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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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...
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.
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?)
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)?
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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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.
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
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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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.
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.
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
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?
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?|
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
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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
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)
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.
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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!"
"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.
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.
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
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!
That's nothing. Divide it by the US population.
Just my two cents. (literally)
The expenses really add up quickly. What's a scientist cost per year with benefits? Let's guess $150,000 (scientists everywhere are laughing and weeping at this number, probably). Hire five of them to do nothing but analyze the data. You're up to $750,000 a year. Add $250,000 a year for assistant's salaries and other overhead. You're now at $1 million.
Now build the scientists a state-of-the-art lab filled with the latest equipment that's used exclusively for this project. Figure $3 million and you've spent all of your money.
Oh, the other $200,000? That's for demolition of the lab at the end of the year so you can build a new one the next year.
How else can you manage to burn through $4.2 million a year listening to a couple of satellites?
Insert witty sig here.
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.
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!!
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.
It's "mea culpa", not "mia colpa". :P
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
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.
Heck... Seti@Home is able to convince thousands of people to donate their CPU cycles for pretty useless stuff (IMHO)... If what they need is data analysis, distribute the effort and make a Voyager@Home or something like that. Other than the cost of the software development, the data analysis part is almost free.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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.
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!!!"
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.'"
Is that not a solution: There are lots of amateurs who love to analyze this data.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
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
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.
I understand your point. Thing is, we're still at the baby-steps stage of space exploration. Before we drop tens or hundreds of billions of dollars developing the technology to send men to Mars for (optimistically) a few weeks to explore a tiny area around their landing site, I think we should spend a few ones of billions of lots of probes that we can drop all over the heavenly bodies to spend months finding the more promising candidates.
The scientific instrumentation and experiments are pre-determined here on Earth. Sure, men can fix things that just stay broken on a machine probe, but it's not like men take up a machine shop to fabricate a spectral mumbleizer in transit because they realize that mumbleizing would be good to do.
Also, I take objection to your opening sentences. I am a huge fan of exploring the universe we find ourselves in. I'm not so blindered as to think the only way we can do that is by sending people, though. We understand Mars better than we do the moon even though we've had a dozen guys stand on the latter. Going to other worlds isn't like loading up a sailing ship and traveling to the other side of the same planet you evolved for. We owe it to those who will go to know as much as possible about the places they'll visit. We're simply not to the point where it's time to talk seriously about sending people to faraway worlds.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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!
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.
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
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
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.]
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.