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NASA Moon Launch May Be Delayed After 2020
krou writes "The Guardian is reporting that NASA is quietly revising its internal estimates of a 2018 launch for its Ares V rocket. Although publicly the date given for the launch was 2020, the internal launch date was set for 2018. The shift in dates seems to be linked to 'growing budget woes,' and 'engineers say that means the public 2020 date to send humans back to the moon is in deepening trouble.' NASA administrator Mike Griffin blamed the White House, and the previous Bush administration, saying funding for Ares V and other projects fell from $4bn through 2015 to just $500m. 'This was to be allocated to early work on the Ares V heavy-lifter, and the Altair lunar lander. With only a half-billion dollars now available, this work cannot be done.'"
So America has given up on the space race, huh?
I guess it's up to China and India now.
We went from having no rocket program of any kind in 1945, to deciding to put a man on the moon in 1960, to actually doing it in 1969. Now, we decide we want to go to go back, and can't make any progress at all.
Our national labs are filled with nothing but bureaucracy and useless political management. There's no sense of urgency, there's no focused direction.
Seriously, we can't do in 20 years today what we did in 10 half a century ago? Come on. This shit's just sad.
From the time JFK announced his challenge to go to the moon it took us eight years to actually do it. Now we have all the technology from all of our space research for the past 40 years, we have five years sunk into the current plan to return, and they are saying they can't finish it in another nine years? This is the fruit of our lousy political and education systems!
For all its grand announcements and associated fanfare the United States government has no intention of going back to the moon. The reason. There are no people, that is no eligible voters on the moon, so there is not point in going there.
However, China does not care whether there are possible eligible voters there or not they just want the high ground. So they will go.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
First off, Griffin isn't NASA Administrator anymore, since Obama accepted his resignation as Obama was being inaugurated.
Next up, I don't notice Griffin taking any responsibility himself for leaving NASA in disarray after years running it. Even though he messed up its budget. Yes, Bush deserves blame for messing up NASA, including by putting a CIA Star Wars hack in charge of it, who wasted our time suppressing climate change research results. But Griffin doesn't have any standing to criticize anyone else until he owns up to his own bad work setting back our space program, now apparently by decades.
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make install -not war
This sounds like flamebait but I swear it's not. I would love to hear someone knowledgeable explain to me why (at least as it seems to a layman like myself) NASA did amazing things for so long then hasn't done anything to capture the public's imagination for decades. I understand how massive the funding was in their heyday, but every other technology sector seems to do more with less over time - is NASA's mission just impossible to accomplish for less than 3% of GDP? Or did they hire worse and worse recruits over time? Or did the wrong people get put in charge? Or does this stuff just get harder to do?
This has baffled and saddened me for years. I really do want to hear an answer from someone who has some insight...
"95% of all Slashdot
Makes for a sort of depressing answer to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven't the thousands of advanced species conquered the universe yet? Oh, they will. It's just not practical right now. Maybe during the next budget period they can establish a group to consider returning to space. It'll happen eventually. They've been meaning to do another manned orbital mission for the last few thousand years. They'll get to it as soon as some immediate priorities are sorted out.
When these things are delayed, the true cost escalate massively.
It's mind boggling to me that Obama is shit-eating happy to hemorrhage 2 Billion a week at Iraqistan, for nothing and no one, but the space program gets fucked up the ass.
This isn't about going to the moon at all: it's about retaining the expertise that America paid dearly for in the 60s! The huge sums invested (yes, "invested") in the space program kept US aeronautics and engineering at the top of the world for 50 years.
But now the Euros make better planes, and US engineering is being rapidly eclipsed.
As expertise is lost, so the budgets escalate, and the delays get bigger, further escalating costs.
Pretty soon the USA is an "also ran" in space, and shortly thereafter it becomes an "also ran" on Earth. The writing is on the wall: only massive investment in science, technology and expertise can save the USA from utter collapse under the weight if 53 trillion dollars in entitlements.
While space investment (under NASAs most specific commission - to provide all their data to any US firm) return well in excess of a dollar for every dollar invested, there are a couple of things that the USA simply MUST do in order to avoid total melt down.
1) Don't start any more wars, and finish the ones you got going on now.
2) Invest heavily in space technology
3) Secure the supply of energy to the world for the entire future.
Number 3 can be achieved by singlehandedly getting Fusion power tamed. I'm not talking about that ridiculous ITER thing - because the only thing which will come from that fiasco is a pile of Ph.D.s about 10 metres tall - and most of them won't be 'merkin Ph.D.s!
No, the small-scale, tiny fusion efforts like Focus Fusion and Bussard's Polywell reactor - if practical will yield results for sums under a billion - while the potential payoff is measured in the hundreds of trillions of dollars in this century.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
In 1961 the Apollo program was founded when US President John F. Kennedy announced a goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969 it was accomplished when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. It took eight years. I was four years old at the time they landed. I watched breathlessly each launch, each landing, and all the reports in between. I actually recall trying to convince some of the adults in my life the significance of these events. The Moon! That ball in the sky! Men are walking on it! I failed miserably. I lived in Watts at the time. They didn't care then and they don't care now.
It had never been done before. Practically none of the necessary materials science, engineering and physics were even understood at the time. They performed orbital vector calulations sometimes using computers, and sometimes using banks of people operating calculators.
40 years later we carry computers in our pocket that have more power than all the computers in the world at that time. Our cars have better navigational equipment. It has been done before. The problem has been solved - we've done it many times. The physics, mechanics and materials are well understood. But now we can't figure out a way to do this again in under a decade. It's over. We're officially sliding into decay.
Now I point to that ball in the sky for my son who's five, and I say "That ball in the sky! We knew how to get there once. My parents did it, but we forgot how when I grew up. If you study hard - if you really want it - you might go there too." And then we point the telescope at Mars.
/And it's Orion. Try and spell it write, ok?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Congress messed up the Hubble Space Telescope project a few decades ago by similarly setting unrealistically low budgets. The scientists agreed to the budget because that was the only way to go forward. Perkin Elmers, the prime subcontractor for the lens, had to take all sorts of shortcuts to meet that budget. They had to skimp on quality control. Instead of multiple tests, they used the same system that guided the polishing of the lens to verify the polishing was correct. It turns out that a bolt was inserted backwards in the measuring laser. Of course, this meant that the mirror was wrongly-ground and that the error was not caught.
The Ares Project is more important not only because it represents the next generation of American rocketry, but also because lives will be depending on the rocket. The early Apollo and Shuttle projects claimed lives because of shoddy work. History is in danger of repeating itself.
Congress and NASA should either do it right, or not do it at all. Astronauts assume the risks at every launch, but we should not let them take that risk if it is too significant. NASA should just put the ball down and walk away if it believes that the project cannot be done correctly on the current budget. Not for political gamesmanship, but to protect astronauts.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/