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."

Comments

Talk is cheap

[elrous0]

"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.

Re:Talk is cheap

[KillerBob]

Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program.

You do realize that:
1) The ISS is an international cooperation, an important starting point for manned deep space exploration as the cost will be prohibitive for any single nation? The PR it's worth isn't in the public eye, it's in the eyes of the nations that the US will have to ally itself with in space if it has any hope of getting a more permanent place in space.

2) The shuttle program is done, with the shuttles expected to be retired in 2010, and that they've been working on a replacement for the shuttle for 10 years, though the short-term solution seems to be to use Soyuz capsules for manned launches? Suggesting that they get rid of the shuttle because it's a load of bullshit promises and tired old technology is a bit redundant when the shuttle has less than a year left before it's permanently grounded.

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. Take every precaution to avoid losing people, but understand and accept that every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space, you're taking risks with your life. It's that 2nd part that the people at large don't seem to understand, and that's why every time there's an accident and somebody dies, the space program loses support.

Re:Talk is cheap

[Shakrai]

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.

Re:Talk is cheap

[TheGreenNuke]

The oceans are also a hostile environment. Yet we designed a submarine for about $6B and currently buy new ones (1 a year at the moment) for under $3B each. When was the last time the nuclear Navy has had an accident? That would be the USS Scorpion in 1968. Only twice in the history of the nuclear Navy has there been accidents resulting in the loss of life, both in the '60's. The Navy also has many more platforms, operate far more frequently, and are designed and built (nuclear construction too) for less than NASA wants to go to the moon. NASA needs to trim the fat and improve safety if that want to keep support levels high.

You also say that you take a risk every time you strap yourself to a rocket and blast into space. Well you also take a risk every time you strap your self to a car, get on a bike, bus, train, etc. But you have to trust that things have been designed properly and the operator is paying attention to what they're doing. If you want a life without risk, good luck finding it. The key is to make sure the proper steps are taken to mitigate those risks.

Re:Talk is cheap

[camperdave]

Part of the problem is that when NASA shows its astronauts, it typically shows them doing pointless zero-G tricks. Tra-la-la, space is play. What NASA needs is a good PR team. Emphasize the danger. Emphasize the rigorous training. Show astronauts as the highly trained professionals that they are, rather than as a bunch of clowns on a high tech pleasure cruise.

Re:Talk is cheap

[Raffaello]

But there's an important difference between space and the deep ocean. The energetic cost of getting a kilo of payload into space are several orders of magnitude larger than they are for getting the equivalent payload size into the deep ocean. Because of this we can afford to overbuild and over-engineer submersibles in a way that we cannot possibly hope to do for space vehicles where every gram costs us dearly. As a result, any space vehicle of a reasonable cost (read billions rather than trillions) will be inherently more risky, because it will be, by comparison with the submersible, built to the absolute minimum engineering tolerances for strength, durability, etc., Basically, anything that adds weight will be built to the absolute minimum tolerance on a space vehicle. A submersible will be significantly overbuilt for hull strength, resistance to pressure, etc. because the cost of moving this extra weight around under water is much, much lower, than the cost of sending the equivalent extra weight into orbit.

Re:Talk is cheap

[Graymalkin]

I know its in vogue to bash the Shuttle and ISS but you really need to do some research. They both have their problems but they are far from being pointless. At the most basic level the ISS has taught us how to design and build a large structure that needs to be assembled in space. Future long term missions require this domain knowledge. The most Apollo era technology achieved was very basic two-craft docking (Apollo CM-LM, Apollo-Soyuz, Apollo CM-Skylab). The ISS is also what has enabled the private manned launch industry. SpaceX would have nowhere to go and nothing to do if it weren't for the ISS. The ISS can house and bus experiments that aren't tied to a single manned mission meaning extremely long term experiments can be run without needing to design and build a new long duration spacecraft. The Space Shuttle despite its flaws can lift twenty tons of cargo the size of a school bus along with seven astronauts in a single launch. No other current or past spacecraft can boast that capability. This capability allowed the Shuttle to launch satellites, perform five Hubble servicing missions, perform dozens of SpaceLab missions, and build the ISS.

You talk about LEO like getting there is a bad thing. LEO is a great place to do space science without getting your crew killed. LEO has the benefit of Earth's magnetic field which protects astronauts from heavy doses of solar radiation. The presence of the magnetic field obviates some amount of shielding a manned mission might otherwise need which means more spacecraft mass can be dedicated to experimentation. It's also much cheaper (relatively speaking) to get a lot of mass into LEO than it is into other orbits. Getting something the size of the Space Shuttle into a MEO or GEO would be extremely difficult to do with a single launch. The LEO environment is then a great place to perform long duration manned missions to figure out how the hell to keep a crew alive and sane on a mission to Mars or a NEO. LEO is also a good place to learn and practice techniques for building things reliably in space. We're learning how to get a crew to Mars or a NEO by orbiting "pointlessly" in LEO, the skills learned in orbit will be useful on NEO and Mars missions. The altitude of the orbit isn't quite as important as the skills learned while you were there.

Bush mandated a moon shot

[Nadaka]

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.

Military budget is...

[0100010001010011]

$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.

Re:Military budget is...

[0100010001010011]

What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways?

The Apollo program was nothing more than a pissing match. We tossed 13 years we dumped $145B (in 2008 $). That's $11B a year, or $8B more than we're spending now.

Imagine if we spent $600B PER YEAR on finding alternative energy. Imagine if we spent $600B in one year on NASA. We'd be at Mars within 5 years. We slapsticked the Moon mission together in, what now looks like record time.

Universal health care would cost an estimate $70B. $70. For ~1/10th of what we spend blowing people up we could give every man woman and child in America full health care.

$12 trillion

[Carl_Stawicki]

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.

Why don't people listen to experts?

[socrplayr813]

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)

Re:If we could only get the gov't out of the way..

[680x0]

There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.

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.