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Hubble Future Is Cloudier After Katrina
XorNand writes "The AP is reporting that Katrina has further jeopardized the already tenuous future of the Hubble space telescope. The hurricane damaged the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the shuttle's fuel tanks are built, and the Mississippi-based Stennis Space Center, where shuttle engines are tested, NASA officials said."
Who really needs to see in space when we have to fund a meaningless war
It's sad that this may have to happen. Some of the most beautiful pictures ever taken were taken by Hubble. But, higher priorities have come up and Hubble must take a back seat to human life.
Millionaires are paying their way with the Russian space agency. The Russkies are probably making a decent profit on each individual paying passenger. Why don't we ask them what the margins are like?
I really wonder... NASA isn't the only space agency capable of getting people up there, and if it really is about the best interest in science whats so difficult in asking other agencies to help out here?
It saddens me that NASA is stooping so low that they're now even jeapordizing a great piece of equipment for reasons I can only explain / comprehend as greed.
Wow. I wish we could mod posts "jingoistic".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Since this is basically already how NASA works, giving money to private companies to supply goods and services, then giving a larger proportion of that cash direct to private enterprise is going to result in still bigger abuse.
The reason there is not a private spaceflight industry is because it does not make business sense. If it did,it would already have happened. As it is, the gains are purely speculative, the insurance risks enormous, and the cashflow projections laughable.
On the other hand the costs of Hubble are negligible compared to many wasteful government programs, and this is one case where a referendum might be a good idea. Ask taxpayers the simple question - do you think that a dollar a year of your taxes (or whatever minute amount it is) should go to improving our understanding of the universe by maintaining the Hubble space telescope.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Yeah, war is usually a very bad thing.
Yeah, the military-industrial complex profits, in essence, from death.
Yeah, the US propaganda machine is working pretty well (but beginning to falter a bit).
But the line about having no enemies? That's just wrong. We do have enemies, very real and very capable ones that will exploit any chink in our armor.
We may have brought ourselves to this point through an imperialistic world attitude, but whatever the case, it is unrealistic to assume that we do not need a strong armed force at this juncture.
Iraq, I agree (as in IMHO), was a bad idea, but I really don't know all the inside reasons for it, do you? (although Michael Moore seems to think he does...)
And in the US' defense, we generally use our overwhelming military might pretty damned carefully and with a pretty good deal of reservation compared to the historical military powers that have existed. We seem, for the most part, to want to do the right global thing as a world power, but we are certainly not perfect and the world is a very, very complex place these days.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Feed for Fools. Stupidity that manipulates.
But I don't mind, for each lame-ass mentally challenged post that is posted about how everything is in some way the fault of Bush (or Gates, or Stallman - notice a pattern already?) the intelligence of those posters go down as they confirm their own myths to each other. It's an orgy of ego-masturbating mindfucking. As this continues it becomes less and less probable that they will ever have any real influence, relegating themselves to total obscurity in a little enclave where everybody wears tinfoil hats.
But not everyone on Slashdot is like this (just a surprising amount) there are plenty of pearls to be found hidden among all the shit, it just takes time to identify it.
This administration has always presented itself as anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-government.
Anti-government IS anti-constitution. Grover Norquist said "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
This is quoted regularly by conservative publications like its something to be proud of.
Why?
I submit that the reason for this is they want to continue to expand private power over the common US citizen, without themselves being subject to the rule of law. That laws concerned with corruption are reduced to being tools that one group of gangsters can use against another in their efforts to control the markets they compete in.
They dont believe in science, or research, except where it can be manipulated and corrupted into either making money for themselves and their freinds or increasing their control of the population. They don't believe in human beings. They put an illusory "faith" system in place knowing that such a system would not tolerate serious avenues of scientific research such as astronomy or physics. Such avenues do not do much to increase their power base or make them money. Therefore they are considered useless or even subversive. The treatment that Robert Oppenheimer received bears that out.
They dont want an educated population, they want a compliant one, an obediant one tolerant of their corruption. They want "power" over everything else. Stupid, ignorant people make better subjects than educated ones. Every King, emperor as well as the Taliban, the Nazis and the Soviets have all proven that such a system can function, if only for a short while as long as the people can be convinced that education is a problem to a society, rather than an asset.
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
-James Madison
"The first truth is that liberty is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than that of their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Stupid Humans.....
Riiiiiiight. Look, there are some very unrealistic ideas about what private enterprise will and will not do. While private individuals are motivated by more than money (thrill of exploration, I did it first, I'm doing it better than my rival over there, etc.), the reality is most private individuals who HAVE the money to burn on something this expensive probably have focused on ACQUIRING money for a large portion of their lives. To expect a large subset of money-minded entrepreneurs to suddenly give up their business-like ways and focus on something with little or no fiscal return (like the Hubble) is unrealistic.
In addition, if there is so much potential to private space exploration, why hasn't it been done before? Rocket technology really hasn't changed much since the 60's, and sufficent cheap computing power to figure trajectories has been around since the 80's. The answer? It's hard and expensive, with a very high failure cost, and a small to nonexistent return potential. This is not the kind of thing that draws in money.
I dearly wish that we would focus on basic science (i.e. does not need to be driven by a possible marketable product in 5 years) in the U.S.A. again - the era of Big Science was inaugurated with the Manhattan Project (when those funny talking European immigrants with thier scribbles on a blackboard built the most powerful bomb in the world), has been strong for many years as the link between U.S. world supremacy and science leadership was not questioned, but perhaps is beginning to close. The tone set by the present leadership (sneering at "reality-based" media, desiring "equal-time" for creation research, bragging about how a "C" student can become the president, etc.) does not bode well for the long term future of scientifc research here.
I guess when you know how the Universe was created according to the Bible, you don't need a Hubble to figure it out.
Sigh.
Let's get real here. They had already been put in an indefinate hold over the foam issue before Katrina. And, a 6 month delay for that was just as fatal for any shuttle flight to Hubble. They won't even be able to finish ISS in the remaining timeframe. Now, NASA can point at something outside its control and say "This is why Hubble was scrapped".
The odds of a Hubble mission before Katrina: 0.01%
The odds of a Hubble mission after Katrina: 0.005%
Yeah.. you're right.. it is half as likely now..