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NASA Seeking Innovative Ideas from Public
Mike Peel writes "Science Blog is reporting that NASA is seeking proposals 'for creating and managing innovative activities, events, products, services, or other types of formal or informal education methods for the purpose of disseminating information nationally about NASA's projects and programs.'" Sadly I don't think simply providing them with a list of people you want shot into space counts.
"NASA is seeking proposals 'for creating and managing innovative activities, events, products, services, or other types of formal or informal education methods for the purpose of disseminating information nationally about NASA's projects and programs.'" Seriously, I have no idea what this sentence says.
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Seriously. The shuttle program at this point in time is insane. We do not have the technology yet to make space travel cost-effective. Instead of pointlessly doing it wastefully now for no other purpose than habit, why not pour all that money into a program to develop new forms of propulsion and energy, and come back to spacefaring when we have a better solution?
,etc.!
It's not like sending humans into space serves any real purpose anyway. Robots can carry out virtually everything we need to do for FAR less payload cost. People often whine about the limitations of the robot missions compared to human missions, but these people have simply not thought through the cost-benefit analysis. Sure, a human mission payload can do more than the current robot misisons: the payload of the human missions is many many many times greater than the robot missions. If any of the Mars lander people could fill something the size of the shuttle with robot equipment, we'd be able to set up huge self-sustaining robot colonies on Mars easily. Instead, we want to send humans in what will then have to mostly be wasted space.
Look Mars, we bring you... poop! And urine! And lots and lots of empty space for our various gases! And tons of food! And energy for a return trip! And beds, chairs, tables, toilets
It's just nuts.
Start working on things that average people (e.g. non-scientists) can get behind.
The shuttle program and space station may be incredibly valuable to the scientific community for research purposes, but there's nothing about it that captures the imaginations and emotions and concern of the general public. I hate to break it to NASA, but there's really nothing you can do to make average people excited about nerdy harcore scientific research.
That's the difference between today's NASA and the old JFK-era NASA.
You geek types out there may say, "but NASA isn't a popularity contest, it's a scientific endeavor". But you have to remember who funds NASA: ordinary taxpayers.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Please, this is not a troll. I renember reading that back in the 70's, somebody got a bunch of companies together to try and buy an unused Atlas rocket from the government and form a private space program - NASA killed it. Do I even need to mention the cost and problems with the space shuttle, or the meter to feet conversion disaster of the mars mission, or the lenzing error on the hubble telescope. The simple truth is that by being there, they make it so that nobody else in private enterprise wants to act. For chrissake, why did a private millionaire space tourists need to go to Russia? Why did the X-prize happen without NASA at all? The writing has been on the wall for a long time, the future of space is here and it is not NASA.
Killing NASA will not kill the geniuses who work at NASA, all it will do is shut down the bureauocrats while the talent finds ways to be applied thru the rest of the private market.
Yes, but sending robots tootling around the solar system is frankly not very exciting, and the biggest payoff of all from spaceflight derives from the extent to which it captures the public imaginations.
Oh no... it's the future.
I have an idea for overhauling all of NASA, let alone just implementing an oh-so-trendy blog:
How about firing the whole lot of politicians and PHBs and hire visionaries, pioneers, and engineers? Folks such as Burt Rutan, for example. While some would say he doesn't have the expertise to build a shuttle replacement, look at what he accomplished with minimal resources at his own company; he has designed quite a few high-performance near-stall proof aircraft (The Vari-EZ and derivatives), the Beech Starship (If I ever come into a lot of money I'd pay well over market value to own one, to keep Beech from destroying it. It's a gorgeous aircraft), several fighters, the Proteus, and of course SpaceShipOne. He bucks trends and doesn't accept status quo as the end-all, be all way of doing things. Heck, even the SpaceShipOne benefactor Paul Allen would be a great addition to NASA. And again, he does things efficiently. He'd be the ideal visionary to manage an organization such as NASA and to see that money is being spent to achieve results rather than to maintain high salaries for a select few PHBs and politicians, and spending a token amount of the allocated budget on money-pit pet projects like the ISS.
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Killing manned exploration for a few decades would free billions we could use to learn about the places we wish to visit in the future.
The space race between the Soviets and the US was great for jumpstarting space exploration, but what humans do in space (other then personally experience it) can be automated.
We are getting away from manned combat aircraft because meat in the cockpit gets tired, makes mistakes, and needs life support. Losing people damages a program far more than losing hardware, because they have emotion-based value to the public.
Free the space prrogram, advance robotic technology, and keep the meat on Terra!
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Promote NASA via TV Commercials the highlighting archievements NASA has done. Promote US Space Camp to kids and adults. It is a great way to get more people interested into becoming an astronaut. Develop a business plan and start turning a serious multi-billion dollar profit. Use the billions of dollars from profits to continue research without fear of budget cuts from the Federal government.
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"Pointless? Hardly. The Shuttle is the only launch vehicle capable of completing ISS (International Space Station). Whether we're better off ditching the whole ISS/Shuttle program because it's wasteful is a separate, though related, argument."
So, we must have the shuttle because we need the ISS. Why do we need the ISS. Well hey, if we didn't have it, the shuttle wouldn't have anywhere fun to go!
That is just so tragically insane I hardly even know what to say.
"This really bears repeating: the viability of a successful space program -- public or private -- has nothing to do with technology; what we have now is totally adequate for the task and has been for at least the last 20 years."
It has everything to do with technology. Yes, what we have is adequate to get into space, but at an ENORMOUS COST that simply does not justify itself in any way shape or form.
"As for doing science, an astronaut can stop, look, say "ooh, what an interesting rock!" then walk over, pick it up, and examine it closely with a Mark I eyeball in, what, 30 seconds? It takes days if not weeks for a Mars rover to do the same thing."
Did I not already cover this argument? Robot missions are done for a tiny tiny fraction of the payload and cost of human missions. They have to conserve and go slow precisely because they are not given the funding, resources, or payload size that the human missions are. And several different sorts of robot eyes are a heck of a lot better than human eyes.
You still have yet to make any case whatsoever that sending meatbags into space has any point to justify the incredible expense. Right now, real science prorgams are being canceled left and right so that this nearly purely masturbatory enterprise of putting humans back on the moon can go forward.
Come on, shutting down NASA to let private companies take over will probably bring benefits in terms of human space flight, commercial science in weightlessness to produce, say, new synthetics,... and space tourism.
But it would kill the thing that - for me - is the biggest archivement of NASA: space science. Forget probes to the solar system, cosmology using satellites or the origins program, because that doesn't produce money. If comanies would exist for the benefit of all, you'd be right. But they aren't, they exist primarily for making money. That's why we need NASA.
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What's not getting mentioned in this light-hearted article, or the commentary, is the disastrous 2007 NASA budget. The idiotic "Vision for Space Exploration" coming out of the White House has made honest defenders of NASA's science initiative look like fools for declaring that science would not be cut. Well, it wasn't cut, it was eviscerated.