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NASA Funding Boost, But No Shuttle Extension in Obama Budget
adeelarshad82 writes to point out that details have been provided for President Obama's proposed $18.7 billion in funding for NASA in 2010 (up from $17.2 billion in 2008). Quoting: "The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation research. Yet it also remains fixed to former President George W. Bush's plan to retire the space shuttle fleet by 2010 and replace them with the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly astronauts to the space station and return them to the moon by 2020. The outline does make room for an extra shuttle flight beyond the nine currently remaining on NASA's schedule, but only if it is deemed safe and can be flown before the end of 2010."
Did they say anything about ditching Ares and going to DIRECT?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
once US manned missions stop, they won't continue in the US until funded by private enterprise if ever. The gap between the end of shuttle and the launch of Orion is long enough for people to start asking, "Do we really miss a manned space program? Maybe we should fund education or XYZ or ABC...."
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Good points but either way my ass is covered :o
The picture is of Cernan but if you look carefully you can see the reflection of Schmitt in the center of his visor.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"A single statement like "I decided to disband NASA, close all its projects down and transfer their funding into the new Emergency Assistance Fund that helps you personally" will do the job."
Ahhhh....yes. The end of the dream. Let me make a prophecy here; When America has lost its dream. America is lost. For that which was the hope of the world will have fallen. Not for a hundred years will a nation rise and say, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." You have already lost the "among". So long, thanks for all the fission.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
[Space X] already won the re-supply contract (pending some litigation) and their capsule is designed to carry people to space. We should cancel government funded efforts and instead contract it all out.
You are contradicting yourself.
Government funded efforts are already contracted out. NASA doesn't actually build rockets. They contract it out to Boeing, or Lockmart, or both (United Space Alliance), or now, Space X.
"Go private" really means that the government stops supplying space money altogether, and allows the free market to decide if space is worth it. Is that what you want?
Martian rovers are crawling the surface for years now, looking at every rock and every feature of the landscape.
First, note that the rovers are "crawling". With a several minute communication lag between Earth and Mars, decisions take a while to make. While humans can't look at every rock and feature of the landscape, they don't need to. The bonus to humans is that they'd be able to determine what is interesting, prioritize their investigation, and carry out the investigate without requiring Earth-side support.
They observed martian weather for two seasons, recorded and reported every detail of it.
At least every detail that the rovers could detect. It's worth noting that the rovers have very limited ability to sense their environment.
A manned expedition, OTOH, would be able to only set up a camp, visually inspect some places of interest within a circle of couple of miles, do all that inside of a month or two, and hastily depart back to Earth.
One merely needs to look at the Lunar expeditions to see how wrong this claim is. With a rover, a human driver, and a couple of months, you'd be able to see a lot more than a couple of miles. Further, there are various Mars exploration programs where the astronauts stay longer than a couple of months. But let's stick with the flag and footprints mission profile and assume they only stay a couple of months.
No way they'd stick around for years, they'd go crazy or die from hunger or suffer accidents, etc.
Mars Direct has a good plan that doesn't have these issues.
But robots don't have such problems, and once you designed one robot you can make a thousand of them at little incremental cost.
The annoying thing here is that you're mostly right, but NASA insists on producing one-off designs. You still need to launch them. And someone needs to control them. And is it too much to point out that controlling robots from Mars will be much more effective than controlling them from Earth?
Robots are perfect tools for meticulous, boring work 24/7; a human on Mars would be likely able to remain outside only for a few hours per day, with remaining time spent on maintenance of the camp, eating, washing, resting, sleeping, documenting, communicating...
If robots did work comparable to that of humans, you might have a point. Robots don't. Eight hours of human work on site can be much more useful than 24 hours of robotic work. The question then is how much more useful? My impression is that a flag and footprints mission for a couple of months would probably be less efficient while a longer term mission, where the astronauts stay for a couple of years, would fall on the other side and be more cost effective (assuming very generously that you're willing to pay the price).
By the time that I discovered that there is a "Robot Exploration v.s. Human Exploration" debate I realized that it would be pointless to argue for robots. The best way for a "robot fan" to win the argument versus the "human fan" is to wait a few years.
In twenty years, humans will be sent to Skynet's glue factories, rending (in a visceral way) the entire argument academic? More seriously, as long as humans continue to make the decisions, it makes sense to have an on site human, just to cut the decision delay time. Any technology that can enhance robots can also enhance humans, who I might add, already have a natural advantage.
Humans will still not have visited anything more remote than the Moon.
Why? What secret knowledge do you know that the rest of us don't know?