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NASA May Drop Ares I-Y Test Flight
Matt_dk writes "Just one week after the first test launch of the Ares I-X rocket, NASA says it may decide to cancel a follow-up launch called Ares 1-Y, which wasn't scheduled until 2014. Reportedly, program managers recommended dropping the flight because, currently, there isn't funding to get an upper stage engine ready in time. Depending on whether the Obama administration decides to continue the Ares I program, this decision may be moot. Earlier this week Sen. Bill Nelson said Obama may make a decision on NASA's future path, based on the report by the Augustine Commission, by the end of November."
Future Leader: Let's use science to process people into Soylent Green!
I wonder if NASA is going to be able to keep up internal interest on these projects with the way their budget keeps getting cleaved. Hell, I wonder how they managed to keep people onboard, what with a 5 year delay between test flights.
Somebody doesn't love his karma!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Too bad we spend a trillion dollars invading the wrong country based on obvious lies and fabrications. I think we would have been better off spending that money on cool space toys or at least getting Afghanistan right the first time.
We will be paying for the George W Bush's disastrous presidency for a very long time.
So Bush initiates Project Constellation, and at a time when it's barely started, after lots of time and resources have been plown into structuring the project, it's on the verge of being shut down?
Well, if it's shut down, at least we saw some cool flames at the back of a rocket!111 Durr...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It will take 5 more years to get another one ready for testing? Clearly someone else (yea, I know, the nazi) was running things back in the old days when they went from speech to stepping on the moon in about 8 years.
...that Obama is really a conservative, not a liberal.
I hope you're joking...
I suppose in some very liberal circles, Obama is conservative ... if you use "conservative" as a "relative" term. But you usually don't use it in a relative term without stating what it is relative to. A conservative democrat? A conservative republican? Conservative conservative?
Anyway, Obama seems to be more "populist" than anything. He won based on his popularity and charisma, not so much his liberal or conservative policies. From my viewpoint, Obama is very liberal. But then, I'm very conservative. So there you have it.
Far too many ppl think that NASA and other RD programs do better under conservatives, but Nixon, reagan, and W were by far the worst presidents WRT NASA, or any spending on RD programs. To be fair, reagan did massive cuts in civilian programs (nsf, nasa, nih, etc), but he did increase funding to DARPA (not as much as the cuts).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Have you seen his energy initiatives? You can pursue science and "the future of our species" without spending billions on pie-in-the-sky space projects.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a space junkie. I like Battlestar Galactica just like any other red-blooded American geek. And if we were overflowing in riches right now, I'd say let's go for it.
But the practical fact of the situation is that space exploration is only one miniscule part of science, and it is very, very expensive. Yes, you make engineering discoveries, and some of it is really glamorous on the 6:00 news. But if you're looking for bang for your buck, let's be honest. You can pursue science that is much cheaper and which has much more immediate gains by investing in stuff like developing alternative energy, beefing up our computing infrastructure, etc.
Just because money isn't spent on the stuff that you personally think is neat doesn't mean that it's not being well-spent or being put to productive use.
Manned space flight != science.
Not that it isn't worthwhile as a human endeavour.
Sure, let's spend money on science, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that manned space flight is an efficient way to do space science.
were about the same. Both ran up monster deficits for no real reason. Both had economic bumps up front, so, I could not blame them for that spending. BUT, once the economy turned, they both increased the debts and threw money away. Between their debts, invasions of other countries, stealing of American rights, etc, the American dream is about to be the American nightmare.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Cancelling Ares I in my opinion would be pretty foolish, especially after so many resources have been invested into it. Its like, they barely funded the project, so that it struggled to produce, and then after they produced a working system, they decide to kill it off. I know conservatives babble on about private space and so on but I am doubtful that those would be as capable as Ares or that they would be any cheaper. More likely, the American tax payer would likely end up spending millions on some wealthy CEOs salary just like what happens with health care now. The problem with NASA not having enough funding can be solved by making sure it is properly funded rather than spending it on these stupid wars.
It has been said that Obama is not a liberal as a liberal would usually support the national space program instead of wars, along with a single payer health care, and I agree. We will be paying for Bushs mistakes for a while, and now (conservative) Obamas, and the rotten corruption of the conservatives lack of regulation on the banks and the financials, which are throughly republican and conservative, but after years of trying to kill of social welfare programs and the space program, are the first to line up for a huge government handout for their OWN mistakes. The irony, is, the people who have been denied social welfare because they lost their jobs, lost their jobs because of the mistakes of the wealthy elites, including those who totally screwed up GM and so many other American companies and have massively offshored the US jobs offseas, and are taking billion dollar bonuses while they continue to drive the US econom into the ground and screw US workers. Then we reward them with huge bailouts and welfare for the rich!
Change you can believe and stuff? What better than a daring scientific project of national proportions to catalyze the United States, to unite the minds and the hearts of all the people, to inspire them, to give them hope and a vision?
During the Apollo missions America had a dream larger than life, a vision that propelled her forward for decades to come. The creativity, genius and overpowering enthusiasm that this country showed was what, I think, eventually broke the USSR - the Star Wars "threat" was so much more frightening to the Soviets, because they (the old gard, anyway) still had in mind the Apollo missions and thought that these crazy yankees might just pull this off!
America is now just a shell of its former self - a gigantic trade and budget deficit, a country wholly subservient to foreign (mostly arab) oil, and almost bought out by the Chinese government.
You want a stimulus, one that will really stimulate all the people, all their endevours, all their emotions? Give NASA more, much more money, and tell them to dream big!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Another comment from another guy who doesn't understand anything.
In other words, how are those low low deficits from Republican presidents working out for you?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
You're calling him a conservative? Wow. I am not sure he could describe a conservative (smaller government, less taxation, less spending, less private sector involvement, and the ability to make military decisions rather than ignoring the bloodiest month in Afghanistan).
Considering the trillion dollars spent toward our deficit with no honest gain (car sales and house sales that correlate directly with government money are not honest gains), I'd say it points more toward his own incompetence than an unwillingness to spend.
After all, what decision has he made other than to wastefully spend money? It certainly hasn't been anything dealing with Afghanistan or Iraq.
I'd say the chances for NASA are good, in terms of getting funding, but in terms of getting funding for useful projects, I'd say they are probably not going to do so well.
I'm going to break Slashdot etiquette by replying to my own reply, but this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
If you were president, and you had the choice to, say, send a manned mission to Mars to collect some dirt and maybe begin the steps it would take to, if we're lucky and very, very good, colonize the planet a century or two from now, or roll out a national energy infrastructure that will get us off of fossil fuels today, thus keeping our own planet from boiling away (and most likely discovering a lot of very useful stuff that would make such a manned Mars mission much cheaper, safer, and more practical when we DO do it), which would you choose?
Some people are still under the misguided notion that we don't have to make such choices, that we can just do both. That's one of our problems with science initiatives today. We're trying to do everything, and we end up half-assing it all and nothing gets done.
Personally, I'd rather just not have a space program (well, nothing much more than putting satellites in orbit now and then) than spending billions on the white elephant of one that we have today.
The design is inherently unsafe, segmented SRB's. Cost per manned launches estimated to be about $1 billion, the test launch cost $500 million. That's about the same as a shuttle launch, epic fail on controlling cost, Falcon X claims to be able to do that for 1/10 the cost. Just another example of government waste. Oh yeah the SRB's are extremely harmful to the environment when compared with liquid fueled rockets. The private sector can and will do this better for less money and much greater safety.
Agree, especially your second line. The point of manned space flight isn't the science, the point of manned space flight is to get us out into space, where infinite resources are available for the patient race. Science will be done in service to this goal. The goal itself is one of very long term economics.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The summary is trying to make hay. There are other tests already on the board between now and the 2014 Ares I-Y test flight. Project managers simply decided that the objectives of that particular test fly could be achieved by other means (test flights) thereby saving the program unnecessary expenses. A very helpful thing considering their already tight budget.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Bah, his reasoning is wrong anyway. A conservative, as defined in this era, would happily spend money on the project because they would see a potential military/commercial gain from the results. A liberal, as defined in this era, would not want to spend the money because it doesn't do anything to further their socialist agenda and spread the wealth.
Actually, conservative is always used in a relative sense - see for example the Conservative Party of Canada. While they are quite conservative relative to most Canadians and Canadian political parties, they really would not be branded as such south of the 49th.
It's been a long time since a Republican could describe (much less act like) a conservative, either.
NASA is paralized by its own size and poltical bagage.
Space should be explored and public money should go to help fund it, but by people not afraid to try new things and maybe die in the process.
People are going to die, while exploring space, just like every other new environemnt. I dont see anything wrong with that. It is still worth doing.
I'm not sure not spending money on space flight in a conservative philosophy as I at least would consider space abilities to be very much in line with providing for the national defense. There's a lot of overlapping technology and abilities in that realm and most conservatives don't have a problem with the government spending money on programs that are huge boons to our technology/industry/defense sectors. I've lived in both New York and conservative North Carolina and I've never heard any backwoods Conservatives down there complaining about spending money on NASA. But I have heard a lot of saved the world through government programs liberals complain about spending money on space flight when we could be feeding people instead. In reality I think there are people on both sides of the fence that support it and people on both sides of the fence that don't
Either way the one thing we POSITIVELY want to avoid is anyone managing to label supporting space exploration as a "liberal" or "conservative" policy and having party lines drawn on the issue as that way we'll never get it done. Space Exploration isn't something we can accomplish during the time span that one party is in power, it has to be a common endeavor supported by the entire nation.
Maybe it's time to merge NASA with the Military again, just like in the glory days.
NASA might have a chance to a bigger slice of the green pie.
Let NASA compete for a bigger slice of the green pie.
I wonder if thats not part of the problem. Currently everything Washington does is spelled out in US/THEM terms. NASA is not well defined in those terms, so it gets left in the cold while those in power fund only the things that are ideologically theirs....
Which, by the way, is a horseshit way to run a country....
Yes, since when did 'conservative' start to mean 'dedicated to spending as much as possible on massive military buildup and wars of world domination', anyway?
And when did 'spreading the wealth' become un-democratic?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
A liberal, as defined in this era, would not want to spend the money because it doesn't do anything to further their socialist agenda and spread the wealth.
The problem is that "liberal" and "conservative" as defined in the US have no substantive policy differences, just different talking points that the American media sells to American consumers as profound and fundamental differences in policy, to the extent that when members of your two nominally different poltical parties do exactly the same thing those actions are universally believed to have different meanings.
When a "conservative" runs up a massive budget deficit it's to keep America safe. When a "liberal" does exactly the same thing it's because they're growing government power to promote their socialist agenda.
When a "conservative" bails out a business it is "saving the American free enterprise system" (still don't understand that, but that's what "conservatives" say.) When a "liberal" bails out a business it's to reward their friends in Big Labour and promote their socialist agenda.
When a "liberal" says we must "spread the wealth" it's furthering thier socialist agenda, but when Sarah Palin said it--which she did!--it's "conservative" government support of the common man, or Real Americans, or something.
I've put the above examples in conservative-interpretive terms because conservatives are the dominant political and cultural force in America today, as suggested by Obama's continuance of almost all substantive Bush-era policies on killing people around the world and looting the national treasury in favour of Big Business. But one could just as easily put a liberal-interpetive spin on them: "conservative" spending is "supporting the military-industrial complex" while "liberal" spending is "providing jobs for our hard-working men and women" (in the military-industrial complex.) And so on.
No actual policy ever changes as presidents and congreses come and go: the single-party oligarchs and keptocrats change the window-dressing and continue to amass power and loot, and the nattering idiots that populate American political discourse continue to steadfastly quibble with each other as if the two wings of the Party were the least bit different from each other in any substantive sense.
For your own sake: wake up, people. Please.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
How about a project of national proportions to get us off of fossil fuels, or at least completely energy-independent, today, and for a fraction of the cost of whatever you have in mind?
How about a project of national proportions to beef up our computing and telecommunications infrastructure so that every American has pretty much instant, real-time access to, well, pretty much everything?
Or for that matter, how about a massive funding effort of national in medical research, with the end goal of something like a cancer vaccine, maybe even a cure, or other goals such as extending the quality and quantity of life in general? That would certainly captivate me.
I love sci-fi, I love sci-reality, I've been a space junkie since I was a kid, and if I had the chance to go to Mars, I'd sign up tomorrow. But I'm also practical, and I realize that there are a lot better things that we could spend a lot of money on than the space program.
Maybe "change I can believe in" means "we're going to stop spending billions of dollars on white elephants and put that money to more practical use." If so, consider me on board. I don't want the space program to die any more than anyone else, but I do think that as a country, we have much higher priorities that we should concentrate on.
Ares payload: 25,000 kg.
Ares status: Years from flight.
Falcon 9 payload: 29,610 kg.
Falcon 9 status: Countdown on hold pending paperwork.
Seastead this.
It's not about war (why some responses seem to think it is...) it's not about the money really - it's about politics.
The government in just a matter of a couple of weeks dedicated $700 BILLION (with a B) to TARP without question. But they want to cut NASA's budget which is only $17.2 Billion. What did / would TARP get us? Hopefully a bandaid over a problem until the economy works itself out. What would NASA get us?
NASA is very good about sharing inventions with the world. To answer that you need to look at what NASA got us economically over the past few decades:
Joysticks - developed for the Apollo rover, helped spawn a whole generation of consumer video games
Kidney dialysis machines
GPS Navigation
Satellite TV
Temperpedic mattresses (and shock-absorbing helmets)
Automotive insulation
Firefighter suits (based on space suit technology and NASA developed insluation)
Smoke detectors (developed for MANNED SPACE FLIGHT & Skylab!)
And much much more...
That small investment created thousands of scientists and inventors, spun off no doubt hundreds of new small businesses opened by former NASA employees, and provided entire new markets of consumer products. Most importantly, it helped us thrive as a technological nation, with a drive to invent and produce that drug us out of the industrial age and into a tech and service market.
Not to mention, NASA's budget is about one half of one percent of the Federal budget. In cold-war days it was 5.5%. It's like saying "Well now that gas has gotten so expensive, we're not buying any for our family anymore" - despite the fact that how much you spend on gas as a percentage of your overall budget from two decades ago has actually gone down despite the "price" increase.
We're talking about refusing to fund innovation here. NASA is a huge machine of innovation that also happens to explore.
Full article here: http://www.ossramblings.com/is_nasa_too_expensive
...Considering the trillion dollars spent toward our deficit with no honest gain (car sales and house sales that correlate directly with government money are not honest gains), I'd say it points more toward his own incompetence than an unwillingness to spend.
The economic melt-down and the subsequent financial bail-out both started before Obama took office.
Whether this was spent "with no honest gain" depends on whether or not--as was hypothesized at the time by many economists--the economy was about to go into a liquidity crisis and subsequently drop into depression equal to the great depression if immediate action was not taken. (The current belief is that the great depression could have been averted, had the government not been too timid in its actions).
Now, I don't know whether this was really just about to happen, or if it was just doomsaying. What are the chances-- five percent? Fifty percent? 90 percent? And, at what point should you act?
Maybe it was a crisis that we would have come out of anyway. But it seems to me that, if there's even a modest chance that the spending averted another great depression, it's an "honest gain" to me.
(And before you say "well, so what-- they all deserved a depression"-- go do some research on what the Great Depression was really like. It was not a camping trip.)
Yes, since when did 'conservative' start to mean 'dedicated to spending as much as possible on massive military buildup and wars of world domination', anyway?
After World War Two, the Old Right that was anti-war (World War One and Two) began moving in a more interventionist direction.
The Democrats of the era were already in favor in foreign intervention. Before Pearl Harbor, FDR was waging pretty much an undeclared naval war on Germany to help the Allies. Wilson before FDR engaged America in WWI. Truman jumped into Korea, and Kennedy in Vietnam (though it was in the planning stages, IIRC, in the Eisenhowever administration).
The rise of the neo-conservatives provided the spark to twist the Old Right from non-intervention in economy and diplomacy into an evil legion that pretty much approved of any war put before them. Prior to this point, IIRC, the Old Right called before Pearl Harbor for students to sign up to oppose the draft in case of US intervention in Europe. IIRC it was supposed to be the largest anti-war movement in US history, but it was totally destroyed by Pearl Harbor. Odd how they forgot their roots so quickly; the transformation likely began in this era, and I believe this transformation became more or less complete around the time of Vietnam, where many on the American left became anti-war (save for those such as Johnson). There still were (and are) those who follow the tradition of the Old Right in this era, opposing the war, but they were pushed to the sidelines of the conservative movement.
War mongers such as William Buckley became highly influential on the Right, and Republican presidents that were influenced by this new pro-war tradition cranked up the bellicosity. The US military was thus dispatched to Grenada, to Iraq, to Lebanon, and to many other places. Liberal leaders began to pick up some of the anti-war slack, but, just as with the Old Right, they haven't been totally effective. And not all of them have been converted, either. Bill Clinton, for example, began US interventions in Somalia and Serbia. He continued the bombing of Iraq, and also bombed Sudan and Afghanistan half-heartedly a few times after the embassy bombing in Kenya. Returning to a neo-con, Bush engaged the US in yet more war. While he was president, the anti-war movement sprang up. It was mostly confined to liberals, but there were also libertarians amongst their midst.
With Obama's election, the anti-war movement has (sadly) died down amongst the liberals. I still hear libertarians denounce the wars, but I now hear fewer liberal voices amongst them. Conservatives call for the expansion of the war into Iran and, on the furthest fringes, Pakistan.
SSC
Its hard for a person to be really a visionary and convince the people that he *is* a visionary. People believe whatever they see and are told.
Um, no. A true liberal wouldn't "waste" money on anything that could promote the economy (by creating new technologies and new businesses), and would instead want to spend that money on social programs to help "disadvantaged" people who would then use that money to buy booze, drugs, or have more kids to get more benefits, who would all then need free lunches at schools.
What Obama is, I'm not exactly sure. I think he's more of a statist/leftist who wants to create a giant government to build more power for himself and his cronies and corporate benefactors, and appease the voting masses with some hand-outs which don't cost much. After all, look at his actions: he's spent giant fortunes bailing out failing companies run by rich people, which has done nothing but further enrich these people and not help regular Americans at all. He's continued useless wars which only serve the military-industrial complex, and get regular Americans killed. And he's been working hard to pass a healthcare "reform" which wouldn't reform healthcare at all, but would only spread out the giant costs of litigation and malpractice to all taxpayers, instead of actually reforming the system to reduce these costs (which are why healthcare costs so much these days). Basically, he doesn't want to do anything to hurt his corporate bosses in the insurance and legal industries.
I'm not the OP, but what he said is no joke. We're talking about a president that praises the free market at every opportunity, refuses to nationalize assets that have been identified as critical but incapable of supporting themselves, refuses to even breathe the phrase "single-payer", it all adds up to a conservative capitalist pig, and your bloviations about his liberalism change that not a whit.
I never said that other programs don't need to be cut. I hope that the insane amount of money that we spend on the military is, in fact, cut quite a bit and repurposed. I also never implied that we must only engage in one scientific endeavor at a time, either.
I only said that given that there are a finite number of dollars budgeted for scientific research, which will always be true, that most space "stuff" is pretty low on the list of priorities.
I'll happily stand with you in trying to get that finite number of dollars increased, especially by reprioritizing science in general relative to other things such as insane military budgets. If it happens, then maybe we can talk again about how those dollars should be spent, and yeah, maybe the space program will once again be worth it, in its proper place given the new budget.
Until then, I stand by my post. There are far more useful ways that we could be spending the dollars that we have, and it doesn't upset me very much that, given the budgets we have to work with, the space program is suffering from a lack of funding. If it means allocating those funds to more productive scientific endeavors, I'm not against cutting it even further.
Since Nixon, the budget has been at ~1% of the federal budget. It dropped pretty heavily under reagan and W, stayed mostly even with Clinton and Carter (though both dropped it in their last years due to the economy) and increased with Poppa bush. This current budget which is W's has it at .52% of budget.
It remains to be seen what Obama/Dems will do with it. When it comes to ppl screaming that they do not live in their budget, I see nothing by idiots. The president SETS NASA'S DIRECTION. W set it to be massive new undertaking, but then grossly underfunded it (just like everything he did).
Right now, everybody is screaming for NASA to push THEIR idea of what should happen, and few want to provide proper funding for any of it. Personally, I hope that the dems get the clue that the neo-cons did not; Space is near to being able to survive on its own and grew RAPIDLY. This is the time for the dems to pour a BIT of money into it and get this set up. It is NOT hard to do. What is amazing is that with less than and increase of 3 billion next year, 2 billion the year there after, and then 1 extra billion for the next few years thereafter, they can create in space what the Internet did; massive jobs and new frontiers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think you mean Republican and Democrat. Neither party seems to fit the old distinctions of conservative and liberal. Instead, they have just been used by the media to polarize the country, while in the end they aim for the same things.
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