Funding Promised for Trips to Moon, Mars

image77 writes "NASA's new administrator, Michael Griffin, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Tuesday the space agency will have the necessary funding to send astronauts back to the moon and to Mars. Delay states "We will provide the funding necessary to get us where we want to go.""

Comments

Just Set Up The Apollo Prize

[Baldrson]

Just set up a big prize for the first team to land a man on the moon and safely return him to the earth.

Cut out all this funding-cycle political crap for crissakes. Yes, yes, I know there are lots of people employed by NASA and its contractors who want the return of the glory days.

Go get a real job and stop destroying the US's pioneering heritage, and don't you dare lobby my Congressman with your time and travel paid for by my taxes.

Re:Just Set Up The Apollo Prize

[Vitriol Angst]

I don't think a prize will work. Getting anything into outer space is expensive and complicated. The fact that some individual entrepreneurs can get a rocket out of the atmosphere doesn't mean they can do anything useful. They would have to have a few Billion and be positive they could do it first. So the prize would have to be more than what it would cost the government to do it. Which would be the same as just picking the one or two corporations that could do it. Actually, you'd have to either coordinate a dozen companies or build a new company from scratch just to make it to the moon--one that had no product it could sell our current revenue. Sounds a lot like a government to me.

I see a lot of problems with NASA--but it will also take a government funded entity like NASA to do it. Government is the exact RIGHT entity to take on projects that don't have a pay-off in the near future but that benefit society.

Businesses are really great. But they are designed to make a profit and not to benefit the most people with the least money. There is a lot of necessary overhead is businesses to manage and procure money.

Again, NASA is bloated and not as efficient as they could be. But parts of NASA have managed the impossible. You just need to get the political hacks and bureaucrats out of the organization. Many of the greatest engineers and scientists have not been driven by money. An organization like NASA is a haven for them to just work on the thought problems and not be concerned with pushing a resume. Maybe NASA can't be fixed, but you aren't going to get to Mars without the government paying someone to do it. If you make it an external company, then you are picking one company to receive benefits that other companies and taxpayers won't. At this scale, you don't necessarily get any efficiency with a corporation.

I don't like the Mars mission because it isn't driven by science--and the money could be better spent creating an infrastructure in space first. Also, it's something that Bush wanted, so you know all the money will be missing and it will be somehow, a minor clerks fault who endagered lives by pointing out that the hydrogen tanks are leaking. But don't gripe about the money unless you first speak out about the collosal amounts of funds spent on military and corporate welfare.

I want to save taxpayer money too. But let's not get all huffy about a Billion $ Mars Rover when we have 25 stealth bombers that are pretty much useless.

"Cede the Moon"?

[Metasquares]

"If you ask anyone in this country, 'Do you believe that the United States should cede the moon to say the Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whoever?' I bet you the answer would be, 'No,'" he said.

Interesting choice of words. It sounds like the speaker is implying that the United States owns the Moon because we got there first.

Re:Another Space Race

[tbuckner]

Unfortunately, what with Republican malfeasance draining the treasury, we are not the rabbit any more. The Chinese are going to have a lot more spare yuan to spend in the long run than we will have dollars. There's a real likelihood they'll go a lot of places first now. Why did we cancel the last few Apollo missions? Because Nixon needed the money to spend on bombing Vietnam.

Re:"forgetting"

[Golias]

This whole conversation reminds me a lot of when Ken Starr was accused of being part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" in spite of the fact that he was the investigator who brought down Republican Senator Bob Packwood just a few years earlier.

Attacking the accuser is an old game, and both sides love to play it.

Regarding the current investigation into DeLay. I don't think there's much there. Certainly less damning than the campaign contributions which Al Gore was alledged to have raised from donors in Communist China back in the 1990s. This will ammount to a tempest in a teapot.

DeLay will stay in office, Howard Dean will manage to raise a few extra bucks for future campaigns by beating the drum over DeLay's alleged "corruption", and life will go on. Can we get back to talking about NASA?

Re:Way to stay on topic! - Slashdot politics

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't understand Slashdot. You see, Delay is a Republican. Any post that criticizes Republicans is automatically modded to be insightful. The child post to which you also refer was ambiguous but might be construed as being mildly defensive of Delay, in which case there is no chance in hell that it would possibly be given a positive mod.

Even pro-Republican posts that are 100% on the mark are given "troll" or "offtopic" because the left-leaning majority on /. can't bear to have a differing opinion from their own. You should know by now that negative mods are only done for censorship purposes, not because of the actual content of the post.

Anything anti-Bush, anti-Fox, and anti-Republican is immediately greeted with cheers by the intolerant /. mods. Anything pro-Bush, pro-Fox, or pro-Republican is immediately shot down with negative mods, even if it's in reality 100% informative or 100% insighful.

Welcome to Slashdot - the geek arm of the Democratic National Committee.

(Wait until you see how quickly this gets modded as "troll" or "flamebait" because I spoke the truth, thus proving my point! Mercy me that Ipost against the /. grain!!)

The heck with NASA...

[Edward Faulkner]

... they make nothing but promises. Typical bureaucracy.

Opening up real space exploration would be simple: make it legal for private companies to build nuclear thermal rockets.

We're talking real space ships here. With that much power, you can afford to make them big, redundant, safe, and reusable. No more wimpy foam and composites - build it out of steel and have more engines than you need.

Relative costs ...

[willtsmith]

The earth has the machining and labor, and sustinence capacity to produce the advanced machinery necessary to make spacecraft.

You would have to duplicate all those mechanisms on the Moon to get things going. Good luck funding that bill of goods when all those materials are available on Mother Earth.

Every colonization model to date has been based on getting to raw materials. But it also has a component of sustainability. You could bring people off ships to work in the new world. They could farm the land or fish for sustinence.

It could very well be feasible after spending multiple TRILLIONS of dollars to eventually get something self-sustaining. But ... WHY??? So we can live in boxes on a lifeless rock???

I think the moonies will have to finance this one. I suggest the formation of extra-terrestrial exploration companies financed by private bonds (independent of the US Treasury). The Terrans would rather concentrate on upkeep and maintenance of the spaceship we already have ... EARTH!!!!