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NASA Turns 50
phobos13013 writes "Fifty years ago yesterday, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the United States Public Law 85-568, National Aeronautics and Space Act to create NASA. In the fifty years since its creation, NASA has made manned missions landing on the Moon, put a space station in orbit, launched numerous unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars, the solar system, and beyond, as well as launching reusable manned spacecraft in orbit. Some of the failures included the loss of two manned spacecraft and their crews as well as the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a training mission. Although the future of the organization is in question, Americans, and the world, are looking forward to another fifty years of progress including a return trip to the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars."
Am I seeing things, or does this story have no comments attached to it five hours after it was posted to slashdot?!?!
That's got to be some record, at least post-1998.
I guess that means I can say... First Post!
Also, Go Nasa! Keep the orbiting observatories coming!
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I'll go ahead and start us off.
We obviously didn't land on the moon, check out the alleged videos, the astronauts jump but don't fly away. Learn some science, you people are sheep.
That should do it, please discuss.
I grew up reading classic scifi like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov..... That stuff really got my hopes up. I read that years ago and thought that by now, we should have interstellar travel, contact with extraterrestial entities, faster than light travel, vacations to the moon, colonies on Mars and on and on. But we have none of that. NASA doesn't do anything interesting. It hasn't improved our living conditions. IMHO, NASA is a waste of money and should be abolished. Fsck NASA.
NASA has accomplished some trult amazing feats during the last 50 years, the pinnacle surely being the moon landing of Apollo 11, which I remember watching as an awe-struck 13 year old. But where does it go from here?
With many countries now seriously into spaceflight and a burgeoning private sector (Virgin Galactic et al) it's hard to see how NASA will stand out as it has done previously.
However in a much more space-focussed world, NASA's vast experience should allow it to take the lead heading-up collaborative ventures with other space-faring nations, particularly for the 'Big One', a manned trip to Mars. A firm commitment to this within a set timescale could re-ignite the public's interest in space exploration like the Moon landings of the early 70s did.
Smivs on the intertubes!
50 years, and we are still stuck in low Earth orbit. 50 years, and still no cost-effective launch system.
Hmm, that might be because reality is different from science fiction. We don't have intelligent humanoid robots either or even flying cars (you'd think that one would be easy), so are those NASA's fault as well? Increase NASA's budget to more than the current fraction on one percent of the national budget and maybe we'll see some more progress
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
But they won't be done by NASA. NASA has become too politicized, too corporate centered, and above all too risk adverse. The upcoming Orion system is just a rehash of the Saturn-5 with reused Shuttle parts. It breaks no new ground and does not push the envelope in any way. If we've learned anything in the last 50 years it is this: 1) When NASA is not pushing the envelope and taking risks it stagnates, gets sloppy, and then a mission fails. 2) You cannot explore space on the cheap.
NASA is now not pushing the envelope in any way and they are trying to come up with a new launch system, go to the Moon, and on to Mars without spending any more money. They will fail and people will die.
I expect to see people walking on the Moon again and possibly Mars within my lifetime. They will be European and Chinese. America will be remembered by history as the Portuguese of the 20th century. Portugal was the first nation to push out and explore the world by ship. Columbus was Portuguese. The first European to round the southern tip of Africa was Portuguese. Then they stopped and Spain, England and the Dutch took up the effort and built globe spanning empires. The US and NASA are following this same path.
Happy anniversary!
For the 1/3 of Americans who support cutting or eliminating NASA's budget, how about you vote for a someone who can properly manage the economy instead.
That's a halucination caused by so called flouridization of the water driven by a military industrial complex conspiracy to exploit the common man and subvert democracy for the establishment of a new world through globalisation and unilateral foreign poli...
Wait, sorry, it is a moon. My bad.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
I'm celebrating those 50 years by reading "Kings of the High Frontier" by V. Koman.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
.. how many spacecraft have YOU put into orbit? that's right, silence.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
YOU don't have intelligent humanoid robots, we're doing fine with ours thanks - and maybe one day we'll share. Love, the Japanese, British, Italians and Sumatrans.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
I just think it's been a self destructive downward spiral.
Cut funding for NASA, NASA stops doing amazing things, people stop caring about NASA, the peoples representative stop caring about NASA, cut more funding from NASA, rinse, repeat.
I wonder if we subtracted a great percentage of things like weather forecasting, satellite communications, planetary geology, solar technology, aerospace and commercial aviation advancements, awesome pictures of our Universe and other worlds, a growth in understanding of the Universe.... if people would start to care.
NASA was a catalyst behind so much stuff that everyone now takes for granted. They are the root of a giant science and technology tree.
The flaws and bureaucracy were always there. If NASA had funding and direction the flaws wouldn't be the biggest thing we notice.
To bad.
Is NASA going to retire, or is it going to do the standard boomer thing of working until it dies because of no retirement plans.
Annual US war budget: $480Bn USD
NASA US Annual budget: equal to about 1 day of war budget.
IAAA (I am as astronomer), and I have to point out that contrary to popular belief here, NASA is largely responsible for the current golden age of astronomy, as well as the renewal of particle physics. With the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes all currently returning awesome data, we're making huge gains in our basic astronomical understanding, from extra-solar planets to galaxy evolution to cosmology. HST supernova studies led to the discovery of dark energy, which has brought particle physics back to life. Future missions, including the imminent Herschel, Planck and WISE satellites, and the next great observatory, JWST, will continue this excellence in true scientific exploration far into the future. And don't forget the rovers, the phoenix and cassini. The general public tends to dramatically overestimate the importance of the manned program. While we /.ers understand the star trek appeal of that, we should be smart enough to remember the science!!
"Fifty years ago yesterday, in 1958"
I presume this was for the benefit of any NASA engineers who can't convert between metric and Imperial years?
*raises glass*
to the next 50 years
NASA's problem; The @$#%#^%* space shuttle Gee. they said space travel sure is expensive! what can we do? Hey, let's build a re-usable space ship! We can operate it like an airliner and launch it every two weeks! (cough!) It will be cheap and economical! (cough!) We can get rid of all our expendable launchers! (cough!) And it will be safe, we can even take school teachers up for rides! (CHOKE!) Inefficient, bad compromise between a cargo ship and crew launcher, Inherent design flaws that make it vulnerable to catastrophic failure, huge operating costs that make it more expensive to launch than a saturn V, and has completely put an end to all manned exploration. Sorry, dicking around in orbit doing science experiments is NOT exploration! I will be glad to see them sitting in museums.
given as much money as they, I could've accomplished just as much. Probably would've have, but that's not the point.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Just smells funny.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/18/nasa_smells/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I am not convinced that the ultimate end of all NASA's work (investment?) has got to be a commercial sector development. Most of space is pretty hostile - too cold, too empty, too expensive, too far go go back if something goes wrong. There are spin-offs but they are pretty tiny when compared to the actual cost. Perhaps what NASA does is worth doing, just because it is fun, and makes us feel good about ourselves?
We have already had the obligatory rants on how (a) the money could be better spent on the starving or (b) how much smaller the NASA budget is than the military. Perhaps we could equate what NASA does to entertainment. I believe the costs of the Apollo program were the equivalent to a cinema ticket for every US adult and child per year. Or, the other way around, when the film "2010" was produced, people considered shooting the spacewalk sequences in space itself: it was more expensive, but not by a silly ratio.
The Apollo program has been likened to a modern building of the pyramids. This is probably a fair analogy: Egypt had a seasonal surplus of labor. The costs did not seem to have harmed them at the time. The Easter Islanders, on the other hand, destroyed their economy and ruined their island putting up those stupid heads. The Great Wall of China was a huge investment, but provided no real protection.
I don't think we can come up with a conventional financial justification for going into space. There is no need for a 'space race' any longer: we don't need to develop heavy missile weapons, and who gets there first is not an issue. Space will be there, much the same in ten years or a hundred. If we are going to do something in space, then let it be purely for the fun of finding out. Budget the thing at about a cinema ticket per adult per year.
Bread and circuses. That's what the people want.
NASA put a man on the moon for one reason only, and that was because of the soviet union.
Since there is no competition taking place now, there is no need innovation.
if you want NASA to have more money, please feel free to donate your own cash. I want no part of it. Don't force others to fund your desires.
The current administration has zero interest in funding anything to do with studying climate change, particularly a satellite first proposed by Al Gore.
It was built, but never launched. It now sits in storage (at a cost of $1M/year), awaiting a less hostile administration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite)
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
...and 35 years of wasting my money.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
50 years of aeronautics research on a steadily declining budget:
http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/technical_excellence.htm
Just $750 million in aerospace funding for FY2007; perhaps it is time to split the ``NA'' from the ``SA'' and give the aeronautics directorate the freedom to pursue its own budget and agenda outside the bondoogle that is the US space programme.
In other words, just turn the clock back those 50 years...
I find it truly interesting that people seem to dog upon the space program and NASA. What many do not realize is that much of the technology that we enjoy today was developed by NASA and its partners to solve a problem in space. It is when they realized that it had practical applications on earth they were able to make back profits.
I have heard from others that "For every dollar put into nasa we get 20 dollars back in new tech." Searching around lead me to find that it is actually around 9 dollars back. Still 9:1 return is not found even in the riskiest markets.
As for tech. Someone told me Velcro was invented to help secure things in zero gravity. Memory Foam (the basis for the Tempurpedic "Swedish Sleep System") was made for beds in space so they would conform. This is all second hand stuff from my parents when I was young so I am going to guess there may be some element of conspiracy to make me interested in science.
Now my only question is, will NASA make it to 60?
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
There, That should help them get funding. George please take note.
80% of the accomplishments were done in 20% of the time.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
IMHO, your HO is an idiot.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
There is ZERO justification for a moon base at this time
Sure there is. Just not a financial one. Not everything is about dollars and cents you know. Exploration by definition means you don't know what you'll find and you don't know until you try.
By the way, have you seen the national debt lately?
NASA's budget is around $17 billion/year. The total US federal budget for 2008 was around $2.9 Trillion. That means NASA's budget is approximately half of one percent of the total federal budget. Compare that with the $549 billion spent on defense or the $581 billion spend on Social Security and I'm not really very worried about the money we spend on NASA. Cut a few bombers out of the defense budget and we can fund NASA for years.
I think NASA is doing EXACTLY what it should be doing, which is unmanned robotic missions.
Which account for roughly 1/3 of NASA's budget with the remainder dominated by manned spaceflight.
Imagine what we could gather from an array of hubble telescopes... and what little more we could learn from an expensive manned moon shot.
Not sure what your point is since we pretty much by definition don't know what we would learn from either. To be frank I think the applications of technology developed for a manned moonshot are more likely to have an application within my lifetime. The amount of technology that came out of the NASA programs that we take for granted these days is breathtaking.
What is the return on the American investment here?
Here is a breakdown by state and here is just some of the technology that has come out of NASA.
All the Trillions of dollars the American tax payer has sent to NASA over the years.
What trillions? The total amount spent on NASA since its inception in 1958 is $592 billion. We spend that much every year on our military.
agreed. NASA has helped us a ton. we just need to help them back, by providing decent funding.
Physics 101 was fun wasn't it? I hear next year you'll have to use calculus.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I'm really excited about the Falcon, and hope everything goes well this weekend. But when someone complains about being stuck in LEO, pointing him to another craft that is only capable of reaching LEO might not be the best approach :)
I've been re-reading Arthur Clarke's 1967 book "The Promise Of Space". Every chapter or two I have to set it down for a couple of days because I get depressed. No one rational in 1967 thought that humanity would just throw away the future, but that's exactly what happened. The politicians and generals in Washington and Moscow had their chest-thumping contest and then went back to their regular business of raping and pillaging the planet. It's the same reading T.A. Heppenheimer and Gerard O'Neil's books. No one then could imagine that the future could be abandoned so abruptly and so totally. Now it's all gone. We couldn't build a Saturn V today if we needed to. Today the US government spends over half its money on the military, a program that condemns our civilization to semi-feudalism for the foreseeable future. For the cost of FIVE WEEKS of the Iraq occupation we could build the Space Elevator. One would hope that ensuring the future continuation of our species would be a higher priority to Washington than slaughtering defenseless brown people, but apparently not. I only know of one other society that deliberately turned its back on the future. In the early fifteenth century China led the world in science, technology and exploration. They traded as far away as Baja California and Timbuktu and the Indian Ocean was regarded as a "Chinese lake". In 1421 they apparently circumnavigated the globe and mapped the shorelines of almost the entire planet. Then the eunuch bureaucrats took over the government and turned their back on the rest of the world. Within a century China was a hodge-podge of introverted warlord-dominated kingdoms involved in continual internecine wars, easily dominated by more united foreigners.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Since the military space programs are larger than NASA, shouldn't they get more money?
I am not so sure a civilian space program is a worthwhile goal. Most astronauts come from the military. The military was the Space Shuttle's best customer. The military has legitimate uses for the high frontier.
And as demonstrated earlier this year, the U.S. military can clean up its own space messes.
Fold NASA back in to the military.
Commission astronauts so they can make territorial claims. Make planting the flag a national goal. Pulp all the America-limiting treaties and recycle them into flight manuals.
The civilian space agency is a relic of the Cold War, like the "under God" of the revised Pledge of Allegiance, and both should be got rid of.
Wow, I haven't been here in a while, and in the past, I've only been directed to the stories and arguments here by a former friend.
What nattering ninnies of negativism.
We never went to the moon. The Apollo missions were part Cold War bluff and part of sacred myth meant to inspire nationalism in a time of discord and near open revolt.
The astronauts would have died in the Van Allen Belts, or in the extreme temperatures and radiation on the moon. The Apollo landings were likely filmed by Stanley Kubrick, who left behind subtle hints to his authorship. Besides, NASA accidentally released footage of Apollo astronauts faking a shot with a transparency, which was meant to portray the craft halfway through their journey from earth to the moon (though realistically, they would have been dying in the Van Allen Belt).
I don't want to argue. This truly saddens me. I mean, arguing nonsense in an era like this. NASA and it's 'exploration' mythos are nothing but a front for the national and military expansion into space, as the powers that be already preside over land, sea, air, and our flaccid & fevered gray matter.
I don't have any patience for this idea that, as one person put it, "NASA hasn't done a thing worthwhile since we gave up on the moon." In just the past decade, NASA has landed on an asteroid, successfully reached Mars six times, impacted a comet, explored Saturn and its moons in detail, explored Jupiter and its moons in detail, and sent missions on their way to Mercury, the asteroid belt, Pluto and beyond. Meanwhile, the Voyagers continue their quest for the very edge of the solar system. (And this is just NASA - other nations are exploring in a big way, too. For example, between the American, Chinese, Japanese and European space agencies, there are two spacecraft active at the moon, one at Venus and SIX at Mars as I write this, with others en route to various destinations.) If you ask me, the golden age of space exploration wasn't in the 60s. It's right now. Yes, I understand that the human element is in some ways more gripping, and I hope that human exploration regains a place in the story, but for now, the robots are doing amazing things. And I, for one, ...
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
12 years until retirement
If you guys haven't seen this guys work check it out. Being a space geek I fell in love with the documentaries on first sight.
http://spacecraftfilms.com/
An outstanding job compiling hours and hours (days?) of unseen footage, re-mastered and re-stored. For example the complete uncut audio loop from Apollo 1 catastrophe.
I wasn't able to leave my living room all weekend with my first order of:
Apollo 1
Project Gemini: A Bold Leap Forward
Project Mercury: A New Frontier
The Mighty Saturns: Saturn 1 & 1B
I'm disappointed the US Space Program didnt meet the expectations of 2001-Space Odyssey which came out when I was kid (and a year before the first moonwalk). Yet I still have hope of a space future for mankind. Even though the ISS is a grossly over-spent $100 billion, seeing it pass overhead several times a month gives hope of a space future. Its the tenuous presence of humans in Space. My friends dont understand why I watch the ISS. Am I crazy? And I dont care whether its the US, Russia, Europe, China or a kid in his garage who succeeds, just that someone does.
I went to a meeting at a NASA facility a few weeks ago, not something I usually do. It felt very 1960s. A conference room with a large fake-wood table, plaques on the walls commemorating events of long ago, and frosted-glass windows for security. On the wall hung three calendars, for the previous, current, and next month, an ancient Government custom. Almost everyone in the room was over 50; many were older.
The meeting was about airspace deconfliction for UAVs, a bureaucratic problem involving the FAA, NASA, and some other agencies. It was all about who to call, what forms to fill out, and what to do when your application wasn't being processed fast enough. The overall feeling was that this was a hard problem, wasn't going to be solved soon, and nobody really cared that much because their budgets were being cut.
Driving across the facility, it seemed a monument to the past. Many buildings, and most of the parking lots, were empty. Here and there an aircraft was set out as a display. The place has an operational airport, but it wasn't used while I was there. A few flyable planes were parked on the ramp, but nothing was going on around them.
It's great to celebrate NASA's 50th; but don't forget what its origins were. Nazi war criminals, the Cold War, a Space Transportation System based on the perceived need to have a reusable launch vehicle for military cargo (it proved unreliable and its mission (ISS) needed to be re-invented), and the militaristic race to the Moon. Yes, we're well aware now that we're on tiny little spaceship with dwindling resources and the circumstances that have put us here are beyond anyone's imagination to explain. We wouldn't have that perspective without the space program. Let's quit pissing our planet away on our addiction to fossil fuels and actually change the way we live. Before we all are just a memory.
So you have a reason these ideas won't work on a large scale?
I'd love to hear it. Because I've already made working models, and the height obtained with a rocket model is much higher using these techniques.
One of my friends had a doctorate of physics and used to work for NASA. He says the ideas are sound, but because of NASA entrenched box thinking, they won't adapt any of them. Of course, this doesn't preclude private concerns like Virgin Galactic from incorporating them.
All of the truly revolutionary, human-civilization-advancing, awe-inspiring work was done over the first 15 years of the past 50 years, and it was done with technology akin to a pocket calculator and a roll of duct-tape.
I am NOT under-estimating scientific progress; but Nasa went to the moon AND back EIGHTEEN TIMES, an undertaking which required far more ability and effort than lofting some research labs new toy into orbit.
We have technology that makes the 1970's look like a 3rd world country, and even for primitive physics SpaceX recently released a rocket engine with an efficiency increase of 40%.
NASA will not get people into space. It is not a help, it is a hindrance. We could have been out there, for not too much cost, 10 years ago, but we aren't. Heck, NASA's catch-phrase for the past half a century is "We'll have men on Mars in the next 20 years". Yeah, that stopped being funny several decades ago.
When we landed on the moon 40 years ago, we could have set up the infrastructure to make it much more permanent ("Remember the Saturns");
since then, over the past 40 years, the only difference is the cost of setting up a more permanent installation has been decreasing and decreasing and decreasing.
For 40 years, it has been getting cheaper and easier to do the same thing we did 50 years ago. And yet instead of doing it, instead of even holding our ground on the progress we've made, we're throwing it away. I for one, cannot believe NASA's "new" shuttles will ever see the light of day, and the space program will be really and truly dead. And Nasa (administration+bureaucrats, not engineers) will do their best to keep space exploration dead.
I have no idea what their motivations are, but they have already killed it. The fact that they threw away the moon (x billion dollars, one great leap for humanity) in exchange for remote controlled cars, esoteric orbiting pet projects, and 35 years in what otherwise is the most technologically advanced era of earth's history, is proof that its not an accident:
For some reason or another, Nasa's administration+bureaucrats have deliberately killed spaceflight. (They CURRENTLY have budget cuts; but these were not nearly so bad until the mid-70's when the fed effed the country, and NASA stopped trying).
Thank God for SpaceX !!!
After getting to the moon in record time, NASA is now relegated to clawing its way to Low Earth Orbit. The can-do spirit has been replaced by CYA middle managers and numerous white papers which lead to nothing.
Truly embarassing. If that's the best NASA can do, it's time to close down the manned space program and let the private sector handle it.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Thank you so much for the Troll rating.
Considering the intellect of some of the moderators of these posts, I consider it to be a great honor.
BTW Ms. Moderator, what's your idea/s for improving launch capabilities? Or don't you have any?
There is even more justified anti-americanism in the world - see some interviews with Gore Vidal (an American btw) on youtube. But I agree with you - I am not American either but I think that NASA is actually the biggest American contribution to the evolution of mankind. And I am also glad that US adopted something good from nazi Germany and not only fascism and brainwashing.