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Lawmakers Voice Support For NASA Moon Program
Matt_dk writes "Members of a key Congressional committee on Tuesday voiced support for NASA's Constellation program, designed to get astronauts back to the moon. The comments came a week after an expert panel said NASA's plans were not possible, given its current budget. The occasion was an appearance by Norman Augustine, head of a committee formed to consider the future of human space exploration. The Augustine committee sent a summary report to the White House last week saying NASA needs at least an extra $3 billion a year to implement the Constellation moon program. The report also included several alternatives to that program. At a feisty session on Tuesday, Congress was having none of those alternatives, starting just minutes into the two-hour hearing."
"Voicing support" doesn't mean jack squat. Put your money where your mouth is or sit down. For WAY too many years now, Congress and various presidential administrations have "voiced supprt for NASA and made grand promises about building moon bases, going to Mars, etc. But they've turned around and quietly kept the same anemic budget that's been in place since Nixon axed their budget after Apollo. And, for all the grand promises, all NASA has actually delivered were a few probes, a low orbit space station, and a "reusable" spacecraft that can only go into low orbit and has to be rebuilt after each mission. Politicians have coasted on bullshit promises for decades now, and NASA has been all too willing to go along with it.
This committee report is the first time that someone has so publicly pointed out what should have been obvious for a long time now--that NASA isn't going ANYWHERE on the current budget. So either give them the budget they need or own up to the fact that the era of manned space exploration is over. Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
mismatch between the task to be performed and the funds that are available to support those tasks
And congress reject this. They call this "voicing support?" Sounds like a death sentence to the higher-ups at NASA to me...
and utterly failed to provide funding for it. Its no wonder that NASA does not have enough money to complete the project. If this results in a funding increase for NASA, it will be a start. Even if it is only a tiny baby step.
Do we believe that future of space exploration is in the hands of some government agency ? I look more at the X-Prize winners and similar developments for whatever space future we might be getting into.
Go read "The Man Who Sold the Moon," a story about an entrepreneur who not only reached the moon, but also set-up permanent colonies. As long as the government runs the show, it will just be like the last moon mission - lots of expensive tourist visits but no long-term settlement.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Well I'm glad they said it. We can frig around with this platform or that platform based on the merits of xyz and sure direct is probably a better launcher and solid fuel launchers are probably bad but haven't we learned the lessons from scraping the Saturn V launchers yet?
Pick a platform, with all it warts, short of fundamental design flaws, and keep developing it.
I think the 747 was being developed around the same time as the Saturn V launchers, look how far it has come. Imagine if Boeing decided to chuck all that development work away and start again - they'd be bankrupt.
Time to get on with it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
$636B. More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
I'm all for research and exploration within reason. Satellites, observation of the universe via things like the Hubble telescope, etc. to find out more about the nature of the universe we live in is great stuff.
But doesn't the federal government have more pressing issues at this time than building a Motel 6 on the moon?
P.S. Don't take the last sentence literally, please.
The Institute of Incomplete Research has determined that 9 of out 10
Lots of stuff we can do on the moon. Maybe better than in LEO. Drugs, genetic experiments, metallurgy, beamed power experiments, geriatric care, tourism...
WTF are we sending people to Mars for? To experiment with how to slow-kill astronauts with radiation?
If I wanted to blow billions on a program with almost no chance of success any time in the next century, I'd have NASA send probes to explore the asteroid belt with the goal of some day mining it for mineral resources.
if anything it furthers space technology more than it hinders it.
We also spend more on new buildings/bridges/parks named after living government officials than on NASA.
Does NASA get votes?
Answer that and you have found the real reason.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The national debt is almost $12 trillion (for reasons legitimate or not, depending on your views). As cool as the thought is, the moon can wait. The best thing the gub'ment can do at this moment is to not interfere with private space endeavors.
This is my signature.
soid st egr.hyTa rsiugm usnin
Any questions?
Remind me why the fuck is it my responsibility to support the bum exactly?
I've given money to panhandlers plenty of times, but you can shove that bleeding heart shit right up your ass.
For probably half of that, you could develope nanorobotics and AI and we could go to andromeda if we wanted to. But no let's blow a huge mountain of cash on quaint rockets (that blow up 1 in 50 times) to send a few guys to the moon and collect rocks or whatever. If people are going to be that stupid why don't you just put me in charge? I could do way better...
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Could the ISS use excess electricity from the solar panels along with a tether to maintain altitude?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_propulsion
The basic idea is you drag the tether through earth's magnetic field. If you pull power off of it, your orbit lowers. If you run energy back through it, your orbit rises.
My only guess is they don't have a lot of excess capacity on the ISS and so lack the power to run with this.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The moon and Mars are cold dry rocks and anything interesting is prohibitively far away. We should have given up space travel when relativity made it clear that we can't actually go anywhere interesting.
As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years.
Compelling? Like an expert panel saying 'this won't work'? What's the point of assembling experts to make recommendations if we're not going to listen to them. I can't say I didn't expect it, but I think it's just pathetic that there apparently wasn't any serious discussion of the alternatives. There may be benefits to going back to the moon, but most of what I've read lately leans toward "I want to relive the glory days when space was new."
If this finally gets somebody to throw NASA some more funding, then I suppose that's something, but the cost of manned missions is staggering. There's so much interesting and useful science that could be done without having to spend (waste?) resources on consumables and redundant systems for supporting life.
I actually had high hopes that someone would listen to the recommendations... Reminds me of a poker player that doesn't know how to fold a hand. Sure, we have a chance to get something out of it, but I don't see that the pot odds are not worth it for manned missions right now.
(Sorry for the poker stuff... no car analogy came to mind)
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
I've given money to panhandlers plenty of times
I don't carry cash. I bet the advent of widespread debit/credit card use has really put a crimp in the panhandler lifestyle. I keep waiting to run into one with a credit card machine.
In any event, it's much more fun to tell them to get a job when they beg for money. This will generate a reaction ranging from "fuck you" to just walking away. If you are lucky they will try to take a swing at you and you can test out your new taser ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
... we'd be on our way to the libertarian paradise in space. Riiight. Dude, don't you understand how this works? The reason we're not doing "long-term settlement" on the moon is that there's absolutely, positively no way to make money at it. If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects would just buy themselves some senators, get the government out of their way, and go do it. But the fact is that getting to the moon at all is astronomically (pun intended) expensive. Getting to the moon with all the equipment, people, and supplies you'd need to build a space colony is un-freakin' believably astronomically expensive. Not to mention all the enormously difficult, unsolved technological problems involved in long-term life in space.
And once you got there, what are you going to do to recoup your investment? There is absolutely nothing on the Moon that we can't get more cheaply and easily on earth. Much is made of the possibility of obtaining He3, but 1) we have no earthly use for it, and 2) there's really not that much of it on the Moon either. The Moon is almost entirely made of silicate minerals... so is the earth.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
This is all happening at such a horrible confluence of bad timing for NASA. Stimulus package + healthcare overhaul + war + recession = bad time to convince taxpayers to fund moon trips. I support most of the above initiatives, but at the end of the day, there really is only so much money to go around.
Whether or not we're spending more than anyone else, we're not spending anywhere close to what it would cost actually do the missions we've set out to do. On the other hand, we are wasting an enormous amount of money in buying way more defense capability than we could possibly ever need. The GP is arguing (I think) that we ought to cut the defense budget and divert some of the money into space exploration.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Actually, forget the bleeding heart, giving money to panhandlers is simply the wrong thing to do. Around here, the city has put up numerous signs discouraging the behaviour, as it reinforces the behaviour, rather than encouraging them to seek out alternatives that don't involve begging on the street.
But we're getting a little off-topic, here. The real point is that 3B for NASA is absolutely a drop in the bucket compare to US military expenditures. If the US really is focused on going back to the moon, it's baffling that congress would balk at such a tiny amount of money (relatively speaking).
Seeing as how the democrats have continued to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since gaining the majority in 2006 and the fact that Obama has expanded the war into Pakistan, I don't see how this is going to happen.
The US government operates somewhere between 700-800 military bases in about 150 different countries.
Also, the government keeps bailing out criminal Wall Street firms.
All of this together is trillions. So where does any money for some moon mission come from? Don't expect congress and the senate to do anything, if they really gave a damn, would the military be spread across the globe and all the losses Wall Street was supposed to receive have been socialized while their profits privatized?
In addition to current problems, at some point in the near future there will be a medicare and social security crisis because money is running out. Nasa moon missions are just not on the horizon.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWWPT8cAUpUCsmOZoABze-6XhwTAD9ALBNU00
We're in the deepest recession since 1930, and have run up $1.38 Trillion in debt, people- and that's not all from the two wars we're fighting.
The administration is forecasting a $9 Trillion budget deficit within ten years, a figure the Congressional Budget Office agrees with.
"Only $3BN more" you say? That's a +15% increase of NASA's budget. "Oh, only 15%", you say. Well, guess what happens after 1000 federal agencies and projects have come to you asking for "only 15% more"? I can't even find a figure for the number of items in the federal budget, but I'm guessing it falls around 10,000 or more.
Yes, military spending is an order of magnitude larger. That is not an excuse to increase spending for another agency; it is a reason to reduce military spending. That is something that is not easily done, given how dependent our country has become on military spending to employ people, and congresscritters are very allergic to "defense" cuts in their district.
We need to be trimming from the federal budget, not adding to it any more, except for the most critical needs. Space exploration, while fascinating and a great boost for nationalism, is not a critical need.
Please help metamoderate.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s.
You're an idiot if you believe that. The Internet, being a world-wide communication medium, was clearly useful, at minimum for research, business, and military purposes. Sure, it wasn't clear that there would be consumer-level interest, but there didn't need to be for it to be worth developing and deploying (after all, DARPA developed it for a reason).
Contrast this with a moon colony, which, to any sane human being, is absolutely fucking pointless as far as money-making endeavours go, and it should be clear even to a simpleton how the two are very different.
And who was developing the Internet until the 1990's? The government. Specifically, DARPA and NSF. And a bunch of universities, probably funded by government grants.
The thing is, it's not good enough to be able to do it on the moon. It's not even enough that we could do it better than in LEO (which I doubt is true anyway, for most things). It's got to be more cost-effective to do it on the moon than somewhere else... and that just ain't happening any time soon.
It should also be clear even to a jackass such as yourself that you can't predict whether or not space exploration will be economically profitable in the mid to long term.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
>>>If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects...
They can't. These companies are BANNED from creating interplanetary ventures. The law allows them to send-up satellites, but it's illegal for them to do any other space-based entrepreneurship. The government has assigned that market to NASA as a monopoly, just like the old East India Trading Company had been granted a monopoly by the crown.
What we need to do is repeal that law, open Moon and Mars development to private business, and we'll see colonies on both those bodies before we die. As long as we leave it in the hands of government, which is more-interested in cutting budgets than exploring (see NASA 1972 when Apllo was killed), the colonization will never happen. Government has already demonstrated it can not be entrusted to do the job, ad this new moon program is certain to end the same way the last one did. As the saying goes, "Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me."
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>>>libertarian paradise in space
Oh and by the way I'm not Libertarian. I'm a Jeffersonian-democrat. He believed in pushing the government out of the way, and letting the People operate freely in their private ventures. So do I. We need to keep NASA, but we also need to revoke their monopoly and allow other businesses like Lockheed, Boeing, even Microsoft, to extend their reach into interplanetary travel. That's the only way to create a thriving space-based community.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Frankly, it's gotten dumb and narrow. There's nothing on the moon that *matters.*
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How about making long-term livable space environments (i.e. containing viable organic ecologies) and not some dimwitted ground-dependent space station? How about making economically viable solar power in near earth orbit and selling it at a profit? How about setting up a few thousand square miles of adjustable mirrors to reversibly control global temperature?
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Uses for space like these *matter*. F*** the moon. F*** all that grandstanding political BS.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
>>>There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
The people who sold me my first modem in 1987, which allowed me to get online and access the primitive internet, would have disagreed with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CommodoreVICModem.jpg - So too would America Online which was born in the mid-80s. No money? There was lots of money to be collected from the internet prior to the 1990s.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Seriously, do you hear yourself? "Well, *maybe* space will be profitable some day! We just don't know yet!" Well that's a great pitch proposal when you're trying to get funding for your new moon base! Brilliant!
Again, constrast this with the Internet: a) The cost to deploy were *much* lower, b) it could be done incrementally, and c) it was clear right from the outset why it was useful. *None* of these things is true of a moon landing. You're either in it for billions, or you're not in it at all. And at the end, as you yourself point out, there's no obvious way to actually make money once you've gotten there. And yet you think business will just jump in with both feet? Please.
No, I don't think business will jump in with both feet. I never said anything of the sort. All I think is that gutting the manned space program is incredibly short-sighted. There will come a day when spaceflight is profitable. That could be tomorrow if we discover some rare and profitable material (not likely), it could be within our lifetimes (somewhat more likely) or it could come afterwards. Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologies and to study the effect that space flight has on the human body.
The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program. Personally I'd prefer that homo sapien not suffer the same fate.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
What we need to do is repeal that law, open Moon and Mars development to private business, and we'll see colonies on both those bodies before we die.
Uhuh.
Why? What reason could any business *possibly* have for spending billions to go to the Moon or Mars? Where's the profit motive?
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
No, it's like having a $600 credit card balance at the end of the month after your paycheck has come in and you've paid all your bills, and saying "well, I'm $600 in debt from fighting my neighbor and giving gifts to all my roommates. What's another $3 on this scifi movie?"
It's another $3 you don't have, that's what.
Please help metamoderate.
Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologies and to study the effect that space flight has on the human body.
Wait... so you *do* think government should be involved in space flight? Because your original post in this thread suggested precisely the opposite.
Which post would that be?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The OP said this:
The point, here, was to argue against the idea that government should get out of the space industry and let business take over. You followed up with:
This comment seems to clearly defend the idea that business would get into space travel if the government would just let them. Now, if that wasn't your intent, my apologies, but that's certainly how I (and others, it seems) read your response.
If, however, your position is that the government should fund and develop space travel until such time as profitability can be established, then I absolutely agree with you. Much like any number of fundamental technologies, government can take the long view to get the industry established, at which point business can get involved (and possibly take over).
Only 3 billion? Why not give NASA 100 billion, I mean it's only money. We have completely lost our minds. 12 trillion in debt today and est. 25 trillion in 10 years and we want to go to the moon? You've got to be kidding me.
If, however, your position is that the government should fund and develop space travel until such time as profitability can be established, then I absolutely agree with you.
That was my point. The internet wasn't really profitable until the 90s (though there were a few exceptions, as others pointed out). That doesn't mean that building it was a waste of time or money though.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You don't understand - this isn't about science, or space travel, this is about pork, pure and simple. NASA has turned into a jobs program, and easy cash for contractors based in the states of these key congressmen - to the point where now, despite their huge budget, they really can't do anything useful in terms of launch.
The Augustine commission pointed out that the whole current setup is an expensive disaster, but Congress doesn't want to hear it, because they're only interested in keeping the cash flowing to their districts and/or campaign contributors, and who gives a rat's ass if any actual science or engineering gets done?
More importantly, look at the Internet alternatives that were developed by corporate interests: things like Minitel / Prestel, Compuserve, AOL, and MSN. These were all walled-gardens, and no one could run services on them without paying the owner for the privilege, and all of them are effectively dead now.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm excited to see the NASA support. NASA research helps everyone!
I recognize that this is possibly an extremely naive thing to suggest, but what if NASA were to be either co-owned by private investors, or sold outright to a private company?
Is there a reason that NASA still needs to be a Government operation?
Given that the key inhibitor to NASA being taken seriously as a "space exploration" organization has been the dire lack of funding over the past three decades, wouldn't it make sense to turn it into a seaparately operated, non-national, extremely well-funded company, with more than enough money to support the kinds of projects that they're describing?
I also understand that initially NASA did have ties to the military, but that for one reason or another it was agreed that they would not be a military organization. I'm not sure if selling the company would put it in danger of becoming one or not.
It couldn't hurt to ask. I imagine if either Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, etc. etc. etc. were in a position to co-own or otherwise play a part in their fiscal support, and there were no legal barriers to do so, NASA could flourish and this wouldn't be a recurring argument every year or so.
Aside: It bothers me that this lack of funding has made it that much easier for Apollo Landing deniers to grow in numbers.
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Spaceflightnow.com had an article posted about a week ago that had to do with the Augustine commissions initial presentation of the report to once of the congressional science committees. You can read it here. There are some interesting remarks made by some of the committee members in that particular article. Specifically, the Arizona representative quoted near the end of the article seems particularly condescending and, well, f***ing stupid.
I can understand that Congress doesn't want to scrap a current project that has some momentum behind it. Aerospace projects take quite awhile to develop, especially the ones that break atmosphere. That being said, if they really do want to get the Constellation program back on its feet, they should fund it. If they are going to play God with their checkbooks though and hold the space program ransom in the name of national interest, screw them. If they won't fund the program properly then it is just going to die slowly and be a money sink until then. If there is anything that NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" space program showed us, it was that space projects that aren't developed properly die gloriously (for reference, that was the program that produced the Mars orbiter which smashed into the surface of Mars due to one subcontractor using metric measurements and one using SI measurements). If Congress refuses to fund the Constellation program properly, you can be guaranteed that shit is going to explode at some point.
If Congress is unwilling to consider alternative missions, you can be guaranteed that manned exploration of space will stagnate in America's government funded agencies.
If Congress doesn't listen to the experts because their hubris has gotten the best of them, you can be guaranteed that the interests of science will no longer be served in this country.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
NASA gets way too much credit for inventions that it had absolutely no involvement. Velcro is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro a prime example of that. It was being manufactured years before NASA even existed. Sure, NASA used Velcro, and popularized it to some degree, but any decent PR company could have done that.
I understand that we want people on the moon. I personally want to go, though I know I never will. But shouldn't we be doing a decade of remote controlled devices and even autonomous ones first?
What's the point of sending people to the moon when we can do most stuff by robot, until we have a habitation base up there and it's largely self-supporting? Such a base should be built by robots before we send people to live in it, anyway.
OK, if we could send an inflatable home that would last for many years, I could see that, but we'd still need bots for drilling, mining, refining, building furnaces and extractors, etc, else there's not that much differnece having guys in cumbersome spacesuits up there and much cheaper machiens run by remote from Earth.
In order to be safe, profitable and long-lasting, we need massive infrastructure up there, and the only reasonable way to do much of that is to build it there. That means bots (lots of them) and time.
Why bother with people now?
A reasonable military budget keeps us safe. A massive military budget makes us look for reasons to us it, involves us in foreign wars, and sinks our economy under a burden of debt.
What you really want, if you're frightened "Ali Kaboom", as you put it, is a massive intelligence budget and an intelligence system run by practical people willing to include talent wherever it exists. Then you add on top of that a military with enough punch to make people hurt if we find out something we don't like.
That's a lot cheaper than a military big enough to squat on two or more countries at once and an intelligence service which can't sift through the data it has, doesn't have enough translators or operatives in groups it doesn't like, etc.
Shift the funds and scale them back. We can buy peace where it's the right choice, enforce peace as necessary, and not get bogged down in situations which we will ultimately lose while throwing away the tool that makes us powerful: money.
When it comes to actually landing stuff on the surface, Mars is cheaper than the Moon, because you can use atmospheric breaking to slow you down instead of using more fuel.
However, once you have the necessary infrastructure on the surface, the Moon is a better place for launching stuff for use around Earth. So basically, Mars is better for colonizing people, while the Moon is better for space-based industry.
Not a typewriter
The rockets produced initially for the manned program made unmanned launches less accident prone, allowing commercial use of satellites to be done with less risk of losing the payload, therefore making it easier to find investors. The benefits to the telecommunications industry alone have more than made up for the manned program.
I view the manned program as an end goal of its own. Like America's westward expansion, there are likely to be untold benefits that are not apparent from the start, except this time there's no native population to screw up.
Not a typewriter
Telling them to get a job during a depression is a little harsh...
i hope that english is your second language, for your sake. because the point you were trying to make is not clear from your original one line snark
- Tourism. Don't laugh. Many cities/states build their entire economies around tourism (why else would someone go to Wyoming), and I don't see any reason why the Moon or Mars would be any different. It could be very profitable to set-up vacations to these distant worlds, especially if you target Hollywood stars who seem to have plenty of money to throw-away.
- Raw materials. Not just on the moon and mars, but the asteroid belt could be mined as well.
- Services for the tourists and miners, like housing, food, and entertainment.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I agree with you partly. While I don't think they'll be putting cities on the moon any time soon (We don't have cities under the sea yet). I do think repealing those laws would be helpful in lowering launch costs. The main thing I believe we will see is advertisements in LEO. Coca Cola would definitely like a billboard in space. I also think they would solve the space junk breaking things problem out of necessity. With lower launch costs and less fears of garbage hitting us the government could take the reigns of exploration at greatly lower costs.
... we'd be on our way to the libertarian paradise in space. Riiight. Dude, don't you understand how this works? The reason we're not doing "long-term settlement" on the moon is that there's absolutely, positively no way to make money at it. If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects would just buy themselves some senators, get the government out of their way, and go do it. But the fact is that getting to the moon at all is astronomically (pun intended) expensive. Getting to the moon with all the equipment, people, and supplies you'd need to build a space colony is un-freakin' believably astronomically expensive. Not to mention all the enormously difficult, unsolved technological problems involved in long-term life in space.
And once you got there, what are you going to do to recoup your investment? There is absolutely nothing on the Moon that we can't get more cheaply and easily on earth. Much is made of the possibility of obtaining He3, but 1) we have no earthly use for it, and 2) there's really not that much of it on the Moon either. The Moon is almost entirely made of silicate minerals... so is the earth.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
Shame no one can think big picture. Yes getting to the moon and getting a colony there would be expensive but don't make it your home make it a jump point. The amount of need minerals/metals in the asteriod belt would make ANY venture worth it, assuming you have the capital to hold out for the long haul.
Two things: 1) [citation needed]. I flat out don't believe this is true. 2) Re-read the part in the original post about buying some senators. If there was money to be made in space, and making the money was against the law... the law would be changed.
I'm laughing. You're just wrong - there are very few people on earth who can even afford the Russian space tourism venture (to the ISS). With a tourist stream of only a few people a year, you couldn't even afford to build a hotel on Earth, much less in space.
Dude, read the original post again. The moon, Mars, and Earth are all made out of the same stuff. What materials do you propose that we could obtain in space more economically than we can get them on earth?
There is no need for such services, as we've already established that the tourism-in-space market is too small to support them. Same goes for mining./p.
Ludicrous. Again - the asteroids are made of the same stuff as the earth - silicate minerals, iron, nickel, and small amounts of other stuff. What material are you proposing that we could acquire in space more economically than on earth?
AOL originally didn't have any connection to the World-Wide-Web and its content was only available to paying customers. Until the mid-1990's it was what's refered to as a walled garden. To extend the analogy, if AOL was a walled garden (or perhaps a theme park) what than the publically funded internet was a state or national park. The only real limitation on who could acess it were those with sufficient knowledge and equipment, unlike AOL there wasn't a central gate-keeper demanding tolls everytime you entered.
There is one enterprise you are overlooking.
Truly permanent communications "satellites."
Populate the earth-ward face of the moon with a large array of communication towers, and bingo-- you have a constellation of orbiting communications platforms that can service for more than just a few decades-- they could service for centuries.
If you have people up there, maintenance and upgrade becomes less costly per unit than traditional satellites-- AND-- it doesn't produce orbital garbage, and they don't have the same risk of colliding with other birds.
I dont espouse it as some perfect solution though, so don't bother with that tact; I know full well that latency from that high an orbit would be astronomically high; but for applications that dont care about latency, like bulk data transfers where out of order packet delivery, and timeliness of delivery arent paramount, (no VOIP data, or streaming video-- but instead for bulk fileserving for remote backup, or bulk data courier services) it would be very effective.
There are also obvious advantages to having manufacturing complexes on the moon, as well as space based tourism.
There *IS* money to be made on the moon.
TARP1 and TARP2. They are just spending for the sake of spending. They could spend 100 Billion of the TARP dollars on NASA and it would have the same effect as spending 100 Billion on seeding the national mall. The point of TARP is to get money into the economy. It really doesn't matter how its spent as long as it is spent.
So yes we have a $9 Trillion budget deficit but 1.3 Trillion of that is in TARP funds which are just spending projects for the sake of spending money.
There is no need for "probably" in your last sentence
What material are you proposing that we could acquire in space more economically than on earth?
Helium-3 comes to mind. As to the composition of asteroids, I wasn't aware that a thorough examination of the asteroid belt had taken place. I know some asteroids have been studied. However, there is a lot of material out there.
Now, getting it back to Earth might be costly. However, I think it is a bit premature to claim that space doesn't have anything that couldn't be obtained cheaper on Earth.
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Much is made of the possibility of obtaining He3, but 1) we have no earthly use for it, and 2) there's really not that much of it on the Moon either.
A potential gas source found on the moon's surface could hold the key to meeting future energy demands as the earth's fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades, scientists said
Yes, it still requires research and engineering. However, that is a far cry from "no earthly use for it".As for your second point, the article also covers that: "The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of Helium 3 than all the fossil fuels on the earth," So you are right, it is a limited resource.
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I hope most of you feel the way I do and are glad to see us stop wasting money on putting people in space for no reason.
We can do far more with automated exploration systems and maybe finally go up once they built us a hotel up there or something.
From your link, it exists at .01 ppm in the lunar regolith. And as of now, we have no earthly use for it. Bzzzt! But thanks for playing!
... we figure out how to actually produce energy from He3 (hint: fusion is, as always, at least 20 years away), and a way to economically extract it from the moon (hint: it's still at a concentration of .01 ppm in the lunar regolith) and return it to earth (hint: moving the mining equipment is going to be really, really expensive. So is the return of material to earth). I'll be holding my breath.
"Yeah, I can't think of anything profitable out there either."
Dude, when you think of something, then maybe you and the space mining investors can have a meeting. In the meantime, nobody's sending a mining expedition into space just in case something worthwhile might be out there. Someone in another of the interminable slashdot space mining threads did the math. At the current costs of getting stuff back and forth from space, even if, say, the surface of Mars was covered in platinum bullion, it still wouldn't be cost effective to go pick it up.
I'd to it in a contest with the pattern:
If you achieve X, you will get NASA's moon budget, plus the 3 billion.
NASA would of course also enter the contest... but not necessarily be competitive.
Realistically, one could give out a 1st, 2nd and 3rd price, made out of the combined budget above.
This contest would happen every year. I bet after the 3rd year, one could make out one contestant who would get it done for the best price / performance ratio.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
But I think we need a few years of establishing fuel, air, concrete, etc, up there before it makes sense to spend much on moving people. You're right that it has to be done, and that it won't be an instant thing, but I suspect the getting things done up there issues will take _much_ longer to solve than the safe transport of humans part does.
Maybe I'm being naive, but we did it once (poorly on some levels, but it worked, and was fairly safe) and the task has gotten simpler, thanks to computing, materials and the fact that we won't need anything like a splash-down, now -- we can start and end the most adventurous leg of the journey at the ISS (or some other platform) because we have a lot of experience moving people into orbit and back.