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Why Does the US Have a Civil Space Program?
BDew writes "The Presidents of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering have commissioned a study on the Rationale and Goals of the US Civil Space Program. In short, the Academies are asking why the nation has a civil space program (including human, robotic, commercial, and personal spaceflight). The study is intended to provide a strategic framework for the nation's activities in space that can provide consistent guidance in an increasingly interconnected world. The members of the study committee are interested in the views (positive or negative) of the general public, particularly those people with a scientific and/or technological interest."
And fund our research instead.
This is my sig.
Seems simple enough.
I read the internet for the articles.
It seems that private companies such as SpaceX are going to be the future rather then government funded such as NASA which has become counter productive the older it has gotten.
It's free enterprise.
That's why I'm very leery of scaling back NASA. The moon shot was propaganda, partially, but it also unleashed a ton of new technologies and trained a generation of engineers. Of course, we could go along with the privatizing globalists, but you see how well that's working?
We may or may not find a role for men in space this generation, but space travel and investigation is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species. And no corporation will EVER do what needs to be done, because it's not profitable except indirectly.
I don't believe they are asking this because they want to kill it. I think it's because they want to provide it with a more defined purpose. Some clarity and consistency in spending.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
What is the real use of getting a man to Mars or another planet other thean bragging about it for the next 70 years? Somehow, some people are in favor of a manned space program. The question is, what is the tangible benifit of sending people to the moon/Mars/Jupiter/Proxima Centauri?
I feel that there is a lack of a concrete goal, something to stand behind. Something that has a good probability of pay-off in the future. Is "finding out things about other planets" a goal that convinces people to support (manned or unmanned) spaceflight? What do we really want?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Because it's polite.
An uncivil space wouldn't get much in the way of positive press.
What are the Clangers saying?
And fund our research instead.
That would have been my first guess, given that there's a very vocal cadre who look for every opportunity to quash manned spaceflight, but TFA doesn't seem slanted in that direction. Could just be lip service, but I'm hoping it is what it says it is: A study to re-examine what we want to do, cross-index that with what we think we can do, and use that to create some concrete plans.
Then again, if the Obama administration turns NASA into the US Space Force, civil space pursuits at the national level may dry up entirely, leaving only military and private space efforts. Not sure I like the sound of that.
I call it the finglonger! But I'll need funding to get beyond the prototype phase.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Because it's there. Space, that is.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
NASA was formed to explore space as a peaceful endeavor, not as a conquest.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
We have a civil space program in NASA, and we have the federated USAF space program. The real question is why have TWO programs?
Because we can.
That should be more than enough reason. We as a species have proven ourselves significant. We are the only know organism that has ever had the ability to leave the immediate confines of this planet. If we stop now then this monumental acheviement was not more than a cheap stunt.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The reason for a civil space program is pragmatic. The military and government is concerned with goals that are separate and distinct from civilian interests. But what are those interests?
The military is concerned with control, management, and protection of national assets. Communications, surveillance, and counter-terrorism are primary goals. Towards this end, the military produces missiles and delivery systems capable of providing this. But the military has no need to explore space, or advance scientific research beyond this.
There is no military or security reason to put someone on the moon, or map out the surface of other celestial bodies. However our understanding of these can advance civilian interest. For example, the helium-3 surface deposits on the moon could provide a energy source far greater than that of fission or conventional power generation. Exploration of the martian environment could provide clues to the formation of our own planet and answer a question long-sought after by both scientists, philosophers, and theologians -- where do we come from? How did we become what we are today? By deploying powerful sensing technology into space we can peer deeper into the universe and unlock many secrets, providing advances in physics, metallurgy, and many other fields. Putting people into space allows for research in microgravity and zero gravity environments. Certain molecular structures only form in the absence of a strong gravitational field. It could provide for advances in building materials, or allow for the development of quantum devices that may not be possible to produce terrestrially (or be prohibitively expensive) en masse. Frankly, there is considerable research that needs to be done.
Military and scientific needs can sometimes be at cross purposes. The creation of a fusion power generator with a net positive output would be a major advancement for any country. Further exploration of the moon may in fact provide this as there are isotopes found there that are very amiable to this goal, much more so than any terrestrial source. However, such a powerful energy source could be used to create star-wars styled weapons, making land-based particle accelerators a reality, or other advanced weapons systems that simply aren't practical to deploy today. Localized atmospheric heating, strong RF fields to provide an ionization layer above a target, etc., all become possible with a large energy source. Because of this, the military would likely move to be an obstacle in such research because it threatens the balance of power. Perhaps it already has.
The military and civilian programs should work in tandem when possible to reduce overall costs, but should also be allowed to initiate their own programs independently of each other, as the need arises. To collapse the two into a single entity gives rise to questions of trust, integrity, and overall effectiveness. Ultimately, it would not be as beneficial to society as the present system is, though in the short term it would offer some economic benefit -- but at the expense of long-term economic and social gain.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The problem with 'scaling back' NASA is that it's not like a factory or a bunch of servers that you can just switch back on in 5 years with a bit of maintenance.
If you cut funding and they have to cut engineering jobs, you're going to lose talent: experience that may not return when you decide you're in another space race.
An interesting statement when the research groups own "Statement of Task" includes:
"and ensuring the future progress of the U.S. civil space program"
Most of their objective list itself seems to imply (to me at least) they are for a civil space program, though I suppose it could be a masquerade for a desire to kill it and loot the corpse.
If they're so successful why is SpaceX doing launches at 5 million when NASA's cost 50 million?
Problem is that NASA has lost focus and what they're doing now is the same thing as private companies are doing but they're doing it more expensive.
Then congress will find it easier to kill off individual space programs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I agree that I don't like space to be militarized. However, if it is, that would be good overall for manned space flight. Nobody can get funding like the armed forces can, and they tend to push the envelope on things that normally wouldn't get looked at twice. Big waste of money? Yes. Possibly the best thing to promote manned space flight that could happen? Absolutely.
You seem to have an axe to grind, sir. I beg leave to ask by whom you are employed?
Pirate Party UK
I worked at the National Academies for a year, and I've never seen such a disorganized, confused, and visionless organization in my life. There were no less than 5 IT departments managing their web site(s), none of which was answerable to the others, and no CIO or central IT management. We had a database driven web site with a crumbling database and I spent most of my year telling them it was critical we fix it before it died, they decided to put the effort into CSS and graphics instead. More relevant here... I had an executive director tell me, and I quote, "Our reports don't matter, what matters is that we have them." The Academies are in theory one organization, but in reality it's 4 divisions that operate like warring principalities, and what little theoretical high level unifying management there is mostly seems to be disinterested. Each of these principalities is run by an executive director, so one of them saying "we exist only to exist" is incredibly sad. The Academies were apparently once a prestigious academic institution, but it seems now they're just a floundering Beltway Bandit - except they aren't trying to make any money even, it's a nonprofit.
The moon shot was propaganda, partially, but it also unleashed a ton of new technologies and trained a generation of engineers.
It also got us Tang. Who doesn't like Tang?
Why do you think that saving the species is a good idea?
Why do you think UP is the answer, when DOWN provides a much more affordable, immediate and suitable environment? (Subterranean living) Sure DIRT is boring. But its cheap!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
before aliens/search/destroy/mankind.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
"The members of the study committee are interested in the views (positive or negative) of the general public, particularly those people with a scientific and/or technological interest."" While you're at it, why not ask such people (those who are neither cretinous nor scientifically dysfunctional nor extremely gullible) what they think about a fable concerning 19 individuals armed with nothing more than religious faith and box cutters who managed to create murder and mayhem on a Herculean scale and thereby triggering continuous war in the West Asia.
Space exploration, intended to lead to significant off-planet industry and settlement in the long term, is essential for the future progress of humanity as a whole. Exactly what the benifits will be isn't something that can be usefully predicted, but simply ignoring the resources of almost all of our solar system is clearly not a reasonable plan.
Currently only major governments have the resources to mount any sort of space exploration efforts. Since it's essential, and only major governments can do it, major governments must do it. That will remain true until it becomes viable for smaller organizations to take up the burden.
In order for government funded exploration to effectively lead towards future off-planet industry and settlement, the exploration effort must contribute towards lowering the price of and broadening access to space exploration technology. Meaningful off-planet industry and settlement won't occur at major-government-only price points, and it won't occur with major governments as the gatekeepers.
A military space program would be unlikely to meet these requirements. Technology would be kept secret rather than being shared, which would fail to contribute to advances by private sector entities and smaller governments. Flashy exploration spectacles would likely still occur - perhaps even more efficiently - but the main benefit to a government run space program would be lost.
A government funded space program's primary task should be to provide seed knowledge and technology for future private space exploration. It will have succeeded when there are multiple separately owned private sector moonbases, asteroid mines, orbital power stations, and long term research habitats. A military space program would subvert this goal through misallocation of resources and refusal to publicly disclose publicly funded developments.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
No manned spaceflight means no warp-capable Starships, no green Orion slave women, no bare-knuckled fights on distant M-class planets, no time travel, no heart-warming self-sacrifice for the needs of the many...
Sendng an unmanned "V-ger" out is great and all of that, but we really want the Star Trek/Wars/etc fantasy and are loath to let it go.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
And thats what life would have been like if I had invented the finglonger, one can always dream, one can always dream..
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
We may or may not find a role for men in space this generation, but space travel and investigation is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species. And no corporation will EVER do what needs to be done, because it's not profitable except indirectly.
I can think of no better time to quote J. Michael Straczynski, using the voice of Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, talking about why humans go to space:
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
I can't improve on that.
It's better than having a rude Space Program!
This is asking about the GOALS of the civilian U.S. space program. No one is talking about throwing out NASA. They're talking about what NASA should be focusing on. For example, the Bush administration removed from Nasa's job description the part about monitoring the Earth and its environment. To me, that should be one of the primary goals of NASA.
Why does the US have a civilian space program?
Because so many other nations do. Even India has a great space program. Why wouldn't the US?
Why does the US have a civilian space program?
Because militarization of space at this point in time is impractical and expensive, so international treaties require the separation of peaceful space exploration from military conquest in a transparent fashion.
Why does the US have a civilian space program?
Because space is the future of human kind. Earth was the cradle of humanity but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The US has a civil space program because people who want space development, for various reasons - national pride, science, etc - find it easier to use taxpayers money than to actually convince people to fund it voluntarily.
It's right to have a space program, it's wrong to force people to pay for it if they don't want it.
\u262D = \u5350
Why do you think that saving the species is a good idea?
Why do you think UP is the answer, when DOWN provides a much more affordable, immediate and suitable environment? (Subterranean living) Sure DIRT is boring. But its cheap!
You can't mean that. Of course we want to survive, and thrive. That's good. I suppose a lizard man from Saturn is indifferent, but humans can't be.
The reason NASA isn't a military project is simple: the aliens wanted it that way.
Going to the moon for the first time ever (as was done in 1969) was obviously a technological 'step for mankind' as Neil Armstrong so eloquently put it. Right up there with the pyramids.
Is the equivalent challenge for America in 2017 going back to the moon? Not really. At all.
And you claim that manned space travel and investigation is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species. No, it's not absolutely fundamental. In fact, it is debatable whether it is even necessary or beneficial. That's the basic argument being made by the scientists.
Moon bases are a waste of time. There isn't sufficient water to warrant it. Mars has several million times more water in concentrated locations. The Moon has perhaps very small concentrations spread over a huge area trapped in dirt.
I wrote a short essay on this at http://www.geodex.org/blog/
All Oobs did was announce his intention of replacing Ares I with EELV's. Then that exploded into headlines about merging NASA & the air force. Now that has exploded into commissioning studies into civil space programs of any kind. His original 1 sentence must now be creating 1 million jobs.
The moon shot was propaganda, partially, but it also unleashed a ton of new technologies and trained a generation of engineers
Indeed. A whole lot of control theory -- my area -- was developed explicitly for the purpose of supporting the Apollo program. So much was done in controls during the 60s.
We have a civil space program because being rude doesn't get you anywhere in this galaxy.
Why should Portugal fund your trip to find new trade routes to China? Even if such a route were to exist it would be much to expensive to travel that way. Good day Mr. Columbus.
Do you think we would have achieved one-tenth the scientific advancements that we have if the military had been in charge of the space program? That's how Russia does it. Ask how many men they've put on the moon, or how many rovers they've put on Mars.
On top of that, the brass hats would have classified everything they discovered, just because that's their institutional mindset.
Keep the space program civil!
I piss off bigots.
Because we need a space program and the first completely-private orbital launch took place in 2008? Seriously, private enterprise is great and everything, but it doesn't do very well at the type of thing that won't show a profit for 50 years. While NASA is certainly not the height of efficiency it *does* take billions in research before you have anything to show when you're trying something really new.
I'd love to see a thriving private space program, I just don't think that's likely to happen any time soon without a healthy public space program leading the way.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
The U.S. has a civil space program so that the funds can be diverted for MILITARY PURPOSES, moron.
If you doubt this answer, I suggest you ask the
the Lame Ducker.
Sincerely,
Kilgore Trout
Tend to appreciate what comes as a result, you know, the spinoffs of such research. Space research and development doesn't stay in space, it spreads into other fields like medicine, automotive technology, and sometimes general consumer products.
The money available from voluntary funding would probably be so small as to be insignificant. You won't see corporate donors of any real scale (not these days) unless there's a direct return on investment visible in the short term (2-5 years.) The majority of people can't see past their neighborhood, and wouldn't be able to point out something spawned from space development even if they had used it their entire lives.
They want it, they just don't realize it. Maybe if they weren't so anti-science and encouraged it instead, they themselves would realize what around them would benefit from meeting the design and engineering challenges for as harsh an environment as space, and maybe then we'd not need tax dollars.
But progress must continue in the face of ignorance. Or we could, you know, just blow up more brown people.
We really need to be able to have laws that let people and corporations claim extra-terrestrial property as their own. Much the same as the Railroads got a huge chunk of land they could sell to individuals and take that money to make the trans-continental railroad we need a similar model for the space colonization.
These new "railroads" of the space age, (space X, Virgin Galactic, ect )"Union Galactic" so to speak could build the infrastructure for space colonization from both public funds and private funds. Heck we could even use cheap Chinese labor to build the thing since they want to go to space as well. Or they could use us....
Either way we need a new international agreement that is reasonable when it comes to countries, companies and private citizens claiming property on other worlds. As long as there is a provision not to settle places that already are settled by intelligent or semi-intelligent life.
We shouldn't have superfluous bureaucratic limits on this colonization process by having to do environmental studies on the moon before colonies can be built. If the planet you want to settle is a lifeless or near-lifeless rock, bulldozing and strip mining should be allowed in gusto.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I agree that I don't like space to be militarized. However, if it is, that would be good overall for manned space flight. Nobody can get funding like the armed forces can, and they tend to push the envelope on things that normally wouldn't get looked at twice. Big waste of money? Yes. Possibly the best thing to promote manned space flight that could happen? Absolutely.
True dat. I don't think it's a question of whether space gets militarized, but when and by whom. I guess that, given that it's going to happen, I'd prefer we be competitive in that area. Space is, after all, the ultimate "high ground", and anybody who knows anything about tactics will tell you that controlling high ground is nearly always desirable.
I know I'd rather have given NASA 700 billion than the banks. At least we'd get something for our tax dollars in the end.
The military seems to have zero interest in maned space flight due to 4 issues.
1) Why send a person when you can send a bomb?
2) It's hard to do stealthy reentry.
3) How do you get people home once they are there?
4) It cost way to much to send enough people do do something meaningful vs flying someone in from a near by base.
The Toynbee tiles are a warning to remind us of the perils of the militarization of space.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
WRONG
The appropriate division isn't military vs "civilian" but private vs public.
It's none of the government's business whether private individuals decide it is profitable, or just plain fun, to have a private space program or not.
The government's only real interest is in minimizing the negative externalities of such private activities -- exactly as with any other private activity.
That they're posing the question the way they are is terrible.
Seastead this.
Manned space exploration may not be economical given more pressing domestic needs at present. But cutting back there doesn't mean cutting back on space exploration as a whole. We still need to send people up from time to time to maintain all that stuff orbiting out there. Just maybe not as often... at least for now, until the situation on the ground improves.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That made me curious. NASA invented tang?!?
It turns out it's an urban legend.
From Wikipedia:
"It was initially intended as a breakfast drink, but sales were poor until NASA began using it on Gemini flights in 1965 (researched at Natick Soldier Systems Center), which was heavily advertised. Since that time, it has been associated with the U.S. manned spaceflight program, so much so that an urban legend emerged that Tang was invented for the space program"
"In short, the Academies are asking why the nation has a civil space program"
Asking what the future short and long term goals should be assumes the answer to be "to accomplish the goals chosen as most desirable" and assumes there will be such goals set. The last item ("how can") even more clearly assumes it exists to accomplish them and seeks to examine by what means it can best do so.
The inclusion of "civil" is misleading because it's superfluous. They are asking about the program administered by NASA, but they are not asking about it comparison to any alternative. The recent news about Obama's transition team questioning whether to cancel the Ares program in favor of using "military" (read: already developed, tested and available, regardless of original customer; that story was badly flawed too) has nothing to do with the Academies' efforts. The latter had to have been in effect well before Obama's people raised the question.
[from the site]:
The committee will, inter alia â"
â review the history of U.S. space policy and propose a broad policy basis for 21st century leadership in space;
â examine the balance and interfaces between fundamental scientific research in space, human space exploration, robotic exploration, earth observations, and applications of space technology and civil space systems for societal benefits;
â assess the role that commercial space companies could play in fulfilling national space goals and the role of the government in facilitating the emergence and success of commercial space companies; and
â highlight options for government attention to address and potentially resolve problems that might prevent achieving key national goals.
Illustrative examples of potential topics for the committee's consideration in the study include the following:
â Near-term and long-term human spaceflight program goals and options for fulfilling them;
â Utility of satellites in understanding global climate change and in advancing geophysical sciences (physical oceanography, solid earth sciences, etc.), and roles and responsibilities of government agencies in such Earth observations;
â Potential opportunities in various space sciences, including planetary missions, space-based astronomy, astrophysical observations, extraterrestrial life searches, assessing planetary bodies in other solar systems, etc.
â Reconciling total program content and total program resources for the civil space program;
â Strength of the U.S. space industrial base;
â Developing advanced technologies for applications in remote sensing and other areas;
â Access to space, availability and cost of U.S. launch vehicles, use of foreign launch capabilities; and
â International cooperation and competition in space programs.
National security space issues will not be a main focus of the report, but may be addressed to the extent that they interact with or impact the civil space program.
[and]
The committee invites you to comment on this study by filling out a questionnaire. Questions you might consider when framing your input to the committee:
â What should be the rationale and goals for the civil space program?
â How can the civil space program address key national issues?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I don't think that military space flight necessarily means militarized space-flight, myself.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Such scientists would be poor representatives of Human Civilization and should reconsider their role in society. You see, at the core of Science ( from Latin "Scio"/"scire" -- "to know" ) lies the principle reason why Humans explore Nature : Our ingrained drive to map out the limits of our knowledge and push those limits back. As the late Arthur C. Clarke put it : "The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." . If a society stagnates, and stops reaching beyond the possible -- stops exploring -- then searching History will show, time and time again, that such a society will inevitably collapse.
Given the above, and given the geological record's testament to the finite probability of life on this planet being periodically ( not completely ) destroyed, and given the new factor that Human Civilization may be responsible for its own destruction, one may logically deduce from the basic laws of probability that our chance of extinction is an ever increasing number, slowly but surely approaching 1, and that the following quote from the late Carl Sagan rings true, now more than ever : "All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct."
jdb2
Is the equivalent challenge for America in 2017 going back to the moon? Not really. At all.
Going back there permanently is just as hard as going there for an hour and then coming back.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Government programs such as the civilian space program, the missile defense farce, and others that involve a lot of money and are very inefficient, or even pointless, allow large amounts of taxpayers money to be moved into the hands of the few. This, to a large extent, is their purpose. To see the greater scheme of things, take a closer look at how government finance really works: http://cafr1.com/
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two, leave us exact directions on how to get to their home planet and specs on what sort of weaponry they have, and then leave us alone for about 200 years. That's about the only way I can see the military getting into manned space travel in a big way.
Those sound like very reasonable issues to me.
1) Why send a person when you can send a probe?
2) It's hard to do safe, inexpensive reentry.
3) How do you get people home once they are there?
4) It costs to much to send a large party vs flying a bunch of bots there or looking through a telescope.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
That sounds like a fantastic idea for a book.
One thing to keep in mind is the outer space treaty (aka Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies), signed by the United States which says:
States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.
The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military maneuvers on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the Moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.
That reminds me of how some say there are three schools of thought in space advocacy, which can be summed up as follows:
http://theforvm.org/diary/bill-white/werner-von-braun-carl-sagan-gerard-oneill
Saganites: "Space is big, billions of stars, isn't God's creation incredible...DON'T TOUCH IT." [though in fairness to Sagan, in his later years he became more supportive of human spaceflight]
Von Braunians: "We vill go boldly into space, and you vill watch on television, and you vill enjoy it." That's the current space program.
O'Neillians: "We will build the tools, go into space, and use its resources to expand humanity and freedom into the cosmos." ...
In a paradigm Tumlinson dreamed up, the space world fractures into three groups: Saganites, O'Neillians and von Braunians.
Saganites, named for astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996), are the philosophers and voyeurs of the cosmos, intent on low-impact exploration that promotes a sense of wonder. They consider the universe an extension of Earth, and want space explorers to be politically correct pacifists and environmentalists.
O'Neillians take their name from Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill (1927 - 1992), who imagined city-size colonies in space contained on vast, rotating platforms (think of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its spinning rings and artificial gravity). Getting people out of here en masse was the thingâ"not to kiss Earth good-bye in the rearview mirror, but to give it a chance, by consuming extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources. (An O'Neillian motto, riding a bumper sticker of his day, read: âoeSave Earth: Develop Space.â)
Von Braunians are, strictly speaking, the old guard, named for the V-2 and Saturn rocket-meister Wernher von Braun (1912 - 1977). Von Braunians advocate a centralized approach: large expensive projects like the ones NASA undertakes, projects that ordinary people can be proud of but not participate in.
I'd add that there's also the Heinleinians, who want to use the power of private industry to bring about O'Neill's vision.
Actually, I find that we're generally more in favor of increased taxes or increased deficit spending to support increased funding of our research. If something needs to be cut to give us funding, we're more likely to advocate cutting MILITARY space programs, or in the event that there actually is no military space program, cutting military spending period.
We are, after all, mostly liberal elitists who hate America.
For the US, the cost of having a space program is about 16,000 USD million. It is a considerable budget even when compared with some US Executive Departments, e.g., Department of Interior (10,700 USD million), Department of Energy (21,500 USD million).
Dismantling the US space program would add a bit more than 1,000 USD million to each of the Executive Departments (it could go elsewhere, but let's assume it increases the budget of the Executive Departments). While 1,000 USD million do indeed mean something, their value is rather minuscule compared to the monumental task each Department has to accomplish.
Increasing funding in other areas by tiny amounts by surrendering the Space Program seems to be a foolish solution at best - a jeopardizing behaviour at most.
The purpose of the Space Program is to execute the space-related activities that are not profitable, that is why you don't see NASA developing commercial aircraft or providing launching services for commercial satellites, or selling GPS services, or imaging the Earth for commercial purposes. Instead, NASA starts-up those technologies in the hope that they will be adopted by the industry once they are profitable. In other words - NASA absorbs the high risk of developing space technology. The scientific return is obvious (who else would do it?) and I will not discuss it here.
It is your call - add one billion bucks to your favourite Executive Department; loose NASA and see no improvement in your Citizen Life or recognize that space exploration is a mostly misunderstood enterprise---a dirty job, if you would---but someone has to do it.
Juan Arrieta
that's pretty profound, thanks for the quotes. The only sad part is that if anyone without the conventional wisdom to be able to handle such civilization destruction level weapons we're totally screwed, which is why its all the more import to also employ technological countermeasures.
Such scientists would be poor representatives of Human Civilization and should reconsider their role in society.
Or else they just have different priorities as far as research goes. Curing AIDS vs landing on Mars, for me and a good chunk of the world's population, AIDS comes first, I'd advocate that research grants reflect that.
Serious question -- what payloads has SpaceX delivered to orbit?
The private sector doesn't have the money required to make manned habitats cost effective. No one company is going to flush trillions of dollars of money down into a hole, praying that their son or daughter might someday see a profit from it.
Government does have the resources. This is why NASA has been to the moon with 1960s technology, and private space companies pray that their stuff doesn't blow up on the launch pad.
Furthermore, the only celestial body in the universe known to support human life is Earth. Spending valuable resources to experiment trying to support life on the moon when we can't even live sustainably on our own planet is probably the most idiotic goal imaginable. The technology you need to live on the moon - super low water, air, and soil usage, zero reliance on fossil fuels, and super low electricity needs are things we can develop on earth first before a bunch of money is wasted trying to get ten souls on our nearest satellite.
The reality is that people would rather spend money that benefits humanity, not childish sci-fi dreams. Prove that a human can live on x amount of resources on Earth. Then talk to me about sending him to outer space.
"scientists say, kill manned space [travel] and fund our research instead."
jdb2
Where have you been for the last 8 years? There is nothing righteous about our power.
Bruce Perens.
We have a civil space program because a belligerent one would be kinda hard to manage!
*badum-crash!*
thank you! i'll be here all night!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm calling bullshit on this. What is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species is figuring out how to live sustainably on Earth. There's nothing wrong with Earth. It has some bad spots, sure, but it's a good planet and the best one anyone has ever found.
People who think the only way we can survive is to get off this rock are absolutely blind--this planet has effortlessly supported life for four billion years, and has done so on its worst days (Permian-Triassic, Ordovician-Silurian). Walk outside on Mars' best day in the last ten million years and you have zero chance of living. Who is more likely to survive: the most clever species from Earth with all the resources that Earth has to offer, or the most clever species from Earth without any of the resources that Earth has to offer?
Good job not understanding the purpose of the report or the agency doing the reporting.
The people researching and publishing this are, essentially, people involved in the civil space industry. It's the National Academies Space Studies Board.
You are apparently readily confused with the language they use for these political reports. You interpret "Why do we have this program?" as if the speaker is implying that we should not.
What they are doing is looking at what function the space program performs, what it has accomplishes, what its goals are, what we can expect in terms of future accomplishments, et cetera. The purpose of this is not just to advise funding in general, but to provide a background for making decisions about setting future goals for the space program and determining how best to set about accomplishing those goals.
Ah, I think we were having semantic issues there. Yes, a scientist would be pretty dumb to say we should NEVER go into space. I do think it's not ignorant to say we should put it on hold until we get some things sorted out first.
But first, we need to antagonize those aliens into attacking us by finding a device to give us wormhole technology, to allow us to go find their planets and let them know we exist.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
The military seems to have zero interest in maned space flight due to 4 issues.
1) Why send a person when you can send a bomb?
2) It's hard to do stealthy reentry.
3) How do you get people home once they are there?
4) It cost way to much to send enough people do do something meaningful vs flying someone in from a near by base.
5) Aliens aren't known to have any oil
6) Haliburton doesn't supply freeze-dried ice cream
7) "Shock & Awe" doesn't have much effect in space since the explosions are dwarfed by supernovas
8) We can't generate a warp signature for the Vulcans to detect yet
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Axe-grinders Anonymous?
Ah, I think we were having semantic issues there. Yes, a scientist would be pretty dumb to say we should NEVER go into space. I do think it's not ignorant to say we should put it on hold until we get some things sorted out first.
Or until we have the right capabilities. Saying we should cross the ocean is all well and good. Diving in and attempting to swim across before you've invented ships is a bad idea.
Going into space is a good idea. Going into space now may not be.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
They will have a reason for a militarized space when the aliens invade in 2025, you heard it here first.
By that logic it's wrong to force people to fund any programs if they don't want them.
Yes including Welfare, Schools, victim support groups, anything.
It's called living in a representative democracy. You don't get a direct say in any of these things. I'd love to stop having my tax dollars stop funding LOTS of things. My option is to elect representatives that reflect my desires and hope they aren't corrupt (heh).
As long as pork barrel dollars are funding garbage I don't care about, I'm fine with them funding at least one thing I DO care about.
Or were you going to get people to fund Welfare and Education and Food Stamps voluntarily too?
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
It should also be noted that the "Obama militarizing NASA" story that was on slashdot a few days ago was complete bollocks. The EELV launchers were partially subsidized by the Air Force, but are entirely owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA's used EELVs in the past to launch things like the New Horizons mission, and I don't think anybody claimed that this was somehow militarizing the exploration of Pluto. This article explains things well:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/media-botches-story-on-obamas-nasa-plans/
The only problem with this is that -- unless they are talking about some other vehicles, and if so, it's hard to imagine what they are -- the EELVs aren't "military rockets." Their development was subsidized with Air Force funds, but they were developed with Boeing and Lockheed Martinâ(TM)s money as well, and they are commercial rockets, available to the military, commercial users, and NASA. There is no need to "tear down a barrier" for NASA to use them, as evidenced by the fact that NASA is already using them. For example, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was blasted to orbit and off to Mars with an Atlas V/Centaur over three years ago.
There is NASA resistance to using EELVs, but not because they are "military rockets." It's because they are seen as a threat to the agency's -- or more specifically, administrator Mike Griffinâ(TM)s â" desire to develop a new NASA-only vehicle, called Ares 1, and perhaps later, the larger version of it, Ares 5. If the EELVs become viewed as viable launchers for the human missions, the case for the Ares, already weak -- particularly considering its extensive development teething problems â" becomes much weaker, perhaps to the point at which the program dies. (It should be noted that five years ago, prior to becoming NASA administrator, Dr. Griffin, who is apparently desperately attempting to hang on to his job, had no problems with using EELVs for crewed spaceflight.)
Hail to my tinfoil hat wearing brother.
You seem to have an axe to grind, sir. I beg leave to ask by whom you are employed?
I'd give a 50-50 chance the AC's an ATK employee.
It's tongue-in-cheek, but you raise what may be the most important point about extending our reach to space - the high cost of resupplying. What's really needed is to produce a space infrastructure capable of producing some basic necessities. Oxygen, water, and protein mines/factories would be a great first step. Then manufacturing materials so that our space stations can be created entirely in space and won't have to be launched piece-by-piece from earth.
Of course, this means a need for raw materials in space, which pretty much amounts to asteroid/comet mining (anything larger has so much gravity that we might as well ship from earth).
It's a science fiction concept now, but all it takes is for one group to prove the possibility, and within a few decades dozens of asteroids would be mined.
Look, this is no different from when Europeans first landed in America (okay - maybe a bit different, but still) - they had no raw metals, no cement, no manufactured items - they were completely dependent on shipments for a lot of their necessities. Until they could produce them from scratch in the new land, they were still just a colony of their motherland.
Last post!
When India says their going to map the minerals of moon, I think the time for excuses is over.
Did you watch 2063?
But you're forgetting something. Projects like this will be contracted out. The contractors are ex military. Its always best to look out for your future employer.
I always believed the reason for NASA being created as a civilian space program rather than a military one is that the latter would have looked too communist back in those days. Now that we're well on our way to a surveillance government, one that demands "papers please" at every other turn, a military space program doesn't sound nearly so bad.
Aw, the comment system dropped my </cynicism> tag.
I think this conservative, who would ordinarily disagree with you on military spending, might have to honestly concede that the current US procurement and R&D program for defense is insane. We need to actually ask some hard questions about military procurement and this is a debate worth having.
Yes, we know there is a cost in wear and tear due to the wars but the USAF and USN are not flying that many missions. I would question the Army spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a "Future Combat" system built around smaller vehicles than the M-1 tank, when the M-1 tank is the only survivable assett we have in theater. I would question why the US Navy needs to have a brand new F-35, when, it just re-armed itself with F-18 Superhornets, and those are honestly almost a brand new aircraft. Speaking of carriers, how many carriers do we need to have in peacetime. Yeah, its nice that we have about 12 active duty super carriers, but do people know that the 20 or so assault carriers operated by the US Marines are actually about the same in capability as the carriers of other countries? And what's up with the sudden replacement of Seawolf with Virgina, and why can we only build one submarine a year? Why does it cost so much to operate 20 submarines when scarcely two decades ago we operated 100? Why does the US Navy have more money than ever, but less ships than it did when even Jimmy Carter "ruined the Navy"? Why is it before we needed 600 ships to adequately patrol the world's oceans, but now, we can't even spare a ship to go take out some pirates? I thought the reduction in size of ships was ok because the more expensive ships were more capable.
And don't even get me started on the USAF, except for this. why we are still building two classes of advanced fighters when the most glaring problem with the usaf is an inability to supply the army from the air. Hello...
We could go on all day.
This is my sig.
...NASA commissions a study to determine why we have a national Academy of Science.
Have gnu, will travel.
You know what killed a lot of the interest in manned space flight IMHO? NASA, by sending up so damned many geeks. Hear me out. Think about those Mercury and Apollo Astronauts. They were all cool as hell USAF test pilots. Totally cool under pressure, walked out to the press with that "I'm a bad ass" swagger. They were just damned cool. Who in the hell wants to see geeks in space? We want Kirk! We want Buck Rogers!
They need to give up the shuttle, go back to Apollo style single use rockets, and most importantly they need to try to bring the cool back into manned space flight. Because frankly the younger generations could not care less about space flight right now. They need to make it cool again for the younger generations instead of boring as hell geeks in space. Because IMHO all it is going to take is one or two more blown up shuttles and folks will say "why bother?" and the plug will be pulled. And sadly most of the younger generations here wouldn't even notice.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"Mr President, we cannot afford a mine-shaft gap." - General (Buck) Turgensen
"The members of the study committee are interested in the views (positive or negative) of the general public, particularly those people with a scientific and/or technological interest."
Go away, I'm 'batin.
I am surprised the following report has not been posted or submitted to /.
Future of Human Spaceflight (16-page PDF)
The MIT Space, Policy & Society Research Group took a step back from the "do this" / "no, do that" debate and examined the very questions being posed by the National Academy of Sciences.
The above link has a 16-page document that examines the reasons for a human spaceflight program. The report is compelling, challenging and thought-provoking.
Give it a read!
I'm a scientist working in an unrelated field but I'd still like to see manned space get more funding. If it starts doing something really interesting, I might even join. Why? To me space is the goal, not the means, but if you want a why: Either there is other intelligent life in the universe, or there is not. If there isn't it would seem a shame that nothing ever got to see 1-10^-20 of the universe. If there is intelligent life out there - well most examples from history show that when the guys on the ships meet the guys on the shore, you REALLY want to be the guys on the ships.
Like the idea. I think that we could create a hoax that works just the way you say. Maybe we should try it on a smaller scale to begin with. I propose that we piss of some religious fanatics and get them to blow up some buildings. We can then pretend that some other country was in some way responsible and has masses of WMDs pointing right at us.
So much for those who claim that the Bush admin wasn't working to a sensible plan.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
Why does the US have a civil space program? ... I have to say this is because Congress has had too much interest in it as a political tool than in advancement of science and mankind itself.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Elton John?
Um. You can't go beyond the possible to the impossible. That's what makes it impossible.
You can revise your idea of what is impossible. You probably should expect to revise your idea of the impossible. You just shouldn't make any specific plans around certain concepts of impossibilities ever being revised (e.g. FTL travel). The inability to plan around such barriers being eliminated is what makes them concepts of the impossible.
In any case, every practical consideration shows that the best marginal value for any conceivable investment vis a vis preserving human civilization is preserving that civilization on Earth, rather than trying to establish an outpost of humanity elsewhere. Such terrestrial preservation efforts certainly include space science, and they may include space exploration. A well known environmental luminary I once worked with told me he thought the Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 was worth every single penny put into the space program, because it altered the way humanity viewed the Earth and its relation to it.
Still, no matter how bad things get on Earth, it is very unlikely that Mars will look better from the standpoint of supporting human life. In any case, what is humanity? If we put all the books and movies and recordings ever made into an interstellar space arc, would that be preserving humanity against the end of terrestrial existence? In a narrow sense, it would. But not in an entire sense.
If we were to put a few thousand humans on a self-sustaining, self-contained, inter generational space station, would this represent the survival of "humanity" if the species perished on the Earth? After a fashion. And obviously this would be a richer kind of preservation than simply rescuing recordings of information we have generated. But such an existence would not preserve all of what it means to be human. For humanity is part of the Earth, and the Earth itself is part of our humanity. Take the Earth away, and you may preserve the artifacts of human civilization, and the living tissue of the human species, but you have not preserved humanity as we know it.
Perhaps if we had FTL travel that would allow us to traverse the galaxy in a matter of subjective months, and had access to countless planets, many of which are Earthlike or could be terraformed, we would have preserved and expanded the experience of being human. Placing humans in what amounts to a tiny metal terrarium for indefinite confinement is a contraction of human experience.
In any case, FTL is as far as we can tell, impossible. Nor can we reasonably plan around that notion being revised. Even if we believe that notion must be revised, we don't know if it will be in ten years or ten thousand years or ten million years.
The best bet, then, for preparing for such a scenario is to preserve the Earth, which is splendid, beautiful, bountiful, and even after a hundred thousand years sojourn for our species, not completely known or understood.
It may seem backwards to say it this way, but in order to expand our horizons, we must survive.
Fisher sold Space Pens to NASA for $2.95 each.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
But you need to keep pushing the limits of technology in order to develop those ships, so that there is someday a "good time" to do it. If you just wait for the tech to magically show up, you're screwed.
Something like AIDS is not an argument against going into space. It is argument FOR it. At the point that a disease exists that kills you when you try to reproduce, you have to realize that diseases can get really really bad. For as long as life has existed on earth, physical separation of members of a species has acted as a means to slow or stop the spread of disease. So, if your things to be sorted out includes stopping the spread of deadly diseases to the whole of humanity, and it does not include the dismantalling of worldwide travel, then it needs to include manned space travel, as space is the only place that humans can get 3 months away from the rest of humanity.
9) The Shadows are trying to keep the Vorlon Presidency finding their ships on Mars.
--The FNP
The latter will have whole planets of hydrocarbons to harvest, countless lumps of metal floating past and an endless horizon filled with other earths.
....
The former will have (what's left of) earth.
And they will have to share it with 100 billion others because hey man, we all got rights. I'm sure it won't matter when the lights go out, and the potable water is exhausted and all the animals are extinct because we needed the food they used to eat. Ironically, all that will happen just after great advances in medical science grant us immortality.
If you ever read Asimovs Foundation, then you probably know of Trantor, a totally enclosed world where a sight of the sky is a luxury. That wasn't too bad because there was an empire outside. But if one planet were all there was
ROTFLMAO.
Seriously, control theory goes back long before Apollo, and long before NASA. Back to the turn of the century and before. Apollo broke no new ground there. Nothing in it's electronics was significantly advanced over rockets that NASA was flying for other programs or that the military was flying. (Heck, the guidance system for the CSM and LEM was based on the guidance system for the Polaris A1 SLBM.)
When the USA cease to have funding for civil programs, they cease to be be a democracy and slowly turn into a military state.
I'm sorry, but NASA has become nothing but a self-preserving PR machine. The quantity and quality of science from manned missions approaches zero. What value do we create in ou economy from NASA's manned missions ? As for the "getting kids excited about science" argument, isn't this really pandering ? Fine, every kid wants to be Buzz LIghtyear... do they want to be the grunt who works hard to understand statistical dynamics and graph theory ? Its like the argument that kids looking at animotronic dinosaurs will make them want to be scientists. How about we take 50% of NASA's budget ( and staff ? ) and assign them to work on problems that matter to our countrym like energy efficiency, alternative energy, homeland security, and technological and economic competitiveness ?
Watching his political shenanigans, up to and including his wife trying to "bail him out", made me sign the petition to get rid of him...
...of course, there's the flip side to that petition...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Sounds about right. Silly bastards would love to kill the manned space program and fund probes and telescopes so they can do more research.
Then you just know that shortly after manned space flight is no longer possible and all launch vehicles are defunct the silly bastards will go and discover something and will insist that they've got to get people out there in space to study it yesterday.
Don't forget an important rule of war:
Send your weapons where your enemies are.
Well, in the modern era its better to say:
Send your ammo where your enemies are.
Either way, space is not needed to pursue either or these goals...especially when finding our enemies here on earth is the bigger problem we face.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
A lot of scientists are aware of the research conducted on the sundry space stations. At our current level of technology, manned space missions are more about national pride than exploration or discovery.
Whereas there would be plenty of beneficial technological fallout from sending humans back to the Moon and onto Mars, there would be as much (but different) technological fallout from developing smarter, better robots to do our exploration for us.
As far as the military is concerned, they'd probably like the improvements to robotics at least as much as the improvements to life-support, light-weight radiation shielding and 'space medicine'.
And fund our research instead.
Yup, and we've been down this road before. 1992, in fact. We were in the middle of building the Superconducting Supercollider, and during the Presidential election, non-physicists lobbied to kill "big science" projects, basically so that the money could be re-routed to their projects.
That cost us the lead in international physics. CERN built their super collider, and never looked back. That also got us the "better, faster, cheaper" mantra at NASA in the 90's, which got us a string of space probe failures. I'm afraid we're now going to go in that same direction again.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
... pull your head out of the clouds. I agree AIDS is not a reason to not go to space. But saying we need to hop the rock because of a preventable and curable disease is either insane or absurdly callous.
5) And if you manage to find the manned threat in space, it takes much less effort to neutralize/kill it (compared to the case where it is in a breathable atmosphere and where having heavy armor is possible).
You watch too much TV.
Stupidity is its own reward.
that it is a welfare program for scientists.
So you are saying that "Boeing and Lockheed Martin" the world's biggest military contractors (or maybe blackwater/halliburton overtook them?) make this project "civilian"???
Stupidity is its own reward.
The Marines are already looking into suborbital fliers (like the SpaceShipOne setup) so they can get around nasty problems like negotiating passage through airspace (which only extends about 50 miles up) and bad weather. Boots on the ground in a couple hours instead of a few days.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Well...An interesting aside - The USAF isn't purchasing two "advanced fighters". They are building one "advanced fighter" (The F-22 Raptor) and one multi-role strike aircraft (the F-35 Lightning). To refer to the F-35 as a "fighter" highly misleading and similar to the way the F-117 is called a Stealth "Fighter" - It's an incorrect classification that seems to stem from the fact that we don't seem to have a word for "multi-role military aircraft". So we call them "Strike Fighters".
The F-35 was developed to replace a number of aircraft - A veritable swiss army knife of the air - including the F-16, the A-10, the AV-8B and F/A-18D and F/A-18C. All of these aircraft are primarily designed for air to ground strike operations. (More information on the origins of the JSF program here - http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-JSF-Analysis.html).
The argument that the F-35 can adequately "replace" or "fill in" for the F-22 Raptor is a political one. The F-35 was never designed to be a "fighter" in the true sense of the word. In theory, it can adequately defend itself against most airborne threats in theatre today due to it's highly advanced sensor and electronic warfare packages but it has neither the range, anti-air payload or manoeuvrability to outperform modern 4th and 5th generation fighters.
The Space program is the ONLY good thing besides the Internet the US government has done since JFK caught a bullet in the head. Let's not cut it please.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
A commercialized space industry is probably the best thing that could happen to advance the pity state it is now.
But saying we need to hop the rock because of a preventable and curable disease is either insane or absurdly callous
I think he meant it in a general sense. When an military-strength genetically engineered nastiness eventually get released (by accident, by a terror group, by a disgruntled lab worker or whatnot) and has a long latency, a quick spread and a high kill factor, we'll all be sorry we don't have a couple of hovering cities on Venus. Hint
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Eisenhower intentionally forced the military to stand down from launching an orbiting satellite, ostensibly to promote the USA as using space only for "peaceful" purposes. But his real worry was that Russia would object to an orbiting military satellite from the USA, and take such an action as a provocation to the escalating arms race. By permitting Russia to launch Sputnik first, this left the USA free to launch its own satellite, and it short-circuited any claim that Russia would have had about trespassing.
The USA had an orbit-ready satellite literally hidden in a closet, but Presidential orders forbade them from attempting a launch. The civil space program (nee NASA) were years behind the military programs, but for public relations purposes, the President wanted the USA's satellite launched with its scientific payload as part of the International Geophysical Year program, showcasing American advances in science.
But the poor performance of the civil space program caused much embarrassment to the USA until Kennedy killed two birds with one stone. With his "we will go to the moon" mandate came massive funds and other resources for the civil program, and, turning Eisenhower's goal on its ear, the "space race" accelerated the arms race tremendously.
Dude, Shadows vs Species 8472 would whip AVP's ass, am I right? Is someone going to finally clue in that the comic book rage of rehashing dead characters could rekindle every great sci-fi that's on indefinite hiatus?
Sorry for the OT...
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
I know at the moment, we seem to have no clue as to how to make FTL travel happen. It seems to fly in the face of all that we think we understand. But, we do know about things like quantum entanglement and we have visualized things like bending of space. I believe that at some point we will achieve faster than light travel. Maybe not by actually moving faster than the speed of light, but by using other tricks available to us.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
The Navy started investing in land warfare a while ago and i'd guess that's where a lot of new money is going.
Big fan of the Fallout series eh?
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
The argument that the F-35 can adequately "replace" or "fill in" for the F-22 Raptor is a political one
That's what I thought. The top speed of the F-22 is Mach 2+, but the F-35 is just supersonic. But, the F-35 is so expensive that we aren't getting nearly the volume of F-22 that we need. We really need at a least 1000 of these things, and then, for the USAF, I wonder why we could not build a ground attack variant and then cancel the F-35 for the USAF.
This is my sig.
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two, leave us exact directions on how to get to their home planet and specs on what sort of weaponry they have, and then leave us alone for about 200 years. That's about the only way I can see the military getting into manned space travel in a big way.
You mean, what the military needs to do is blow up a city or two and make it look like aliens did it...
Project BLUE BEAM!
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two,
What we really need is a small asteroid to hit in a rural area causing a large explosion that doesn't cause a misinterpretation of a nuclear attack which scares the public into realizing without a space program they are going to eventually end up like the dinosaurs.
Sadly, I suspect the asteroid won't be so polite to where it lands.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Sure he/she can mean that. Nihilism is a common mental disease of humanity.
Or maybe, we could get a bunch of artists and scientists together, develop both teleportation technology and an interdimensional gateway, then we could genetically engineer a giant squid monster and teleport it into downtown New York!
Seriously, control theory goes back long before Apollo, and long before NASA.
Well, sure. "Control theory" is huge and has a long history. But the space race did, as far as I understand, heavily motivate work in, in particular, optimal control. I mean, Pontryagin's Maximum Principle was only introduced in 1956; Apollo began shortly thereafter, in the '60s: This was in fact the period when this work was being done!
Apollo broke no new ground there. Nothing in it's electronics was significantly advanced over rockets that NASA was flying for other programs or that the military was flying.
Now, fine: I don't know much about the history of the Apollo program in particular, so in large part my claim that the program motivated the development of optimal control is the repetition of similar claims made by professors and others in the field. Maybe I've been living in an echo chamber where people repeat the same factoids to each other without evidence and create for themselves a kind of wikitruth; maybe that's all this is. So if you are in fact familiar with some of the details and would care to elaborate, I'd be interested to hear. But to be clear I'm not so much interested in the electronics with which the digital computers were implemented; that's not what controls is about: controls is about the algorithms implemented thereon -- as I'm sure you appreciate.
But a quick Google turns up some evidence to support my assertion. For instance, see this account of the design of the backup control system for the Lunar Module. To summarize, work began in 1963 for Apollo, and used optimal bang-bang control -- so it was clearly an application of then-new optimal control theory. I'd need more sources and have to research this more to make my claim stronger, however.
Finally, like I said, if you've got more details on this I'd be curious to hear them.
What mineral would anyone want to go to the moon for? Shipping gold or diamonds are not worthwhile, the shipping cost alone is more than the stuff is worth.
And fund our research instead.
There is a part of me that thinks that we've been spending far too much money on global warming/climate change "research" over the last 20-30 years and that money would have been better spent else where.
Government supported science is the modern state supported religion complete with high priests and teaching all the kids that these are the facts of the universe that damn near can't/shouldn't be changed.
I'm actually very pissed at that not that we have a new religion, but how we've got pieces of a religious system and it hiding itself as science instead.
They need to make it cool again for the younger generations instead of boring as hell geeks in space.
Having grown up all my life living under the knowledge that man has gone to the moon, and we have spaceflight, is what makes it "uncool" to me. It's a conquered experience. There's no great "space race" anymore, we're not doing anything new and exciting in space. We're studying things like "The effects of micro-gravity on the reproductive cycle of some bacteria" or "How do crystals grow in micro-gravity." Wow. Exciting shit right there. In my opinion outer space is just a waste of funding, until all the problems of living on Earth are solved (feed the hungry in Africa) I could give two shits about solving the problems of living in outer space. Geek or not.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
I meant to say, with regards to "bad ass" astronauts with their swagger or what not (seriously? You care about how they look and walk?) That they're just instruments for conducting experiments in space, and are themselves a sort of experiment in "what happens to humans who live in micro-gravity."
"Cool people" doing boring things are still boring people. Dirty Harry being force to play World of Warcraft for 8 hours a day isn't nearly as cool as the Dirty Harry who goes around blowing people away with his handgun, just like Buck Rogers monitoring the status of the experiments being conducted in space quickly becomes dull. The excitement being gone has little to do with the people themselves, and more to do with the conduct.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
I however do. If the US would start militarizing space, it would probably be the begin of a new space race (as other countries would not want to have their rather non-liked concurrents to gain even more tactical superiority) - and technology would greatly benefit from something like that.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
I would question why the US Navy needs to have a brand new F-35, when, it just re-armed itself with F-18 Superhornets, and those are honestly almost a brand new aircraft.
To replace the Harrier. Super Hornets may be super but they don't to V/STOL.
we have about 12 active duty super carriers, but do people know that the 20 or so assault carriers operated by the US Marines are actually about the same in capability as the carriers of other countries?
Just because other navies suck, does not mean we should make ours suck. Also, the amphib ships'ses only fixed-wing asset is the Harrier, and will be the F-35. So that's why we need large carriers as well as small, and F-35s to use with the small ones.
we can't even spare a ship to go take out some pirates?
Why should we? All that will happen after the pirates are killed and captured are second-guessing and recriminations, and sailors on trial for squinting meanly at captured pirates, and the ACLU and EFF suing over reading pirate SIM cards.
Let the rest of the damned world try to take care of a single tiny problem without the United States leading the way.
I''ll take a remote island somewhere in the Pacific over a Venusian floating city any day.
Lets face it though. If you could join the US Space Force, aka "Star Fleet", you would.
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
Bah, throw a couple of Playstations in the capsule and just wait and see how many of the "younger generation" suddenly get interested.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
I have but two goals for our space program:
Find a cost effect way to get garbage and nuclear waste deposited on uninhabited planets.
Build automated factories off world to strip mine the piss outta them for raw materials.
And as an added bonus:
Build a UMAX prison on the moon. Good luck escaping it back to Earth...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
With the new administration, there won't be any money in the military budget so what really makes the difference? That is until another 3,000+ Americans die because of another Muslim attack.
I have an idea why not make NASA another government sponsored entity and create another program like Fanny and Freddy to get poor income people in to space!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4A0RuXhnQA
We all know how efficient the government runs things...
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
This gets into a fundamental philosophical issue of priorities. Do you take whatever is the highest priority problem and focus the entire resources of society to the exclusion of all else or do you diversify efforts to include some lower priority issues as well?
"so much so that an urban legend emerged that Tang was invented for the space program"
Yeah, but that's true of almost everything that "came out of the space program." The only consumer product I can think of that was specifically designed for the space program is those Fischer pens, which I think we can all agree that as nice as they are, they weren't that much of an improvement for society or something that couldn't have been invented otherwise.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm calling bullshit on this. What is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species is figuring out how to live sustainably on Earth. There's nothing wrong with Earth. It has some bad spots, sure, but it's a good planet and the best one anyone has ever found.
Well, I believe you are wrong to do so.
You see, for our species to survive we have to survive in the short-term, the medium term and the long term.
Most people advocating for space as a method of species survival are looking at the medium to long term. (thousands of years to billions of years).
You appear to be looking at the short term. Certainly we have to find a way to live sustainably on Earth, because we won't make it(technologically) beyond that if we don't. This could easily come to a head within a thousand years. Even then the consequences of this probably means population crash not end of the species.
But sustainable living is only a short term solution.
People who think the only way we can survive is to get off this rock are absolutely blind--this planet has effortlessly supported life for four billion years, and has done so on its worst days (Permian-Triassic, Ordovician-Silurian). Walk outside on Mars' best day in the last ten million years and you have zero chance of living.
No, you are the blind one. Certainly the planet has "effortlessly supported life" in general for billions of years. You conflate the planet's ability to sustain life with the planet's ability to sustain human life, and that is wrong.
For example, go ask a trilobite how "effortless" their survival has been. Or have you ever asked yourself how many of those "effortlessly supported" years humans can't even breathe in? (As a hint, there wasn't always enough oxygen for us). There is no reason to suspect the planet will not move to a phase that is inhospitable to human life again.
So in the medium to long term those people are perfectly correct. The only way to ensure survival of the species is to ensure that a world altering catastrophe does not kill all the humans. The only way to do that is to have humans off planet - enough of them in sustainable solutions elsewhere such that the gene pool is viable.
We already know that in a long enough timeframe we will have another major asteroid event, for example. That could turn the planet into another Mars (no atmosphere, core dead, etc.) or simply be large enough to kill off everything larger than a german cockroach. Unless we have major population centers off of this world when that happens so does the death of our species.
That is not the only scenario one can imagine where species survivability depends on having sustainable off world colonies, but it is one scenario that is absolutely certain to happen (barring some deus ex machina scientific way of deflecting the thing).
Who is more likely to survive: the most clever species from Earth with all the resources that Earth has to offer, or the most clever species from Earth without any of the resources that Earth has to offer?
Your question is nonsensical. It isn't a race between some humans "out there" w/o Earth's resources vs. us with the resources. It's us with Earth's resources creating technologies to allow us to survive in space with the resources available "out there". It's not like space is just totally empty!
Consider Earth as a bootstrap mechanism in this case. Certainly we can't just plop people out in space and expect them to survive but we can develop all the technologies to enable them to do so, and use enough Earth resources to enable them to start to utilize the resources available "out there" and thus be independent of Earth. We hope.
But in the cases of 2-4, wouldn't the potential result of such a research effort as could be afforded by the military to solve be a solution to these issues?
It depends on how much 2-4 outweigh 1, though.
Actually you don't make any sense. Did you know that we spend less of our money as a percentage of GDP on military now then we ever have in our history as a nation since WWII? The opposite is true. We need to buy more F-22 and F-35 fighters because the unit price comes down as we buy more. We need to spend MORE on survivability of smaller vehicles so we can be more mobile and yet still functional. We need realtime battlefield information fed straight to individual soldiers HUDs and we need non-lethal systems in use and deployed now... not tomorrow. We need to take this job seriously and start acting like the superpower we are. I'm not talking about spending money on bombs. I'm talking about spending money on the right tools for the job to allow our military to be the best possible. No more congress cutting the number of fighters that they themselves already committed to buying. No more cutting benefits for Veterans. No more denying raises for the Soldiers working now who by the way get paid a fraction of civilian contractors in the same danger. Just cut that shit out now and pay what is needed to hold this place in the world.
It's over! I have the high ground!
You underestimate my powers!
Don't try it!
*ZAP*
Yeeeearrrrrrrrrrgh! I hate you!
Or they could just put their I Can't Believe It's Not a Moon -brand mothership into Lunar orbit for a few days, send a transmission saying: "This looks like a suitable world. Our word for 'Yes, master' is 'Ndsda'. Practice pronouncing it, we'll be back in 200 years", and depart.
You Americans and your violence fetish.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You posted an eloquent reply, but we'll have to agree to disagree on it. While it's true that survival means more than just short-term, your claim that "sustainable living is only a short term solution" is wrong, and here's why. Sustainable living is, by its very nature, sustainable indefinitely (look it up), and living in such a way provided over three million years of security for humans and their direct ancestors. That is, in your words, "medium to long term (thousands of years to billions of years)" survival. To wit, this was through a number of disasters and climate changes with pre-technological societies (herein lies the "effortless" part).
Given that, in your words, we have a readily available means to keep our species alive for the medium to long term, the focus should be on making Earth more hospitable for us, not on space exploration. Focusing on making space hospitable is akin to trying to develop an iPod before the record player. Certainly there's some benefit to be had, but if the long-term survival of the species is truly important than the order of operations is important, and wasting resources now on making space hospitable is just that: wasteful.
I think you may agree with me on principle with this: you said the only way to ensure our survival is to be sure a world catastrophe doesn't kill all humans. Given the size and resiliency of Earth, the access to materials, and the known working environment, making a sustainable and hospitable environment here that would withstand catastrophe is a far easier plan than making one that would survive catastrophe outside Earth.
This is true even with your asteroid example. Like I said in my first post, Earth's worst day in the last billion years was a picnic compared to Mars' best day. People consistently underestimate Earth as a hospitable place, and underestimate space as a hostile place.
The absolutely best path is to make sure we can survive on Earth before we try to survive out there.
That damn W. We hates him. He should have turned NASA over the military long ago. In fact he's the one that started the civilian space program and we should impeach him.
Huh? Wait one...Eisenhower? Kennedy?...Nevermind.
In terms of the Federal government's budget:
Department of Defense: 52%
NASA: 0.5%
Gee...yeah...cutting NASA will save LOADS of money.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I don't know where you got your numbers so I might be going out on a limb here but I'm guessing NASA could launch a Falcon 1 comparable rocket into low earth orbit for a comparable amount to what SpaceX does. They don't have much of a reason too though and they are certainly not doing the same thing that private companies are doing. If they can use private companies to lower their launch costs without having serious disadvantages, I'm sure they will.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
"As a result of the failure of three previous launches, the rocket carried a non-functional boilerplate spacecraft. [4] The boilerplate spacecraft is a 165-kilogram (363-pound) payload mass simulator, known as Ratsat,[1] which remained bolted to the second stage of the carrier rocket after reaching low Earth orbit.[5] It has a hexagonal prism shape, 1.5 m (5 ft) long.[6] SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk estimates that Ratsat will remain in orbit for between five and ten years before burning up in the atmosphere."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1_Flight_4
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
Just cut that shit out now and pay what is needed to hold this place in the world.
Why hold this place in the world? Let's see, right now the USA is spending about 600 billion a year bringing democracy to two countries that hate us, protecting allies that won't fight with us, all so that all of these countries can dump their goods onto our soil and take our jobs. Did you know that prior to World War II, the USA had FIFTY PERCENT of all the manufacturing capacity on the planet. Now we're down to less than 20%. This whole big standing army to keep our "allies" safe is symptomatic of a standing decline in the fortunes of the USA relative to the rest of the world that has taken place since World War II.
Enough already.
Seriously. What good does NATO do the USA? IF Europe wants to have another war, if North Korea wants to invade South Korea, China invade Taiwan, or Japan China, or vice versa, why should the average American even care. It's not our job to police the world. Let the world police itself. All these other nations scream diplomacy while safely under the American blanket, well, let's take that blanket off and let them fend for themselves.
This is my sig.
Yes. It is *always* wrong to force people to pay for stuff they don't want to.
Sometimes, the benefits to everyone are so great (as in education, ideally) that we do it anyway. But just because in some cases something wrong can be justified by the benefits, does not mean that every benefit justifies something wrong.
Now, ideally, education, welfare, food stamps would be paid for voluntarily. And if they can't, then we really ought to examine why they're popular enough to vote for with your free vote, but not popular enough to vote for with your effort (dollar-vote).
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If we militarize space, it will probably cause the end of civilization as we know it.
He says it like it's a bad thing. Personally, I would prefer to have civilization as we know it include intergalactic space ships, far-reaching exploration, multiple planets on which to live, etc.
And don't forget the exotic aliens, drugs, and Pleasure Droids.
So yes, please end civilization "as we know it" and let's get on to something better than sitting around in wooden boxes.
I would not say this:
"2) It's hard to do stealthy reentry."
We don't know how hard it is, or whether it's already easy enough. That's the beauty of stealthiness. For example, if a military were doing stealthy re-entries all the time, you might not know.
Before the F-117 and B-2, stealth aircraft were considered too hard to do. But there they are.
the ability to deduct lobbying expenses from taxes is the problem.
Wow, so an organisation that is mandated by the people (in as much as it is government funded) is forbidden from lobbying, but companies which are often in direct conflict with the general populace (e.g. **AA) can spend as much as they want on it?!
How the hell did that come about?
Or else they just have different priorities as far as research goes. Curing AIDS vs landing on Mars, for me and a good chunk of the world's population, AIDS comes first, I'd advocate that research grants reflect that.
That's the problem. You see, if we keep trying to solve all our problems before we go into space, we'll never get there.
The research we have to achieve to get humans on Mars, and back, will benefit medicine here as well. It's not like we'll only use that knowledge in space.
Advances in medical equipment & treatment will also benefit.
Or you could look at it this way- if we send enough AIDS-free people to start a Mars colony, then once we finish killing ourselves off on Earth AIDS will be wiped out, and the Mars colonists can come back & repopulate.
Substitute any disease for the word AIDS above.
But as for AIDS specifically, it's not that hard to avoid. Use protection & don't sleep around, don't share needles, and don't get blood transfusions in 3rd world countries.
Other than that, there are very, very few people who get AIDS in other ways. Spend the money on the nasty diseases that aren't so easily avoided.
I'm glad we're on the same page.
And yes, forcing people to pay for something is theft, and yes theft is wrong, and no majority rule or institutions doesn't make it right.
\u262D = \u5350
Father knows best hey ? Prick.
\u262D = \u5350
Well I should have "in space" to the first question. Look at it this way: if you go up, you have to deal with radiation, lack of gravity, lack of resources to expand populations, the initial population will be limited, and will have to be managed (growth wise) We'll be dependent on many, many technologies.
If we go all Matrix and underground, we only need much simpler technologies, less radiation, and we'll have our beloved gravity.
If you want to save humanity, dig a hole, don't plan to live some where you didn't evolve...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
U.S. military spending is greater than that of the rest of the world combined.
We could halve our military spending, and still massively outspend any potential adversary.
Unfortunately, AFAIK nothing like that is in the new administration's plans.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Outer Limits covered this one a long time ago.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Why does it cost so much
Bad management on the part of contractors. Bad Oversight and dismal efficiency on the part of the customer. Politics + piss-poor scheduling + unrealistic expectations of managers + poor requirements + all the "usual" technical things (risks) that can go wrong = FAIL
I loved working in the defense sector. It is really cool work (mechanical engineer / dynamics), and one of the few domestic industries left that does research in my areas of interest. But it is horribly inefficient due to all the red-tape, politics and crappy management. We might not need all this defense tech now. But when you consider how long it takes to get the crap working, it just makes sense to be preparing for anything other than world peace a decade or two down the road.
helium-3 on the other hand....
I heard from my adviser (who is well connected) that while these were all factors, realistically the government pays contractors a fixed percentage of the costs. Since this is the case, there is little incentive on the contractors to reduce costs since they take a hit in profits. He continues to try to push the Armed Services to change the way they pay the contractors with little success. That's really all I know since it's a story he told us one day but it sounds reasonable.
You posted an eloquent reply, but we'll have to agree to disagree on it. While it's true that survival means more than just short-term, your claim that "sustainable living is only a short term solution" is wrong, and here's why. Sustainable living is, by its very nature, sustainable indefinitely (look it up), and living in such a way provided over three million years of security for humans and their direct ancestors. That is, in your words, "medium to long term (thousands of years to billions of years)" survival. To wit, this was through a number of disasters and climate changes with pre-technological societies (herein lies the "effortless" part).
You do know that around 70,000 years ago humans were "sustainably" whittled down to some ~1,000 persons in the whole world? You are aware that in the past 600M years we have records of at least five mass extinctions? That is, more than half the planet's population of species destroyed? That doesn't sound like security to me.
Sustainable living deals with methods to survive our own waste products and our own consumptive models. How to not kill ourselves off through our own actions. Sorry but you can't tell me I'm wrong based on a dictionary definition. It is not by it's very nature "indefinite" in this scenario. Dictionary definitions are only as good as they are applicable.
None of the scenarios involved in sustainable living deal with catastrophic events such as killer asteroids that wipe out all life larger than a microbe, for example. They all deal with having the Earth still be a viable place to live. Since we are talking about a time scale in which the earth may no longer habitable, the "indefinite" nature of sustainable living is suspect (and in fact, incorrect).
That is why it's only the short term solution. Certainly it is a necessary step for our "indefinite" survival, but it does not appear sufficient to do so. That is, humans will be wiped out if all we concentrate on is living sustainably on this planet.
However, sustainability is pressing issue. Put it this way, if we don't pursue sustainability at this time we may not have another chance to. If our technology totally crashes we may not be able to reboot it. We also won't like our lives much. In which case we'll be wiped out anyway, either through some relatively minor occurrence such as happened 70,000 years ago or by some major event.
I think you may agree with me on principle with this: you said the only way to ensure our survival is to be sure a world catastrophe doesn't kill all humans. Given the size and resiliency of Earth, the access to materials, and the known working environment, making a sustainable and hospitable environment here that would withstand catastrophe is a far easier plan than making one that would survive catastrophe outside Earth.
This is true even with your asteroid example. Like I said in my first post, Earth's worst day in the last billion years was a picnic compared to Mars' best day. People consistently underestimate Earth as a hospitable place, and underestimate space as a hostile place.
You are presenting a false dichotomy. We are not talking a catastrophe in space versus a catastrophe on Earth and who would fare better. We are talking about a catastrophe on earth wiping out humans there and what to do about it if you want the species to survive that event.
Unless there is a technological measure we can take to not have the asteroid hit us there is no sustainable or hospitable environment we could create on the planet that would withstand the catastrophe. It really is game over for people still on the planet at that point. You appear to be underestimating the nature of, well, Nature.
Given that, in your words, we have a readily available means to keep our species alive for the medium to long term, the focus should be on making Earth more hospitable for us, not on space exploration.
... there are uncountable scientific discoveries and all the benefits they will bring? Is that not a good enough reason? Who is fucking wasting my tax dollars to pay these assclowns to ask idiotic questions? Fire them ALL!
I'm certain the Madison Avenue types could "market" some product that can only be made on the Moon. But the most important things that I can think of is, "Knowledge, and "Elbow Room", both of which exits solely on the Moon.
I should hope so too. From 1945 to 1990 the US was engaged in a global struggle for dominance against a rival superpower, and had to maintain a large and intimidating armed force in order to appear credible compared to the Soviet military. And in WWII the US was actively fighting two major rivals simultaneously.
Whereas right now the US is fighting, er... a bunch of guys with AK-47s and home-made bombs. And the occasional lunatic in a suicide belt.
If these clowns are an enemy that calls for Cold War levels of expenditure, then wow, were the Russians ever wasting their money on all those planes and rockets.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Exactly how large a military budget is required to scramble eight fighters to shoot down four airliners? Because that's what it would have taken to prevent the last incident. Occupying foreign nations, on the other hand, does nothing to prevent such actions. Imagine the scene in the US terror cell's safe-house. 'Oh, brothers - our plan to destroy the World Trade Centre is well advanced, our pilots trained, our tickets bought, but alas! the infidels have occupied Baghdad! We must now go and fight them over there, for certainly we cannot now fight them here.' Yeah, I don't see it either.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Living where you didn't evolve is how new species come about. You can dig a hole and be a coelacanth if you like. I'd rather take to the stars and be an amphibian.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.