Voyager spacecraft becomes a super-powerful entity and we have no clue whats going on when it comes back to kill us all.
If only we had kept monitoring the transmissions from the Voyager spacecraft, we'd be able to tell when it starts its homicidal rampage.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Forgive my ignorance here, but I thought I remembered reading a few years' back that everyone was looking forward to Voyager getting way out beyond the solar system because we might learn something more about the Oort cloud, source of all those nifty global killer meteors people got so worked up about after "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact."
Or is the instrumentation on Voyager just inadequate for finding that little matter in that much volume?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
America should stop polluting space with our arrogant imperialist dirty probes.
We apparently can't afford $4.2 million per year for discovering the origins of universe and having a presence beyond our solar system, but $1 million per year for studying wild shrimp is apparently a needed project.
I know that pointing out frivolous spending is the easy way to attack spending cuts for what one considers important, but this is just goofy.
I'm a big tall mofo.
.. it's so expensive?
$4.2 million dollars to analyse incoming data? You could employ 80 PhD astrophysicists for a year for that much. Surely there's not so much information coming back as to require that much computer time?
I'm not trolling, I'd just love to know.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There's no one as short sighted as a bureaucrat. I should know: I am one, and I work with them every day. We regularly do foolish things, to achieve short term, counter-productive goals.
See what I've been reading.
I mean, the V'grs havae a 28 year headstart. building a Human Resources probe fast enough to catch up with them may be cost-prohibitive. It might be cheaper just to keep 'em both on the books and write them off at tax time.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Spend a few dollars now to take care of our electronic children as they race off into space and maybe they'll be a little less pissed off when they return.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Just lay back and watch...
I'd suspect funding the Voyager probes would be a better (and maybe more ironic, given ST:TMP) use of their money than more episodes of that television show.
Imagine that: buying science instead of fiction.
This is insane. Sure some money will be saved, but nearly 30 years of funds will have been wasted. Do the math.
I think it's sort of indicative of our priorities that we spend $160 billion+ on a fanastic romp in the middle east and barely feel the need to justify the expense and yet we have trouble coughing up $4 mill a year when it comes to funding a scientific expedition which has the potential for giving us greater insight into our place in the universe. its times like these that i wish i had the option of controlling what my taxes funded.
Maybe they should have a better budget, but they consistently disrequard the areas where real science is delivered to prop up the useless ISS.
We need to save that money so we can put guys on Mars so we can...ummm...have guys walking around and stuff and taking cool photos and ahhhh...talking to the president over the radio and stuff.
We've already explored the edge of the solar system pretty thoroughly, right? That $4.2 million is badly needed to pay for approx 1/2 hr of the cost of our Iraq "policy".
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I can't imagine a worse idea in the space program than terminating these missions to save a half-drop in the bucket of the overall budget.
I've read a fair amount of discussion of how they're approaching the heliopause (the point at which the solar winds begin to be overpowered by interstellar winds) and, as JPL will say, "The thickness of the heliosheath is uncertain and could be tens of AU thick taking several years to traverse."
Considering it'd take billions more dollars and waiting decades to get that piece of data from somewhere else, I'd call it a bargain. I'm sure I don't know the impact of that information, but if something as fundamental as how far our sun's influence really extends is unknown, it seems like it'd be at least somewhat important.
Right on. Killing sandniggers is great entertainment for mentally challenged trailer trash! How could one rail agains *that*!?
Why not doing a Seti-like project ? Nasa just collects raw data, and a distributed program would analyse if the signal contains interesting stuff.
Why do we have to shut them down. This is kinda like the remote computers that I leave up in a closed office. Yeah, no one is using them anymore, but I keep them running all the time, because eventually I may need to get to them. Once they're shut off, turning them back on is Hell for me, impossible for NASA. It doesn't take any effort for me to ignore them, they're in condition that no one else can mess with them... Who are they bothering? JUST LEAVE THEM ON AND IGNORE THEM. That's a lot better than shutting them off.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Where do I turn in my Geek Card?
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
I'm surprised North Korea hasn't just hacked the Voyager crafts yet. It wouldn't take much programming skills (just a seriously powerful transmitter/receiver) to upload your own firmware into those suckers that locked out anyone else's signal.
Maybe they should just open source the sucker. Let the open source community run the science. Put the sucker on sourceforge and give us access to the transmitters everyone once in a while.
Someone you trust is one of us.
$4.2 million... let's see. That buys us about half an hour in the Iraq war, right? Where we spend $6 billion per month? I think that's right.
That money's needed for faith based initiatives, abstinence-only education and 'my-granpappy-ain't-no-monkey' stickers for textbooks. Question; can they save money by shutting down the analysis portion and just collecting raw data until more generous hands are on the budgetary purse strings?
Space missions that have lived beyond their usefulness should be shutdown, sometimes crafts work longer than initially planned. In this case however, the non-NASA affiliated scientists that rank the usefulness of old missions want it to continue. Where did the money in the budget go for the voyager's? Lets raise a couple million and help em' out.
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Bush is an oil corporatist. There's no money in space for him and his friends, ergo, space gets cut.
Trolling is a art,
lets see here, $4.2million, ~$16billion nasa budget, ~$2trillion national budget, ~$10trillion gdp.. .026% of Nasa budget, .00021% of fed budget, .000042% of gdp, .00049% of my own annual budget
this would cost
and a stamp on the letter to my congress reps would cost me
yeah, i think this is nearly cost effective to tell people of my concern because it's even cost effective for them...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
to keep these prohrams funded? As a taxpayer (reluctantly so), I am not willing to pay more money out. Having fought some budget battles, for some one to win, others must lose. Who is willing to give up a pet project?
Better yet, why not have those who want to continue the program contribute directly to it? Kinda like OSS?
Why does everyone insist on making every boneheaded decision by a government department the fault of george bush himself?.
Wow you must be really putting a lot of stock in his abilities to put his nose in every pie like that, so really what you're doing is saying how intelligent he is. He has to be if he can run everything!
I know this is an unpopular view, especially in the geek community, but it has to be said: I think this is a good thing.
I don't know, maybe I wasn't given too many model spaceships to play with as a child, maybe I didnt sit slackjawed infront of the TV watching Star Trek enough and maybe the firey passion that lies in some people about reaching the edges of our universe just isn't alive in me.
And it is quite possible the bleeding heart in me is just too overwhelming to recognize the significance, of spending millions on these space projects in part of billions of a NASA budget, while [for example] the US still doesnt have universal health coverage.
Bush's "starve the beast" mentality has the chilling effect of drastic cuts everywhere. I would much rather see NASA's budget get slashed to bits than any other program that deals directly with life on *this* planet.
Face it, NASA's whole begining was a technology ego fueld race with the USSR and perhaps its continuing existance is simply a "leftover" phase or just more ego building.
Let's just cut NASA funding all together now and save us about 200 stories, and the usual unwitty comments, on slashdot. not to mention it'll save us a lot of money and we don't have to worry about the possibility of some discovery challenging the existence of god.
in fact, let's just cut all non-military government research funding by 75%. we can trust private institutions to do this. after all, these are american companies so we can trust their sense of morality.
while we're at it, let's raise the price of stamps to 1$ a piece. this will help them build up a small reserve which they can blow on a new set of Elvis stamps, and we can save ourselves the 2 discussions and 2 minutes yearly on reading the stories about prices of stamps going up. it will also encourage people to use electronic distribution.
And where else can you get this data at even a hundred times this price?
Maybe some other country wants to receive this data.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
OK, maybe I'm being totally naive here, but... The probes are launched, they've long since finished their grand tours, and they're heading out to deep space. There's not a lot of operating to do. AFAIK, at this point, it's just listening, and the aforementioned analysis. So, could these roles perhaps be filled by amateurs? I know there'd be no shortage of volunteers. Distributed computing is the easiest part. Human analysis could be done by a mix of amateur and pro astronomers. Listening is probably the hardest (expensive radio telescope time), but perhaps even that could be handled via a distributed array system?
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I think the real story here is that the Aliens told NASA to cease and desist from sending probes into their territory.
Why do you think we've never been back to the moon?
Because the Aliens are mining the back side of it with their huge motherships, and NASA have been told to stay away.
If a spacecraft is about to leave the solar system, then surely we should at least leave it running for a couple of years in order to get some more data on the Pioneer anomaly - it would be a shame to pass up on the chance to study one of the few unexplained anomalies in elementary physics...
...write your senator.
Because everytime he opens his mouth he sounds like a total and absoulte moron......
Kinda makes him the poster boy for stupidity.....
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Average Americans are willing to spend how much money to "save" a TV show like Star Trek : Enterprise, but they can't find enough money to save something that's actually providing value for the human race?
Thank you.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
By my calculations at $166 million a day to be in Iraq, the US government could save the Voyager's first year's $4.5 million by leaving Iraq 39 minutes early. That seems reasonable.
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
This is just another example of the short-sighted science policies of the current government in the White House.
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
Should the public become aware of how shoddy the Bush administtration has handled the EPA, NASA and other science organizations, there would be a massive protest (not that Bush listens to anyone other than "Big Dollars").
It is time therefore, for all those who value research, intelligent thought and learning to make it known what is happening to science in the US and try to stop it.
Maybe someone should say "hey, ya know, I think there's a huge quantity of oil on Mars...we just need to go get it and it's ours".
If someone did that, we'd have a man on Mars before the end of 2006.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
NASA is just playing favorites right now, they have been so mismanaged over the years the damage is going to hurt to fix. Next thing you know, they're going to pull out some astronaut who is homeless on the streets, "look, we blow billions of dollars and we can't afford a few hundred thousand to buy this man a house! Damn you republicrats! Scientists think this astronaut should live in a house!"
Gee, we would have missed out on Anomalous acceleration if we had pulled the plug the first time they wanted to. (Have they adequately explained that yet?)
By guns, with the 4.3 million dollar we can buy guns, some guns, well not superguns, but normal ones, and we can send some more people to some country far far away to die there, for other people, who are damn rich ... and dumb ... and need oil. Or something, porbably they don't even know what the Universe is, besides Universal Studios ... or so ... GOSH ... I wished I would be rich, I'd give them the money ...
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Here's something else to consider - we've spent over $100 billion dollars now to invade and occupy Iraq - but NASA's budget is only $15 billion per year? Isn't space exploration a little more important than beating up on a third world country (flamebait)?
Maybe you shouldn't have voted for him.
No sympathy.
W doesn't give a rip about science.
Are you trying to take his title?
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
No, the problem is that he got very little enthusiasm out of the public when he presented the concept. As a result, he assembled a "team" to take care of it and went on to more pressing matters. If you want someone to blame, talk to:
1. Congress, who not only fails to fund NASA, but regularly cuts their bugdet while forcing them to outsource to ever-more-expensive contractors.
2. NASA's internal beauracracy that shifts managers around and kills programs without actually improving anything.
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It's a shame... especially if you think cost per citizen, and what the potential return on the investment might be. If you assume 200M people contribute to the taxes (don't know, but it's within a 2x factor), the cost PER taxpayer to maintain the daily operation and data anaylsis PER YEAR is $.02! How ironic that in this case the taxpayers don't even get their two cents worth!
The war in Iraq spends more than $4.2 million in an hour.
The man is a geek after all, no? Doesn't Bill and wife have a charity company or something? Give some loot to baby V, G!
While killing foreigners is immensely popular to watch on the evening news and deserving of many billions of dollars, science doesn't kill anybody, theres no explosions and so is very uninteresting to your average joe sixpack.
I didn't.
Anything else?
Considering that during the current fiscal year we have spent $ 151,351,702,275.20 just on interest on the debt, it seems that $4.2M is a very effective use of tax dollars.
Because it is the President who selects the Secretaries to run the various governmental agencies. The Secretaries in turn will attempt to follow whatever agenda the President wants.
While Bush, or any President, will not necessarily get bogged down in all the minute details, come budget time the minions are sent forth to find a way to do the Presidents bidding.
I had already moderated in this story so I couldn't post under my regular name so this is not an attempt to insulate me from my comments.
The 2nd issue is a direct effect of the 1st.
The 1st being the result of a republican-controlled congress.
They did it with no child left behind, they're trying to do it to social security, and they're doing it to NASA.
Instead of pledging money to save a mediocre show, why not find ways to channel this into maintaining some of these projects. I suspect you might find more geeks willing to part with greenbacks to fund such a thing than "Enterprise," and the program managers might, when faced with the choice of this or cancellation, find ways to drop the cost ("lifeline" support).
Just a thought...
If they want to save money, start asking for volunteers to do the daily operation and data analysis. Can you imagine the geek points you'd get for be associated with these projects. Might even be enough to get laid.
--
He'd better turn his Italian card too.
The way budgeting typically works in an institution, every year the administrators are told that they will have a budget of $x which is (typically) y% less than the year before. Administrators, whose self worth is directly tied to the budget and headcount they control, then find whatever (usually small) parts of their budget might have the most political leverage over the more senior administrators who set their budget. When the media then announces that whatever sacred cow is about to be slaughtered, the Administrators are more likely to receive their budget of $x-1/2y% or, in other words, relatively more money than comparable administrators in other departments.
Note, that certain administrative departments, think the Defense and Intelligence communities in the current presidency, receive favorable treatment thereby distorting the rest of the budget process. In fact, yesterday at the World Affairs Council of Northern California former secretary of defense Robert McNamara said that he felt that our $400b defense budget was excessive.
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
Come on guys ! Be practical! $4.5 million to "get" some stupid signals from a cold spacecraft which travels like a worm?
or $4.5 million a day to to buy more Humvees and body armours???
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I am Jonathan Vos Post, formerly Mission Planning Engineer on Voyager 2, for the the part of the mission called "VUIM": Voyager Uranus Interstellar Mission.
a cePu blications/210Ways.html
I worked for Charlie Kolhaase, Mission Planning Director, and Ed Stone, Chief Scientist.
So far as I'm concerned, NASA is telling me that I wasted my time (except for those nice screensavers of Miranda, which was a part of mission under my responsibility). Now they want to kill me, bury me, and desecrate my grave.
That's what this feels like, anyhow.
The interstellar part of the mision is extremely serious science, as others have said. We only have 4 interstellar probes right now, two Voyagers and two Pioneers.
Kill the still-working half of the fleet, and we're back to square one.
Who cares how the sun interacts with interstellar medium? Who cares if anomalous acceleration of the Voyagers tells us something about Dark Energy?
Let's go invade Iran, or shoot another Italian journalist, or detain a few hundred more people at Gitmo. Yeah, that's what our wonderful government wants to do with the money saved.
The gentleman from the Voyager Navigation team with whom I worked most closely still at JPL (promoted to management) -- I won't mention his name to spare him retribution from above -- correctly described himself as "The other interstellar navigator, besides Sulu."
My credentials on the subject are at
http://www.magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures/Sp
Yeah, because if Kerry would have gotten he would have.... Oh wait he would have killed off the plan to send people to Mars.
I agree wholeheartedly with the grandparent post about how without the prospect of manned space travel the public will have no appetite for any space exploration at all.
While I really love seeing the pictures sent back from Titan. The one thing they really make me think and wish is, Wouldn't it be great for someone to actually be there exploring that moon.
Seriously. This kind of news makes me feel very uneasy. Why is that we somehow have all the money in the world to investigate and research how to maim each other more effectively but can't find the pocket change to keep one of the most interesting ongoing science projects going.
Governments spend tons of money on arms research and ways to make mice reproduce asexually, but for some reason they think that a project that's been going strong for 30 years and still is valuable isn't worth anything.
It will be ANOTHER 30 FREAKING years before we can get chance to gather this information again.
Truly sickening.
I really hope that they'll come to their senses and reevaluate this decision.
(Sorry. Just had to get it off my chest...)
We all know that spending 4 million a year on old junk floating around in space is a waste of money. We need those resources to protect the homeland, defend our country from the ravages of terrorists, seeking to destroy everything we hold dear.
That 4 million is much better spent on armor for assault vehicles in Iraq or the next Republican Inaugural Ball.
Science. Bah. Next thing you know people will be squawking about education, as if educating people was good for anything. Listen up people, education turns people liberal! We can't have that! Keep the masses uneducated and Republican, the way God meant them to be!
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The 1st being the result of a republican-controlled congress.
Nonsense. Both Republicans and Democrats have been responsible for the various issues that NASA faces. In fact, the reason why we have the ISS instead of Space Station Freedom is because Clinton (and his Democrat controlled congress of the time) cut funding.
The issue is that congress critters are looking out for number 1, and that means shunting money wherever it will get them re-elected. Giving money to NASA doesn't get a representative re-elected unless NASA outsources to a large corporation in their constituancy. If we want space travel, we need an independent Space Agency, and we need the general public to make space travel a re-election issue.
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Is the first step. ;)
...
So, then stop it, already!
(Yeah, I know completely unproductive. I think it's funny at least.)
Would that be funnier like this:
1) Admin you have a problem
2) Cut it out
3)
4) Profit!!
I was surprised that my previous rant about Dan Goldin was flagged as flame-bait... but I want to revisit it.
Goldin in his reign was instrumental in killing NASA. As opposed to lobbying the government and stirring public interest, he became an implement by which NASA became irrelevant as he oversaw slash-and-burn budgetting.
NASA did not recover. I believe all recent failures in the space program are due to Goldin's initiatives.
And this is relevant to the Voyager topic because his policies continue. Its not an argument about funding cuts from the fed - because the fed greases the palm of the lobbiest selling the sexiest product (and lobster dinner.)
NASA today is nothing more than a federal children's edutainment organization. And the nation and the planet will suffer as a result of this. How many technological innovations came out of the space race? These presented REAL value to the corporate crowd. So anyone who thinks that research constitutes tax dollars ill spent - please remove all computers, cd players, cell phones, vcrs, and other subsequent beneficiary gadgets from your homes.
Shutting down the projects is also vile. Open the project up. Give it away to someone who will support it in industry. Or give it up to another space agency (or country that still thinks space exploration is a point of national pride.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Why go so faaaaaaar away?
70% of the earth' surface are oceans.
It's easier to send men to the moon and back, and have them do some space walk than to dive 4000m deep and do the same.
Sub surface research is not "sexy" enough and you don't have this cool simulation videos what 42 million dollars spent might look like if nobody get confused by inches and centimeters...
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
What NASA really needs is a better pitch man. Which of the following sounds better:
"Voyager is a 30 year old probe that has lasted well beyond it's intended purpose."
OR
"Voyager is the first wave of NASA's proactive plan at deep space detection, which ranks among the organization's most cost-effective projects to date." (The "second wave" would be Voyager 2.)
Let's face it, a room full of eggheads just don't know how to pitch a great product. If NASA would start selling it as a security feature, and not just some probe that sends back random data, this wouldn't be much of an issue.
Save money? For what? I thought NASA just got a big (PR-worthy) infusion from Congress. Is it all going to launch spy satellites? Further subsidy of Russian defaults on the ISS? Another 45 minutes of war in Iraq? The bill for one day of Secret Service in Bush's Social Security deathtour? In a $2.5 TRILLION budget, why save 138 micropercent by blinding America's most distant probes into the universe?
--
make install -not war
i think that unless either voyager finds intelligent life or a comet/astroid heading for earth, they should cut funding for them. either that or minimize the program to very bare operations. there's a fine line between eeking out info from old programs and irresponsibility. nasa needs to get a better perspective on its goals and focus more resources on fewer projects.
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
EXACTLY!!!
Remeber, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Cheap talk about a Mars mission that will never happen is cover to cut practical science today.
This is exactly the same as the cheap talk about a "hydrogen economy" which has been used to prevent progress on fuel economy today.
save some money from costly occupations :)
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
Yep. Bush will go for silly not-gonna-happen-and-no-point-if-it-did stuff rather than science any day.
NASA's internal beauracracy
Just as a data point, NASA is asking for $77 million next year just to fund changes to their financial reporting systems. Ie the noise in the flapping around the edges of the work of the people who couldn't find $4mil for Voyager would fund it for nearly 10 years.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Maybe the the information coming from the probes does not justify spending more money on them. What can you learn from a probe that is 11 billion miles away? It's a cold dark empty space. Rinse & repeat.
The history of the voyager missions is a real lesson in making do. That they still work at all tells you that 30 years ago nasa did a damn good job. Scrapping them to save a tiny handfull of cash seems however like a very typical thing for the americans to do. "Look we are cutting costs and giving the filthy rich tax breaks. Ain't we good!" No matter that canceling this project will means loss of data loss of jobs and the money will easily be used on some meaningless project that will never have half the impact but makes for better headlines.
Recently a dutch minister said he wanted to The Netherlands do have its own nasa. A few million is easily in our budget. Take it over from the americans and you got instant space mission rather then being the country that supplied the toilet paper for the international space station.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Maybe wild shrimp toting sonofusion-powered sonic stun beams will crush our enemies!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
4.2 million a year? That would kill you or I. However, if NASA really does decide to kill this project, perhaps some enterprising billionaire for whom such money is a pittance, (I can name a few; Bill Gates, Martha Stewart, and Oprah, for starters) can take this on as a "Chartitable Cause". Flame me if I'm wrong, but isn't spaceprobe operation-grossly simplified-a matter of keeping communication, downloading data, analysis, and-if there is fuel for this- slight course corrections?
Would someone like to explain why NASA gets to shut down an ESA project?
The US decided not to go ahead with their half of the Solar Polar Project at a fairly advanced stage, now they want to shut down the other half?
IMHO, the triggered reaction was intended. NASA wants more money to maintain basic science in the face of Project Mars, Bitches! and is threatening to cut these projects to show how dire the situation is.
When the Pentagon wants more money, they spend $$ committed to payroll and then tell Congress that unless they get more money, people won't be paid.
NASA's budget kung fu is weaker than DoD's.
Why does everyone insist on making every boneheaded decision by a government department the fault of george bush himself?
Because if The President wanted more science, there would be more science. Remember the space race? The President wanted to flex a bit for Russia and put science on a "fast-track" - and_we_touched_the_moon - rather quickly at that.(if you belive that sort of thing). And that was what, almost half a century ago?
Really, if The President wants science and technology for science, that is where (more) resources will be allocated; if The Commander in Chief wants more war and technology for war, there will be (more) war and technology for war.
It is not that The President has to have his nose in every pie, but that the pies he is sniffing get the appropriate funding.
[lame_pot _shot]We all know what kind of pies the current U.S. President likes to sniff, and it is not sweet sweet science pie.[/lame_pot_shot]
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Why do they need to Photoshop anything, when there are real shots like God giving us the finger?
So the US is willing to spend US$300+ billion on a questionable war (though democracy seems to be slowly starting there), but can't spare US$4M for advancing human knowledge.
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed. NASA's webservers (OK, JPL's) have consistently collapsed under the load of people checking the initial data returns from the unmanned probes. The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes. I think you underestimate the people's willingness to pay for good science, as well as their ability to understand what makes good science.
There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system. There will also be those who denounce spending a penny on "frivolous" ventures like space probes as long as Just One Child Goes Hungry here on Earth. I'm a fan of spending money wisely. We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Let's just all PRAY to understand the mysteries of the universe! Faith-based science!
would be of highest priority, considering all the issues mankind is pondering: global dimming question, ozone depletion/regeneration, green house effects from water vapor and carbon dioxide levels, climate change. I guess the cartoon ostrich technique of burying head in the sand is more appealing to our rulers...
Even if the program is cancelled there may still be some data observerd. These guys still get occasional data from the Pioneer craft even though the missions ended in '96.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
When Slashdot includes a spell check I will use it, until then, get over the typos...............
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Folks, I need to make this very, very clear: Research science is no longer a priority at NASA. It's all going to the manned program. We're trying to refocus where we can, support the effort with good science, but the only way we're going to continue to expand our understanding of the space environment as a whole is if you--all of you--get on the phone and convince your congressfolk that pure research is worth funding through NASA. Otherwise things are going to come to a pretty serious halt and space scientists are going to start leaving the US.
Baloney. Space science has been well funded in the past 15 years and continues to be so. Just look at the tremendous diversity and success of the current program - Mars rovers, orbiters, Messenger, Cassini, Great Observatories. Space science in the US has never had it so good. The question is will NASA continue to fund deep space missions long after their initial budgeted lifetimes? I can see why NASA budgeteers have problems, the progession is geometric. But I think the Pioneer/Voyager missions are so cheap and unique that they should be kept alive. Ulysses is another matter. I don't think it is in the same historical class. I'm sure that in 20 years some solar scientist will come up with a 40 year cycle the Ulysses must be funded to observe.
an ill wind that blows no good
One of them new fanlged popups that gets past firefox let me know that I might be infected with spyware and offered a free scan. Frankly, it really drags my opinion of a site down if they are serving up ads like that.
We could save them. I'd happily chuck in a few bucks a year to keep these probes going and I'm sure most of the people reading this story would too.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
What if NASA simply removed funding for the probes, but allowed a volunteer organization to take over the day-to-day administration. I would wager that the job would get done even better (after a few mis-steps, probably), and wouldn't cost the tax-payers anything. (I'm not saying that the probes aren't worth funding, just that volunteer funding definitely beats no funding.)
What if this is already NASA's plan? Create a demand for volunteer funding? Brilliant!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
That money's needed for faith based initiatives, abstinence-only education and 'my-granpappy-ain't-no-monkey' stickers for textbooks. Question; can they save money by shutting down the analysis portion and just collecting raw data until more generous hands are on the budgetary purse strings?
Half of our budget goes to Medicare and Social Security. How much of that money do you think is wasted due to government bureacracy?
Now, how much of the budget goes to the (albeit stupid) programs you mentioned?
Yet no spending cuts* can make it through Congress, because both sides are weighed down by lobbyists who will paint any cuts* in the most drastic light possible to sway public opinion. Everyone wants to cut spending, but not on THEIR projects, which means nothing gets cut.
* Note: 'cuts' are a misnomer. No spending is ever actually cut by Congress. When they use this word, what they really mean is they are just SLOWING the GROWTH in spending on a particular program. Most programs have built in "raises" each year in spending. That way, Congress can say, "Instead of giving your program 2% more money this year, we're only giving it 1% more -- we're cutting spending!"
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
$4m is nothing.
Who needs science when you've got Jesus?
-Turkey
Give it to the public to run!
For crying out loud. The machines are going to be out there sending signals back no matter if there are people on Earth collecting the data or not. It is my guess that there would be no shortage of volunteers to donate time and resources to keep the projects going. So why the hell NOT give it to the public to run? It would cost little to transfer the project out and provide gobs of good public feedback. For that matter, sell it to some other interests who might find some commercial value in it somehow. But to just abandon it and let it go when it could continue to serve some benefit is ridiculous.
The bulk of the funding is needed to provide DSN coverage to the Voyage Interstellar Mission. The rest is for support costs. Each Voyager spacecraft requires 50-70 hours of DSN coverage per cycle (based on the reading of the mission status reports on the VIM mission website). If they terminate funding and someone doesn't find a way to sneak commands to the spacecraft on the sly, contact will be lost, the Voyagers will go into their command reset "safe modes" and we may never regain contact with them. This is shameful. They don't cost much to run but they give us valuable data on the Sun's influence and how it influences the interstellar medium. The data helps refine models on solar wind dynamics, wind influence and strength over distance, particle interactions with the interstellar medium and ultimate tell us where our neighborhood ends and interstellar space begins. To the layman, yes, go for it. But these spacecraft are the only two vehicles this far out. It would take a decade or more to get a new spacecraft out there and if they cut funding to these, what makes you think they'll spend the billions of dollars and time needed to design a new spacecraft to explore the same region. Probably not in my lifetime. I'm a big fan of the VIM. I stand in awe of the foresight and talent of the engineers who built the spacecraft and the fact they remain operational after decades in space. The communications needs aren't that much and it is incredible that these faint whispers can be heard from so far away. Someone can't just pick up this mission from NASA. They would need a network similar to the DSN to communicate with the spacecraft and the technology is so old that it is improbable that someone else could learn how to communicate and interact with the spacecraft in time. Likely the only hardware and software on earth that can understand the Voyagers exists at NASA and if shutdown or disposed of, this knowledge would be lost forever. If someone were to pay my living expenses, I would happily work to help keep the VIM running. There is grandeur in hearing the whispers of ourselves from so far away and we should listen until they can't talk to us anymore. Cut some other program to help fund it. I can think of several.
"Because everytime he opens his mouth he sounds like a total and absoulte moron......"
he sounds to what he is
Welcome to America, where even in NASA, managers are idiots. I mean, seriously. $4 million in a MULTI-billion dollar budget? Give me a fucking break. Retards.
If you think I was referring to your typos then you're stupider than I first thought.
How about all those freaks who want to donate money to support a mediocre show like 'Enterprise' put into something worth while like this. Who needs big government to fund it, what about Paul Allen or the other rich geeks. Its only $4 million isn't it?
Obviously you have no concept of comprehension. You just proved bush is diverting funds from everything else.
Lets see the war in Iraq costs about $350 Billion. Just so we can turn around and buy oil from Iraq and Iraq can make billions more.
$4.2 Million to learn about the universe itself?
Advanced learning and understanding verses war and destruction.... hummm. I guess if your stupid or being paid off you would go for the $350 Billion.
Mind you I think the US should have spent $350 billion on alternative energy research instead of spending all that money to stabilize a country to be dependant on.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Instead of blowing your money on a crappy T.V. show, how about putting it where it can do something worthwhile?
Tell your State's House Representative to support larger budgets for NASA, with earmarks specifically for these programs:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
If they terminate funding and someone doesn't find a way to sneak commands to the spacecraft on the sly, contact will be lost, the Voyagers will go into their command reset "safe modes" and we may never regain contact with them.
This is shameful. They don't cost much to run but they give us valuable data on the Sun's influence and how it influences the interstellar medium. The data helps refine models on solar wind dynamics, wind influence and strength over distance, particle interactions with the interstellar medium and ultimate tell us where our neighborhood ends and interstellar space begins.
To the layman, yes, go for it. But these spacecraft are the only two vehicles this far out. It would take a decade or more to get a new spacecraft out there and if they cut funding to these, what makes you think they'll spend the billions of dollars and time needed to design a new spacecraft to explore the same region. Probably not in my lifetime.
I'm a big fan of the VIM. I stand in awe of the foresight and talent of the engineers who built the spacecraft and the fact they remain operational after decades in space. The communications needs aren't that much and it is incredible that these faint whispers can be heard from so far away.
Someone can't just pick up this mission from NASA. They would need a network similar to the DSN to communicate with the spacecraft and the technology is so old that it is improbable that someone else could learn how to communicate and interact with the spacecraft in time. Likely the only hardware and software on earth that can understand the Voyagers exists at NASA and if shutdown or disposed of, this knowledge would be lost forever.
If someone were to pay my living expenses, I would happily work to help keep the VIM running. There is grandeur in hearing the whispers of ourselves from so far away and we should listen until they can't talk to us anymore.
Cut some other program to help fund it. I can think of several.
Actully stupider is not a word, you can say more stupid or greater stupidity.....
Why don't you republicans go hang out at the GOP message board, then you can all discuss among yourselves the evils of the school lunch program, why rich people should'nt pay any taxes, the evils of the UN etc... etc...
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Bush will just look up what they were going to teach us in the Bible....
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Maybe the US can outsource it to another country that has more money to spend on research/space programs? Let them know how to run the thing and hand it over.
Can't Lockheed-Martin or some other private agency take it over? Or would the red tape screw everything up?
Hughes Aerospace? DirecTV? Burt Rutan? Someone that knows about satellites, step up to the plate and buy this stuff!
But where are you going to get the kind of marginal value you get by operating a probe, the startup costs of which have already been paid for (and justified by a successful mission)?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Career bureaucrats more interested in promoting themselves than getting the job done.
Yes!
Think of those 'rubber sheet' diagrams -- showing the distortion of space by gravity as a nice smooth event.
Now those four probes are out where they ought to be getting close to 'flat' space far from the sun -- and they're finding what could be wrinkles.
There's your 'space warp' -- if you can show there's any such thing.
No, better cut the funds FAST. It's not in the Bible, so we don't want to risk discovering it.
This frightens me... first Columbia crashes, conservatives in the White House, and now cancelling our deep space programs? Eerie.
1. Stupider is a word. You're obviously trying hard to prove yourself exactly that.
2. I'm not a republican, but don't let that stop you from dividing a world of various shades, meanings and colors into black & white. I mean, if you can't automatically label people you disagree with then you might have to think. We can't have that.
Now, how much of the budget goes to the (albeit stupid) programs you mentioned?
(speaking of faith based initiatives, abstinence only education, and "my granpappy-ain't-no-monkey" stickers for textbooks from the grand parent post)
Bush has said that last year the government distributed$2 billion in grants to faith based organizations for social welfare purposes. His budget for the upcoming year includes $206 million for abstinence education, an increase of $39 million over last year! And the monkey stickers, that's a state issue; but you can be sure that some states have spent quite a lot of money on stickers that suggest creationism and evolution stand on the same level of scientific footing.
The point is that while its true that the government spends most of its money on Medicare and Social Security, Bush is also blowing ALOT of money on socially conservative programs. The $39 million increase in abstinence education this year would have been more than enough to keep these clearly worthwhile science programs going at NASA had it received those dollars instead. But no, we're going to spend it on programs that have a clear history of producing and disseminating false, misleading, and distorted information about reproductive health. There's your Bush science right there, people.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
You people make no sense. The last president to do ANYTHING about improving the space program was Reagan. He spent money trying to undo the boneheaded space choices made by every president and congress after Kennedy. Once Reagan was gone, the status quo was again reasserted. I don't see ANY evidence that ANY valid choice in president would improve the space program.
If you want science done at NASA, it needs to be a re-election issue for congress critters. The president has some say, but at the end of the day it's congress who holds the keys to the purse. Making them see the light would be far more effective than complaining about the effectivness of the president's attempts to encourage the space program.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The San Jose Mercury said yesterday that NASA offering voluntary severance to almost all of its NASA Ames employees and contractors. It may have to lay off half of them due to budget cuts. NASA Ames has been a center of space and engineering science. due to its location, it very expensive to operate. However it draws on Silicon Valley and the local universities for talent.
Here are some numbers.
Do you realized that NASA was one of the few agencies to get an increase in their budget?
How about we do this the old fashioned way and just ask people directly for money. If someone can raise 3 million in private funds to save a tv show about exploring space, Enterprise, then somebody could certainly come up with the same amount to keep someone receiving and recording signals from voyager. NASA should turn over the keys to whomever raises the cash to keep running the program.
... if a community effort could raise the money needed to keep Voyager going. There seem to be lots of passionate responses here wanting to keep the mission funded.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
No, he's pushing for that because it gets good press, not because it has much in the way of scientific value. It lets him claim to be interested in spaceflight while he kills off Voyager, the Shuttle, and Hubble. Bastard.
Bush is an oil corporatist. There's no money in space for him and his friends, ergo, space gets cut.
While I agree that's why this program is on the chopping block, it has nothing to do with 'space' getting cut. Like you said, Bush seems to be a closet oil baron. That's why he LOVES space. That's why we are backing off from the space shuttle at the same time we are supposedly going to the moon and mars and finishing ISS and other scientifically pointless ventures.
When it comes to gas-guzzling, rockets put hummers to shame. Especially inter-planetary rockets. I predict a Saturn VI will be showing up soon.
Random and weird software I've written.
Is there anything to stop another body such as the ESA taking over the reigns if NASA gives up on it? Just a thought.
I'm sure I don't understand the cost or complexity of running a spacecraft. However, I'm certain that a volunteer organization could raise more than $4M per year to keep these spacecraft running. Additionally, I imagine that they could at least off-set some of the cost by relying on volunteer, possibly quite distributed, labor. Naturally, some of the labor cannot be distributed, and perhaps for some of the labor you don't want to rely on volunteers. However, money is money, and if NASA can do it for ~$4M, then I doubt that it would cost more than that for an independent organization to do the same. There are probably quite a few retired NASA employees who would be willing to donate their expertise. Probably several of these employees were involved in getting Voyager off the ground in the first place.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The argument is that Bush cut funding for NASA. He increased funding for NASA and congress cut the budget. So NASA has to rebudget to make up for ITS shortfalls.
Now you can argue that the war funding could be used to fund NASA. It could also be used to increase education and feed the world, cure cancer, woulda coulda shoulda...
You can also argue that maybe if the US wouldn't pay so much for video games, and tvs, and computers and millions to save shows like Enterprise then maybe we'd have more money to invest in private space exploration.
No, it's just easier to think it's the big bad man's fault (this year it's Bush) and next election we'll put a SMART man in office...like Hillary Clinton... and we'll pat ourselves on the back for being forward visionaries.
It doesn't change the fact that Bush fought for increasing NASA's budget. But I'm sure it helps you sleep better at night.
The ideal military defense, in my mind, would be:
A strong military with a large officer core, with training camps, procedures, and guidelines ready to quickly train and equip a huge scale army in case of invasion. After World War I Germany was only allowed a small officer core as an army. What they did was compose an elite core of soliders and train them to the hilt, and send to them to learn operation doctrine with all manner of other militaries - including at one point England, France, and Russia. When World War II started looming they were able to conscript a huge army and very quickly train and equip them. The civilian police authority was militarized, and you had a very powerful military machine where a very tiny one had exisited just 10 years previous. It's a good model for defending your country.
Spend most of what we spend now overall on ballistic missle defense. Not regional based defense, or protection that will benefit other areas of the globe. As close to perfect shield using whatever technology works to deflect/destroy any plane, missle, or ship that appears hostile from entering American terrority.
Lock down the borders, and have a good national debate on what levels of immigration we want, and from where immigrants should come. Recall our military from Europe and the Korean pennisula, from Japan and from Cuba. Line up our military on the borders, North and South, East and West, and keep out anyone who doesn't belong, no questions asked.
Create an all-volunteer expeditonary force that recieves private contributions as well as left-overs from the other branches of military service for foreign wars. Call it the American Foreign Legion. Let it be directed by the UN or by like minded nations. Offer very little pay and benefits for volunteers, except a guaranteed slot in the regular military afterwards, and maybe some discounts on college.
Amend Constitition to disallow the regular military from operating outside the terority of the US in any way except if first directly attacked. Direct the volunteer expeditionary force to handle nation building, relief efforts, and other such tasks non-defense tasks. Permanently fix funding for this branch of the military at $1 government dollar for each $1 private dollar. I'd imagine you could run a military like this on about $100B-$150B a year total. And another $200-300M for the expeditionary corp. With that we'd have a virtually impentrable border, a strong airspace protection system, and every private ship entering US waters could be escorted by the Coast Guard and each container opened and checked off-shore for contraband or weapons.
If we were ever invaded like Pancho Villa and his militia once did, or like the events that took place at Pearl Harbor again, we'd be able to institute a Department of War in short time, and repeal any invaders.
But I guess I am not practical. The Department of Defense isn't about defense. It's about pork barrel politics.
When it comes to gas-guzzling, rockets put hummers to shame
Rockets burn hydrogen and oxygen, not fossil fuel.
http://www.answers.com/stupider&r=67
Wow your right, my college english prof raked me over the coals for using stupider in a paper...
Hmm wonder if I can go back some 18 years later and get my grade changed...
Doesn't change the facts, nothing I said was stupid or stupider... just my opinion. You are apparently the one that doesn't like differing opnions.
So you are a democrat that voted for Bush, who cares..
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Mr. Columbus, I can't believe you are still clinging to this absurd notion that the earth is round. Yeah, let's not explore anything, I'm sure there's nothing left to discover in THE UNIVERSE. Unmanned probes are great, but an unmanned probe will have a limited set of instruments, cameras etc. and a limited ability to use them. A human can develop new methodologies and experiments on the fly and therefore return much more data.
Finding other idiots on
Giving money to NASA doesn't get a representative re-elected but it can affects things that can.
IANAL but the way I understand it is a privated citizen or corporation can donate money to a government project and a portion of that donation is either a tax credit or a tax deduction. When this is done properly that money is ear-marked for that project's budget and can't be used for anything else. So if it's deductable, and your at the 17% bracket, your congress-critter just got 17% of your donation removed from the funds available to his pork-barrel prodject!
If a print letter is more impressive to your congress critter than an Email, imagine how impressed he/she'll be when you've cut a check! Next you want to tell him/her, that your descressionary funds have been reduced due to your donation to NASA and therefore he will'not be getting a campain contribution from you this year! Additionaly you can tell him that we've invested 30 years into the voyager projects and throwing this a way, just when we about to get the next batch of intersting data, will set us back at least a century; so if this isn't rectified not only will he not get a campain contribution, neither will his children, grand childern, or great-grand children!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Look, they have panels of experts who rank the continued viability of these spacecraft and Voyagers and Ulysseus rank near the bottom of the pile.
It sounds really easy to say, lets just extend the support because its only a "measely" X million dollars. Then come the insipid comparisons to how much we spend on project Y, program Z, or war #1.
How do you think we end up with super silly budgets? Nothing gets cut. There is always someone who will stand up and cry that it is silly or downright stupid to cut support.
This is what is happening here. We have systems that cannot return data in sufficient detail for what we spend on them. Who knows, maybe some of the peeople who are watching these systems can provide better insight elsewhere, perhaps some are just hanging on because they can't be useful anywhere.
there comes a time when even the sacred cows have to be let go. I am not say that these are sacred cows but let me try one more comparison.
How many here think we should ditch the shuttle (I raise my own hand). Numerous posters comment how its a just a fraudulent waste of money while a whole 'nother crowd pops up and screams that if we do we might as well shut down NASA --- (strawman arguments usually)
So, let them go.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Let me point out to Bob Park's point of view on the way science is viewed by the current administration.
For those of you who don't know who Park is or have not read the excellent Voodoo Science, he is the president of the American Physical Society.
Murphy(c)
Ground antennas are in regular contact with the spacecraft, which are expected to last until at least 2020 before giving out as their plutonium batteries decay.
Man i need to get some of these for my Wavebird controller.
In many ways, Poppa Bush, Clinton did more. X project was resumed at NASA during the early 90's. From that we almost had another alternative to the shuttle (X-33), but W. killed it. Likewise, from the X project is the hypersonic research that will pay dividans assuming that W. does not totally lock up the knowledge with the military (sadly, I do not think that will happen). In addition, under clinton, he started the transhab as a replacement for Reagan's ISS and future exploration. But W. killed that as well. Fortunately, it was sold off and is now in private hands where it will not need massive funding, just continual funding. Both Clinton and Poppa Bush would have funded more for NASA, but they were both trying to balance the budget that Reagan had left (a true f***ing obsenity).
In fairness to reagan, his ISS was not to be the monstrosity that we have today, it was to be more like the original spacelab. For that, Clinton is to be blamed. But Reagan was no better than any other president. The last president to make an intelligent choice WRT NASA was johnson, but he was simply continuing Kennedy's work.
In the end, I do not thing that NASA will not be about manned exploration, but about doing the things that only pay very long term dividans. In essense, they will be on the cutting edge of research and most of that will be robotics. The reason why is simple; Funding. As was pointed out, congress holds the purse strings and pulls them close if they do not like what NASA is doing or is not helping them out.I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It lets him claim to be interested in spaceflight while he kills off Voyager, the Shuttle, and Hubble. Bastard.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call. Did the president call up O'Keefe and tell him to stop flying the shuttle? Nope, that was O'Keefe's call. The president actually asked what he could do to get manned flight back on track.
Now Voyager is facing cancellation from a desk jockey inside NASA and you think the president had something to do with this, how? The program is facing cancellation because some beaurocrats are worried about losing their jobs. The shuttle incident made things look very bad for NASA, and the inquery board's findings of "too much management" made them look worse. Managers inside NASA are trying to look like the "fiscally responsble" ones so that it's not their head on the chopping block.
Stop trying to make everything into a Democrat vs. Republican argument. It has no bearing on reality and only makes people here look stupid.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Mod Up More.
That was classic intercourse!
If only you'd stopped before that last, ignorant line.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Once again we have another example of real science being killed off so NASA can continue it's slavish and visionless mission from before we even landed on the Moon.
So we watch while they desperately try to scape up every amount, no matter how tiny, from worthy missions such as this in order to feed the Space Station and Shuttle programs.
When the post-Apollo era was first being studied NASA came back with a 1-2-3 punch, a space station to study deep-space and long-duration missions, a space shuttle to support cheap, timely and safe crew exchange, both in order to get ready for a mission to Mars. Nixon balked (rightfully) and told them to pick one. They picked the Shuttle, justifying it by saying the cheap access to space would let them go back to the station in the late-70s/early-80s. That turned out well.
What's sad about all of this is that the missions only support each other, neither, on it's own, would have ever made it to bent metal. They built the shuttle to make the station cheap, but when the shuttle turned out to be the most expensive launch system in history, they STILL kept to the original plan -- and now we have the most expensive launch system supplying the most expensive space station. And since the budgets go down (inflation adjusted) every year, NASA has to turn off every other project and feed every dollar into these useless projects.
Someone needs to stop the madness. No one will. What's the sound of freedom? "Oink!"
and the reason that we have the bloody thing at all is that noone has had the balss to kill the pointless money sink.
You said so yourself, it is charity on large scale. Unless they somehow made money off of it (or tried to). Not all uses of private money are Capatialsim.
It might seem like semantics to some, but I get annoyed when the Libertarian leaning people on slashdot misuse a term they are supposedly understand.
Stephan
If you really wanted to cut government discretionary spending, cut defense spending. By eliminating the non-functional boondoggle that is Star Wars and cutting funding for other Cold War weaponry (about $50 billion off of the current $400 billion defense budget), we can free up enough to more than pay for the Voyager program AND a whole bunch of other things.(Source)
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Someone familiar with Voyager please enlighten me... Why does it cost $4.2 million to record a radio signal? I'm sure you need special equipment, but that figure seems a bit exorbitant.
Seems like one scientist could handle the job of recording. If later on we want to put more people on the job of analyzing the recorded data, we could.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
This is just another example of the short-sighted science policies of the current government in the White House.
All you need to do is convince them that Emmanuel Bin Laden (or Osama Goldstein) is hiding somewhere out there.
"silly not-gonna-happen-and-no-point-if-it-did stuff"
He's shooting for the stars, I agree... but that's the point!
It's the right idea. Any research into manned space travel should be the top priority of the PLANET. We have forever to observe the solar system. If we don't get self-sufficient colonies off of this rock, humanity itself could be extinguished when the next big disaster strikes.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
In your eagerness to discredit and malign Bush, you imply that anyone who believes in the feasibility and value of attempts to go to Mars (for which there are many plans on the board of varying practicality), and possibly of manned spaceflight in general, is unreasonable. Surely you do not mean this. Even if you personally do not hold the same idea of value and feasibility for this type of exploration, surely you agree that there are some respectable scientists who disagree with you, correct?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I can't believe NASA has been pissing away our tax dollars on some unmanned satellites out in the boondocks of the soloar system. By killing the support for this program we will save enough money to launch one more shuttle flight (where the REAL science is done) in just 302 YEARS!
($4.2 million / 1.3 billion average shuttle flight cost.)
As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I love Microsoft because they "...will make the decision based on what is best for customers."
Let me add that I love NASA because they always base their budget priorities on how to get the most scientific knowledge for every dollar spent.
Oh, and they're immune to politics and mere PR crap.
Insert witty sig here.
the question begs to be asked, why do faith based programs need money at all. isn't jesus enough? can't he provide them with everything they need without the government? or is he no longer able to provide miracles? or _is_ his miracle simply the current government? ;)
If they can scrounge up millions to try to keep Enterprise on the air, I'm sure funding ACTUAL REAL SCIENCE should be a more worthwhile cause.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
The sun is nearing a 11 year low on a 22 year activity cycle. It has nothing to do with "magnetism" in that regard.
I am a sysadmin, so maybe some of you writing programs can say "yea or nay" to this...If the problem is money for data analysis, why not a program like SETI at Home to crunch it? I would be willing to run something like this to see that they keep the missions going...I am afraid the day after they quit analyzing the data, they will find life!
The question is, why is it so expensive? We're just monitoring the damn things! Hook up a computer to record all the data, and have a guy come in once a week to clean the place! Once you get a good chunk of data, use distributed computing to analyze it. This really shouldn't be costing us that much.
(I realize radio-telescope upkeep is probably expensive, but it can't be 4.2 million a year...)
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Gee you're a complete fucking contradiction.
So it is all Bush's fault. He's the one with his hand on the trigger?
It has nothing to do with (the fact that *YOU* POINTED OUT) NASA's spending.
Oh wait let me guess, Bush is the one who made NASA spend $77 million on their financial reporting system, right?
If you want someone to blame, talk to...
Sigh! If you want someone to BLAME, talk to:
1. Yourself (ie: Why do I continue to vote for morons??)
2. Your neighbor (ie: Why are you voting for these morons?)
I just can't understand this thing we have against putting actual qualified people into office. Do they appear too arrogant? Do they have bad breath? Are they are bald, old, and wrinkly? What's the deal? If you want your gov't to do things like good science or good LAW, you simply have to vote for people that believe in those things. Voting for the guy with the biggest campaign budget will get you what you have now. If this is what you want, then carry on. If you want change, you know the routine. Am I getting through yet??
What?
finger on the trigger
Face it, the Bush administration does not understand science or space exporation. The following is an actual quote from George Bush while he was govenor of Texas:
"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."
...Governor George W. Bush, 8/11/94
Huh huh... he said "Uranus"
That's nothing. Divide it by the US population.
Just my two cents. (literally)
A few million a year vs a "big Science" shuttle
launch of some grampa senator or the total vapor of a manned mars mission. Save the bogus money and use it to do real science on projects that already work.
Billions of dollars bonked
into mars because someone forgot the parachute or
how many newtons are in an imperial gallon; shutting down V-ger is the same level of stupidity. jeez,
it works unlike most of the NASA explosions.
NASA should consider open sourcing those projects. Learn from SETI@home. There are probably enough enthusiasts with the brains to keep those missions up with only minimal funding required by NASA for the very basics.
I have a hard time believing you were in charge of anything. Welsome to the world of government contracting. Sometimes you have to justify your existance and sometimes outsiders have different priorities. Flaming about world politics you probably know very little about will not help your cause.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Space.com article discusses that these satellites aren't in predicted trajectories.
I'm not saying the two are mutually exclusive. I just find it interesting that people are willing to take to the streets for a television show and will invent a foundation to fund it, but wait for someone else to tell them where to send money for real science.
I'm just wondering if anyone will create a Voyager United fund, or if they'll just fold their arms and wait passively for others to solve the problem.
There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system.
It is not absurd. We are just not ready yet. And you get ready partly by sending robot probes first.
Table-ized A.I.
This news makes me very, very sad and I can feel your pain...
I was not born yet when the Pioneers/Voyagers were launched, but when I started to learn more and more about the world around me as a kid.. I became fascinated with space at a very young age.
I just cannot tell you how much both projects and their teams have inspired me throughout the years... and how much I wish I had been born earlier and been part of the whole those mission teams!
Those probes are IMHO still on the frontier of our knowledge and technological capabilities as humans.
Even though they're 'just' made with technologies from the 1960's and 1970's... I have an enormous amount of respect for the way those probes have been built, their ability and stability.. and their precision!.
IMHO, these missions are one of the 'wonders of the (tech.) world' and a beacon for what we should be doing as a race: explore the Universe!
(indeed, instead of all those pathetic wars on this planet)
Thank you and your collegues for everything!!
Are costs really the problem? NASA will get to spend about $16.45 billion dollars next year. To me, this sounds more like the standard bureaucrats ploy. Tell the rubes to their favorite programs are going to be cut, unless we can get our hands on more money. Same thing happens every time your local school district thinks it needs more cash. If it is being cut, surely it must be on the bottom of the list of priorities. Maybe we should be asking what else is higher up on the list. I'll let you in on a little secret. Even if you raise the money start your own Voyager project, NASA will fight you tooth and nail. They'd rather have the project die, than have their own little space monopoly challenged.
If they are really short of the $4m per year to fund this project, put the mission up for tender...
I am sure that there are other countries whose governments would love to have a deep-space mission
And for $4m per year, it's a bargain!
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
I can see it already on the news:
...
Virgin Voyager 1 and Virgin Voyager 2 spacecraft have discovered a new planet in an area formerly believed to be outside of the solar system last month. A spokesperson for Richard Branson said the newly discovered planet will be called Virginius
Voyager: "Hello, Earth? Wait until you hear what I found. See, there is this great big..."
Earth: "Please deposit another 25 cents. Please deposit another 25 cents. Please de..."
Table-ized A.I.
Regarding a reply from further down:d =142000 &cid=11900922
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?si
Is there nothing that can be done by distributing work to PC's?
I think a manned mission to Mars will get so much commercial attention at the outset, that there will be "Mars fatigue" on the part of the American public well before they reach Mars. Unless they find two-headed advanced alien civilization (one head just won't be enough), people will have turned off daily updates of the mission. The only ones who will stick with and care about the Mars mission are dedicated geeks. But they will be turned off by the whole "McMars" approach.
Meanwhile Fox will pick it up, and will re-vamp the whole "Mars Mission" as a reality TV experience. Mission specialists will be coached to; "have more attitude, stir things up." Mars feaver will pick up again and be a smash hit.
Meanwhile, China and India will have developed FTL drives and be sending images back from Jupiter, which won't do as well due to poor dubbing. The entire U.S. economy will go into a tailspin, however, once Tarantino is recruited to improve the Chinese space program documentaries.
There is going to be a lot of real science that ends (for more money than continuing it) and we are going to get little out of this Mars Mission. Because it is just PR and will be run that way. Real science at NASA will get short-shrift. They might as well apply to weapons manufacturing companies because that is where this slush fund is going. Yippee!
Please give me credit for having coined "Mars Fatigue" first. Just my 5 minutes of fame.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Even if they scrap the collection/analysis of data, the probes will still be transmitting, and we'll still be receiving. Why not just release information about the frequencies and protocols used, so that anyone can view the data that will get sent with or without the program. I'm sure plenty of people would be willing to collect and analyze it.
"may god help bush is hes wisdom to lead the world back to the dark ages"
What?
With critics like these, what the hell does Bush have to worry?
Ok, so the Deep Space Network time costs some dollars to run, but will that network operate cheaper when it is idle and not rented? Probably not.
Sometimes, only the variable costs should be considered, not the fixed costs that will just turn up elsewhere.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed....The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes....We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
"The conquest of space is worth the risk of life....Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves because, in the final analysis, only man can fully evaluate the moon in terms understandable to other men."
-Gus Grissom
Grissom was talking about the moon, but it's true about any location. We go because that's what we do. Exploration salves the spirit.
Robot probes have their place, and it is a vital one, but you underestimate the power and importance of having a person there, whether there is the moon, Mars, or wherever else you're going--because until we're there, we'll not have been there.
What we need here is a little out-of-the-box-thinking. Why not turn it into an all volunteer project? Here's our chance for one of the greatest open source hacks of all time. If we can create multiple operating systems and associated software with only ad-hoc means of funding, I think we can do the same with this project. Surely we could reverse engineer the transmission protocol which communicates with the spacecraft (even if the data is encrypted, its 1970's based encryption which we should be able to break). In fact what we are dealing with here is all 70's based technology. Moore's law to the rescue. But we'd also need a large antenna right? Well I have not done any signal-to-noise calculations, but what if we used 1,000+ smaller antenna distributed throughout the country? You know, like those large dishes from the analog satellite TV days. Okay, maybe the recievers would have to be sitting in a bath of liquid nitrogen. So what? It's cheaper than milk. And we might have to be syncronized in time and know the precise locations of each antenna. Hey, that's what the 'Net and GPS are for. There are a thousand other reasons why the pessimists might say this couldn't work, but pessimists never accomplish anything anyway, ignore them.
Would someone like to explain why NASA gets to shut down an ESA project?
... the Europeans, for all their leadership's stupidity on software patents (welcome to the downward-spiral-to-hell club, by the way), they aren't likely to spike funded research just for the hell of it.
... but religious fanatics are not rational, reasoning people. Faith trumps and precludes reason, and therfore rationality, and this is clearly borne out in his behavior and policies. Why he is irrationally wreaking this country we don't know, but speculation is fun, and the above is not completely out of the realm of possibility. In any event, it certainly is fun to speculate.
The US decided not to go ahead with their half of the Solar Polar Project at a fairly advanced stage, now they want to shut down the other half?
Bush probably fears for the reputation of America as leader in science and discovery, now that he has slashed NASA's budget, replaced real ongoing scientific research that is yielding exciting results today with unfunded, and unfundable, pie-in-the-sky programs that will never amount to anything (sending people to Mars will probably happen in the next century, but not in the next 20 years). Scientific discovery is likely to peter out to no small degree in America's space program as a result of these terrible policies, while the European Space Agency is coming into its own. What better way to protect ourselves from emberressment than by getting the ESA to stop research as well.
Not that it's likely to happen
But why would the Bush regime do this? Maybe Bush fears the science will difinitively disprove the existence of God. He is dumb enough to miss the fact that the existence or lack thereof of a God is orthogonal to science, and while science has disproven most of the Book of Genesis, it will (likely) never touch on whether or not a God exists. The most it will ever do in this regard is prove or disprove various Christian/Mormon/Muslim/Jewish assumptions about said beings interaction with the physical world are/are not true. So far it's been "are not true", particularly for the Mormons (who have had a bad year having their basic beliefs WRT the Book of Mormon and the native Americans as descendents of a cursed son of an Israeli settler in pre-Columbian America disproven by genetic analysis) and the Muslims, but so what? The real question of is there or is there not a God is ananswerable by science, at least as we now know it, but I digress.
This isn't likely, mind you, and certainly no rational person would think like that
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Although I disagree with the decision, perhaps some kind of compromise is in order to avoid a *complete* shut-down. For example, rather than send readings every day, maybe the probes could be programmed to summarize or lossy-compress the info and send it only once a week.
For instance, rather than send recordings of a continuous stream of radiation level reads, split the data into hourly or daily chunks, and send only the min, max, average, and std. deviation for each chunk. This would take less bandwidth, and thus could be batched into fewer communication cycles.
Further, maybe program it to store events that fit a certain profile or threashold. If a big event is recorded, then Earth is told about it on the next communication cycle, at which point more resources are optionally spent to download the details of the event.
Table-ized A.I.
Are we actually getting any data that is useful or is it just letting us know that it still there. The article never said if we are getting any data. I remember a few years ago reading that the signals from deep space are so dim that we just know it Voyager, but not what they are saying. If we are getting data that is one thing, but if all it is doing is saying "I'm still here, it's cold out here" then it may be time to let them go. The solor probe is one that should stay and running, it is giving data.
Great people don't need people to complete them, great people complete other people. -- Matthew Pawlikowski.
Jeez, take up a collection. I'm certain you could find that much a year for viable science.
He's shooting for the stars, I agree... but that's the point!
Well, as one of the many who don't agree with almost anything Bush does, I have to agree that shooting for the stars has a lot of potential. I have thought for a while that we need another Kennedy to set a lofty goal and then get the country involved in achieving it. People want to care about something, but everything is politicized so much that it's hard to find anything we can agree to like. (Doubly so when partisanship requires that half the country dislike something simply because the other half likes it.)
That said, I think his execution was fatally flawed. I don't know anyone who is excited about our going to Mars. I don't see aerospace companies getting lucrative contracts to do the almost-impossible. I just see more business as usual. It's sad. He needed to get a lot more support before making a pronouncement like that, including finding the billions to fund it.
I did.
Anything else?
(written from prison)
"Mmm... tasty!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Geeze, I can't believe I just read through this entire thread and haven't seen a single mention of what people (at least those who are US citizens) can actually do about this. Go here:
http://www.congress.org/
Type in your zip code. Look at the list of your elected officials. Call them or send them a paper letter (even better if you include a donation in it). I did it, and you can too. Believe it or not, congresspeople actually listen to their constituents.
That said, I hope in the future more and more science-related projects get handled by private groups, like the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 launch of the first solar sail spacecraft next month. That way, instead of whining to congresscritters about using other people's money for projects we care about, we can just give the money ourselves. I'm sure the actual Voyager space program would be able to raise at least as much money as the Enterprise television show.
No, and you probably wont. Ever. When people vote Kerry to get Bush out of office, or vice versa, you get this kind of mentality. When politics is about getting votes, not good politics, something is terribly wrong.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Why is the above a troll? Flamebait maybe.
What if we voted for the guy that lost, does that mean we can point our fingers and say, "I told you so!"
I am sorry for this. The team that worked on Voyager are world class engineers. You are never going to get the recognition or money you deserve. That seems to be the price of following a higher calling.
Just remember to the "people that matter", guys like you are the real heroes. I work on websites, multimedia and videos, but uncharacteristically, when people ask me who my heroes are I respond; "my dad, Richard Feynman, and physicists." Sometimes Jimmy Carter because he was one of the few polliticians who pushed our country towards things that had long-term benefits. I don't look up to athletes except to admire their discipline. But having met actors, athletes, scientists, polliticians and clergy, I have to say that scientists are by far the most interesting and heroic of the group.
Sadly, I don't think NASA or America is going to see a silver lining for some time. The fact that few of the NeoCon supporters have realized what a total failure things have become means that any realizations will have to wait until after a 2nd great depression, after sea levels have risen, and after America has become 2nd rate. When things are obvious, and blaming someone else will be little consolation for hungry, sick kids without a future.
I recommend you find another place to work. You are only going to prolong the pain by watching NASA slowly die. I could be wrong, but that's just how I see it. I felt the same way on November 3rd, when, in direct opposition to what the exit polls inidicated, Bush won reelection of a sort. I knew I had to give up my dream that America was anything but a corporation with good PR.
Wow, have I become a bummer, or what?
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Absolutely. Good post.
There are many good reasons to go to Mars. Bush, however, is not interested in them. He doesn't really want to go to Mars, he wants to destroy NASA. "What, you can't get us to Mars? Say goodbye to your budget..."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
latest bumble would be redundant so let me try to keep my blood pressure down and look for alternative interpretations of the decision:
If we kill enough of the basic data gathering about solar cycles, there will be less data to refute the head-up-their-ass contingent who say global warming is not caused by fuelish humans and is just natural variation in the output of the sun...
Nah, that didn't help me any either...what our govmint is doing to science just sucks any way I look at it.
You call that a troll? I have a whole beltway full of trolls better than that!
'cuts' are a misnomer. No spending is ever actually cut by Congress. When they use this word, what they really mean is they are just SLOWING the GROWTH in spending on a particular program. Most programs have built in "raises" each year in spending. That way, Congress can say, "Instead of giving your program 2% more money this year, we're only giving it 1% more -- we're cutting spending!"
This is because of inflation. If the same amount of money isn't buying as many nuts and bolts, then naturally, every program will be "cut" as the economy grows. Inflation will jump a few percentage points a year, so programs are adjusted for inflation. When they choose to decrease funding, they will sometimes kill the inflation adjustment.
How do you know? Anyway, there are several ways to send a message to someone that they will still read quite clearly that are nonetheless more oblique than giving them a phone call.
Underfunding NASA is a pretty clear message, for example.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
and good riddance to bad garbage I say.
I'm sure when oil is discovered on a distant celestial body Nasa will get lots of funding to "explore without prejudice"
What does it take to recieve the signals from these satellites? Why does the govt have to continue doing the decoding? Crack the scheme, decode the data yourself.
I followed you right up until:
programs that have a clear history of producing and disseminating false, misleading, and distorted information about reproductive health
Are you insinuating that abstinence does not provide 100% protection against both unwanted pregnancy and STD?
And while we're cutting out spending on programs, let's take a closer look at "welfare reform", light rail projects, "sustainable urban communities", or the Big Dig.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Underfunding NASA is a pretty clear message, for example.
Which, I repeat, is what Congress does. The President has almost no control over funding!
Unless, that is, your point is that Congress sent O'Keefe a message, and he caved.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No, he is insinuating that teaching only abstinence to high school students does not produce a demonstrable reduction in rates of pregnancy or STD's.
Where these programs mislead, is in implying that abstinence is the only viable strategy for avoiding pregnancy and STD's.
hopefully my intention was conveyed in the subject.
We did that once. It was called The Dark Ages. Oh, what glorious days those were.
Sadly, a bunch of malcontents -- Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, et al -- started asking impertinent questions and, despite repeated polite entreaties, refused to shut up about it. The result was the chaotic mess we have today. (And to think these guys' names are revered today.)
But we're working on it. We have a great friend in George W. Bush and, with his help, we will restore the order, stability, and tranquility mankind enjoyed in the past.
It would cost less money to build a working fusion reactor than it would take to send a 6-man team to mars for 6 months. Now which of those do you think would help long-term space exploration more?
Here is the basic idea a fusion reactor produces 1,000,000X the energy per unit mass than a chemical rocket does so your ship needs little fuel mass to keep it going and going and going. It's also vary vary safe to build and transport so you build one ship in orbit using one of these and you can basically get to turn on the ION drive and leave it that way for years thus getting 100's or thousands of to mars from orbit cheaply. After all why build a ship that can go there once when you can build one that can make the trip twice a year every year for 20 years.
Yes I wan to get off this rock but we need to be really to do that by first building cheep craft to get to orbit and then build ships than can move us around the solar system cheaply. Until that point going to mars is little more than a publicity stunt that teaches us little and is so costly we will not repeat it for 50 years.
That's MILLIONS of TAX DOLLARS that should instead be going into WEALTHY PLUTOCRATS' POCKETS.
Is that not a solution: There are lots of amateurs who love to analyze this data.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
knows how to spell "kool-aid"
To translate. I just called you an idiot.
Yeah, that's pretty much my statement. While Congress is strictly in control, the Pres does have some influence there... It's not like they don't communicate.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have seen talks given about the heliosphere, based upon current data from these probes, and how future data will shed light on this. This is an active area of research and the Voyagers are providing very useful data. The scientists are not suggesting indefinite funding- they want the funding to be continued because these probes are on the verge of passing out of the solar system into interstellar space. This is a very real boundary that astronomers would like to know more about and it seems absurd to end these missions right before we get there.
Terminate these Voyagers now, and in ten years you will see calls for a new probe to be launched to study these regions; only now, you will need 1/2 billion dollars for an entirely new mission. That is why this is penny wise, pound foolish. The scientific review board apparently agrees- they felt there was enough science there to continue funding.
If you would like to see what is being published, do a search for Voyager on the ADS; you will find numerous papers based upon this current data: http://adswww.harvard.edu/
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call.
Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to *keep* the Hubble?
I appreciate your sentiment that this is not necessarily a Rep vs Dem issue. However, the president is ultimately responsible for what the federal bureaucracy does. While scrapping the Hubble may or may not make sense, let's not forget that the president has considerable sway over the actions of federal agencies.
It would cost less money to build a working fusion reactor than it would take to send a 6-man team to mars for 6 months.
Since when was making physics work a matter of money? There has never been a Fusion plant that produces more power than it uses. Not a single watt, not a single Joule. While scientists have ideas on getting around this, Fusion is perpetually "20 years away". I don't see that changing until we're already in space. Why? Because then you can build fusion plants that don't need so much destructable shielding.
Here is the basic idea a fusion reactor produces 1,000,000X the energy per unit mass than a chemical rocket does
Err... right. One million times, you say? Assuming you're correct (which you're not), you still need to translate that into work. Most nuclear rockets are 2-10x more powerful than their chemical counterparts, not some mythical "one million times". Oh, and I did I mention that the 10x rocket uses fusion? Fusion BOMBS that is.
It's also vary vary safe to build and transport so you build one ship in orbit using one of these and you can basically get to turn on the ION drive and leave it that way for years thus getting 100's or thousands of to mars from orbit cheaply.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Someone PLEASE stop the torture.
After all why build a ship that can go there once when you can build one that can make the trip twice a year every year for 20 years.
I agree. That's why nuclear, interplantary starships are the right idea. Of course, to build those we need funding. So far, only the going and down part has been funded. And very wasteful methods have been funded, at that.
Yes I wan to get off this rock but we need to be really to do that by first building cheep craft to get to orbit
Agreed. Got any ideas? I've got a few. The simplest is to build a scaled down Big Gemini, and pop it on top of an inexpensive rocket. At 50 mil per launch, it would be far more cost effective than the Shuttle. If we have a reason to send people up constantly, then economies of scale could conceivably lower that to ~10 mil per launch.
That's one idea that could be investigated, but hasn't been. The dirty little secret is that the space program was wound down after Apollo, and hasn't been truely focused since then.
and then build ships than can move us around the solar system cheaply.
Indeed. NERVA and Orion are well understood concepts in starship propulsion. Early craft could use these engines while experiments and research is done on more exotic methods such as Nuclear Salt Water and Daedalus drives.
Until that point going to mars is little more than a publicity stunt that teaches us little and is so costly we will not repeat it for 50 years.
Well, we could use the first reusable ship to go to Mars. After all, we DO have to build a ship. Why would we bother making it disposable? After all, this isn't a moon shot from the bottom of the gravity well.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yet no spending cuts* can make it through Congress, because both sides are weighed down by lobbyists who will paint any cuts* in the most drastic light possible to sway public opinion. Everyone wants to cut spending, but not on THEIR projects, which means nothing gets cut.
You're wrong. The National Science Foundation last year (FY2005) had an actual, honest-to-goodness cut of 1.7% relative to FY2004. Accounting for inflation, that's more like a 4-5% cut in real spending power.
As far as I can tell, the President has little commitment to real science (that is, the kind where you don't already know what the answer is that you're trying to find).
Sadly that hasn't been true for a while.
That BBC News article was written way back in 2001. In 2002 NASA stopped receiving recognisable telemetry data and in February 2003 there was no signal at all from the spacecraft (there was only a very weak signal in the January 2003 session).
See the Pioneer 10 home page for the details.
Chris
Let me get this right, it costs NASA $4.2 million a year to receive and analyze a few kilobytes of data from these probes a day? It sounds like they have a team of engineers working on this project for god's sake. Maybe they could, you know, just scale back their mission and put the engineers somewhere else? I mean, do they even really need one engineer devoted to this full time? It's no wonder NASA has budget problems.
It is absurd. I'm sorry, but Earth is the only body in the solar system that can support human life. Any outposts will be just that, utterly dependent on the home world for food, water, air, and materiel.
Unless, of course, you believe in terraforming, in which case we've reached the same impasse one finds in discussions between the devout and the atheist.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
starship voyager. It's discontinued mission, to seek and find a new job...To boldly go where everyman in the unemployment line has gone before.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Nice, easy solution.
Instead of the government spending billions apon billions of dollars fighting the most illegal war in the history of this country, they could spend the money on something useful like science, research and development, rebuilding the lacking education system.
I am still in shock with those figures... 77 million? Jesus, I would be happy to do their financial accounting for 1% of that every year.
Hey idiots at Nasa - yea you dumbnuts - give me a job - pay me 1% of that 77 million and I will have your financing done.
Jesus, I want to be a gov't contractor.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Having worked for NASA TWICE in my career, once in the late 80's and again in the late 90's NASA is ALWAYS underfunded. However, NASA wastes a LOT of that money they do get. They can't even determine if they get overcharged for a pencil. NASA is in dire need the kind of contract and expense reform the DOD had to do after the $2000 hammers were revealed. Also, scientists at NASA want missions to do EVERYTHING and they have zero concept of what it costs, then they continually polish things, underestimate timelines and then the projects take 3X as long as planned and eat the budget for the next 2 missions. It's not that NASA has bad ideas or bad scientist or bad engineers, it's bad managers mostly on the financial side. Along with a great case of not saying "NO" to new projects so that things like building maintenance can occur!! If everyone wants to continue to listen for Voyager (which is a very weak signal and hard to pick up out of background noise of the Universe) then they can start a private foundation to listen. After all, Bill Gates and others give many millions for things like AIDS research so I think they could give a few thousand for Space!
You should fix your sig. You say the Department of Homeland Security started destroying our rights in 2001, but the DoHS doesn't go back to 2001. However, BushCo did start destroying our rights in that year--with a little help from his old friend, UBL.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I agree that NASA needs finance reform - in fact, every part of our government needs the same thing. I don't agree that we should stop listening to Voyager, though, since it's a pittance compared to the unnecessary overhead found through all levels of government.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When you look at the relative costs of BushCo's other priorities, the amount of money involved here is incredibly trivial. I admit that the RoI from this specific kind research is unknown, but it's exactly the kind of research that can only be funded by a government--someone has to have a long-term perspective. There might be an enormous breakthrough here, but no private organization could speculate on that and spend even a few million dollars per year. However, if you take a really long term perspective--the way government is supposed to--then whatever you learn, even if it is small, will eventually accumulate to a large value.
Religious fanatics aren't interested, of course. They already know *EVERYTHING*. Meanwhile, BushCo is glad to exploit their deliberate and intentional ignorance for political advantage and personal profit. Sad.
Note: Insightful has to start from the truth. I don't care how nicely you write and how well you package your lies. They is no such thing as an "insightful falsehood".
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
If SF fans can donate millions of dollars to a corporation, why can't we take up a collection for the 4.5 million dollars to keep these missions going? 1 dollar from 4.5 million people would be enough. I'd give 10 bucks and at that rate we would only need 450,000 people to keep it going.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How does anyone know where the 22-year magnetic cycle begins and ends? Is there a party in Times Square?
-Mike
With the exception of a few sacred cows, every office and program becomes expendable. If there aren't enough of the right people bitching and moaning to defend program X, then it's not important enough to fund. Sure, it's a pain in the ass to have to rejustify one's work each year or so, but it's not an unreasonable way to allocate resources within a huge organization such as the US Federal Government.
Unfortunately, humans don't organize well beyond a certain size, hence the collapse of the Soviet state, and NASA considering wiping a program when it's just about to start paying off in valuable science again.
Luke, help me take this mask off
>There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system.
Would you like to have laws to prevent people from spreading offplanet? An iron curtain around Earth, so to speak? Government "programs", whatever, but are you going to tell people that they can't fly on their own dime? When the tech is their to build spacecraft at garage-level, are you willing to enforce a ban on the cosmos? Heck, let's have Burt Rutan arrested, post-haste. Talk about absurd.
I agree with you about the slieght-of-hand on the Vision for Space Exploration. The Hubble people should put the new instruments into a new craft and then plan out the NEXT one. I'd love to see "Hubble" as a line of similiar telescopes - imagine what becomes visible with 4 Hubbles as interferometers in solar orbit!
When there is a reason, a real reason, to go into space, people will. And they'll go to stay, hopefully, and build new worlds and cultures, and repopulate Earth when we get whacked with a comet again.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I think you are off by a factor of ten, the "Save Enterprise" campigan raised only $3 million. But that is still almost enough for a full year of funding.
Are you insinuating that abstinence does not provide 100% protection against both unwanted pregnancy and STD?
No, I never said that. I was specifically talking about instances in which the abstinence curiculums make outlandish and false claims like HIV can be transmitted from person to person via sweat and tears, half of all gay teens are HIV positive, and that you can become pregnant just by touching someone's genitals, condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as much as 31% of the time, and that a 43 day old fetus is a thinking person. All of these are assertions pointed out in the Waxman report on abstinence education programs; and while you may respond that his report has been critisized as itself being factually inaccurate, I think that an honest assessment of that criticism will show that these are almost exclusively attacks from those that support or are involved with the abstinence programs. I'm not going to provide any links or references here because it's all easily available on google.
And hey, I totally agree with you that there are hundreds of other programs that waste government funds. Maybe someday we'll have a congress with the political will to honestly review them and make some honest and productive cuts. Right now, though, I still assert that it's the height of madness to cut something costing just $4.5 million that provides real science while funding programs that fill kids heads with misinformation for the low low price of just $209 million.
With all due respect, I think it is safe to say that every federal government agency thinks it is always underfunded. Tradeoffs have to be made. Certainly the military could use a haircut in a number of its programs but the fact is that space science is not that important to the majority of US voters.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Now, it seems as if most of scifi tv/movies had it wrong - that in fact, English speaking Americans will not be flying starships. They will be flown by Chinese and Indians...
Not that I have a problem with this in one sense - being a humanist...but it does kind of suck living in an age where a country once known for being a world leader, is making itself, with all haste, a second-rate power...
rant: We had a 30+ year head start on the world in space, and we blew it! We fucking blew it! Too many shallow and near-sighted politicians, and too many apathetic Americans famous for quotes such as, "why should we study the jumps of grasshoppers?"
dahlek (will you squirm when you are pecked
just passed by the House for roads. Yet a new million needed for this is not available???
There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money.
A minor point, by Ulysses isn't actually a NASA mission, it's operated jointly by ESA and NASA, and ESA actually built the spacecraft. I'm not sure the USA actually has any right to terminate it, although it almost certainly does rely on the DSN for some, if not all, communications, so this could be seriously curtailed.
At a minimum this would piss off ESA big times, and historically NASA/USA behaviour in regards to this mission hasn't exactly been brilliant. There were meant to be two spacecraft in the original mission, one built by ESA, the other by NASA, but the US one got scrapped and ESA got left with only half the mission.
NASA has remained involved, since it was launched with the Shuttle, and they provided the RTG, and the DSN, but sometimes it really seems like they are taking the mick. :(
Actually it is rocket science...
I think that's it's pretty clear to many Slashdotters that NASA is bureaucratizing itself to death. I'm equally sure many administrators at NASA think that this viewpoint is laughably layman ... and since they are perfectly willing to come into work every day, with a desk, phone and computer, while NOTHING AT ALL is launched or flying again that day, then we can see their biases.
... just to save a sum of money that could be easily covered by the everyday excesses of the bureaucratic class. In effect, the body is thinking about eating a couple of fingers while lard hangs off its belly, just so the brain can continue to believe in its own supremacy.
Like any cancerous bureaucracy, NASA is proposing the cuts for 2 reasons:
1. Scare Tactic. Instead of administrators cutting the number of administrators, administrators instead cut at the actual functioning of the organization: missions, projects, tasks and workers. This produces the desired fear effect and their budgets may be sustained thereby. (My city has been doing this kind of thing for years, and it bringing out the method a lot lately due to the collapse of the economy.)
2. Smart Morons. Modern business methods have infected much of American culture. Hence, we get a NASA administrator thinking that a 30-yr-old program that is still ongoing is something that should be shut down early
I've been predicting that America will cash out much of the accomplishment of its culture since it no longer wants to take risks or take lesser profits for general prosperity. As how my prediction affects NASA, the agency will continue to let equipment de-orbit, will continue to cancel programs, and will continue to advance the unintentional program to make itself completely irrelevant. The Shuttles are dead (even if they return to fly, they won't last long). Nothing will replace the Shuttles anyway. Mir is gone. Hubble is going to go. The Webb Telescope will never be launched.
And the collapse of supersonic commerical transport only continues to demonstrate from all this that Western civilization is giving up the ghost. Accomplishment is being abandoned. Nothing is replacing all this, either. The future in space is almost undoubtedly Chinese.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
When politics is about getting votes, not good politics, something is terribly wrong.
Yeah, it means the voter isn't paying attention. It means the voter is easily distracted by bullshit. As long as you claim to live under a democracy(democratic replublic if you prefer), the only person you can blame for anything is the voter. It doesn't matter what tricks the politician may try to pull. If the voter falls for it, there's nothing to be said. The voter screwed up. While we were watching the "Bill and Monica Show", we got DMCA. We almost got clipper chip. Don't fall for the diversions and everything will work out just fine. Bush is using 9/11 to cover up his screw ups and to help us forget what happened in 2000. He manipulated the 2004 election with the same diversion.
What?
It cant hurt. Contact/email/webform your senators and congresspeople.
/.
Let them know you care about space / science.
If you have time to read this message, you have the time to send that email.
Otherwise, its useless jabber and speculation and talk.
Not George Bush, not Nasa, *You* are to blame for letting this happen,
if you dont do *something* besides bitch and moan on
I really liked the Bush announcement of the "hydrogen economy"... You guys remember the last paragraph that explained how there are two main methods of creating hydrogen?
;o)
1) Water electrolisis,
2) Coal combustion...
Guess which country has the biggest untapped coal deposits in the world? Guess which solution was chosen by the Bush administration...
Long live green energy! (what the end consumer doesn't see...)
Sadly, it seems frighteningly true of the Bush administration.
The world seems to be moving toward a conflict between two extremist groups - one "Muslim" and one "Christian" and neither bearing much relation to the teachings of either faith.
Maybe he did call him and maybe he didn't. But what we know for sure is that Junior is the guy who gave O'Keefe his current position. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to ascertain why Junior promotes certain people. I personaly find it hard to believe Junior would recommend someone who didn't share his views - and these decisions most likely reflect those views. Regardless Junior definitely gets to share the blame at least indirectly for putting this guy in charge.
It's not just Bush. It's the whole whacky group of zealots that call themselves fundamentalist christians. Bush hasn't done that much for them but shitcanning space programs is doing those freaks a big favor. They did not want the Hubble to go up and is a fact that many people seem to have forgotten. The Hubble is not finished yet. And as for any project that goes looking for answers out in space, well those are just the ones the freaks don't like. They say things like "we have no business going out and peering back into time to witness creation" But they're okay with little episodes within our solar system. Does everyone understand now? Spread the word, this is not a joke.
They really are a sick bunch. And the shrub owes them some favors. Plus Bush probably thinks the moon visits were faked.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
Scientist say this cut is... Wow, there is only one scientist left? They must have done some cuts already.
There is no replacement for displacement.
NASA is terminating and postponing a lot of project. The two Voyager missions are just better known to the public. Remember the Mach-10 project X-43A? NASA planned two further generations of this experimental plane. Canceled. Take the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission. Canceled. How about the Hubble Space Telescope? On death row. Other scientific communities are affected, too. You know things went south when National Labs face a 60% cut in running time (e.g. AGS at BNL). Imagine companies would have to turn off their production lines for 60% of the time... Biology - same story. Stem cell research, AIDS research, heck, even travel money is cut for political reasons (remember the HIV/AIDS conference in Bangladesh, with US scientists stranded at home). Here are a few more NASA projects hit by budget cuts:m l
Compare how much is missing for scientific projects and how much has been redirected. You may have voted for this policy!
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nasa-05c.ht
Now, where does the money go? Well, some of it has been accounted for at
http://www.theocracywatch.org/faith_base.htm
to deactivate them, but one day....one daaaaaaay.... Vger will return!
"Spock, this "child" is about to wipe out every living thing on earth. Now what do you suggest we do, spank it?"
Laws? Great googly-moogly, no. But I'll bet two dimes to a doughnut that pretty much everyone who travels to another world, whether on his own initiative or as a government employee, is going to have to come home post-haste or die. There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
Not sure how you leapt from my statement to "Lock 'em up if they leave the atmosphere." All I meant is that travel to other worlds will be nothing more than an opportunity to plant a flag and bring home some rocks. The science fiction notion of outposts and useful space stations and commuter ships between them all is just that -- fiction.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
NASA should provide the information neccessary for people outside of NASA to continue the Voyager program.
Maybe they could set up a SETI like program to do.
Maybe a non-profit foundation could be setup to do this. And people contribute to this foundation.
I did read the article, but I have no idea what would be needed to accomplish this.
Any ideas?
Interesting that you should put it this way. My girlfriend is an astronomer (PhD astronomy/astrophysics) and she got into it as it was a science that did not involve death or killing things in order to study them.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Why cooperate (and share the burden) with other international space agencies to do the listening to signals?
resurrect my
If technology advances enough, self-sustaining colonies can form.
Table-ized A.I.
Precisely. I had done my time at NASA as well, and the best solution to fix NASA is to let inactive, older GSes retire. If not willing, make it expensive to stay being a civil servent. That's one step. Then, retrain all financial managers for disciplined spending; and mandate to review their spending pattern for identifying any waste (I actually mean to catch any fraud that GAO or Inspector General missed).
And for God's sake, reduce the bureaucractic level on getting through a job day by day!
There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
:-)
Rediculous. There's plenty of oxygen, and plenty of hydrogen. Just add electricity to mine these core elements and you can create water. Radiation is less of an issue on any surface, and the natural bedrock can be used to form a base with a built-in radiation shield.
All we really need to survive in space is nuclear power, good nitrogen mines (Nitrogen is the one key element to life that's hard to find in the solar system), and a bit of human ingenuity.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
(blink)
Short sighted?
A plan to phase out the space shuttle in the next 5 years, plus building a base on the moon and mars.
Looks like the long view to me.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
When these probes were launched, I don't think anyone would have expected or imagined that they would continue to operate for more than a quarter century. Yet here we are, 28 years later, and we're planning to kill the longest-running space missions ever, which have been returning scientific data for longer than 1/3 of the world's population have been alive. I simply cannot fathom the reasoning (or lack thereof) that leads to such stupefying myopia.
For the love of God, 4.4 million dollars per year is a ROUNDING ERROR compared the the amount of money the US has spent in it's effort to stop terrorists by force (the futility of which is something one could write about for pages and pages and pages...). The American government will spend ten thousand times that amount this year to be ready to kill people (plus five thousand times as much spent actually killing people in Iraq + Afghanistan), yet THIS is, of all things, the program chosen to die?
Something is terribly wrong with America if this is happenning. Can the problem be fixed before the damage is irreversible?
I am beyond upset about this one. The probes that have boldly gone where no person has gone before are facing the end. The Voyager probes which discovered the volcanoes on Io, the ice on Europa, the atmosphere on Titan, the moon Tritan orbiting Neptune which has methane ice geisers and are now on the verge of exiting the solar system are facing the cut of there $4 million/year funding. (Four million dollars is what the U.S. budget spends every ten minutes by the way, so this is just a mere drop in the bucket). The Voyagers have at least twenty years of power left, if not turned off, and more if all goes well
Maybe we should all step back a take a deep breath. Instead of getting all hot and bothered about defunding a mission on its last legs, maybe we should be grateful that the taxpayers of this country have ponied up $$$ for the last 30 years to keep this afloat. Just a suggestion.
Wow, sci-fi fans can pitch in several million dollars to keep a show on the air, while when there is REAL merit in a project, voyager etc. it just goes down the toilet. Yes, before you roast me to a crisp, I know its a government program and that 4.3 million is peanuts compared to what they spend on the grand scale of things, but im surprised that people wont at least write to their representative in congress about this. There was an interesting article that I read in Science Explorations, published 4 times a year, forget the issue, in which they compared the United States to other G8 in science education for primary and secondary schools, and you guys came in rock bottom. This just supports the fact that all of the major scientific breakthroughs will be made by foreign companies and foreign engineers/scientists and that the us will be following them instead of leading.
Underfunding NASA is a pretty clear message, for example.
Which, I repeat, is what Congress does. The President has almost no control over funding!
You are either a lemming or a political operative.
For citizens of other countries who are reading this but are confused, the reality is that in the US at the moment, the executive and legislative (and very nearly the judicial) branches are held by the same party ("Republicans").
The parent is trying to absolve any one party of responsibility for the mess these yahoos have gotten us into by essentially dissolving it, i.e., if no one person is to blame, then no one at all is to blame.[*]
[*] Except perhaps Dan Rather, Hilary Clinton, celebrities, homosexual, communists, the French, and other bogeymen.
the fact is that space science is not that important to the majority of US voters.
Is ANY science important to the majority of US voters?
Twenties Retirement
No, he's shooting for some short term headlines.
If we don't get self-sufficient colonies off of this rock, humanity itself could be extinguished when the next big disaster strikes.
But Bush's silly grandstanding has no relationship to any long term goals such as collonisation. It's just PR blather. There is no political gain fron making a speech about how you are putting N billion over 20 years into development of, say, closed life support systems. Artists impressions of boxes of pipes just don't look good behind the speaker in the way that pictures of people doing nothing interesting on mars do.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Note, that is not the cost of their accounting, it is the one-yesr cost of some changes to their accounting which are taking many years.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
I never said anything was Bush's fault. I just said that his PR bullshit about mars is not an indication that he has any interest in science.
Bush is actually a quite open and honest guy, as politicians go. He has, so far as I can see from over here, done more or less exactly what he was elected to do. That he has, for instance, been running the US economy like an 8 year old who has lifted his mother's credit card is the fault of those who voted him in saying he would do exactly that.
In the current context, he has made no secret of his anti-science stance. Science is the evil stuff which denys divinely revealed truth and doesn't recognise single cells as being as important as adult human beings. Went down a storm in enough of America to make it official US policy. That science also sometimes points out facts uncomfortable to the oil industry is, of course, just a coincidence:-).
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Don't ever believe your work was for nothing! However much the Voyagers have cost, the knowledge they sent back to us is priceless. Thank you.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
It's more important to shut down a project bringing information of value into the scientific community, thereby leaving 4 Million or so dollars around so that can be spent on making sure the control knobs on a Stealth Bomber are painted with white stripes instead of no paint?
"Holy Hand Grenades Batman", I think they maybe onto something there.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
I haven't written anything bad about Bush. That he is anti-science is, if anything, a good thing - he was elected to be anti-science. That there is a large anti-science constituency in the US is the worying thing.
you imply that anyone who believes in the feasibility and value of attempts to go to Mars[...]
And I said nothing at all about people who propose Mars missions.
I just said that Bush is not proposing anything real WRT Mars. That is not a value judgement, it is an observation of the man's concrete behaviour. Whether it is good or bad is a personal judgement.
Personally, I think a programme which was targeted at creating the infrastructure for regular and extended presence on the moon and the, when feasable, Mars would be a very Good Thing. OTOH, an Apolo style `send up some jocks in a tin can to have their photos taken' scheme which leaves nothing behind but a bad feeling about manned space exploration in the public mind would be worse than useless.
Bush want's neither. He wanted a quick JFK moment, so he made a speech. Everything else is just very expensive post-press-conference fodder for the press. Hopefully, some scientists and engineers are diverting some of the resources to something useful, but that is not what Bush intended, he just wanted the pretty TV pictures and the headlines and maybe the odd gullable space-nerd's vote.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Where do you imagine they get the hydrogen from, huh?
They're called "hydrocarbons" for a reason.
Random and weird software I've written.
Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope.
Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to send the shuttle to service Hubble? He could have.
As it stands, O'Keefe's decision makes no sense.
Now Voyager is facing cancellation from a desk jockey inside NASA and you think the president had something to do with this, how?
Because the President outlined a plan for NASA which states Mars is the goal.
New Shuttle -> Moon -> Mars (and something about meeting our 'current commitments to ISS'). Everything else begs for scraps. Voyager exists under the rubric of "everything else".
Bush probably didn't order the Hubble or Voyager scrapped, but he did redefine NASA's mission in a way that made doing these things far less likely than they would have been in the past.
With Bush in power, science suffers. If this isn't clear to you by now, you really haven't been paying attention.
"In fact, the reason why we have the ISS instead of Space Station Freedom is because Clinton cut funding."
Space Station Freedom wasn't lost to budget cuts, it's policy: if things go to plan, soon we will be free from all space stations.
Next step: Space Observatory Freedom, starting with Hubble...
Blank until
Kinda makes the running costs of Voyager seem insignificant now doesn't it.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Actually, military r and d would be important to most US voters. It is what has given us our current status as the sole superpower. US preeminence in the computer industry is based on the massive investments by the military in microelectronics that was needed to build superior military technology such as fly by wire fighters, ICBM's, and the M1A1 Abrams tank. Without these we would all be speaking Russian as a second language and saluting statues of Stalin.
Regardless of what one thinks of the current US administration, it is far better than many of the alternatives.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
This president seems to be the type that does things rather than just talking about them. Even if more recent information indicates that what he earlier said he would do is a dumb idea, he "stays the course" or whatever. Just because you don't like him doesn't mean everything he says which you like is a lie.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I know, right? All those crazy Christian suicide bombers are really frightening. Not to mention all the beheadings of innocent hostages they keep doing.
Oh wait.. they don't really do any of that do they?
Take a sip of reality sometime, it's quite refreshing.
Hehe, I had a nice discussion at school, well it was about the technology development etc.pp
My teacher said "Our brain is meant to help us to survive on this planet."
Sure, he's right but actually we aren't trying to survive (like it was few thousand years ago), we are using our capacitys to answer the question "why are we here".
I think aborting the Voyager Mission would be really stupid. $4.2 million a year is a bunch of money but I think it's worth it. Voyager can give us some valuable data what happens at the edge/beyond the solar system - but sure, let's just stay stupid and make war on countries some people even aren't able to spell its name..
*sigh*
There has never been a Fusion plant that produces more power than it uses. Not a single watt, not a single Joule. While scientists have ideas on getting around this, Fusion is perpetually "20 years away".
:-(
Sorta like the Moon and Mars plans that have been batted around for several decades
Sigh.
Both fusion and interplanetary manned flight suffer from the same thing - lack of vision among our political leaders.
In a lot of respects, both are dependent to some degree on another (fusion to reduce travel times and up cargo capacities, and spaceflight to mine the helium3 we'll likely need to obtain practical fusion).
Real Soon Now. Really...
Cheers,
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
The problem really isn't Bush, tho; it's the self-sufficient ruling class we've allowed to create itself thru inadequate supervision of our elected representatives
But that's an old problem and generally only been solved by revolution.
Cheers!
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Only a whacko christian fundamentalist would mod this a troll, which adds more proof to the pudding. Me thinks they doth protesteth too much. It won't do any good the word is already out.
Has everyone such a short memory? These deep space projects are being canned for religious reasons. They think "we have no business looking back into the time of creation". I am not making this up, Tricky Dick (Richard M. Nixon (I am not a crook.)) tried to shitcan the Hubble funding. They complained around Hubble launch time also. And here it is again. ush owes them favors, as such he's trying to axe these projects.
>Laws? Great googly-moogly, no. But I'll bet two dimes to a doughnut that pretty much everyone who travels to another world, whether on his own initiative or as a government employee, is going to have to come home post-haste or die. There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
I have to disagree. (sorry it took so long to reply) There have been exstensive studies dealing with hi-volume access to LEO, and the businesses that become viable below certain price points. One application is permanent elder care in low or zero G - old bones respond better with less gravity to fight against. There are also plenty of studies and stories (yes, fiction) about permanent settlements from the start - flags and footprints is a waste of time if colonization is the goal. One engineering perspective is George Herbert's One Way To Stay plan. I highly recommend John Lewis book "Mining the Sky" - he goes into detail about the sheer quantity of resources available in the inner solar system. Comets, many chondrite asteroids and both of Mars' moons have significant quantities of water and other volatiles. Water makes fuel and atmosphere, combined with other volatiles you can have plastics. One of the major missing elements is actually nitrogen, but mining that from Earth's atmosphere becomes viable as well with LEO industry. Radiation is less an issue when you can live in a city in the center of a comet or shell of water. Sure, it's fiction for now, but if enough people work to make it happen, we'll all be a lot better off for it.Something to think about.
On the "lock em up" thing - i was just pushing things past their logical extension.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I hereby claim_1/ First Post on the new theory that we don't need dark energy because there may just be wrinkles_2/ in space that are not detectable, close to large masses.
1 9
And I again say -- don't turn the probes off just as they're getting to the edge of the solar wind, where the non-local universe begins.
______________________________
1/ Even a blind sow finds an acorn every now and then.
2/ "A Fermilab press release reports that the expansion of the universe may be explainable without the need for dark energy or a cosmological constant. Apparently, ripples from inflation in the early universe may account for the observed expansion rate of the universe.""
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/22422
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