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."

Comments

Pay for results

[Colin Smith]

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.

/. Section

[hobotron]

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.

Why the moon?

[FlamingWombat]

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?

Re:Why the moon?

[cyclone96]

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?

Good question.

In my mind, part of the answer is for practical engineering experience. The moon is a less ambitious goal than going to Mars out of the chute, but much of the technology and simple organizational engineering experience can be leveraged towards Mars.

I think folks often overlook the evolutionary nature of aerospace projects. One program provides the building blocks for the next. There are many elements in today's space program which are derived from Apollo. One example is the space shuttle main engines, which are the direct decendants of the old Saturn V J-2 engines in the second and third stage (and these engines have been surfacing as possible powerplants for the shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle that is likely to be used for the Exploration program).

Even the ISS program, which has been criticized extensively for poor science, has provided invaluable engineering experience on how (and maybe how not) to build a vehicle to go to the moon/mars. For example, we've had serious problems with the gyroscopes on ISS, there's something going on in the bearings which only happens in zero-G that causes them to wear out. The opportunity to dissect a broken one after the next shuttle brings it back is going to be invaluable. The spacesuits we are using require a lot of maintenance - somehow we need to improve that. When I discuss this with my colleagues (I'm a NASA engineer, flying people in space is what I do), we often remark that if we had tried going to Mars in the '90s without the experience we gained on ISS, it would have been a mess.

If we do Exploration right, we're going to leverage an aerospace workforce that has learned lessons from Shuttle and ISS, and use the moon as a proving ground. That experience is going to allow us to tackle the greater challenge of going to Mars.

As far as Bush using this for a "distraction", I tend to find that argument pretty weak. The space progam ceased to be a daily headline news item (except for the occasional event) in the early 70's. Nobody realistically believes America is going to forget about Iraq and other major issues for a relatively minor government program.

Re:Does anybody else...

[zippthorne]

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.)

Re:We Have To Use The Moon

[luna69]

> 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.

Re:Does anybody else...

[nyrk]

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.

Re:I'm not impressed

[cmowire]

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.