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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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We need tax money to make craters, not explore them.
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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.
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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.
Ah, the "stupid" analogy. :)
Question - how much did it cost to fund Christopher Columbus' initial 1492 expedition? (Considering that it required royal patronage... I'm thinking it was nearly the same order of expense). In retrospect, that cost was paid back and then profited by history (consider the combined GDP's and natural resources found in Canada, the US, Mexico, Central and South America...)
Colombus didn't go to colonize, and I don't have his numbers, so let's check out an early colony for comparison: Jamestown.
Check out this nice set of referenced calculations for how much people paid to get to the New World. Depending on how much they were bringing, some people paid less than as ~$2k to get to Jamestown. The most expensive were ~20k. That is, for themselves *and* their gear. That much money wouldn't even pay for a single kilogram to go to Mars.
Oh, but it gets worse. On an unsettled part of Earth, modern technology is not needed to survive. The technology you need can be created in the wilderness. Not so on Mars. You need technology to survive, and modern technology suffers from "long tail" problems: each piece of technology has many components, each component many materials, each material taking an industrial process with many steps and often many raw materials, and so on. You simply can't go there and "bootstrap" like you can on Earth.
A more apt comparison would been if instead of going to Jamestown, the British colonists instead went to colonize the Marianas Trench.
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Sure it's a long way in the future before a colony on the moon could repopulate the earth - but if we never start, we will never get there.
You're missing the point Rei was making. A manned mission to Mars is not the first baby step towards having a full-fledged off-planet colony. It might seem like a rational progression from sending a few people for a short stay, to a few people for a long time, to many people for a long time, to a complete self-sustaining off-planet colony. But it isn't. The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that make a colony completely out of our league any time in the future.
We should be working on cheaper reusable vehicles to reduce launch costs. Any Mars colony is going to require a lot of material to get it started, and to sustain it until it can become self-sufficient.
We should be working on robotics and fully automated construction/industry. We will want to build as much infrastructure on Mars as possible before any people actually arrive.
We should be working on ecology and hydroponics because right now the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem we have is arguably between the size of a country and a planet, and we have never succeeded in boot-strapping an ecosystem from nothing. The whole point is that the colony can't depend on Earth, and we have no ability to do anything in space that doesn't depend 100% on Earth support.
By the time we actually solve these problems, the minor task of actually getting a human's feet to touch the ground on another planet will be considered trivial.
The Mars Mission is not the start of a Mars Colony. It's a boondoggle that was threatening to get in the way of the actual science that could, in time, lead to an actual off-planet population.
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