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NASA Policy Includes Mars, Moon Missions
TopSpin writes "The US House of Representatives passed a bill establishing NASA policy for the next two years. The bill is seen as an endorsement of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, including returning man to the Moon and eventually Mars. The House struggled with compromising other NASA initiatives against new manned exploration, eventually deciding to expand the budget enough to accommodate both prerogatives. The bill also endorses a servicing and repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope."
So NASA is supposed to do all that in two years? or will the expenditures carry on until the next president has another "vision"?
What NASA does (or perhaps is forced to do) is waste money, because everybody knows none of these grandiose plans will ever occur. The Mars mission will be international or won't be at all, because there's no cold war to justify n-times the cost of sending some bozo to Mars where robots do just as well for cheaper.
So, like Slashdot just told me very accurately, nothing for you to see here, please move along.
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Not programmes. If you pay for programmes, you get programmes, not results.
Seriously, this is basically how all successful exploration has proceeded in the past.
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Politics, indeed. Since this is only one of the hurdles in getting the budget NASA needs to fulfill the promises by this administration, I am still wary. Ill believe it when I see cold hard funding translated into actual projects.
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I have to ask, why do we need to go back to the moon? Is there any real, scientific reason for it, or is it just our dear president trying to keep people's minds off other things with another moon mission?
If you live in America, how can you justify that statement? The whole reason you're here is because someone thought it would be a good idea to traverse dangerous terrain at considerable risk and expense and evidently, liked it enough to stay. (and yes I count native americans in that group as well. Walking across a land bridge in the sub-arctic couldn't have been easy or cheap.)
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> Yes of course we could do it otherwise, but not as
> efficiently or as often
This is not the case. At all.
We don't go up from a gravity well, then down into another gravity well 390,000 km away, to a surface even less hospitable than low Earth orbit, and gain anything except higher fuel costs, more danger, and theed for even MORE hardware.
Most well-respected mission designs came to the conclusion a long time ago that the Moon wasn't a "stepping stone" to Mars, it was an unnecessary detour.
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Nasa is by it's very nature too afraid to move on anything this quickly. To date, they've been too concerned with the possible loss of human life. if you look through history, america has made great progress riding on the corpses of great men who gaves their lives to the progress of success. Nasa should follow in these footsteps and begin launching rockets more often, with more emphasis on getting to the moon and staying there. Yes, i know i'm ripping on them, and they have done a lot. But oh well.
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Think? Yes
"Greatly increase the standard of living for the world's poor"
So would throwing huge ammounts of money/resources at the poor fix the problem? Tell me how to translate resources into "encouraging education and intelectual development, and tollerance", and I would agree that government funds such as these should be routed towards it.
Blind statements of "let's save the world first" are pretty ironic. Save the world from what? The world is what it is. We cannot create a utopia, becasue not everyone can agree on what that is. Yes, we can clean up our backyard, and *some* resources should go to that, but not all.
Manned space exploration is not something you do instead of cleaning up the situation, it is something you do in addition to. Programs such as this create the demand for the educated, because it is something that people WANT, and like to see.
Is it really true?
They'll keep Hubble in service? The article doesn't sound positive on that.
Maybe it's because the space shuttle isn't as reliable as first envisioned, but this is where Nasa could score; by offering monetary assistance to competing outside engineering firms who would come up with design improvements.
Maybe scrapping the shuttle is not realistic, but a redesign is.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Because you could completely remove NASA from the budget and the little piece of the budget you'd get wouldn't do a damn bit of good for the health-care, education, and economic systems. NASA doesn't take up that much of the federal budget, and most of the problems there are not a matter of money, but of dreadful mismanagement.
And there's probably more that can be done with space technolgies, STILL, than trying to explore the oceans for new life that we'll probably make extinct anyways.
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peak. v.tr. To bring to a maximum of development, value, or intensity.
pique. v.tr. To provoke; arouse: The portrait piqued her curiosity.
Either is technically correct, but the meaning is subtly different. The actual English error is the word after the one boldfaced, which should have been plural possessive, not simply plural.
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If there is no extra money, and a long term cash commitment attached, then this is nothing but hot air. It is easy to SAY that we are going back into space, but it is only words untill they put the money where their words are.
Quite true. Mostly, the big appeal for me about space solar power is that it enhances our design diversity and ability to cope with problems with our ground-based nuclear power plants.... If I was running things, I'd probably keep some coal and natural gas fired plants going, too.
I like your argument about Mars, but I think that actually works better on the Moon. Why? Because we don't entirely know how to do a closed-loop lifecycle exactly right, forever. So the Moon has a chance of being sold as something other than a suicide mission.... because if they need ___ from Earth real quick on Mars, they are screwed.
The problem, of course, becomes trying to establish the safety of childbearing in low Gs. In that sense a space colony supplied from the moon is going to be much safer, although even that's an open question.
Mostly I figure that there's stuff up in space that's worth doing, but we won't realize it until we've actually been up there for a while. Much like buying Alaska didn't make sense for the US immediately.
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The House struggled with compromising other NASA initiatives against new manned exploration, eventually deciding to expand the budget enough to accommodate both prerogatives.
S.R. Hadden: "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
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NASA should simply send an unmanned probe to Mars containing a well-sealed, well-protected capsule containing a check for $1,000,000,[insert your favorite number of zeroes here], payable to bearer.
The first person who manages to get there and collect it gets to keep it.
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Of course, back in NASA's glory days, every manned mission was launched on a military missile (Redstone, Atlas, Titan II) or on a rocket initiated by the military (Saturn). Even the space shuttle project was designed mainly around the requirements of the Air Force.
NASA's current problem is that the shuttle turned out to be too expensive and risky even for the military to use.
NASA on a crap budget backed by Bushes rhetoric will never achieve it
NASA has never had the budget to develop major space systems independent of the military. If they want to do any more groundbreaking work, first they'll have to figure out how to align it with military goals, and then figure out how to market it to once again fool the public into thinking that it's all just being done for the science.
> But if the goal of the United States is to be
>truly a spacefaring nation, then bypassing the
> moon is silly.
Perhaps, perhaps not. The problem is that history shows that grand plans like "becoming a truly spacefaring nation" get funded for a little while -- long enough for the politicians to take credit for their daring vision -- and then cancelled. Witness the aftermath of the final Apollo missions: Saturn V assembly line shut down, a retreat to low earth orbit, and a boondoggle tincan in orbit that exists more or less so that we can continue to claim to have a manned space program.
I think the best shot we have of actually sending people to Mars is to just go. I think that if we stop at the Moon, people (i.e., Congress) will get tired of the costs and call it a day once we've built some tin can "base" on the Moon, which we can them promptly abandon...or sell to the Chinese.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!