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NASA Plan to Return to the Moon
sjoeboo writes "NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion during the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.
The U.S. space agency now expects to roll out its lunar exploration plan to key Congressional committees on Friday and to the broader public through a news conference on Monday."
What happened to Mars by 2015?
With Bush set to drop $200 billion on Katrina, finding money for going to the moon is going to be difficult. However, with the Chinese headed into space again, maybe they can argue it for national security.
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Nice to see that with modern 21st technology, we can make it to the moon in only thirteen years, as opposed to the long eight year program it took forty years ago.
The cake is a pie
It only took us 9 damn years to get there in the first place! Now that we already have the technology to make it there, they want 13 years?! Fuck that shit. Thye should be able to get there in at most 5 years. I'll bet $100 NASA's beaten by the Chinese or Burt Rutan. Any takers?
What is your penile percentile?
Congress won't fund these guys well enough to put people in low earth orbit safely, and they want to go back to the Moon?
-JDF
I don't care whether you define that "this decade" as starting in the year 2000 or the year 2005... ...if NASA could do it within a decade in the 1960s, why can't they do it within a decade now?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While it's good to see NASA seriously looking into returning to the Moon, I think the money would be better spend in focusing on sending robotic missions. Not only would it be more cost effective, but it could have just as great a scientific return, and would spur the development of a technology that would have huge spin off benefits here on earth.
I'm also all for a more agressive effort to explore Mars robotically. But the idea of sending humans there so soon seems very foolish to me. Why? There's little benefit to having people do the exploring, when an advanced robot could do the job better, safer, and faster.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
The $100 billion price tag is news, however, and good news. Usually when a president (any president) tries to give NASA an objective, NASA gets pissy and invents a price tag in the trillions and announces that everyones favorite programs will all have to be cut and 10,000 kittens slain to achieve that goal. That sort of turf war doesn't help anyone.
This seems ike a legitimate plan with a reasonable price tag, however, and I'm excited to hear it! Short timelines? Nuclear engines? This is the NASA that once kicked so much ass! I completely agree: it's now about whether the next president will ruin it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Set a date, any date, as long as it's two or more presidencies away and you basically don't have to come through with your promises, even better, someone else will take the blame.
Basically there isn't the political will to do something like this so they kick it into the long grass and allow schedules to slide, costs to rise until it becomes too expensive and has to be cut.
They're talking 100 billion anyway. They'd be better offering a 100 million prize for an orbital vehicle, half a billion prize for a lunar orbiter, a billion or two for a lunar base etc.
Deleted
"Ten thousand?" Luke gasped. "We could buy our own ship!"
"But who's gonna fly it, kid? You?"
"You bet I could! Ben, we don't have to take this."
No doubt there will be those of the next generation up to the task, but you just don't see the push of science and space at least as I remember when I was going through school (of course the round wheel was the big thing back then). Is becoming an astronaut or rocket scientist as cool as becoming an "American Idol" or a reality TV star?
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Don't preach to me about spin-offs.
Okay. How about I preach about lowering the costs of space transport? How about I preach about the billions of tons of cheap ore that could result? How about I preach about the free energy obtained from solar mirrors focused on space engines? How about I preach about a future where dangerous and toxic industries can be moved off the Earth? How about I preach about a future where man can thrive across the solar system, guaranteeing safety from little things like asteriods? How about I preach about a future where the power of the Sun is harnessed to power trips to other star systems? How about I preach about a future where truely inexpensive science probes can be launched to finally reveal the remaining secrets of the universe? How about I preach of a future with unimaginably technology that results from the science done?
How about we get off this rock and finally do something other than IM each other about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton? How about it?
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The unmanned spaceflight mafia isn't really about saving human lives, its about sparing costs and avoiding unnecessary risks. If it was necessary to send humans to do these missions, then we'd be all for it. But bottom line, it's neither necessary nor effective. Robotic probes do the job cheaper and better. Why not spend 20 or 30 years doing more development on materials and technology using robotic craft, then send men to moon/mars for an overall cheaper project cost than trying to do it with men from the get go?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I'm thinking this time, that perhaps we will see some additional leaps of technology. We certainly got enough technology breakthroughs from the space program. Perhaps, even with pesky physics still requiring the same effort to launch payloads into space, we can find a way to create a system that can better sustain itself. The Shuttle failed to create the space presence we should have. This time, let's do it right. Which is what NASA is trying to do.
Sure some of the commercial ventures are making progress, but unless they get some massive capital, I can't see any of them making a serious commitment to a permanant presence in space (and the ISS does not count as a permanant presence, anymore than Skylab or any other tin cans in space would).
What we really need to do is verify if there is water on the moon. If there is, then suddenly the value of the moon skyrockets. After all, with water, you get hydrogen, and oxygen, which means that the sustainability skyrockets. But we can't find out what's really there until we can make a more complete exploration. Sure, there's risks, with abrasive rocks and with radiation. And I'm sure it'd be even better to grab an asteriod and park it in orbit around the Earth, to use as a stepping stone, but the Moon isn't a bad place to start, with a shallower gravity well, and... I don't think we'll be killing any lifeforms if we end up having toxic by products from any productions.
So let's get up there and start looking around!
Of course, my big fear is that somehow, a future president or congress will think that thre are better things to spend the money on, or that having radiation emitting objects in space is bad (bad for what, I have no clue, evidently they haven't seen the sun in a while or something). But maybe this time, we'll stick to it. Here's hoping
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
The waste has been being trapped in Earth's orbit ever since Apollo ended. We have been pissing away billions just to orbit the Earth, something we did over 40 years ago.
We are not going to get anywhere in space until we get out of orbit. Putting a permanent presence on the moon opens more opportunities than any orbital venture ever would. Other than distance the tech involved to live on the moon would be easier that staying in orbit.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You're deluding yourself if you think the amount of money spent to rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast over the next 12 years will not exceed $100 billion.
...
.... ROBOTS!!!!
As opposed to the moon which would be flying up, up, up to the moon, than down, down, down, back to Earth.
Don't give me that habitat and colinization crap. These missions have NOTHING to do with science they are just joy rides and pork for aerospace contractors.
BTW, I agree that the shuttle was a dumb concept. They let spacelab de-orbit in favor of a space station that could be launched and recovered.
Space exploration should be left to dedicated, life-long career profesionals
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Does this mean we don't have to rebuild New Orleans? Maybe the looters can walk away with a Shuttle ticket or something.
We need to develop a rocket large enough to launch all of the welfare-sucking animals in New Orleans into space. Those people contribute nothing, riot at the drop of a hat, and leech off our system. Even before the hurricane they contributed to one of the highest crime rates in the US.
Like the saying goes, "shape up or ship out." They haven't shaped up, now we need to ship them out.
Yes. Far better actually. Men with brains are far too general purpose instruments to collect the kinds of data that are most useful for modern science. For the cost of one man & his eyes, you could send at least 10, maybe 100 different cameras that can look at mars in whole ranges of different ways, spectrums, etc., and divide the risk over all of those missions. With the one man mission, if you blow it, you've lost the whole deal. Special purpose instrument packages just way outperform human beings in terms of data collection capabilities now.
Imagine if I asked you to perform science on a new microbe in Antarctica, would you rather:
a) send some guy to look at it with a microscope
or for the same cost
b) send a robot with a scanning tunneling electron microscope, a chemistry package, a DNA sequencer, and 10 other instruments related to the science of microbes, and then study the collected data remotely.
Assuming a and b can be done for the same price (and actually, b will tend to be cheaper), I would hope you would choose b. You don't choose a until you know so much that b is no longer the more effective option. And we aren't any where near that with either the moon or mars.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So in short - I agree with 100%!!!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
You're leaning on a tired old worn out notion that even the U Chicago boys would laugh at.
Yes we CAN run out of money. Money is something real and tangible, and we are spending more of it than we've got. The irony is that the CHINESE are buying up our debt. The greater irony is that we're financing our OWN DEBT with our purchases at Wal-Mart. We'll just owe it to China at the end of the day.
We are in the STUPID economy. People don't understand the cost of destruction. They only bring up idiotic economic theories whose real purpose is justify wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
They are brutal FASCIST regime now. They've given up the pretext on caring for the welfare of their people.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
That's the one that causes me to have the blood pressure of a morbidly obese chain smoker. Some day people are going to wake up and realize that, well, we are NOT going to solve all the problems here on Earth. Ever. We'll be lucky to solve half. We can't solve problems when society refuses to recognize the true causes, which in many cases is "people are stoooopid." We need to focus on the big ones like energy, somehow eradicating the memes that make people vote for monsters or fly planes into buildings and getting the educational system out of the hands of the ideologues, be they on the Left (feed good education) or the Right (anti-science).
Anyway, it looks like the private space sector might actually be showing some life, so f*ck NASA. I'm updating my resume to send out to Rutan's company and maybe a couple others. I'm going to be there, baby!
What saddens me most is that I don't really have much faith in them anymore. When I was growing up in the 70's, the folks at NASA were my heroes. They were the smartest, most determined, and best people anywhere in the world. I kind of wish I had that back, but at least private industry has given us a few new heroes to live vicariously through.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And how many such probes have we have sent out? How much have we missed out by not having people out (desk jockeys with joysticks don't count) there deciding what to probe with the existing hardware we have actually managed to land?
Quite frankly, as a professional scientist, the argument that computers and probes make better scientists than us human beings offends me. It's like saying that once you've mastered how to use a chemistry package or a DNA sequencer, you're a scientist. That's just technique. Science is intuitive art.
PS. It's Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM).
The owls are not what they seem
Back in the days of the Apollo program, going to the moon was something that mankind had never done before. It was something we didn't know if we could do. Hence we were willing to accept risks. We were learning so much new stuff - it was worth it, and more importantly, the public could see that (we were gaining a lot of knowledge).
Mankind has always been willing to accept risks to explore or conquer, the unknown. A bunch of people died trying to climb Mt. Everest for example. But once it was conquered, and done safetly, then when someone died - it became a tragedy. The culture isn't any wimpier then it was back then - simply the politicians have a hard time of justifying the sacrifices to average joe - who simply knows, it was done once safetly. Why shouldn't it be 100% safe now? The general public does not hear about experiment x that went well in space anymore.
On the other hand, if it was something new and unheard of that NASA was doing - like going to another star (I assume the benefits of that would be obvious), I'm pretty sure the general public would accept the risk without much complaint.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Here's a seat-of-the-pants outline of prizes that achieve the goal:
$5 billion:
$5 billion
$5 billion $5 billion $5 billion $5 billion We're not even 1/3 of the way through the budget and we've got a system that can transport the mass equivalent of the Apollo missions.Where we go from here is a choice I leave to you...
Seastead this.
- It's stifling technological innovation, as if there's not already enough of that at NASA (how old is the shuttle?) -- read the proposals. All of the planned missions will be done using reconfigurations of existing shuttle technology.
- It's taking away money from other worthy programs -- JIMO, Prometheus, a million other proposed robotic missions, all because some politico wants to seem smart. I find it especially offensive that Bush thinks he can make the public think he cares about science and technology development -- am I supposed to forget about 'global warming doesn't exist' and 'the jury is still out on evolution'? Give me a break.
FWIW, I certainly hope that one of the first things the next president does is come in and cut this program out and let scientists decide what's valuable for science return, not some bible-thumping moron.As to STEM vs STM:
a ps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.32.6131a ps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.67.075405s a.org/ViewMedia.cfm%3Fid%3D67030%26seq%3D0
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://link.
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://link.
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://jot.o
That's a start, there are plenty.
As to desk jockeys: why not have them be the scientists who you would otherwise be sending to operate the instruments directly. You admit you need the instruments, why is close physical proximity necessary. Are astronomers using remote access telescopes not doing real science? Are particle physicists not on site with their particle colliders not real scientists?
Finally, I never claimed that computers and probes make better scientists, I suggested that they make better instruments, which I stand by.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Quite frankly, as a professional scientist, the argument that computers and probes make better scientists than us human beings offends me
I think he's saying that robots make better explorerers than do scientists. Nobody is suggesting the robot should analyize the data itself or decide what to analyize. Nor construct hypotheses or design tests to validate them for that matter. And quite frankly I'm suprised that you, a professional scientist, should have jumped to such a conclusion.
The time has come to put an end to this sort of waste.
So, New orleans would have been better off with no warning of the approaching hurricane at all? Cause, you know, those weather sattelites are just the sort of waste we need to put an end to?
The space program has had few side-benefits in recent years because we haven't been pushing our limits, merely doing things we already knew how to do. If we embrace a new space program with a goal we don't know how to achieve, we will once again reap ten times what we spend. That's what happens when you force yourself to invent new technologies.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There's nothing wrong with NASA scientists. The wrong is in the politics and management above them. The scientists are astounding and talented people. Please don't shoot them down for faults caused by those above them.
The F-1's and the SSME's don't compare. The proper comparison is:
SRB: 3,300,000 lbf
F-1: 1,500,000 lbf
SSME: 400,000 lbf
J-2: 200,000 lbf
All combined, the Space Shuttle is a more powerful vehicle. It produces more thrust, higher efficiencies, and can lift significantly more weight to orbit.
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Odds are, the current one already has. We're fighting a war, and currently spending about a billion dollars a week doing that. A reasonable guess is that the insurgency will take five or ten years to defeat. Meanwhile, taxes have been cut for those Americans who can most afford them. Things might not have been so bad if we'd had any sort of planning for the postwar situation, or if we'd gone in with a real multinational force, or if we'd simply stayed home, but what's done is done.
The result is that the U.S. owes a lot of money. Sooner or later, the Federal government will either need to raise taxes, cut spending, or both. Even if future administrations support the mission, in that kind of climate, 100 billion (perhaps more, knowing how these things tend to turn out for NASA) is gonna be a tough sell.
[My hope is that the next President who shows up doesn't dive in and try to change everything.]
My hope is the next President jumps in and compares the cost/benefit ratio of putting a couple of people on the moon for a few days with the cost/benefit ration of every other science project, including unmanned exploration, and the cost/benefit ratio of every other activity that the government could be involved in, and then selects the projects with the greatest cost/benefit. Putting men on the moon or Mars as a personal vanity project or to show that one can do 'the vision thing' probably isn't anywhere close to the top of the list. For example, for 100B, you could give 833,000 kids a free ride through the most expensive Universities in the country. For $100B, you could replace 5 million government vehicles with hybrids and save 500 million gallons of gas. Or reduce the Social Security deficit. Or return it to the taxpayers. Or fund 20+ Cassini-Huygens or Mars rover type missions. Bush has done a reasonable job of getting us back on track to the moon, but of all the possible challenges to the nation, is that the one that most deserves 100B of our money? I don't think so.
"We still have the tech. It's come and gone as many different engines, including DUMBO, Timberwind, the Space Shuttle upper stage engines, and (most recently) TRITON."
Yep, those would be the ones. I just find the idea that we have the technology but won't implement it due to budget issues is as short sighted and detrimental just as the Romans having had the capacity to create the steam engine (and thus start the industrial revolution long before it finally happened) but failed to do so because of cultural limitations (ie. no need for labor saving techniques due to abundant slavery).
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
It's stifling technological innovation, as if there's not already enough of that at NASA (how old is the shuttle?) -- read the proposals. All of the planned missions will be done using reconfigurations of existing shuttle technology.
/. like 2 months ago, (back when they were talking about the space shuttle's replacement), linked to a space.com article that explicitly said reusing parts was a consideration in replacement shuttle designs for exactly this reason...
This is because no senator will ever approve the $100B if they don't get to keep their current pork barrel(s). This is purely political since NASA operates on public funding; One of the articles here on
Since China plans a moon base in ten years, then NASA can visit them for a nice cup of tea. China will have a week-long orbital flight in three weeks and the Russians are visiting the space station. Americans can look up at the pretty lights in the sky, wave and cry.