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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.
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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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.
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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