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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."
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.
$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.
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
First off, i cost next to nothing to get payload to the bottom of the ocean, just grab a penny and drop it. The cost comes in bringing it back up
The weight of a sub is actually quite a critical parameter that is watched like a hawk. Don't forget these thing need to go up an down through great pressure swings and thermal variants for over 30 years (not to mention possible battle conditions). The design is not just "well lets bulk it up". If it adds weight, you have to add length to give enough volume to float that weight, and that costs a lot more money than you think. Lets not forget the newest ones carry all the fuel they will need for 30+ years. So yea, it may be a touch easier, but they're also carrying 30 years worth of baggage.
>>>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
Insightful my ass. NASA's budget is less than 1% of the federal budget. Let's say you managed to cut it in half. Congratulations, you trimmed less than 0.5%. If you're serious about reducing the deficit, there are much more effective ways to go about it than going after something that makes up less than 1% of the budget.
He also used a number of other tricks, such as leaking the fact that he was going to draw the Coco-Cola logo on the moon and then getting Pepsi to pay him not to (and, thus, win a lot of free publicity over the fact that they'd bought the advertising rights to the moon and were not using them).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1) The ISS is an international cooperation, an important starting point for manned deep space exploration ...
Quibble. ISS has too high an orbital inclination to be useful as a starting point for any manned or unmanned deep space exploration.
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.