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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."
Wow I think we just found intelligent life in Washington DC, alert the press. Call the nation guard, they must be stopped before they do other things that actually make sense.
Yes I'm all for space exploration but I think Mars is a little far out there. There are a lot of other space programs that could really use the funding (launching a new hurricane observation satellites and global warming research satellites come to mind). Maybe we should think about a moon base first and once we get that up and running then a president can start talking about Mars.
-RZ
But that was 35 years ago. And the intervening time has been nothing more than a series of disappointments, vast amounts of wasted money, broken promises, contractor giveaways, and harsh realities. A shuttle that was supposed to be like a spaceship turned out to be more like a very expensive splashdown pod with wheels and a hefty refurbishing pricetag after each mission. A space station turned into little more than a low-orbit money sink. Promises of new ships and grand missions were promised--with little more to show for it in the end than some animation and a lot of wasted money.
The height of our achievement was putting a couple of glorified RC cars on Mars and putting a telescope in orbit. And both those missions were a pittance compared to the wasted billions of dollar spent on projects which went nowhere and accomplished nothing.
I've come to accept that man may one day land on Mars. But he won't be wearing a NASA logo on his suit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
While I think that a lot of bad choices have been made by most of the presidents involved with NASA (starting with Nixon), NASA has been moving forward. Take a LONG look at what is happening right now. Bezos with with his new Shepard is simply a clone of the DCX (funded partly by NASA), but a decade later. Likewise, you have Spacex with falcon/dragon moving up, which is definitely a copy of NASA's Saturn/Apollo. And of course, you have Bigelow who bought the rights to Transhab as well as has had support from NASA dealing with life support which are all from ISS. Scaled Composites is creating a low cost version of the craft that NASA was going to build in the 70's, but Nixon killed (foolish). Even now, with naysayers knocking the ISS, it is doing a great deal of ground breaking work. Before we can go to mars or moon, we MUST have subsystems that will not fail. In addition, NASA is designing new sats and engines all the time. Hopefully, by 2012, the indis will have us not only in space, but heading to the moon. At that time, NASA will probably re-focus on doing things that they can not/will not do such as Nuclear engines for LONG-TERM sats and mars. This will be needed by 2015. And we will see the indis once again use this tech as a means of springboarding elsewhere. NASA has a function in doing what companies/individuals can not/will not do. And to that end, they have been a trailblazer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When the Shuttle program ends it will give an out to the ISS partners to begin the end of the ISS program. When the ISS program ends, manned spaceflight be over for at least the remainder of the 21st century.
Here here! I wish I had mod points today.
It used to be that a war's home front consisted of a lot of sacrifice - not just sending the boys off to fight and die, but also making do with less, shortages and rationing, and, of course, higher taxes to pay for the military expenditure. Now we somehow think that we can fight a war without sacrifice. In the particular case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the President and Congress seemed to feel that we could not only afford a $750 billion open-ended war (probably over $1 trillion before all is said and done), but could even afford tax cuts for the most well-off at the same time.
The President and Congress (2001-present) don't even feel the need to account for the cost of this prolonged war in the normal budget - it requires periodic "emergency" spending so that everyone's precious balanced budget fuzzy calculations can still work out.
Just to put it in perspective, Bush's Iraq war has so far (budget approval through this year) cost us, the US taxpayers, about $400 billion (it's running about $200 million PER DAY), and it's estimated that it'll be over $1 trillion ($1000 billion) by the time the troops eventually come home. On a more personal note $1 trillion is about $10,000 per US household.
Compared to that, NASAs annual budget is around $17 billion.
So, yeah, rather than killing 100,000 Iraqi civilians, turning Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists, making the rest of the world hate us, and destroying the US constitution as an added bonus, we *could* have done a LOT more fun and worthwhile things. Or Bush could instead have just given $10,000 to each family in the US to spend how they please. Same cost.
The estimated size of the K-T asteroid was roughly 10 km wide. That's considered 'still fairly small' as far as Near Earth Objects go. It wasn't the impact that killed creatures over a couple of kilos, it was the enviornmental destruction that followed (such as blocking out the sun, thus destroying vegetation that creatures needed to survive, etc.)
It would be much easier and cheaper to set up a self-sustaining underground "space station" on earth, than to do the same thing on Mars or the Moon.
It's called an input-output matrix, kind of like how your favorite search engine aggregates web page votes, except it handles supplies instead.
And that doesn't even consider the possibility of special built relatively independent machines, or of bootstrapping.
I should probably point out that if we divide the cost of the war in Iraq ($400 billion) by the population of Iraq (a bit over 26 million), we find that we've already spent $14,934 per Iraqi citizen. In retrospect, perhaps we should have just mailed them each a check with a note that says "this check will be valid as soon as Saddam Hussein is out of power". That would have accomplished our goals more cheaply, with far less loss of life.
And of course if you use the more realistic $1 trillion figure mentioned above instead of just the $400 billion we've spent so far, then when all is said and done we will have spent $37,336 for each Iraqi citizen. Maybe we should just bought them all a new SUV? (Oprah style!)
But I suppose it's not how much money we spend, but rather who we spend it on. A cool trillion dollars of US tax money in defense contractors' pockets is a pretty good return on their political investment, isn't it? What a wonderful coincidence that Halliburton's former CEO just happens to be the Vice President who was the driving force behind this, err, extraordinarily generous expenditure of US tax dollars.
Not that I'm bitter or anything....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Have you done any research on these programs at all? I'm guessing not. Your second example is the soybean tech research. Did you know that soybean is one of the three main agricultural exports of the U.S.? How about the conservation of the Great Lakes, which supports a $4 billion dollar fishing industry (to say nothing of the massive amounts of cargo floated through)? Why is this a waste of money? You seemed to have singled out programs that look like they're related to environmental or charitable causes, without even verifying if they are indeed related to these ideologies.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math