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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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>>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
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.
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
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
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.
Not a typewriter