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Obama Moves To Link Pentagon With NASA
Amiga Trombone sends this quote from the beginning of a story at Bloomberg:
"President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the US's civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China. Obama's transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle, which isn't slated to fly until 2015, according to people who've discussed the idea with the Obama team."
"Houston, we have a problem.."
"Roger that, missiles launched"
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
finally... a good idea from the Obama camp, I was praying for at least one - now they will be able to use the cover of black military programs to protect their funding streams. Time to to get back in the space business
With the equity markets down over 32% last year and the economy still deeply intrenched in a deflationary correction, buying any "stock" right now without a large and reliable dividend is not wise
Well, I'm a big fan of buying dividend stocks, so I won't argue with you on that one, but I think your wrong about it being unwise to buy non-dividend stocks. You want to buy stocks when the prices are low. I'm actually loving this period -- I'm not gonna retire for 30+ years and this is a great time to be buying shares at dirt cheap prices.
Sucks for the people who were going to retire soon but if they were going to retire next year why the hell did they have so many investments in equities? If I was close to retirement I'd have most of my nest egg invested in cash......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Kinda like that "tolerant" neighborhood near San Francisco
If you think San Franciscans are tolerant try applying for a carry permit within the city......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
NASA will become a fourth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, known as 'Starfleet'.
The military and Nasa have always had a relationships; choosing astronauts from the ranks of the Air Force, for one. Obviously, the technology developed through the space program has military applications such as spy satellites and obviously a rocket that can put a man in orbit can just as easily deliver a multi-ton warhead to the other side of the planet. What worries me in this plan is shifting the focus from science to defense objectives.
While NASA has a long relationship with the military and shares plenty of technology, they are a civilian organization. I know that up until recently, NASA's mission was, "To understand and protect our home planet...", but the main focus has been to send interplanetary probes into the solar system, bust up comets and generally produce outstanding backgrounds for our desktops. Would this shift in leadership take more energy away from studying the nature of the universe, lofting the next generation of space telescopes and studying our planet from above? Under the military it seems more likely that NASA's goals would shift away from "understanding" and more to "protecting". I imagine this wold involve developing the next generation of anti-satellite and anti-anti-satellite weapons (despite the fact that earth orbit is supposed to be a weapons free zone).
What insight does the slashdot community have on this? Will shifting NASA to military control result in a more nimble and focused organization able to achieve the goal of putting a man on mars in the next 20 years, or will military research take precedence over science?
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Check NASAWatch to see some inacuracies in this Bloomberg story.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
The design of the space shuttle was influenced enormously by the military, just FYI.
He's not a moron and this is not unprecedented.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My interpretation of the article is not that Obama will want DoD staff to help manage NASA projects, but rather he wants NASA to be able to use already developed DoD rocket technology (which is now too classified for NASA to use). Since it's already developed, the over-budget and over-time has already been paid for....
Altruistic as the space race may seem, China will soon be a much larger influence in the world than today. Currently, their middle class is larger than the entire population of the USA, and the rest of the population is catching up fast.
If they have a well developed space program, it's all the more leverage if they start to flex their muscles. You can bet their bureaucracy knows of the military benefits of space. Everyone and their mother already has surveillance satellites up. The US government wants a powerful presence up there as well.
The race for power is underpinning this race for space, just as it did in the time of Sputnik. Only this time, bankrupting China (like the US bankrupt the USSR) doesn't seem to be an option.
What, you'd prefer to buy when stocks are up? While it is true that a lot of investors do buy high and sell low, it's really not the best way to make money.
I'm pretty ignorant on this subject, and not a US national, but wouldn't this be a rather good way to eliminate redundancy in similar projects across both agencies at a time when the US needs to rationalise expenditure?
What's maddening is that nobody involved in this debate seems to realize that:
1. We solved resonance and pogoing issues in the 1960s vis-a-vis the Saturn V stack.
2. We can simply dust off the Apollo 18-20 J-series mission plans and the Apollo X/ALSS/AES/LESA studies, and execute them.
3. All we need to actually get back to the Moon is a Saturn V stack updated with newer materials and automation technologies.
4. SRBs are insanely dangerous due to their non-throttalability, and should not be man-rated beyond the poorly-designed Shuttle stack.
We knew all this *more than 40 years ago* (we ignored the SRB issue back then, which led directly to Challenger); how can these people be so ignorant?!
Here's a link to just a few of the studies which were done of follow-on missions. Here are links to Apollo X, ALSS, AES, and LESA.
Stephen Baxter's Voyage is an interesting alternate history based upon some of these mission plans (although he's way too hard on the Germans, IMHO).
The bottom line - if NASA want to go back to the Moon (far better to offer a $20B X-Prize for the first organization to put 30 men on the Moon for a year and a day, and return them safely to Earth), all they have to do is to start building modernized Saturn Vs, Apollo CMs, SMs, & LMs.
I don't see what the big deal is. NASA and DoD have worked togeather before (Shuttle program but DoD dropped out for non-manned launches). This is not about militarization of NASA (DoD's space budget is significantly more than NASA), if it's cheaper for NASA to adopt or modify one of the heavy launchers used by the DoD, than why not ? What raised my eye brow was Griffin's response about NASA's inability to evaluate rocket options ....
I was already concerned about his wanting to send more troupes to Afghanistan, but now this????
Umm, Afghanistan != Iraq. You do remember why we are over there, right?
The government always needs a boogeyman to keep us off-balance. The cold war with Russia carried it for a while.
I don't think the populations of the countries that were effectively annexed by the Soviet Union thought of them as a mere bogeyman. The Cold War came about when the Soviet Union refused to honor her wartime agreements and decided to annex Eastern Europe. It didn't come about because our Government needed a bogeyman to distract the population.
but this demonization will only hurt relations
So we should turn the other check when they oppress human rights and just keep doing business with them as usual?
Also, keep in mind that China already has the US by its financial balls in a very assymetrical fashion, and I'm not sure what that would portend. But it does give China a lot of leverage over the US.
How do they have us by the 'financial balls'? They could dump their holdings of US Treasuries and pull the rug out from under that market -- but that would hurt them (and the rest of the World for that matter) at least as badly as it would hurt us. They have 400,000,000 people they need to pull out of poverty. That isn't gonna happen if they undermine their biggest trading relationship.
I had always told everyone to keep eyes on China, for they would become the next rival of the US in the 21st century
They may well become our rival. We'll see. We aren't without our own strengths and they aren't without weakness though. We might see a different World in the 21st century but we'll still be around.
keep an eye on the relationship between Russia and China, as I suspect they will become strong allies in the years and decades to come
It's just as likely they'll become rivals as it is they will become allies. Either way, it's part of the geopolitical game. We're laying the foundation for a future relationship with India. Think India might be a useful counterweight to China?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Step one of agitation: Know your audience.
...that the military hasn't been running a black budget man in space program right along all this time. Their budget is huge compared to nasa, and right in the article, they have heavy lift rockets perfectly good for the task. And who's to say they don't have a two stage to orbit rocket plane or hybrid scramjet/rocket whatever dropped from a mothership already? Like they are going to brag about this, or we take it as gospel that they just stopped developing black budget advanced flying craft 40-50 years ago? The last one they finally fessed up to is the B2, we are now being made to believe they just gave that sort of research and deployment up? Really? They just stopped? And look at the near hysterical fit they went into when that dude in england hacked into some servers and he claims he found evidence of *just that*, a running black budget military manned space program. They want that guy shut up, locked away for the rest of his life in the US. Why? He didn't do anything but look, no damages, seems like a two year sentence or something like that is his native country would be sufficient, but nope, they went into serious overdrive to get him extradited.
Don't dismiss the thought out of hand. My guess is, because I have yet to see any evidence that they have given up black budget advanced aeronautical research, is that we had the technology for man in space a long time ago now, and the military just kept doing it, with the nasa efforts beng the public misdirection effort to keep focus elsewhere for deniability purposes, They just got better at burying stuff inside the black budgets.
Space is the high ground, no way in hell would they NOT want that advantage, including having humans up there and a way to quickly get them up and back. There's another guy out there who has been imaging rather large and pretty secret orbital craft, I don't have the url handy but I have seen his pics, those are some really large spacecraft, some of they completely large enough to hold a small crew.
from TFA: "Obamas transition team is considering a collaboration between the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agencys planned launch vehicle,"
The idea is to SAVE MONEY. Whether that works out or not, we'll see. And as for "trading bullets for rockets", first that seems an excellent idea to me, but also Iraq is costing upwards of 300 billion last I heard; whatever NASA gets is pocket change compared to that.
Another way to look at it: buy as much as you can. Either this cycle will will end and you'll come out a wealthy person in a few decades - or the economy will completely collapse, and we're all screwed anyway.
The whole reason the Space Transportation System (STS, or just "space shuttle") looks the way it does is entirely due to now-defunct military requirements. When they were designing the shuttle, the DoD had a requirement to be able to place a payload in polar orbit and return to Earth in one orbit, in order to "secretly" deploy spy satellites. This is hard. No, really, this is very hard. The earth is spinning "sideways" and it takes a tremendous amount of impulse (read: fuel) to change your orbit from sideways to vertical. Then you have to land again.
NASA, dutiful organization that it was, came up with the idea of "tacking" the orbiter on the side. And they gave it wings. This was the only way they could get the crew-carrying module to safely glide back to its original destination.
About 5 years into the design, the DoD said, "No, thanks, we don't want that system anymore," and left NASA holding the bag. So, we're stuck with this design where the re-entry surface is exposed to the outside during launch (nobody else does that). The engines on the orbiter remain the highest energy-dense engines ever developed.
For more trivia, see here.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
Sucks for the people who were going to retire soon but if they were going to retire next year why the hell did they have so many investments in equities?
That's a good question. The general answer is that most retired investors need their portfolio to generate a return at least equal to inflation, over time. Historically cash has a negative return after inflation and bonds are maybe break-even at best. But last year all that went out the window. Stocks have had a 1-year negative return that's almost unprecedented and even high-grade bonds have taken a hit. Plus markets over the world are down, not just the U.S. So, while generally cash is a bad place to be, long-term, last year nothing else was any good. That still doesn't mean, though, that you should keep your nest egg under the mattress: over the long term you'll see no net growth and your retirement income will shrink, net inflation.
The DOD black budget is over 30 billion per annum now, as of 2007 figures I just looked at. Do you know what is in it? I don't. And it has been in the billions going all the way back, so add it up, half a trillion and change over the past few decades. That's enough to keep a little advanced space R and D going in there some place. Nasa for 2008 is 17 billion, and I would presume that any black budget efforts in space wouldn't have to be totally sourced within the black budget, a whole lot of the tech that could be used could just be schlepped over, they don't have to "develop" every single rivet or engine, etc in the black budget, just the interesting bits. A regular adapted airliner or b-52 can haul another craft, so something smaller than the shuttle but larger than the old x series of planes could be hauled up to drop point with off the shelf airframes. If Scaled Composites can get to suborbital for mere millions in a few years and a small handful of techs, the DOD could certainly already have something that could get to NEO given their budget and *half a century* lead time using similar mothership to dropship tech. Anyway, we have leaked names, aurora, brilliant buzzard, tr-3b. I say where's there's smoke, there's fire, and they certainly would have the motive and intent, plus the means as regards funding and secret facilities, plus a past track record of not only developing one off advanced prototypes, but actually deploying small fleets before it got released to the public, sometimes even at multi years level. How long were the nighthawk and spirit flying before they admitted to owning them, or the sr-71?
What I said, don't dismiss the notion out of hand, look at all the tantalizing clues plus the obviousness of how much they would want something like that as part of their total package. Robots and computers are damn useful, but sometimes there's no substitute for having a meat sack on the job someplace.
All we need to actually get back to the Moon is a Saturn V stack updated with newer materials and automation technologies.
I share your admiration for the Saturn V. But re-creating it is not the best idea.
According to Henry Spencer, the blueprints for the Saturn V still exist, but much of the undocumented extra knowledge was in fact lost. The skilled machinists who knew how to turn those designs into working parts are long retired or dead; the special heat treatments needed to make some of the alloys are forgotten; etc.
And, as another poster noted in this thread, if you did build a Saturn V it would have 1960's electronics.
If you say "but we will just update the alloys and electronics" then it isn't really a Saturn V anymore, and it will need to be re-tested and re-engineered. In which case, you might as well have started from a clean sheet of paper.
Also, the Saturn V was our answer to the problem of getting boots on the moon as fast as possible. I'd prefer to see the problem of moon travel solved correctly, which IMHO means making it easier and faster to mount expeditions, and making it possible to send larger payloads. This means I want to see a cheap, really reusable orbital vehicle; a space station suitable for staging moon missions; an Earth-moon spacecraft, assembled in space, that was never designed to land on Earth or the moon; and reusable moon landing vehicles.
Every time you use a Saturn V to go to the moon, you destroy one Saturn V. That's expensive, and it doesn't scale well. If we have a reliable "pickup truck" that can carry a small payload to orbit, then do it again in less than a week, we can send up the crew and supplies for a moon mission.
With the Saturn V, our astronauts lived inside a little tin can for a few days, then returned. I'd like to see an actual moon base sent over in pieces, and see people living on the moon for months at a time (and doing science the whole time).
Cheap, reliable, routine flights to orbit change the whole game. Instead of repeating the space race, let's build an infrastructure and go to space to stay.
(far better to offer a $20B X-Prize for the first organization to put 30 men on the Moon for a year and a day, and return them safely to Earth)
Yes, yes, yes!! And make that prize tax-free while you are at it. And put a smaller prize for second place. These prizes would be cheap if someone succeeds, and if no one succeeds we would pay nothing. It's better than paying cost plus contracts to aerospace contractors.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I disagree... people buying high and selling low is a great way to make money...
As long as you are the one buying low and selling high.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
What exactly does America have going for her here? And what do you think Obama can do? Do you think his voodoo reaganomics will spend us out of trouble?
The voodoo economics refer to trickle down economics... which is the exact opposite of what Obama said he would do... Ironic considering reaganomics are much to blame for the current crisis!
Also the American national debt is even more of a concern to the RoW than for the US... so if the US really got into trouble, we (the RoW) would probably bail you out!
Oh and the situation was even grimmer in the 30s... So reform can turn things around (New Deal 2.0?)
-The American manufacturing base is declining.
Source? Everything I've seen shows record industrial output prior to the recent economic downturn. What indication do you have of a reversal in this long-term trend?
-High school graduations and the overall literacy is down the tubes.
Once again, the data that I could find contradicts your claim. Why do you think any recent spike in dropouts is anything other than a temporary aberration in the larger trend?
-The Baby Boomers are about to retire.
That was certainly the case a few months ago, but the stock market crash took care of that problem. The evaporation of so much wealth has pushed out retirement for a lot of boomers.
-The 50+ trillion National Debt (by 2020) needs to be paid, or at least serviced, which means much higher taxes (and much more job loss)
First of all, remember that even with low inflation $50 billion in 2020 is likely to be worth about $38 billion in today's dollars. Second, I find it hard to believe that people will continue to loan the US that much cheap money. If we run up that much debt, it will almost certainly cause high inflation. Cash would be a very bad position to be in with high inflation, as would bonds. If you have the stomach for commodities, they would probably weather inflation pretty well. So where would you suggest putting money in a high-inflation situation? Personally, I'm going for real estate pretty soon. But like I said, equities seem fairly well-priced right now, too.
And what do you think Obama can do?
Not much - the fed has pretty much blown its wad. The best I can hope for is that he spends all of this debt money on infrastructure, so that we at least get something lasting out of the political stunt called "stimulus".
Do you think his voodoo reaganomics will spend us out of trouble?
Reaganomics was usually applied to "trickle-down" theory, which isn't really what Obama is proposing. Nevertheless, any stimulus isn't going to change the broad direction of the economy, but it might take the edge off. The government is a lot bigger than it was during the depression, so don't try to compare government action then and now.
If I were you, I'd convert your stocks into gold and get the hell out of here.
Gold is way too erratic for me. If I had been a really smart guy and seen the stock crash coming in late september, I might have transferred to gold. Unfortunately, the price of gold crashed along with the stock market (after an initial spike). Now, it has since recovered - so if I held on to it I'd be fine, but no better off than if I'd stayed in cash. And who knows what it will do tomorrow? It's varied by roughly 15-20% in just the last month or so.
Starving dudes with loose nukes, that's what it's coming to.
Now you've lost me.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
USCG is part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and not currently part of the DoD since we are actually at "war".
The USCG was also transfered from the Department of Transportation and not Commerce on the creation of the DHS.
It is also considered one of the five (5) armed services under the US Code with the Marines as well (even though the Marines are administrated under the Department of the Navy due to historical reasons).
Of course, if you get the thirty year nothing prevents you from still paying it off early, you just a slightly worse rate.
The difference then is that if you get a worse job (or in our case, your wife plans on staying home after you have kids) you revert back to the lower monthly payment as a requirement.
"I will not weaponize space." (and technically, weaponize doesn't mean what his puppeteers think it means)
Being tolerant doesn't mean being stupid.
The only thing that's stupid is disarming the law-abiding portion of the population and marking them as easy pray for the armed predators of the world.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Keep in mind that the only reason the military got involved was because NASA couldn't come up with the funding on its own for a Space Shuttle-sized RLV. If NASA had scaled back the ambitions of the Shuttle (for which they already knew they didn't have the demand), they wouldn't have needed the military money and wouldn't have had to make the design compromises that they did. And the DoD was left holding the bag when NASA went into CYA mode for a couple of years following the Challenger accident. Military satellites need to be launched on the DoD's schedule, not when NASA feels like it.