Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Cashflow Problem Puts Moon Trip In Doubt
krou writes "According to the Guardian, the Augustine panel is going to declare that there is simply no money to go back to the moon, and the next-generation Ares I rocket is likely to be scrapped unless there is more funding. The $81B Constellation Program's long-term goal of putting a human on Mars is almost certainly not going to be possible by the middle of the century. The options outlined by the panel for the future of NASA 'are to extend the working life of the aging space shuttle fleet beyond next year's scheduled retirement until 2015, while developing a cheaper transport to the moon; pressing ahead with Constellation as quickly as existing funding allows; or creating a new, larger rocket that would allow exploration of the solar system while bypassing the moon.' All of this means that NASA won't be back on the moon before the end of the next decade as hoped, 'or even leaving lower Earth orbit for at least another two decades.' Another result of the monetary black hole is that they don't have the '$300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth.'"
It's in Congress' collective pockets. And going towards fruitless things like corporate bailouts.
NASA is gonna die, and our only hope is Privately funded space travel... Or the singularity to solve all our problems...
have a lottery for a chance to win a trip to the moon...
One of these days Alice, to the moon...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
... how much could it cost to rent a hollywood studio and some video equipment for a day?
Because it certainly has not had any impact on the orgy of irresponsible spending of President Obama and his fellow Democrats.
Face it, it isn't because we "DON'T" have the money its because NASA != votes.
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
Just note it as, NASA != Votes.
It is no more difficult than that. There is no conspiracy. This not because of Iraq/Afghanistan. This is not because of a bloated defense budget. It simply is because NASA does not generate votes or control and as such does not qualify for a President or Congress not interested in science. Please don't confuse a President who TALKS about being for science, just understand the science politicians support is the science that polls well.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
We're in the middle of a recession that's one of the longest on record. They're projecting that the budget they have now will be the same fifty years from now, and everyone panics over this? Oh please. Just wait until the Chinese start firing rockets into space with people on them and design their own Apollo program. I bet legislators will look between the couch cushions then and find the spare cash they need to one-up them. I've never credited Congress with an abundance of brains, but pride? Oh, they got that in spades.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
NASA's only real problem is that the government is giving them a crap ton of stupid projects to do. What good is identifying the asteroid that will kill us all? We can't stop the stupid thing. Why exactly are we going to the moon again? As a launch platform for mars? How about we use that other launch platform we have.. you know, earth. We got to the moon in the 60's because NASA was told "Get to the moon.", so sure enough they hopped right onto it.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
There never seems to be enough money for something as fundamentally important and immensely valuable to the human race as space exploration. But apparently there's always a bottomless pit of wealth for bailouts, to help grow government bureaucracy and expand what in many ways are entitlement programs.
Nothing ever happens on the moon.
On the bright side, this might just help NASA become more efficient in terms of expenditure.
I really am not. The sad thing is that a lot of that money would have been spent on good high paying jobs in the US. It might have also started to inspire young people to think about jobs in science and engineering like it did in the 50s and 60s.
Well let's hope SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule work.
Or
Vote for me in the next election.
My platform is.
More money for Space.
Faster and cheaper broadband.
No more software patents.
And your tax refund can not be more that the amount you paid in taxes.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Keep all the little, boring projects that the public doesn't care about in the budget and then threaten that unless you get more money, then you won't be able to do the big, visible ones.
It's one of the oldest budgeting tricks in the book and somebody should be handing NASA's chief his ass for pulling such a stunt.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
We were able to get to the moon in the 60's, but there's no way we can get there in the 21st century? If Congress is giving them too many stupid tasks to do, they should just divert the funds & manpower from those programs and redirect it to SPACE TRAVEL.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
No matter your political leanings, it is hard to argue that NASA does not provide a great return on investment. But with our myopic tendencies (Congress and Business) no one has the balls to invest what is needed to continue long-term success.
Conservative, mod down for violating
There is a world recession on now, but it will eventually get better. Most people seem to think that will happen in 2-3 years or even a bit less.
Presumably then the money tap will be turned back on. If helium 3 turns out to be as important as it seems it will be in the next century, the money will be found.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
How hard is it to see that manned space flight inhibits space exploration? What does physical human presence on a spacecraft do that can't be done by remotely controlled or autonomous robotics? Why spend billions upon billions of dollars to provide food, water, atmosphere, heat, radiation protection, cabin space, lighting, and excrement processing when these are entirely tangential to any compelling mission? Almost the entirety of productive and scientifically valuable space exploration of the past half century has been performed by machines.
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects. Manned colonization of the cosmos is, at the present time and likely for centuries to come, no different from a belief in an afterlife filled with saints, virgins, and angelic personages. It is not real. If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
How can they determine what 90% is unless they've located 100% of the rocks?
I can hear it now:
My President, there are 10163 large rocks out there but we've only seen 5892 of them. We know that the others are out there, though, but we haven't reached 90% so we need more funding. Trust us.
Bloody idiotic measures. That's as dumb as the "war on {a concept}", which we knew to be a crock when it was first declared.
The agency needs about $300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth. Congress has not come up with the money and is unlikely to, according to the National Academy of Science.
There is no advantage to detecting an incoming impactor if you do not have the means to prevent its impact. Having less time before large scale annihilation may serve the public better. But when it does hit (don't say if if you mean when), the loss of tax revenue will cause more damage to the budget than the space budget would have.
A microgram of prevention is worth a metric tonne of cure.
All they need to do is a $1B prize. It will happen.
Seastead this.
suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Our manned space program has been on a budget that amounts to just enough to keep limping along in LEO, but not enough to do anything useful for the last thirty years. And honestly, we don't care about what the Chinese do. We don't need an excuse to develop nuclear capability anymore. We aren't in a battle of ideologies where allowing the Russians to be better than us in anything would be a "win for communism". If the Chinese put a man on the moon we'll say good "job catching up", and then do nothing.
Congress doesn't have the decisiveness to kill the manned space program altogether nor the will to spend what is genuinely needed to kick start a colonization effort. So we continue with uninspired mediocrity. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this will change any time soon.
It's also massive incompetence at NASA. Contracts improperly run, Congressional direction to waste money on less efficient ways of doing things (thanks senator Byrd), and your typical inefficient government bureaucracy conspire to waste a large percentage of the budget.
Please explain to me why the nations of this world cant get together and share budgets, knowlege and whatever is necessary to get to where "humanity" wants to go when it comes to space exploration.
all i hear about is "humanity" followed by NASA ... Americans perhaps, not Humanity. The fact of the matter is that this world has changed since the 1960's ... and america isnt what it was before. I dont think getting to mars is something the NASA should be working on by itself, this is a project that should bind nations together... not set them apart. i wouldnt be surprised if eastern countries start teaming together to get to mars in the near future, leaving whats left of NASA behind... time will tell i guess.
"the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth"
If they don't know how many there are, then how do they know when they've identified 90% of them? Did I miss something there?
My sig sucks.
There must be something that could turn a profit to pay for space exploration. Rare metal in asteroid or something else? Thinking of all this, it always reminds me the Star Trek story, the need for a WW3, a science guy inventing a light speed capable engine. The day we gonna drop our stupid money based system and start working for a common goal we may see space exploration happens. For now we're only looking our planet nose. There's is infinite space out there and lots of resources, more enough to satisfy man growth for long.
I'm sorry kids, I know I promised it to you, but we're not going to get to go to the moon anytime soon.
(Pause for "Awe but..." and whining)
You see, the thing is, we're on hard times here. The country's not what it used to be. We just don't have the money right now to spend going on trips to the moon and such.
So keep up those grades and -- if you're good -- maybe we'll go to the moon in ten years.
B.S. Corporations don't have the giant amount of capital needed to fund any serious space exploration, especially when the financial rewards are questionable and probably many decades away (asteroid mining, space-based solar power, etc.). Corporations have to get their capital from investors, who want to see a return quickly, not 50 years from now after they're all dead (since most investors are older and saving for retirement; young people are busy spending all their money at the mall or other disposable things).
The problem is that our government has mismanaged our tax dollars, and instead of investing it in space exploration to keep America at the forefront of technology (with all the spin-off technologies developed, in addition to the potential new industries named above), we've wasted our money on useless wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq II, etc.), welfare for people who don't want to work, and more recently idiotic corporate bailouts for companies that were mismanaged and failing. If we had devoted 1/4 the Defense budget to NASA all these years, we would have had a Moon base by now, and probably a Mars one too.
Instead, what's going to happen is that a government with real vision for the future is going to take over as the #1 power on the planet, and they're going to push space exploration. That country is going to be China. And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead. Instead, to be realistic, we should start writing sci-fi stories where everyone speaks Mandarin, and everything big is done for the glory of the Party.
NASA should just do an IPO, raise the funds, go completely private, remove the redundancies created by bureaucracy and go ahead with their work. Then they can throw the frivolous projects out, and continue with the useful stuff.
IMHO, the Russians/Chinese/Indians/Private companies with their space organizations will get to the moon/Mars much faster than NASA anyway since their motivations are different, and especially, those countries take a lot of pride in their space related work.
Oh yeah, cause it's -all- Obama's fault, right?
....we had a charismatic leader who inspired us with his oratory skill to achieve that which we think is impossible, and set a firm deadline....
and steel our resolve by his being cut off in the prime of life....
if only there were some other country on the planet that posed a technological and ideological threat to us to further spur us into action....
darn...
The thought of a Chi-Com moon will open the Governments coffers.
We have the potential for a new wide reaching conspiracy theory here people.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
The future of space belongs to a country willing to use nuclear propulsion. Chemical rockets are a dead end. They haven't improved much in forty years, and the limits of that technology have been nearly reached.
yeah, mankind will never go back, not in this era of civilization anyway.
we have become to trite and petty, we much rather kill each other off or maybe just watch american idle that achieve anything that might be beneficial to mankind as a whole.
hell, we even stopped curing our ailments when we realized that treatments could be more profitable that cures.
but take heart, hopefully we've left enough record that mankind's successors to this planet will have a chance to learn from our failure.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
It sounds good, but which projects would you "buy stock" for? And if so, would you expect your money back?
You are an idiot.
What good are autonomous robots if they cannot simple find all the raw materials and set up a habitability , location of off this planet. All robotic exploration has been centered around finding resources capable of sustaining life.
Understanding of how humans can travel in space has a number of great advantages. Just extended stays in the International Space station have yield a great deal of medical brake troughs. Understanding how to provide human with self sustaining habitat is also key. To simply say that maned exploration of space is to expensive is just plain short sided idiocy.
It is not like we have created a boogieman to scare all the useless people into traveling to another planet or something. Although if we do we should keep the telephone sanitizers this time.
Wait is this a publication in a country who more than 25% believe we never went to the moon?
Fuck them. This is pure hype and hope that we won't continue to humiliate them in space. Beagle pancake anyone? It's fresh from Mars!
"going to declare" - fuck you - tell me what lotto numbers are "going to be declared" asshole.
"There is nothing out there worth the cost of going. Does it mean we don't go? No, it merely means that we've passed 'The Point of No Return On Investment.'"
Starglider29a
Offline document
"Can I have some money for food?"
"Aww...no. We're going to send a robot to the moon!"
Hey, you hungry? Go ask to wash the BMW of the guys who wrote the code for that robot, or the guy who tested the propulsion system, or THE GUY WHO EMPTIED THEIR TRASHCANS!
The money wasn't burned, it was PAID. Those who got paid will spend it. Give them a reason to PAY YOU for something, and they will.
I made money burning some of NASA's money, but also private customers'. Food and robots are NOT EITHER/OR.
It seems that if we managed this 40 years ago, we should be able to do it again without making it sound so difficult
"And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead."
At least there won't be a fucking McDonalds on the moon.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
... which includes aiding, rather than usurping and suppressing, the development of PRIVATE spaceflight technology and business, the way they historically aided (somewhat) private air flight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why would American rely on a government agency for their space missions? The less public funds in the space business, the more chances for private enterprise to have a chance at profitability. When you compete with the unlimited pockets of Uncle Sam is hard to convince your investors that you have any chance in making money in space.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
My prediction is that there will not be a human outside of low Earth orbit for at least the next 50 years, with the possible (unlikely) exception of the Chinese attempting a lunar orbit or landing.
Perhaps in the 50-100 year timescale, we'll have figured out radically different approaches: Nuclear propulsion, a space elevator, a launch loop. Or we'll be able to upload our minds into hardware, and send people into space without sending bodies. E.g., your consciousness gets radioed into the probe once it's tunneled through the Europan ice.
The government has made it abundantly clear that it understands and cares little for scientific progress. It doesn't matter whether you lean left, right, or upside-down, the fact of the matter is that neither Congress, nor recent Presidents, have serious desires to see progress made in scientific realms for purely progressive reasons. As other slashdotters have pointed out numerous times, there is an enormous list of spin-off benefits that come from manned-exploration of space. Not only that, but direct benefits such as a progression of the human species beyond its own world are a payoff in and of themselves. Politicians don't care. If something won't result directly in votes, money, or power for politicians, then there is little chance that thing, be it a movement, a field, or an ideology, will get any serious backing from the legislative or executive branches.
This can also be seen in the Green movement, for example. Rather than fund or seriously investigate truly sustainable energy sources such as breeder reactors and fusion research, the government wants to hop on a trendy bandwagon (votes) that involves the more inefficient methods of solar and wind energy production and the costly subsidization of corn-based bio-fuels (money). We can, and should, therefore kiss off serious government spending towards goals like space exploration. True development and innovation will come in this field through privately funded space organizations and governments of other countries.
Companies like Bigelow Aerospace will work to make space accessible to the civilian population. Companies like Orbital and SpaceX will continue to try to reduce the cost/kg to LEO until space is affordable and accessible. Universities will continue to inspire engineering and science students to work on space-related projects just for the sake of doing 'something totally awesome' such as the Cubesat project. This will, in turn, provide a place of invention and learning. Other governments such as Japan, Russia, the UK, and the EU in general will lobby harder to have more say and dabbling in international space endeavors such as the ISS. Slowly, unfortunately, I think we will see NASA start to sputter and stagnate over the next few decades.
All I have to say to NASA is, "Thank you for all of the inspiration and hard work you put into paving the road to space for us." That organization put decades of hard work and research into opening up a whole new universe (literally) to us as a species. NASA, at its height, embodied the peak of the American 'can-do' spirit and gumption. It very much did make heroes of many dreamers and it should forever be remembered as an organization that truly inspired and captured the minds and dreams of thousands of people. The human race owes NASA a great debt for this and this alone. Sadly, however, I fear this organization is going to lose much of its former glory under the suffocating chokehold of egoistic and, frankly, stupid politicians.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
You have a point there.
What the panel is going to tell Obama is that the entire budget from the shuttle should, as it winds down, be transferred entirely within the manned space office directly to 'exploration', which consists of Constellation and 'advanced capabilities.
In essence, they are about to tell Obama that he should continue to award the budgets and increases already asked for, for specifically what they've asked for them for, continuing on through 2013. That is already reflected in the budget and proposals, as is their request to transfer shuttle funding to Constellation.
Look at the budget and proposal numbers from
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/210020main_NASA_FY09_Budget_Estimates_Summary.pdf
for "Exploration (Constellation systems)" and "Space Operations (Space Shuttle)". As the shuttle winds down, Constellation winds up. It's already there, it has already been asked for, Obama already knows about this. The panel is merely repeating NASA's requests.
There is hardly anything newsworthy here, certainly nothing to run around with your hair on fire as Guardian appears to enjoy instigating by leading the pack. I'm not sure who started this screamfest, but it's spread all over the web with no one doing the little research as was done here in order to find out if the noise to noisier ratio is justified. Had they done so (and maybe they have) I suspect they'd ignore it and print this expose' of nothing what so ever in exactly the same manner anyway.
The other claim in the article, the reference to the Near Earth Object program, MailOnline reported previously and similarly slanted backwards. The claim that NASA says can't track all the rocks is a misstatement of "NASA needs more funding for more scopes/projects as the numbers grow", and the claim that NASA is alone in doing this is falsified by a visit to the NASA/JPL NEO web site that shows the seven NEO programs, one of the Australian, one of them Japanese, and one an international consortium. Thus, the second part echoes the first in that it's media initiated awfulism based on the entirely mundane politics of having an 'independent panel' created by the agency that wants what it said it wants, say the same thing.
The panel itself may even make cautionary and emphatic noises. The fact remains that the numbers, produced before the panel was even announced, already show NASA's budgets, projections and requests to cover exactly the programs which are being singled out for needing that money. They're just trying to prevent the NASA budget from being gutted and the money transferred to the health care program or any of the other programs grabbing at anything that might move.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
Why, yes, I do.
Virgin Galactic comes to mind immediately.
Once there is a significant private presence in near-earth orbit you can expect to see development of the moon with private funding.
For starters, it's a LOT cheaper to mine, refine, and launch material for space-based industry on the Moon than on the Earth. The gravity well is MUCH shallower, even with significant industrial outgassing the atmosphere will remain thin enough that electric catapults can provide most of the delta-v to orbit payloads, solar power is much more economical with no atmospheric attenuation and full sunlight whenever you need the power for a launch, and hard vacuum simplifies the construction of solar panels.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
For just 900 empty jars.
BurmaShave
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Back when the Bush Vision for Space Exploration was started up, the Congressman for the area around Johnson Space Center was Tom Delay, the Speaker of the House. Now, it is someone with much less clout. I think this is really just a return to not having friends in high places (be those friends ever so scumbagish).
I think we have to question why, at the precise moment in history when a US commercial space flight company is nearing completion of the first ever non-government rocket AND manned space craft, we want to develop another rocket on government funds. Let SpaceX use any NASA facilities they need, and if they succeed with the Falcon/Dragon then give them a contract. That could be as soon as 2011!
NASA should aim for the next big leap after rockets. Take all that ARES money and invest in laser propulsion, nuclear propulsion, space fountains, VASIMR derivitives, who knows. THAT is the way to really bust space wide open for the common man. That is the way to make sure that when when our astronauts meet the Chinese astronauts on the moon, they will be offering individual bottles of beer and we will be sharing entire coolers of beer. Even if they got their beer there before us.
(For those of you worried about the international rammifications of sharing American beer in space, NASA is partnering with the Canadians. The Canadians can be in charge of robotic manipulators and malt beverages.)
All that money designing a stage that looks realistic on HDTVs gone down the drain!
typing messages that are free from grammatical errors can really be hard. I still have the urge to over use semi-colons.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It can be helpful to look at some actual data once in a while, calming, even. The problem is big, yes, but the historical record shows that the USA was able to reduce it's total national debt as a percentage of GDP, consistently since World War II, with the notable exceptions of the years of Reagan, Bush, and Son of Bush. This was done by growing the economy. It could be done again. One of the best ways to stimulate that kind of massive economic growth would be to use space exploration and alternate energy as a replacement for the military research and development, which drove much of this growth during the Cold War. USA National Debt as Percentage of GDP. If we choose not to do something like this, the debt will be crushing, yes.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Not surprising ... the political will barely existed to get us to the Moon in the first place, even though we had the fear of the Red Menace pushing the program along and fast-tracked it to take place within a decade. The biggest problem with Constellation is that it requires a Moon shot as a prerequisite. We've learned everything we need to from that dusty old rock, visiting it again is just an excuse to keep aerospace dollars following for another couple decades.
Now I'm not claiming that rational thought even comes into play in matters of US budget...
However, I know that with my personal budget, while I'm paying for two kids in college, crossing my fingers that my company will stay afloat, and just generally trying to stay out of debt during this recession, I stopped putting money into my 401K. I don't look at my 401K as a luxury, but it is lower on my list of essentials.
I don't know where the NASA dollars are going to go, but I'm all in favor of some responsible spending...
My prediction is that there will not be a human outside of low Earth orbit for at least the next 50 years, with the possible (unlikely) exception of the Chinese attempting a lunar orbit or landing.
The Russians have already offered flights around the Moon for $300,000,000. Maybe NASA could buy a few.
The cost of human spaceflight is going up.
$300,000,000 is a lot less than Apollo 8 cost, and non-government prices are only going down from here as private companies take over the manned spaceflight business.
Nobody has identified a compelling economic, scientific, political, or military rationale for sending people into space.
Yes they have; it's called tourism. Get the price of a week in orbit down to a couple of hundred thousand dollars and you'll have more customers than you can handle... that won't happen overnight, but it's quite feasible in a couple of decades.
My guess is that the first people to walk on Mars will be rich tourists, not government bureaucrats.
isn't that sort of why teh cultural basis of humans was east asian in Firefly?
Ask people about the space program. They say it's expensive, dangerous, and pointless. They are wrong on all counts, but that doesn't stop them from giving their opinion.
Democracy. Don't you love it?
with only 500 million years left until the planet becomes uninhabitable, the next species to create civilization will likly not have a fighting chance to get to where we are today.
As a NON-American everytime I read one of these stories, or about SCO, or RIAA, or USPTO I cringe, and am thus not surprised about the opposition to the USG having anything to do with health-care.
But it need not be this way, in Switzerland we pay about 13% income tax, it varies from Kanton to Kanton and 7.3% VAT and everything works, the first time. Health is paid for by insurance and social security and is first class in 4/5 languages. What you need is to get control of the Congress and add some direct democracy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy] so ypu can stop the pork and corruption. You also need term limits in Congress.
Oh geeze, I knew I shouldn't have waited to submit a story on this, as the Guardian article linked is pretty crappy, which isn't a surprise considering how opposed the Guardian usually is to manned spaceflight in general. It doesn't even list the options the Committee is presenting to the White House. Here's some better sources:
The actual presentations from the meeting: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/08_12_meeting.html
http://www.space.com/news/090812-nasa-spaceflight-options-refined.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/08/13/show-exploration-the-money/
Basically, the Augustine Committee concluded that you can't do too much with the $10B budget spaceflight currently has, but a number of interesting options open up if you increase that by $3B. Basically, there's two main types of scenarios which have been outlined:
Some items of interest regarding both scenarios:
Out of every $10 that the federal government spends, they spend a nickel on NASA. You heard me right, NASA gets barely 0.5% of the federal budget. Stick that in your pie chart and see what a ginormous expense NASA is.
Whereas we are spending over $400 billion per year on interest on the debt. Like that's productive.
President Obama should commit to funding the Space Shuttle to 2015, and the ISS until 2020, under a separate budget line from the NASA R&D budget. Then peg the NASA R&D budget at 1% of the federal budget for the foreseeable future. At least, until such time as NASA needs to be massively expanded to deflect an asteroid or something.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
Yeah, Firefly was the first sci-fi I've ever seen to do that. However, everyone spoke English and Chinese, making it seem like the USA and China were the two leaders who escaped Earth and established themselves in that new system. And I guess the ones who followed American culture more ended up becoming outlaws and living on the fringes of society on the outer planets, while the ones who followed Chinese culture more were happy citizens of the Alliance living on the inner planets.
We choose not to go to the moon. We choose not to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are hard, but because they are expensive, because that goal will fail to make the best use of our energies and budget, because that challenge is one that we are unwilling to accept, one we are willing to forgo, and one which we intend to loose, and the others, too.
Instead, what's going to happen is that a government with real vision for the future is going to take over as the #1 power on the planet, and they're going to push space exploration. That country is going to be China. And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead. Instead, to be realistic, we should start writing sci-fi stories where everyone speaks Mandarin, and everything big is done for the glory of the Party.
Like in the show Firefly?? Truly, life imitates art!
Orion was a fascinating concept, but the approach isn't scalable on a very important axis -- number of flights per year. Sure, you could launch a lot of payload with one launch, and that might be useful from time to time, but getting to orbit on demand at a lower cost than we can do today is more important. If we invest, at a consistent steady pace, we can build systems to reduce the cost of getting to orbit. If we invest in technologies like VASIMR, we can reduce the amount of fuel we need to haul up to LEO to get somewhere else, which has a very nice multiplier effect.
Reducing the cost of access to space will make it possible to do many things, great, interesting, useful, economically beneficial, and fun. Rather than a few trips to the Moon a year, and a trip to Mars once or twice, and then nothing for fifty years, we could have ongoing routine exploration, manned and unmanned, expanding our reach, for the same price. Focused and continued R&D is the key. We have come tantalizingly close to setting the right, attainable goals, and nearly reaching them, with the X-33, VentureStar project, which sought to develop a set of specific technologies in such a way that the end result would be a transportation system. Had we stuck with it, we would have it by now, at a cost which would have appeared to be modest by STS standards. More importantly, it would liberate substantial sums which are currently hostage to the operational budget of the STS. Other technology approaches to similar cost-per-kilo performance and reduced operational cost are possible, such as Skylon. Unfortunately, the Orion / Aries approach is not designed to meet these goals, and will never achieve meaningful increases in flight rates.
Even tiny sums of investment and tiny prizes have stimulated technologies like electromagnetic rail launch (pioneered with a grass roots donation campaign, which funded research spanning decades, by the Space Studies Institute) and tether climbers for space elevators. Even a well-funded, focused R&D effort might not bring an Earth to orbit space elevator for a long time, but without the effort it will certainly take longer. A fascinating intermediate step would be a space elevator from the lunar surface to lunar orbit. No atmosphere or weather to contend with, shorter elevator system and smaller gravity well. The payoff would be dramatic reductions in fuel mass required to sustain a base on the lunar surface -- a huge multiplier effect.
Spending on research like this takes place on Earth. The benefits would be substantial. Now is the right time to start.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I figured it was going to go down this way sooner or later. As much as I would love to see humans return to the moon (better yet: Mars), I knew it was a lost cause if only because it was GW Bush's idea. If Charles Manson had come up with the idea from prison it would have had a better shot at becoming reality.
Which is why we should focus on the Lagrange points, and sending missions to asteroids and comets. Asteroids could be mined, and Comets could be used for establishing fuel depots at the Lagrange points. NASA should expand COTS so we can get companies like SpaceX and OribitalSciences among others developing heavy lifters. I think that would be a more achievable goal and have a higher utilitarian value then the chest thumping Nationalism that comes with putting a man on the Moon and Mars.
As long as the human race is confined to this rock it will eventually go the way of the dodo. From a species preservation point of view it is immanently logical that the human race needs to aquire a foothold on another planet. That is why such well known raving lunatics like Stephen Hawking are very much in favor of a Mars colony.
... what's the excuse for the next couple of deficits in the Trillions? And that's without the health care bill passing?
The truth of the matter is, regardless of party, the U.S. Government is spending money we don't have. We do it most years, in fact. And regardless of party in power, its accelerating.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"Where's the obvious profit on a tripulated mission to Mars"
After you get there, you own Mars and pretty much all the resources in the asteroid belt. If someone wants to prevent it, they have to build a comparable space presence, and you can charge them rent for basing their asteroid belt operations on Deimos (escape velocity 20 KPH) and Phobos (escape velocity 40KPH), and, hey, there are plenty of asteroids for everyone.
-- Terry
Informative.
"Survivor: Moon". In this show, mind-numbed TV viewers would text message their votes indicating whom should be kicked off the moon this week. At $4.99 per vote, it would only take 16.4 billion text messages to pay for going back to the moon. We could cover some of our risk by placing bets in Vegas against the contestants actually making it to the moon.
If we were really sneaky, we could skip going to the moon altogether (again) and film this all in a sound stage in Arizona at night! We could save even more money by outsourcing the film editing to India. That way, NASA couldn't lose the footage (again).
Is that like 'Q' winning ?
Chinese nothing. Just find some terrorists on the Moon and then we'll send men there, no matter how difficult, expensive, or pointless it is.
which tells you a lot about where western culture was going by that time.
"The cost of human spaceflight is going up"
Pure remote control of robots beyond GEO is the same stupid, as putting marshmallows on the moon or mars.
"Nobody has identified a compelling economic..."
I trying for quite some time to promote the idea of telerobotic space stations and space ships. Bringing humans as far into space as needed, but in small crews, controlling a larger number of wireless robots controlled in realtime. Having clear objectives, those missions would start with managing/repairing satellites in LEO and GEO, later-on profits will be used to explore the NEOs and the moon. If you build a remotely controlled space station in sun-synchronous LEO or GEO with maintenance service and repair the telcos, mils and govs will come and want there sats installed there. And if you think about waste reduction. Recycling parts like power supplies and mechanical structures will have a fancy double effect: Space junk reduction and reduction of launch costs. Just send a new antenna and mainboard from time to time, we can install it using our fancy micro-bots of insect size... Why nobody is talking about micro-robotics in space, I can't tell you ether.
The cost of the Iraq war has been projected to be in the $2 trillion range. This was money completely pissed away. How come nobody worried about the cost of that?
We (the USA) spends $600 billion on the military every year. The summary quotes the cost of a Martian mission at $80 billion. Going to Mars would be easily the most important accomplishment of mankind in its decade, probably in its century... and you're really telling me that a fucking 1% cut in the US's military budget for a dozen years isn't worth it?
And don't tell me about the "necessity of national defense", when the US military expenditures dwarf those of any other country. Cut the US military budget by half, and we're *still* drastically outspending the Chinese (and Russians, and whoever else) -- and over ten years you wind up with an extra three trillion dollars, which pays for a lot of rockets/health care/clean power/tax cuts/whatever you're fond of.
So don't tell me the US can't afford a space program.
"Sometime between the time Clinton left office and Obama entered office the Federal budget surplus disappeared."
That "budget surplus" was a fraud. The national debt grew by $1.4 trillion during his presidency, and it grew larger every year.
Hiding things off-budget does not make you a financial success.
National Debt - Source: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm
1993 4,411,488,883,139.38
1994 4,692,749,910,013.32
1995 4,973,982,900,709.39
1996 5,224,810,939,135.73
1997 5,413,146,011,397.34
1998 5,526,193,008,897.62
1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
"After you get there, you own Mars and pretty much all the resources in the asteroid belt."
What for?
"If someone wants to prevent it, they have to build a comparable space presence"
Again, what for?
While I can see the bussiness plan on about two century timespan, the only need to control outerspace is in order to control outerspace bussiness... but currently there's no outerspace bussiness to start with!
who cares! America got there first and we did it forty years ago!!! we'll go back when we feel like it. we can take our time, America is the only country with a respectable space program at all.
Not a favorite author here for technicalities, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_Point
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
How about political cooperation? The ISS while not perfect had the russians and us working together in space on something with billions of dollars involved. Having countries invest together is useful. We should do it more... (Playing devils advocate for the most part).
Also you predicted we wouldnt leave LEO based on the fact that pride is a stupid reason to do things. I don't see what being a stupid idea has to do with whether it is politically doable.
It seems to me that NASA is doing well with their deep space programs. By that I mean anything beyond lunar orbit. NASA has got into a successful groove with their robots, landers, rovers and so on. Why not continue with that?
Even considering the occasional failure the robotics are working well overall. Real science gets done, it's interesting, we explore, people are inspired (OK, maybe not ALL people...), it's a good thing.
On the other hand I consider manned exploration extremely risky and expensive. We don't even know how to shield the astronauts from radiation! Oh sure, the answers are easy here on Earth, but all the terrestrial radiation shields are massive, and mass leads directly to huge cost increases in space. The reality is that we may send people to Mars knowing that they will get a radiation dose unacceptible in any other context.
Bottom line, if the budget is tight, chop the risky and expensive stuff. Some day the tide will turn and the money will flow again. If not, well simply amortizing the manned program over a longer period of time can make a big difference. A delay won't hurt anyone much and gives science and technology that much more time to figure out how to build things like a lightweight radiation shield.
What's risky and expensive? The manned deep space flights. Everything else is cheap by comparison.
The problem is that most manned space efforts require at least 10 years to go from planning to operation, while the particular administration that initiated don't last more than 8 years (if they are lucky). So if administration A starts out with a grand scheme to conquer the solar system, it will be left to administration B (or more likely C) to finish the job. The thing is, most administrations do not want to expend the resources (both financial and political) to build what they see as a technological monument to the previous administration (see Nixon 1969). Unfortunately, we are likely to see this dynamic continue.
No I don't mean a faster than light craft... I mean business.
We are now at a place where we can begin implementing real robotic technology. Begin mining the moon and asteroids. Begin generating real wealth and new technologies. Begin building settlements on the moon. Mining water on the moon. Building large subterranean habitats capable of supporting thousands of people. We could place a 10 year moratorioum on taxing the profits of space based business. As well provide small grants to new players, and socially empower people to create new and interesting space based technology.
Once a thriving and robust space base economy is growing and thriving, we take 10% of the profits, and invest it into building a completely new technology base for moving people and resources cheaply into space. A city ready for people will exist on the moon, and vital resources will be pouring in from dozens of large asteroids
It's time for our vision to exceed our fear...
Good luck on having space travel in 100 years since we'll have burned up all our fossil fuels and will be traveling in horse'n buggy.
The beginning of the end for the USA as a first world country - get ready for rice and beans!
No military rationale? The country that controls the moon controls the earth! Suppose some country places a dozen 100MT missiles on the moon. Who would dare to say no to that country? Combine that with the 1 Trillion USD military budget (most of which is secret) ... lack of funds ? pfftt
The truth is that this is the end of the peaceful use of space.
Yeah, right. And Health Care will be deficit-neutral. And unemployment will stay until 8% with the Stimulus.
500 million years is a long time, even by the evolutionary time base.
It only took us 2 million years to go from gibbon-like pre-hominid Human. There's still some of those types waiting in line.
I'd be willing to bet on raccoons or maybe one of the other cat, ferret, badger variants. Bears aren't too far out of the realm of possibility. Just about any critter that spends a fair amount of time upright, picking stuff out of trees might make the transition given a couple of million years, and a well timed evolutionary stressor.
... but scientists are not members of any politically-favored labor union or other organization that can help members of Congress get reelected.
At the rate Congress is spending money, it will not be just the space program which gets cut. Tax-and-spend will ultimately turn the US into a slightly larger version of Argentina.
...They don't want the world to see there is no flag or rover! :)
Above the best technical and contextual world best analsys, in fact we Humans need "Big objectives (again)". For me space exploration is (always was) the way for it. And for radical moves and accomplishment of great ideas we can't no longer discuss little technical details like billions for it, or etc.. Go ahead and reset the Nasa bank account, using a simple tn3270 transaction (takes 2 seconds) and voila, problem solved.. money is purely fictional and doesnt work in extreme critical panic seasons. Funny how sometimes this all look, as we were under Alien influenza or something.. but.. no, hey its just us .. humans. So cut the bad ones and promote the dreamers and the ones that enjoy doing things in the right way, instead of paying Millions to the ones that "talk the talk, instead of walk the walk".
Born in 1969, I evolved reading, dreaming, working, on computer and related techcnologies, wishing that i would see a man travel to Mars, departing from our first lunar base.
So.. its with extreme saddness that I start to see that this once again keeps being postponed. Meaning a dry and long desert time window till I hit the big sleep in 30 or 40 years.
Postponing strong and important big achievements like space exploration, have a tremendous negative effect on the hopes and dreams of millions of people like me and lot's os Slashdot readers im sure. And as i try to pass on this post of mine, to all Humanity really.
We need trustable leaders, and we need to quickly discuss a new model of sustainbility in everything around us based on true values (which rewards new knowledge and pleasure of doing things the right way).
We can't no longer afford to pay Managers with srink thinking based on their own short timelife, used to work more as fireman then as motivational engines inside enterprises.
And finally we need to start making thing in the right way, and forget about the old model of respecting deadlines and putting in production or live wrecked/systems, wrecked/news, wrecked/medicaments, wrecked/wrecked-stuff.
"Living on the planet is not always easy, but hey, it includes several round trips around the Sun"
or "Start looking to the sky and beyond it, Universe doesn't stop there"
Or.. maybe i shall accept the reality of shifting political and economical to the East and just need to move into Singapure or China to continue to pursue my life time objectives, since USA is dying and will take much more generations to recover to the status of "Motivational Country that achieves big things" that made my teenager growup felt like a dream of achieving great things.
we've wasted our money on useless wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq II, etc.)
Most people don't make the argument that Desert Storm was a waste of money... unless you mean that we left the Iraqi government in place and dropped all of our support for a coup after Saddam was repulsed. We had support from nearly every Arab country to take out a man who had started two wars in ten years and poisoned tens of thousands of his own countrymen. Not to mention we had 1,000,000 troops on the ground compared to only 250,000 the second time around... Although we did destroy any ability he had to wage war against anyone with a stronger military than, say, the Vatican City.
He was no threat to the US, however. If the Arab countries supported the action so much, they could have at least paid for it all, so it didn't come out of our budget. They certainly have the money.
You don't see China wasting their money on other country's wars (not since Korea and Viet Nam); instead, they're focusing all their efforts now on building themselves up economically, and part of it on their own space program.
This was predicted by BodhiCat when Bush II first announced the "moon program. " Its just a way to take funding from the space station and planetary probes and budget for the "moon program," then cancel the "moon program" and reduce NASA's funding. Boo Obamba for continuing the short-sighted policies of Bush II.
If no one else can get there, "owning" it irrelevant. I might as well claim that I "own" it.
If someone else can get there, it's not clear that you'll be able to stop them from landing there. Unless you break out a war. No court on Earth is going to grant a private company ownership of land in space (I believe there are international treaties preventing this).
Consider: why aren't private companies setting up offices in Antartica, so they can "own" it and charge rent?
Read Khalid bin Sultan's book sometime. He and General Schwarzkopf were the joint commanders of all forces during the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia was terrified that Iraq was going to go after them next. US initially went to the Middle East to prevent Saddam from making the next logical jump into Saudi Arabia, where they stayed for over six months before pushing Saddam back from invaded Kuwait.
CLEARLY, the better solution is to be able to deflect it. Make THAT the Number One goal of space, and the lifting, the space stations, the Moon bases, and even a Mars offsite backup will follow. Practice now, while we have the luxury of time and error.
true, and there are candidates that aren't even following the same path that we did... my money is on the cephalopods: they seems to be quite intelligent and have a dexterity we could only dream of.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson