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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.'"
Why exactly are we going to the moon again?
Uhhhh-- You're not from around here, are you? The non-geek answer is here. The geek-trying-to-not-be answer is here. And the real geek answer is... well, anything modded +5 on this thread that isn't "Funny".
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects.
Except that space advocates have been for decades proposing projects which are entirely realistic, feasible, and specific. Whether they're affordable is of course an open question, and whether they're desirable is a matter of opinion, but there is nothing like the ambiguity you claim.
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.
By saying "cosmos," you're conflating science-fantasy ideas about warp drives and such with well-understood science and engineering problems involved in colonizing the Solar System. I suspect you're doing this deliberately to make it all look equally silly. In case you're really so ignorant that you don't understand the difference:
Cosmos -- not going to happen without fundamental changes in our understanding of physical laws. Too bad.
Solar System -- easily doable with technology that exists right now, using little more than a Newtonian understanding of the world.
It is not real.
Human footprints on the Moon are real. Many of the people who put them there are still alive. That's as real as it gets.
If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
How about being inspired by the actual record of what people did? Are you actually more inspired by fiction than by real life?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
There is one objection to the space elevator that I've mentioned here before but never seen anyone seriously address.
The earth is built like a gigantic capacitor. The ionosphere has a relatively strong negative charge, while the ground has a relatively strong positive charge. An insulating layer of dielectric air is between them. It's a leaky self-adjusting capacitor because of lightning. A space elevator would bypass this insulating layer of air, making a direct physical connection between the negative and positive charges. Additionally, I believe that the carbon nanotubes proposed for its construction are electrically conductive, but even if they weren't there is probably more than enough current for electrical breakdown to take place considering that lightning does this to air molecules about three million times a day. What would keep the elevator from instantly vaporizing due to electrical arcing the moment it's installed?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
... 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
Whilst it is always fun to kick the beancounters (I do often enough) I don't think it is entirely their fault in this instance.
Space travel is not a field that allows much real experimentation. As a programmer now moving into space science, I can attest how different this makes things. A programmer can compile-debug-compile 50 times a day until something is just right. The NASA equivalent of compiling something costs $300 million each time.
This led in the 1950's and 60's to the development of complicated methods of systems management, which because they enabled Apollo to be a success have been copied and rigidly adhered to around the world ever since (Europe is a prime example; our native systems management experiments in ELDO were a dismal failure whilst Americans were walking on the moon. So we scrapped everything, simply copied NASA system management techniques, and now we have highly competitive heavy lift launchers)
Rigorous documentation, interface management, and change management do tend to drown space agencies in paper work but by the same token shit doesn't blow up quite so often anymore. Space systems management is conservative (in the literal, not political sense) because it would be extremely costly to explore any different ways of doing things.
The way things are done now may well represent a local maxima in our ability to build and fly rockets, but randomizing the function could easily cost trillions.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?