Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
It's the public's imagination that's at fault if that really is the case. NASA continues to do spectacular, amazing things.
The NASA current missions page:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/
Does the Cassini-Huygens mission do nothing for you?
That Hubble Telescope doodad not honking your horn?
Spirit and Opportunity are things that make you go "meh"?
If you (or rather some notional "member of the public") would rather be watching tonight's new episode of "The Apprentice" than reading about one of these missions, then where does the lack of vision lie?
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
We are still doing things. Quite a bit of things. The only difference is we don't really need human beings up there to do these tasks, thus you don't hear about the missions and discoveries. It's not big news unless a human is physically involved, generally.