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Obama Taps Charles Bolden To Lead NASA
viyh notes that President Obama has named former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. as NASA administrator. Obama's campaign space adviser, Lori Garver, will be Bolden's deputy. Bolden flew four shuttle missions, two as commander, as well as 100 combat missions over Viet Nam. If confirmed, Bolden will take over an agency uncertain of its direction. The shuttle Atlantis's landing will mark the end of the servicing era — it was the last planned mission to repair any satellite. Some inside the agency are less than happy about how NASA's future looks from here.
I thought NASA was pretty damned certain of where they were heading over the next few years, the only uncertain part was what the next NASA administrator would try to change.
Used to be, back when I was in high school, that we listened to Kennedy's speeches about space and dreamed of becoming astronauts. NASA, in those days, was something of a heroic world where the best and brightest grouped to find ways to get men to the moon and return them safely to Earth.
We looked at the Alan Shepards, Louis Armstrongs, and Buzz Aldrins as supermen. They were our Sanjaya back then. The right stuff, they had it, and we wanted to have it too.
But now, NASA is just a sad shadow of what it used to be. The agency is hamstrung by lack of funding, but more than that, in the decades that have passed since I was a boy, educational standards have dropped to such an extent that even if we were to increase funding to reasonable levels, that we'd need to bring in foreign contractors just to make up the intelligence gap.
The average American doesn't care about space. They care about what is directly in front of them. Their car, their job (if they still have it), and their bellies. The curiousity and hunger for space is gone except in a scattered few.
It'll be another 12 years before any kind of rehabilition can take place. Until the next generation of kids passes through schools that encourage thought, discipline, and creativity and not just feel-good, everyone wins, it only matters if you try "education".
But Frank Borman did not get the job done as the CEO of Eastern Airlines, while John Glenn was less than impressive as a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1984 (and was one of the Keating 5).
In pro sports, Hall of Fame athletes are more than not failures as head coaches.
One problem could be that the program, while brutally tough, is laid out for these guys. As head of the organization, they'll be the ones creating and staffing the program instead of following it.
I agree that NASA is a pale shadow of what it used to be. I'm not sure I agree with why.
Kids are fine these days. There are plenty of smart folks out there kicking ass. Why is it that every generation thinks kids suck today? Have we all forgotten the stupid stuff we did?
NASA may be lacking funding, but are they using the funding they have wisely?
Why do we maintain the space station? There's no real good science going on. Why do we want to go to the moon? There's nothing there. Why would we want a colony on Mars or the Moon? No magnetic shield makes radiation very hazardous. We can't live there.
Why don't we use robots? Well, we do, and frankly all the good exploration comes from robots, not from people.
Yes, we've lost the jazzy "coolness" of space. Know why? 'Cause it's EMPTY. Nothing there. Nothing to get excited about. B O R I N G.
Lets explore the oceans instead!
Lets put our gumption and know how to solving problems here. There's plenty to go around... and you know what? Plenty of people hack, build, problem solve, and explore right here.
Creativity and exploration isn't dead. It just went somewhere more fascinating than cold empty space.
-T
Where the hell did this comment come from, and why is it being modded up? To whose ignorance are you referring? Why is it particularly cool that the NASA administrator and the president are the same color? Would it be less cool if he were some other color? Can you rank for us the various color permutations in order of coolness?
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
I've had the distinct pleasure of working with Jim Wetherbee, the man who has commanded more NASA shuttle flights than any other.
During that time I asked him why he left NASA. And I don't want to put words into his mouth, but suffice it to say I think he felt like the country's support of NASA is terrible and he decided he wanted to go somewhere that he could make a difference (because he no longer felt that way in NASA).
It's sad really. The space program, while expensive, has resulted in many great technological discoveries and inventions. And yet do you even know how small of a percent of our GDP goes towards it? It's pathetic.
I only hope this Bolden is something like Jim Wetherbee. If so, there may be some hope yet.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Why is it that whenever the President appoints/nominates someone for an important position, the word 'taps' is mentioned.
Given that this is Memorial Weekend, the word Taps is more associatied with the bugle call for fallen soldiers, and is approppriate for remembering the Challenger and Columbia crews, (and Grissom White and Chaffee)
witch? git? seriously please read your posts before you submit
he's clearly a NASA insider who had her/his spell-checker budget slashed.
rewriting history since 2109
Screw sanjaya. But tell us what that thing is.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's a big link in our current communication chain for one.
The relative weightless environment lends itself to certain experiments.
Considering where we are going as a race is going to be important soon since we're starting to drain a lot of resources on Earth.
It's also not a good idea to keep "all of our eggs in one basket." Stepping off to other planets will not only give us access to a whole new set of resources but could be important if there was a mass extinction event on Earth.
And the funding for space R&D often finds it's way back to the homes of the tax payers just as military R&D does. The vast majority of all technology around you was funded by wars and man's desire for exploration.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Have you read your first link? Besides, have you ever seen the cockpit of a fighter before? let alone the space shuttle? He was a damned test pilot, his whole job was to fly questionable craft at ridiculous speeds, i'm sure he knows how to spot and fix technical problems. Now he's piloting NASA, i think he'll do fine.
The last guy, Griffin, had 7 degrees and i think everyone was unhappy with him. So we gave an academic a shot, now let's try someone else.
Selected by NASA in May 1980, Bolden became an astronaut in August 1981. His technical assignments included: Astronaut Office Safety Officer; Technical Assistant to the Director of Flight Crew Operations; Special Assistant to the Director of the Johnson Space Center; Astronaut Office Liaison to the Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance Directorates of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Kennedy Space Center; Chief of the Safety Division at JSC; Lead Astronaut for Vehicle Test and Checkout at the Kennedy Space Center; and Assistant Deputy Administrator, NASA Headquarters. A veteran of four space flights, he has logged over 680 hours in space. Bolden served as pilot on STS-61C (January 12â"18, 1986) and STS-31 (April 24â"29, 1990), and was the mission commander on STS-45 (March 24, 1992 â" April 2, 1992), and STS-60 (February 3-11, 1994).
Bolden was the first person to ride the Launch Complex 39 slidewire baskets which enable rapid escape from a shuttle on the launch pad. The need for a human test was determined following a launch abort on STS-41-D where controllers were afraid to order the crew to use the untested escape system.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Obama wants to combine efforts with the the Air Force, which has a MUCH larger space program and a proven launch capability (Delta IV, Atlas V) already in hand. We will get to the moon faster and cheaper adapting the Airforce's existing technology, rather than letting NASA continue to flail and fail with the Ares I. Choosing Bolden has less to do with his background as an astronaut and more to do with the fact that he was a former general in the US Airforce. Obama wants to "To boost cooperation between NASA and the Pentagon," by, "reviv[ing] the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which oversaw the entire space arena for four presidents, most actively from 1958 to 1973." - including during the original missions to the moon! Insiders at Nasa, including former chief Michael Griffin are extremely resistant. They want to build and control their own technology (this should be familiar to anyone who has ever managed developers). âoeNo one really has a firm idea what NASAâ(TM)s cost savings might be, but the militaryâ(TM)s launch vehicles are basically developed,â said John Logsdon, a policy expert at Washingtonâ(TM)s National Air and Space Museum who has conferred with Obamaâ(TM)s transition advisers. âoeYou donâ(TM)t have to build them from scratch.â And thats the key. All quotes taken from: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aOvrNO0OJ41g
"NASA, in those days, was something of a heroic world where the best and brightest grouped to find ways to get men to the moon and return them safely to Earth."
That's because they were doing something we've never done before. Once we went to the moon, Americans (and humanity in general) were bored with the whole thing... been there, done that. During the Apollo 13 mission, networks cut over to Batman. Higher ratings, you know. Not even going to Mars will have the excitement that the Apollo program first had. Once you've been through that door, the rest of the doors look the same. You wont see the same kind of excitement that Apollo had until the first teleportation machine is built.
"But now, NASA is just a sad shadow of what it used to be. The agency is hamstrung by lack of funding"
NASA is a shadow of what it was because it has matured into a useful, mature agency; one that services satellites with reusable craft, and explores extra-terrestrial bodies via robots. Boring, but very much useful. Mature is neccessary, but mature isn't exciting.
"educational standards have dropped to such an extent that even if we were to increase funding to reasonable levels, that we'd need to bring in foreign contractors just to make up the intelligence gap."
This is mostly hype, and mostly wrong. As an old rock star said, the good 'ole days weren't always good. Schools did used to be more effective, but only because curriculums had a more practical focus (practical maths, job skills, trade skills). On paper, requirements have only gone up, unreasonably so in many cases. We're sending our kids to school earlier, graduating them later, and keeping them in classrooms more hours per day and more weeks per year. Now we're talking about mandating pre-K for all kids. Educational standards aren't the problem, because we're fast coming to a point where we'll put kids in schools as soon as they're physically able. And it's all foolishness.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
We colonised, traded, eventually enslaved, because there were things to extract, sell, harvest. It's the Moon we're talking about here, a huge desert from which nothing profitable can come from, not even Helium 3.
And what on Earth makes you think that a Moon base would be cheaper than a space station?? I can't begin to fathom what would make you think that letting a cluster of airtight tanks at our door step would be easier than building, manning and maintaining a fucking village on the Moon. And what for anyways? What do you want a colony on the Moon for??
You just got troll'd!
There are a number of valuable aspects to space exploration.
First and foremost, there are more and better accessible resources of nearly every kind to be found in space. Contrary to detractors of this issue, the problem isn't getting the stuff to the Earth, but rather getting there in the first place with enough equipment to obtain those resources in the first place.
By resources, I mean heavy metals (gold, silver, platinum, iron, copper, aluminum, uranium, and much more) and energy that is available in such staggering amounts that it boggles the mind to even comprehend what is available. All of these can be obtained using existing technologies, or with technologies that have at least had some minor demonstration projects that aren't really exotic or different from what we are already doing on the Earth. Indeed, reducing iron oxide to pure iron is much, much easier to do in space and even beneficial for its "pollutants" (mainly oxygen).
On top of all this, these minerals and resources can be obtained with a much more minimal impact on the environment here on the Earth. If you genuinely are concerned about global warming, trying to figure out how to feed a growing global population, learning how to predict and avoid natural disasters like tsuamis and hurricanes.... all of this demands a strong and growing presence in space.
If that weren't enough, the countries and peoples that "control the high ground" will also have the military advantage in any future conflicts. Simply put, if the country you are in doesn't have a strong presence in space (or have a strong ally in space), you are screwed and doomed to be invaded or destroyed as a nation. The economic rationale is a strong one and has a huge and more immediate impact, but this military issue is all that more important to remember, and ultimately the one that got America and Russia into space in the first place. Worries about weapons in space are misplaced.... they are already there and have been deployed there for decades, regardless of what governments may have said in the past.
In addition to all of the above reasons, whenever people get into a new situation and have to work on solutions for new problems, that knowledge gained from living in that new environment can be adapted to other situations back in more familiar territory. Just being in a new situation will allow neural synapses to be organized in a new configuration within your brain, meaning that you are literally going to be thinking differently than others who have not been in that situation, such as being an astronaut in space. This is going to give a diversity of experience that will ultimately enrich all of humanity just simply by being there at all. For this reason alone, it is a pity that more people have not been to the Moon than the dozen men that went there.... we certainly don't have a female perspective of what it is like to walk on the Moon.
The scientific, political, and cultural knowledge that can be gained by going into space is something that is literally immeasurable. If we don't get into space and stay there... and expand our presence in space, humanity is doomed to extinction. It will have also been a waste of life for us to not get there.
Now as to if NASA is the best way to accomplish the task of going into space for Americans, that is something of a much more worthy debate. The key to unleashing the potential of space exploration is to drastically reduce the cost of getting up there in the first place. Common ordinary citizens need to have the ability to go up there and become prospectors, settlers, amateur explorers, and artists... and do so without having a government hand-out to get there.
NASA has supposedly been trying to reduce the cost of going into space with multiple vehicle prototypes like the Space Shuttle, Venture Star, DC-X, and so many other vehicles that it is nearly impossible to name all of the vehicle designs that have been proposed and in many cases had some initial hardware built for those designs. It
nope, obama is half-white. so what?
When you tap Charles Bolden, you may search for you Control NASA card and put it in your hand. Shuffle your deck afterwards.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I don't see anything about the racial bias in white's voting patterns. In fact going by the voting patterns of Asians and Hispanics whites should have voted 65% for Obama - which would have easily won him the election blacks or not. Way to push racism on one group while ignoring any others.
This is about scraping the Aeres I and saving $
I hope so. Ares is nonsense. One tiny rocket whose sole job is to lift the crew module into orbit, and it can't even do that; and one giant beast of a rocket that is so big that they can barely fit it through the doors of the assembly building, and will require completely new factories to build. Without the Ares V, Ares I has nothing to lift crew to, except to jump onto the ISS treadmill. Plus, that's all it can lift. No more supplies. No more spare parts. No more modules. Just people up, people down.
NASA already has a successful launch system in the STS system. By simply moving the crew to a module on top of the stack, and moving the engines to the bottom of the stack, you wind up with a vehicle that can lift more than what the shuttle can. Because it is using all the same components, it is essentially already man-rated. Using current components (many of which are in stock) it can be ready sooner. A Jupiter rocket can be built right now, using the same factories that produce the SRBs and External Tanks for current shuttle missions. That means that people will be able to keep their jobs now, instead of having to wait for ten years to maybe work on ARES.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The environmentalist idiots want to treat Earth as a closed system. No resources available from off-planet. They do not understand what that means, but they think it is a smart idea anyway.
I believe it is an important mission to teach them what is means.
When was the Earth last "sustainable", meaning that natural processes recycled wastes as fast (or faster) than they were produced? Oh, I'd say somewhere around 1800 or so. Maybe 1850. Certainly no later than that. Given that population level and a healthy level of technology, I think the carrying capacity of a sustainable Earth might be as many as 250 million. Not anywhere near 6 billion.
What does this mean? Well, it means that if you want to treat the Earth as a closed system and want to manage natural resources in a "sustainable" manner we need to reduce the population to about 250 million. Overnight. Or at least as quickly as possible. It is highly doubtful that a Islam vs. Rest of of the Planet war would kill that many people. Avian flu isn't going to kill more than a few hundred million, even by the worse estimates.
Nope, we need to offer the alternatives of use off-planet resources or start the killing. Cull 90% of the human race in the name of "sustainability" or get an active space program. One asteroid would provide resources that we haven't even considered for perhaps 25 t0 30 years. What biological and hydrocarbon resources could be gathered from cis-Jupiter space? Simple answer is lots and lots but we are short on specifics right now.
Could be the environmentalists are right. Could also be that the great culling might not really be necessary. I'd suggest giving off-planet resources a try. Sadly, I don't think very many people are going to put it to the leaders of the environmentalist movement quite this way. Where we are likely to go is having 6 billion people living on the resources of 250 million. And strong enforcement to make sure nobody uses more than their fair share.
his whole job was to fly questionable craft at ridiculous speeds
He'll fit right in with the other drivers on the Beltway (I-495.)
He'll fit right in with the other drivers on the Beltway (I-495.)
Local humor, hilarious(to the 5 people reading this that live in your area).
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
He's been a test pilot, and all that implies.
That does not imply that he is a design engineer, which is what is required. The head of NASA does not need to do design himself, but he needs to think like a designer, and recognize the likely limitations of every design and of every test of every design.
I think it is worthy to note that he also achieved the rank of Major General (two-star general)... in of all things the U.S. Marine Corps. That is also by itself an impressive accomplishment in a branch that is loathsome to do promotions of any kind... at least compared to the other military branches. If it were merely for his accomplishments as an astronaut, he should have been merely a full Colonel, as it typical for most retired astronauts.
This also indicates a level of leadership skills, showing that the Marine Corps would be willing to trust him with a group of Marines at least as numerous as the number of employees that can be found at NASA. The NASA administrator and a division commander (often a Major General) could be considered quite comparable in terms of responsibilities.
Why this might be a point of contention to show a lack of qualifications boggles my mind.
It's fascinating how right-wing trolls love to say "Barack Hussein Obama" but hardly ever say "John Sidney McCain III."
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What's uncertain is how well an experienced pilot with very little technical knowledge [wikipedia.org] can run a huge agency that has extremely complicated technical problems.
This is a popular meme amongst the technically-inclined (a group in which I include myself), but when it comes down to it, a NASA administrator with a high level of technical expertise is largely what got us into the current mess we're in. Nobody would dispute that the prior administrator, Michael Griffin is a technical expert, with several masters degrees (aerospace, civil, and electrical engineering) and a PhD in aerospace engineering.
Unfortunately, as often happens with us technical types, he ended up getting obsessed with a particular technical idea and ended up blocking out potentially-superior alternatives. In Griffin's case, he designed a novel shuttle-based manned rocket (using a solid rocket as a first-stage) prior to becoming administrator, and once he became administrator he put NASA's weight behind his pet design and clamped down on engineers who raised concerns. According to some recently-leaked NASA documents, the supposedly-unbiased ESAS study which selected NASA's current rocket design in fact gave safety exemptions to Griffin's pet design while unfairly penalizing competing designs. Fast forward to the present, and it's looking like the issues with Griffin's design (now called the Ares I) are fundamental design problems with costs ballooning skywards.
While technical proficiency is nice, it's not the most important thing in a manager of a program like NASA. Far more important is the ability to judge things in an unbiased manner, and being able to listen to your subordinates when they voice concerns.
Not to forget he has two degrees, listed at the bottom of his page, instead of the top.
Electrical Science degree in 1968 from the Naval Academy--think Electrical Engineering with intense quantities of hands on design experience for products that have to deploy in war times.
The notion that children need longer in school is pc and daft! And the idea that you can teach a cohort of children for 15 years, as is now done in the UK is ludicrous. First children differ hugely in ability and are profoundly affected by their environment, here in Switzerland most 10 year olds are tri-lingual, because, in this tower of babel it is easy to become so. Since we stream and have different types of school, as do Germany and France, kids get the type of schooling their minds need and become satisfied and succeed at what they are asked to do, and when they leave, go on to higher education or ON THE JOB training.
Kids leave Berufschule or Ecole Artisanel at 17, reasonably numerate and able to read and write, normally in two languages.
The academic kids go to University or one of the Federal Technical Highschools eg ETZ Zurich. There they can do a first degree or PhD as fast as they can, or more slowly.
The US system has stopped working since it seeks to achieve equality of achievement, not equal opportunity, which leads to endless erosion of standards since no one can fail. Thus you have a politicised school systems in which I pity the academically bright student.
You need to get your priorities right, get the bright kids out of normal High School and into somewhere where they can progress as fast as they can. In my view, 5-6 years in school is enough for anyone, two years for basic numeracy and literacy in two languages, two years maths and another one/two years in science. Before some of the teaching profession jump up and pontificate about History, Geography, Religious Studies and Social Sciences I say the kids can do RS on Sundays and pick up most of the rest as part of coursework, your kids should read the Constitution and Bill of Rights, ours UDI at Ruetli Field (1291).
Finally you _do_ need to teach maths first, you cannot understand science otherwise.
a huge desert from which nothing profitable can come from, not even Helium 3
And your basis for this sweeping declaration is ... what, exactly?
there were things to extract, sell, harvest
The Great Plains were once called "the Great American Desert." And with the technology of the time, they were; it took a significant portion of the 19th c. to develop agricultural technology that made farming in, say, Kansas a viable proposition. Once that technology was in place, the "desert" became the breadbasket of the world.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If the Slashdot tag is right, not only is he from outer space, but he discriminates against women.
Fixing the Constellation / Orion program is not really going to fix the problem. "Go to the Moon, again!" and "Go to Mars!" are not strategic objectives. They are relics of the Cold War, where space exploration is viewed as a trophy. We got there first!
We spent a decade and over a hundred billion on a space station, only to yank the transportation system out from under it without preparing another first, and change the plan to:
"abandon it a few years after its completion, never funding the science research it was built for, so we can... go to the Moon!"
Could there be a more colossal failure of leadership in our space program?
In fact, there has been. A series of programs over the past 30 years were cancelled before they could yield the fruits of R&D which would be required to build a next generation space transportation system. So now we've decided to stop pretending that there is any motivation beyond the Cold War trophies, and get down to business building trophy capturing systems, updated versions of tried and true expendable rockets.
Sure, we could send people to Mars, once, or maybe twice, before the program was cancelled or cut back to occasional in-orbit operations only, which at that point will consist of visits to the Russian or Chinese space station or Lunar outpost.
The biggest problems with Constellation are that the system will do little to reduce the cost of a pound of payload into orbit, and is designed to conform to a launch infrastructure which isn't scalable. Two launch pads, with room at the Cape, but no funding to build a third. Two giant crawlers, Four vertical assembly bays (in practice 3, because 1 is use for storage), but barely enough funding to keep that facility water tight, let alone expand it.
How many flights per year could this infrastructure sustain? Enough to sustain a base on the Moon and occasional flights to Mars? Unlikely. It can barely sustain six or eight Shuttle flights per year. It could possibly handle a dozen or maybe 18 launches under Constellation per year, in a well funded year. What can you achieve with that? That certainly isn't going to be a foundation for a growing space economy.
We need to think about space access as an economic stimulus on the nature of the trans-continental railroads. We need to build an infrastructure to get to orbit reliably, then the moon reliably, then the asteroids and beyond. The first step would be an X-33 / VentureStar style program (with reasonable goals for the current generation system, but planning and R&D to lay the groundwork for advanced systems like space elevators come later) which builds R&D, then a fleet of vehicles, to increase our ability to get there, reduce the cost of a pound of payload to orbit, and increases the reliability. In parallel, we would have steady funding for technologies laying the roadbed to the next generation vehicles, twenty or thirty years out, as well as the power plants, and in-space engines needed for the in-space operations.
Maybe Constellation could be a first step in that plan, but it doesn't look to me like we're planning anything beyond failure. This system isn't scalable, and can't become scalable. It won't be cheap enough to fly, so we won't fly it often. (Sound familiar?)
Compared to fixing health care, this project wouldnâ(TM)t be all that expensive. Approached with the mindset that we are building a railroad to allow us to develop an in-space economy, the payoff would be enormous. If we continue a cold war, Moon-as-trophy mindset, we will never reap the full rewards of the investment weâ(TM)ve already made.
Perhaps we could redirect the 4% DoD increase to a long term investment.
Obama's Warfare State
Of course, Iâ(TM)m just tinkering at the margins here with the radical suggestion that the 4% DoD increase could be better spent laying the rai
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
This may come as a shock to you, but there are a number of environmentalists, myself among them, who agree completely that using off-world resources and finding (or creating) places other than Earth where large numbers of people can live is a Really Good Idea. The problem is time. Even if every industrialized nation in the world committed themselves right now to a serious, well-funded program of space resource utilization and colonization, it would be a generation before the materiel started coming back to Earth in significant amounts, and another generation or two after that before emigration to off-world colonies would have a prayer of reducing population pressure in any meaningful way. In the meantime, we have to find a way to work toward sustainability, even if we don't actually get to that point ... or else find ourselves in the nightmare scenario you describe, which would pretty much guarantee that we'd all be stuck on this planet for a very long time to come.
Right now, at this moment in history, we can do both: work toward colonizing the Solar System, and also work toward keeping Earth a good place to live. We may not have that option much longer. Extremists who dismiss those who concentrate on one or the other goal as "idiots" really aren't helping.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
lol. What you did there is a variant of the "they said Galileo was wrong" fallacy, that is "We though X was worthless, but X turned out to be great, Y seems worthless, therefore Y will surely turn out to be worth it".
Besides a logical fallacy, do you have anything going for your argument that there's anything to be done on the Moon? (I mean precise stuff, not "maybe in the future we'll have ideas").
You just got troll'd!
A wide variety of mining and manufacturing operations which have already been proposed for the Moon, by people who have studied the idea in great detail. This information is widely available, and it's not my job to educate you on the subject. If you were interested in having an a rational debate, I might be willing to give you a few pointers, but you've pretty much declared that you're already at the "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with facts" stage. Enjoy your ignorance.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The director of engineering of an electronics engineering company (who hired me) said that fewer than 1 in 20 people who have engineering degrees and call themselves engineers actually have much technical knowledge. More than 95% of electronics engineers are not able to create simple electronic designs.
It is more reasonable to guess that the new NASA head has no design experience at all. The careful thinking required of a successful design engineer does not mix well with a test pilot's taking severe chances with his health.
That's a very knowledgeable reply, in my opinion. Your last paragraph: "While technical proficiency is nice, it's not the most important thing in a manager of a program like NASA. Far more important is the ability to judge things in an unbiased manner, and being able to listen to your subordinates when they voice concerns."
What is absolutely necessary is both technical proficiency and managerial ability. If NASA cannot find a leader with both, it would be better to minimize NASA projects until one could be found.
not to quibble with your comment "fly questionable craft at ridiculous speeds" yes he was test pilot, but not testing the aircraft he was flying, he was an ordnance test pilot, testing new bombs. Big difference, New aircraft test pilots usually come out of the air force TPS at Edwards AFB. I have tons of respect for anyone that has real combat time especially in the Vietnam era aircraft. He'd be OK in my book, the techies usually don't make good managers in the NASA environment - better to have an ex Marine Corp General, he obviously knows how to play politics..
The problem isn't a lack of smart American kids. It's that for the last decade the smart American kids became quants on Wall Street making a million a year, rather than a grunt at Boeing make 50k.
This is my sig.
Well I've read many proposals for mining operations on the Moon (manufacturing, are you sure?) but I've also read rebuttals about why they'd be uneconomical and other reasons why they'd be undesirable, hence why I'm asking what you'd consider an actually viable plan.
But since you declined doing so I must declare victory and hence I accept your apology.
You just got troll'd!
No matter who is running NASA, Congress (i.e. the U.S. taxpayer) pays the bills, and Congress tells NASA what its priorities are. Congress told NASA to flush billions down the toilet that is ISS. Congress told NASA to go back to the Moon, but didn't give them any money to do it with. Congress (and the President) can change NASA's priorities in minutes, with no warning or appeal.
In the 1960s NASA had clear direction and lots of money, and they landed men on the Moon. Now they have neither, and have been going around in circles (literally) for the last 35 years. Sad.
I've always felt slightly shortchanged by how things worked out. When I was little (the 1960s), space was everywhere and the sky was a challenge, not the limit. I came of age in the 1970s, just in time for the space program to implode. It looks now like the next people to go higher than low Earth orbit will do so just in time for me to retire.
...laura
"We need to think about space access as an economic stimulus on the nature of the trans-continental railroads. We need to build an infrastructure to get to orbit reliably, then the moon reliably, then the asteroids and beyond."
Honest question: Why ?
How is the average American going to benefit from such a venture ?
What are the running costs going to be ?
What are the yields going to be (space vacations ? asteroid mining ? ... ????) ?
I grew up with dreams of space exploration. I thought sending people to the moon and mars and beyond was a really cool goal for "humanity at large" (or, er, something). Now I realize that if people actually want to go to space, then there's a demand in the market that isn't being filled. Companies can profit by figuring out how to fill that demand. They'll try and fail a lot but they'll use their own money to do it. All of the tried and failed attempts will cost the average person absolutely nothing and will lead to some really cool ideas and efficient designs. Eventually the competition will drive prices down (so long as government stays out of it and doesn't give any special privileges to any private venture), and make it affordable for the people who really want to go to space.
Like the posts have been pointing out, NASA has no direction and is one big huge bureaucracy. Great way to waste resources. Even if NASA does set up a moon base or send a few astronauts to Mars the question still remains: how does that benefit Americans ? Phrased differently, what problems do Americans currently have that sending people to the moon or Mars will solve ?
It's a nice dream but the government is not a business. They can only divert resources from productive areas of the economy (i.e: areas that are producing things that make people's lives better here on earth) in order to pump them into projects that have questionable utility. Or in the case of NASA: absolutely no utility what-so-ever.
hah, the resistor color codes. nice!
No, they won't. Companies are not necessarily interested in advancing humanity, but getting ahead in the next 1-5 years. There is very little incentive for a private company to spend 15 billion dollars a year on anything that won't pay off in a decade. (If you don't believe me, start your own company sometime!)
Governments can fund BIG projects with uncertain but (if successful) huge outcomes. America became a world superpower (in part) because it's not afraid to fund such things. I would rather have the government triple NASA's budget rather than buy a couple more golf balls for GM execs...
Unfortunately, as long as the average techie in the USA has this myopic pseudo-libertarian "if it's worth doing some private company is going to do it" attitude, our children will only dream of the the glory days when there were Americans who walked on another heavenly body. By then, the expertise (and the infrastructure) to do such things may have been irretrievably lost.
[The best thing Obama or any other leader can do is to inspire a clear and concrete vision for the next 10 years and put in the framework to support it. But this boils down to general political will, which is sadly lacking].
The rationalizations for the space shuttle program are all bogus.
TFA laments the loss of the ability to repair satellites in space, and states that the shuttles have carried out 10 repair missions, 5 of them on the Hubble. Okay, Wikipedia says that the total cost of the space shuttle program has been 170 billion (in 2008 dollars), which works out to 1.5 billion per flight over 124 flights. So if the shuttle has only carried out 10 repairs in 124 flights, repairs clearly aren't one of its major missions. These figures also show that the repairs aren't cost-effective. The entire Hubble program cost about 5-6 billion dollars. Clearly this figure can't include the five shuttle missions to repair the telescope, since their cost would come out to 5x1.5=7.5 billion dollars. Given the exorbitant cost of the repairs, it seems that NASA could have been more cost-efficient by simply launching 2 or 3 space telescopes over the last couple of decades rather than one. Or, as an alternative, we could take the 15 billion dollars spent on the shuttle's 10 repair missions, and simply spend it on insurance for satellites. 15 billion bucks will buy a lot of insurance.
So if repairing satellites isn't an economically viable justification for the shuttle, what about getting to the space station? The problem is that we then have to ask what the purpose of the space station is. Yes, yes -- I have the answer! The purpose of the shuttle is to fly to the space station, and the purpose of the space station is to give the shuttle somewhere to fly.
Of course there's always scientific research as a justification for the crewed space program. But that always makes me wonder, why doesn't the crewed space program have to submit proposals for peer review, competing with other science experiments that want funding? Could it be because the scientific returns are trivial, especially in relation to the vast costs?
The plain truth is that the U.S. crewed space program is nothing more than an exercise in nationalistic propaganda.
Find free books.
Ms. Garver has been hyper critical of the Ares project (both I and V) and has tended to push Direct. In light of the current status of Ares I, I will be curious to see where this goes. I have to wonder if Garver was appointed by Obama or by Bolden.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We haven't even met the aliens, and you're accusing them of gender bias?
GPL
BSD
2 line
You said, "A good manager can make up for gaps in their technical knowledge by appointing a good technical staff and setting up an environment in which they can give quality advice."
The problem is this: If the good manager doesn't know a huge amount about technology and design, he or she cannot know who is good technically, and therefore cannot appoint a good technical staff. He or she will instead appoint those who are politically attractive.
Serious engineers often say things that non-technical managers don't want to hear, and couldn't evaluate even if they were willing to listen.
The only thing ridiculous about the speeds on the Beltway is how slow they are.
He'll fit right in with the other drivers on the Beltway (I-495.)
Local humor, hilarious(to the 5 people reading this that live in your area).
Surrender, Dorothy!
(hee, hee! Beltway humor!)
Government and public money funded organizations do not deliver.
To bring your comment to the topic, are you suggesting that the future direction of NASA should be disbandment or just privatization?
My two cents is that the privately held government contractor that I work for, developing components for aerospace applications predominantly intended for space, has historically wasted money with tremendous efficiency.
More generically, I am only a lowly materials engineer, but I am sure that there is still plenty of meaningful work that can be done through studies in space. What I am not sure about is if we can build instruments of sufficient technical complexity and manufacturing quality at a low enough price to make that progress possible without sending people up there to upgrade or fix them once in a while.
I seriously doubt the overall NASA head sits in on the interviews for particular engineers.
The only problem I foresee is that he might have some trouble adapting to the level of follow-through in his new command, being from a background where delivering on your commitments is a somewhat higher priority.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
im replying to this point because my finger slipped when I was moderating and I gave it the wrong moderation point! By posting I'm hoping the system will remove my errant moderation point. (there's no undo I think for moderation points).
We will master space or die out. We must not just explore it - we must make it our home. Anything less is to choose species suicide. As long as the survival of our species is limited to one planet, one star system, we are doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs. When we have escaped that perilous limit the Universe is ours. If we fail in this the Universe will clean the slate again and try once more to bring up a life form that can win.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There is no place that humans shouldn't be. Not in the seas of Saturn. Not in the core of stars. Not below the event horizon of the black hole the Milky Way revolves around.
Given enough good science humans will go to all these places. Some of them will even come back.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is this: If the good manager doesn't know a huge amount about technology and design, he or she cannot know who is good technically, and therefore cannot appoint a good technical staff.
Interesting point. Consider though: How do -we- determine if a manager/administrator is good technically, since we aren't aerospace engineers ourselves? The answer is that we determine this the same way a manager would determine if their staff is technically astute, by looking at their education backgrounds, their track records, and how well regarded they are by experts in the field.
Another thing which I don't think I explained previously and contributes to my view is that I don't think NASA should be in the business of designing and building rockets. It's somewhat similar to how I think the US Postal Service shouldn't be (and isn't) in the business of designing and building airplanes and delivery trucks. An ideal model is one where NASA purchases crew tickets and/or payload space on commercial rockets to particular destinations, in which case having an administrator with an aerospace engineering background becomes almost extraneous.
Don't be fucking stupid, and crack open a history book for once.
America became a superpower because it was the only one standing at the end of World War II without its economic infrastructure in rubble. Oh, and that economic infrastructure, that had a huge boom in the wartime years? That was a planned economy.
Really, I sometimes wonder how libertards like you even manage to breed.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The problem with US healthcare is that it's a duopoly owned by people with an interest in preventing care. To get approved as a doctor you have to pass your board exams, and the board is motivated to rate-limit the acceptance of new doctors to continue to drive up the standard of living for the current doctors who pay their dues. To open a practice you have to get certified by some insurance companies to provide care to their members so you can get paid most of the time, and the insurance companies are motivated to prevent care to the uninsured.
This is not a recipe for inexpensive care for common folk.
In fact I think we've progressed to the next level as some insurers don't actually pay the doctors. They just permit their insured to use the doctors, and negotiate a discount with the doctors such that the patients are expected to pay all of the money the doctor gets, and the insurance company's portion is the amount that the doctor raised prices to have a margin they could discount for the customers of the insurance company. The patient then pays the doctor as part of their "copay" or "deductible" several times the actual cost of care to meet the additional overhead required to get paid from the insurance companies at all. So the net benefit of paying a thousand dollars a month to an insurance company for family coverage is that you can actually get access to a doctor. Which you would naturally have had without cost if there were no medical insurance companies. The benefit of being a doctor in this relationship is that you get paid by the patients who can pay, which you naturally would have done if there were no medical insurance companies. In order to maintain this insane relationship the doctor must refuse care to the uncovered. So in effect with medical insurance companies we have an additional layer of business which adds cost, provides nothing, and prevents care. I have to ask: WHY? Seriously, WTF are you people thinking?
If you want to drive down the cost of medical care then pay a few grand each on retraining the current surplus of displaced workers to provide it, and make it legally possible for them to do so by making the certification of medical personnel the government task it should always have been. Is this hard? Is there some obscure math involved that I'm not seeing? Because from here it's frimping obvious.
But then we have tort reform and malpractice lawyers. For tort reform there is no better policy than "for the provision of medical care, a waiver of claims is presumed". For the lawyers I would recommend the shade of a good tree and a few meters of rope to rest upon. Oak and hemp is traditional but in a pinch any old elm or fir and nylon or even jute, leather or cotton will do. Please: hang yourselves.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Now that america has finally chosen black president, there is black power to put black in the power of every thing. Future of the america really looks black when black man is putting a budget in black and cutting protections against black death and putting black in positions of power to raise other black in position of power. Oh. Future looks so black.
©God
You said, "How do -we- determine if a manager/administrator is good technically, since we aren't aerospace engineers ourselves? The answer is that we determine this the same way a manager would determine if their staff is technically astute, by looking at their education backgrounds, their track records, and how well regarded they are by experts in the field."
Being a design engineer might be considered a different kind of culture. Those who aren't members of that culture can't judge a member of that culture accurately. It's somewhat like judging whether someone is a native speaker of Italian. Does that person use Italian colloquial expressions correctly? Only someone who is a native speaker can judge.
Educational background tends to be somewhat irrelevant because a competent engineer taught himself most of what he knows. How could someone who is not a design engineer know someone's track record? How could someone who is not a design engineer know who is an expert in the field, except in rare cases of very public accomplishments?
My original comment is moderated to -1, Troll, at present, after being moderated up. But there is simply no doubt: Being a design engineer is a culture of its own. It's a very intellectually demanding culture. It's a culture that is so unappreciated that people think that someone who has been a test pilot all his life can lead teams of engineers.
People who know that only an unusual person can be a successful artist believe that just any "good" manager can appreciate engineering enough to manage teams of engineers. They think that it is not necessary for a manager to understand what the people he manages are doing. That's a wildly illogical but widely held belief. An that's one reason why NASA has gotten such bad results in recent years.
It's difficult to find someone who is both a good manager and a creative engineer, but that is what is needed to head NASA. Otherwise, the pretenders rise to the top, and those with true ability are disregarded. Pretenders in positions of power are what people call "bureaucracy".
Damn, really wish I hadn't just spent my last mod point (+1 "Agree a lot").
Frankie Boyle had it right before the election. "He might as well be called Muslim O'Gun-Bomb"
except 8 is gray not indigo
When I was a F/A-18 electrician in the Marines for VMFA-232, General Bolden would come by once a month and fly our jets. Really nice guy, this is a great accomplishment.
"During the election, about 95% of African-Americans voted for Barack Hussein Obama due solely to the color of his skin."
And during the last election, about 90% of African Americans voted for Kerry. And the time before that about 90% of them voted for Gore. And before that for Clinton.
In short, you're a racist moron, who never objected to 43 previous presidents all happening (very coincidentally I'm sure) to be white males.
"Note the voting pattern of Hispanics, Asian-Americans, etc. These non-Black minorities serve as a measurement of African-American racism against non-Blacks."
In that case, they should also serve as a measurement of European-American racism against Blacks.
But instead you seem to consider the white vote unbiased and racism-free. You can't keep even your own arguments from shooting you in the foot.
"If African-Americans were not racist, then at most 65% of them would have supported Obama."
In that case 65% of white people should also have supported Obama.
"At that level of support, McCain would have won the presidential race."
No, if 65% of both whites and blacks had voted for Obama, Obama would have won even easier than he did now.
You moron.
"Feel free to vote for the non-Black candidates and against the Black candidates if you are not African-American."
You've all already been doing that, you moron. Do you think you're gonna convince anyone who actually *ever* voted for a black person, EVER?
Do you think that a string of 43 white male Christian presidents has ever been a coincidence?
Now you're using a supposed African-American racism (there does exist racism in the African-American community as it exists in all communities) to justify the voting pattern you've ALWAYS been following.
Or do you think that it was only a coincidence that a nation that has been in majority white Christian had previously only voted for white Christian presidential and vice-presidential choices?
I doubt you've EVER bothered defending for voting a string of white Christian male presidential candidates before.
"Voting on the basis of skin is quite acceptable by the standards of today's moral values."
And when hasn't it been acceptable for *you*, you moron? When was the last time you voted for a black or Asian or Hispanic presidential candidate?
The vast majority of black people have also voted for white people for president though, in past elections. I very much doubt the reverse holds true for you.
We need to think about space access as an economic stimulus on the nature of the trans-continental railroads. We need to build an infrastructure to get to orbit reliably, then the moon reliably, then the asteroids and beyond.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. The reason you have trans-continental railroads is to move raw materials from one end of a continent to the other. Purely economic. In space, there's nothing out there. Nothing to breathe, nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and nothing to stay warm with. It's a complete waste of money, and there's nothing out there we could begin to dream about economically shipping back.
You missed the nail by a little bit -- the space program was not about trophies, but about perfecting ballistic missile technology to set up Mutually Assured Destruction. The science and moonwalks were a bonus.
What we really need is a Manhatten project crash program to save the biodiversity on the planets. Whatever we find in space will be virtually unchanged 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. However, if we let these rapid extinctions continue, we will lose a free, ready-to-go library of millions of biochemicals that are out there for the plucking. We couldn't re-create that in a million years.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"Experienced pilots (especially test pilots, as he was) also tend to be rather technically astute individuals, so I'm sure Bolden should at least be able to be somewhat in touch with the technical side of things."
I agree, but that knowledge is too limited. What's necessary is someone with design experience, who is also very idealistic.
You embarrass yourself. There is a world of information beyond whatever you read in a cliff notes summary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Heck, 30 seconds with Wikipedia and you would realize that history of the economics of railroads isn't what you assumed it was.
In the United States (and other places) the creation of the Transcontinental railroads were heavily subsidized by governments. There is no doubt that there creation was accelerated greatly (by decades or more) by these subsidies.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
s/there creation/their creation/
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The reason the railroads were build was purely economic. I said nothing about the free-market or private industry. As a social democrat, I'm well aware of the government's involvement in the construction of the railroads. The reason the government financed the building of the railroad, was because, like all empires, they wanted a good transportation network to move raw materials from one end of the empire to the other.
"All roads lead to Rome".
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso