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Subcommittee Stops Human Mars Mission Spending
An anonymous reader writes "Last week's House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science FY08 budget markup would prevent work on programs devoted to human missions to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue "development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." The Mars Society is already leading an effort to get the language removed."
Yeay -- way to go congress!
This unfunded mandate has been robbing our science for long enough.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
If NASA is that busy, then why not offload some of its activities to the private sector fer cryin' out loud?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You can either go off starting random wars of aggression, or you can conduct planetary exploration. The American taxpayer, quite rightly, doesn't want to pay for both. Many don't want to pay for either, frankly.
If you would rather support explorers than crusaders, make sure the Presidential candidate you vote for in '08 agrees with your point of view, and hold him/her to it.
I'm not sure I disagree with this idea that we shouldn't be blowing money with some goal of sending humans to mars. What exactly would we gain of it? I suppose the theory is that we could bring back samples of shit to study, but why couldn't the same be done on an unmanned mission? Seems to me there is little reason a human needs to go there, and doing so is more about proving that they can than getting anything useful out of it. On top of that I would imagine it complicates the mission immensely with additional systems and failure points(life support, how the astronauts stay sane through the trip, etc).
Really, what is the point?
This is basically a big FU to Bush, one of many that will come out of Congress over the next 2 years. The relative merit of appropriations is irrelevant - this is the "We Hate Bush" congress, and their actions will typically have that as a primary element.
In other words, politics as usual.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
According to the article, NASA "has too much on its plate" and needs to focus. Given the fact that there are many problems in the low Earth orbit area (aging weather satellites, and Hubble to name just two), should NASA be diverting valuable manpower and time to Mars mission planning?
I know I'd rather have NASA put up replacements for aging weather satellites before putting up manned missions to Mars.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I've always looked up to the Space Program. Putting people and satellites into orbit or on the moon is incredible. That's it. Incredible. The scope of what they do and the success with which they do it is nothing short of phenomenal. To top if off, it's something that we have undeniably been the best at. No ifs, ands, or buts, we are quite simply the best at it. Now the politicians have decided it's no longer a priority. Toss it on the midden heap and watch us get passed by. Not just by the Russians (who were never ALL that far behind us), but by the ESA, the Japanese, and any other country who has leaders that have a sense of adventure and a sense of the long term benefits all the research involved produces. This is a sad day.
Mission to Mars. ...
A Planet with a high percentage of Carbon Dioxide - What can we learn from that, maybe links to global warming?
Finding ways to store mass amounts of energy to shuttle astronots back and forth from earth to mars, in a small place, perhaps will help with out energy consumption problems?
Ligher Weight, easer to move, rugged space suits. This can help create far better materials for many applications.
Number of americans employed for such a project helping the economy.
Working with other nations of such a project, better tolerance for other cultures.
One project of this scale has many side efects that a lot of supid winy people just don't want to grasp their minds around to understand.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is a dumb idea for America, because whichever nation has a Mars base has an escape valve from Mutually Assured Destruction in instance of nuclear war. "Yeah, you got Washington, all right, but our 6,000-person Mars base is going to last a lot longer than your radioactive, rubble-strewn ass..."
technical writing / development
Sorry folks, but Mars is a waste of time. We're better off studying the asteroid belt and sending probes to the more interesting moons. Even with fusion, it would take a really long time to make Mars even close to livable.
The asteroid belt is full of resources and the great thing about them is that they are already in space. We should start cataloging them and marking the ones that have necessary things like water, iron, gold, etc. Once we know what's out there, it won't be long before someone figures out how to get it and bring it back.
NASA is a dead end.
Stick a $1 billion prize into an investment fund and hand it over to anyone who can get people on to Mars and back alive. Do same for moon base. Close NASA down. Billions saved and lots of highly motivated businesses and individuals will do their damnest to earn that cash.
Deleted
I hope we do.
I'd love to almost nothing given for manned space exploration until launch costs go down**. I'd rather see the money spent on A) robotic exploration, which almost everyone in the field acknowledges is far more cost effective; and especially spent on B) cost-reduction research.
To get off the surface: Nuclear thermal rockets. Scramjets. Rotavators. Advanced reusable rockets. Cost-optimized conventional rockets (say, SpaceX's Falcon series, or even some more esoteric concepts like OTRAG). Advanced captive carry concepts. HARP-style. And so on.
Once already in orbit: Too many to begin to list; here's a start.
Also, in general, materials research would be a very big one that would apply to almost everything (and not just the space industry).
** I would, however, support funding for continued operations of ISS. I think the current plan for ISS is the most idiotic possible: "finish up the last bit of it, only fund it for a few years, then let it reenter". What idiocy -- spend a fortune building it, and then once you get to the point where it would be relatively cheap to keep operating, let it crash. Ongoing operations are the cheap part, and also provide an opportunity to pacify the "no funding for NASA unless there are people in space" crowd.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
For any of you who aren't aware, the Bush administration is notorious for unfunded mandates. If Bush thinks it's so good as to put it in the State of the Union address, he better damn well find a way to pay for it... otherwise it's just hot air as usual.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Basically telling the president to pay up.
When Bush first announced this initiative, the director of Nasa was a Bush lackey and immediately moved to cut funding to other Nasa program likes Hubble to pay for it. (Eventhough presidents change every 4 to 8 years and with them their initiatives.) Congress pays for Nasa activities, and usually they have control. It just turned out that their was a Bush lackey in charge at Nasa and he started gutting other programs to pay for all this.
This was just a way to call the president out to have him pay for his initiative. You don't want to start a precedent where every time the president changes then existing programs are all gutted just because the president makes some random policy speech.
The committee has it right: trying to impose a manned trip to Mars on NASA without a huge funding increase is going to wreak havoc with NASA's science programs. If the president wants this, he needs to fund it.
The Mars society should be ashamed for trying to have this language removed; apparently, they think that going to Mars is worth dismantling the rest of our space program.
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself.
What are you smoking? Do you seriously believe that "humanity" has any hope of colonizing another planet to "save" itself?
It's been half a century since we first put people in space, and now we're still "just" putting a select elite few up into space to screw around with silly zero-g experiments with little commercial or scientific value.
The suggestion that we will have the resources, technical capability and political unity as a planet to put a large-enough-to-be-genetically-diverse-enough-to-" save"-humanity population not only into orbit but to reach a habitable planet, build a base large enough to house them, grow food, mine raw materials....long enough to either "teraform" that planet or "escape" again to another...
...is absolutely batshit insane. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to build protected self-contained habitats on earth.
Please help metamoderate.
Bah, the money's there. They could just cut even more of those silly NASA projects that go to things like studying the Earth's climate; heck NASA's been "shifting its focus" away from many sound projects to study the Earth and the Universe in favor of sending trained monkeys on a 900-day vacation to an uninhabitable planet. After all, better to sink that money into our friends in the Aerospace industry building some massively expensive boondoggle, all in the name of "technology transfer". (which, by the way, is what happens when you step in a pile of Aibo droppings)
Incidentally, this is a standard political tactic when dealing with budgets. If you want to protect an agency (or a department in your company, or whatever), you allocate money to everything except the agency's big project that the boss is sweet on. You come back and say, "Here's what we could do. If you want this project, approve money for it."
Besides, it makes sound sense: a mission to Mars inspires the imagination, but it's only the best use of limited resources if you read science fiction books and don't believe in Evolution. 'Cos there may be inhabitable planets, far, far, away, but there isn't another Earth; and humans didn't exactly evolve to live on a planet other htan Earth. If your goal is to colonize the galaxy (a questionable one), that goal is better reached sinking what little cash you have into studying the cosmos, figuring out where you want to go, and how to get there, as well as studying the Earth, and figuring out how to make it last so we can develop a culture capable of going there. For a mission to Mars is gonna be hugely expensive, and it's several orders of magnitude cheaper than exporting life to another world.
If your goal is to find out about humans, society, and the universe, then again, your money is better spent on cheaper research projects. Heck, you could even make an argument that a manned Mars mission's worth of unmanned probes would give us a far better picture of the red planet and the solar system then frying a bunch of anthropoids in Martian radiation.
Of course, if your goal is to inspire the population and distract the people from an unpopular war, well maybe.
Challenge:
1) Pick a finished piece of technology sitting somewhere around you.
2) Figure out what all of its components are.
3) Figure out what all of those components are made of.
4) Figure out the industrial processes needed to make those ingredients.
5) Figure out what raw inputs are needed for those processes (all of them, not just the primary ore).
6) For every input that needs to be manufactured, trace it back in the same way. Repeat.
7) For every part of the industrial infrastructure that might wear out or be consumed, trace back a complete route for its production.
8) For every truly "raw" input, figure out what sort of process it takes to mine it (factor in all equipment and consumables). Also figure out how much infrastructure it will take to move all of the "raw" inputs, once mined, to their destinations, given that deposits won't be next to each other.
9) For all new parts that you've just added, go back to step 2.
This doesn't even address the issue of actually *manufacturing* parts and products and all of the facilities needed to make the millions of accumulated parts of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and raw materials.
And this just looks at what's needed to get you that one piece of technology that you picked.
Modern technology suffers from very serious "long tail" problems when dealing with colonization.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
"Why would you care if one day a man walks on Mars? Maybe I am just a selfish prick, but unless that man is me, I don't really care. Turning vast amounts of society's resources into a project to get a handful of humans onto Mars is a waste of my money. It might make your nationalistic pride feel warm and fuzzy, or maybe give you a feeling of greater human accomplishment, but warm fuzzy feelings is the extent of what is really accomplished."
Replace some of your text to reference the Olympics games and you have another huge waste of money to give glory to a few and fuzzy feelings to the rest.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Shame, because NASA has the biggest technological head start in this race.
I'm usually less technical and more emotional when I post about NASA, and you know what? This is an emotional issue.
Really, what got us to the moon? A clear vision from our young charismatic leader, which was followed up. We wanted to prove American technological might. We wanted to explore and push the boundaries of humans and their technology. We wanted to do the impossible, show the world our best and in the process learn all about ourselves and our place in this universe. Everyone involved in the Apollo program believed, was passionate and had what they needed to get things done. We did it with an overwhelming tide of determination.
History gives us a fine, valid example of what is needed and if the politicians really cared about getting it done, they'd follow that.
But it's just not going to happen, because guess what, they don't really care. The speech like the one we got from our current president, about the Crew Exploration Vehicle? I thought I was listening to the CEO of General Motors. Oh, and the budget allocated for this? About half to 1/3 of what was given for the Apollo program, adjusted for inflation. And that must be divided among our current programs, too. Apollo was a singular focus, uncompromising.
There are a lot of people to blame, but I think we can all start with congress and the president. Their priorities are with other things.
But see NASA isn't a dead end. No company is going to operate at a $119 Billion loss(assuming it only costs $120B, but that could be as bad as the trillions) to get to mars, when it has no current current practical value. NASA exists because there is no company that could operate with such losses when there is no immediate commercial gain. That's not to say that going to Mars doesn't have amazing repercussions for science or giving the human race a place to expand to. It is a good goal for sometime in the future but NASA has more practical considerations that should not be dropped just for Mars.
NASA makes contributions into aeronautical research both in safety and in generating new technology and in environmental science. The first is how we stay competitive with other nations who's aerospace industries are heavily supported by their government (China, Europe, et al). The second is extremely important for anyone who believes that we have air, water, dirt and life on planet Earth irregardless of climate change.
So if you're willing to see our aerospace industry collapse, our knowledge of the Earth stagnate AND real space exploration fail then we can go your way, otherwise you're just not being realistic. Of course we could just give NASA the money it needs for all jobs, but this is probably not feasible at the moment considering the mismanagement of our taxes either fighting wars that we probably should not be in, or through pork barrel BS.
Patrik
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Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
Why don't we consentrate on getting a good foot print on the moon, set up a base, maybe even a launch site w/orbital fueling and then... think about Mars. It's hundreds of millions of years old, it'll still be there next century and with a base on the moon to supply fuel at a fraction of the launch cost we can send a much, much better equiped mission there.
Also the technology developed to sustain life on the moon can be used on Mars with the added bonus that the moon is that much closer should anything go wrong.
br.Until man goes to the moon I think we should consentrate on sending more driods to Mars, maybe set up a remote base built and run by robots.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.