Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA

FleaPlus writes "Apollo 11 astronaut (and MIT Astronautics Sc.D.) Buzz Aldrin suggests a bolder plan for NASA (while still remaining within its budget), which he will present to the White House's Augustine Commission; he sees NASA heading down the wrong path with a 'rehash of what we did 40 years ago' which could derail future exploration and settlement. For the short-term, Aldrin suggests canceling NASA's troubled and increasingly costly Ares I, instead launching manned capsules on commercial Delta IV, Atlas V, and/or SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. In the medium-term, NASA should return to the moon with an international consortium, with the ultimate goal of commercial lunar exploitation in mind. Aldrin's long term plan includes a 2018 comet flyby, a 2019 manned trip to a near-earth asteroid, a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos, and one-way trips to colonize Mars."

Comments

Manned space flight is a fucking waste

[Nicolas MONNET]

For every useless wanker up there, just to make sure he has a reasonable chance to come back in one piece, and to provide him with a place to shit, sleep and eat, you've spent the equivalent of a hundred Mars rovers.
For the price of the Uselessational Space Station, we could have built an interferometric telescope with which we could have looked at neighbouring solar systems' planets, and figure if they had life.
Go ahead, tell me how sending dozens of rovers exploring the whole solar system and/or having a look at Proxima Centauri's planets is any less interesting for the general public than watching a bunch of bozos awkwardly trying to bolt a nut in 0g.

Re:No Australians on Mars...

[catxk]

As copyrights and patents are at the very core of human innovation - always has been, always will be - the Mars scenario you describes will result in there being no tech or cultural development. I thought this was common knowledge...

Re:Good ideas. - you've stumbled on the solution

[petes_PoV]

the NASA budget is about 1/20th what our total military expenditures are

Hey, there's a thought. If you want to get NASA's budget increased, as well as getting "space" back into the public eye, just declare war on the moon or mars or some other damn planet. I'm sure the gummint could dredge up some astrologer, from somewhere (pity Regan isn't in the job - he, or his people would easily come up with someone), who could tell everyone what a bad influence the planet of choice was.

And if that didn't work, you could always accuse them of having WMDs.