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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.
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
Not really. Such projects should be gov-supported, only opener, although I guess with international teams all over the place now, that counts as progress in international terms. But going back to the moon just for the moon's sake, come on, we've got other fish to fry. One of the things that pisses me off is that there's no central organisation specifically aimed at hunting and tracking down incoming asteroids. There's still too many "oops, didn't see that one coming!" cases, and sooner or later the near-miss (who thought up that word - that should be near-hit!) will not miss. Also we need to start sending probes to neighboring systems asap, nevermind that it'll take decades if not longer. Earth is a Single Point of Failure for the human race.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
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.
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soid st egr.hyTa rsiugm usnin
Any questions?
Not quite. You need to give that bum on the street some more credentials... he's living from meal to meal, and sometimes goes 2 or 3 days between chances to eat. Oh, and he's a former Nobel laureate, and invented things like Velcro and Kevlar, without which the military's equipment wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as it is....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
Yes. Because a) the US stepping in to other countries in order to stabilize things has worked so very well so far, and b) no other nations could possibly work together with the US to address international issues in a multilateral way.
And this is ignoring the fact that the US military blows obscene amounts of money on pointless technology development (cutting edge interceptors when there has been a dogfight in decades, missile defense shields that don't actually work, tactical nuclear technology, fancy airborn laser systems, microwave-based crowd dispersal gizmos, etc, etc). All while actual, useful scientific and technological endeavours go underfunded. Brilliant!
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.
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.
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.
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