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Obama Choosing NOT To Go To the Moon
bonch writes "Obama's budget proposal will contain no funding for the Constellation program, which was to send astronauts to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA will be focused on terrestrial science, such as monitoring global warming. One anonymous official said: 'We certainly don't need to go back to the moon.'"
Space is the future. If you don't go out there we will stagnate and disappear.
In the wrong direction. We should have spent the 60's on healthcare reform, increasing national spending, polarizing our government between the political parties, and copyright enforcement. Yes, that would have given the 70's a golden age such as the one we enjoy now, except without microprocessors -- which we don't need.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Which part of that has anything to do with global warming?
Why is it suddenly NASA's job to monitor global warming? Why not create an agency with that job, instead of re-allocating something that has for many decades been all about space exploration?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
'not to go to the moon in this decade and not do the other things, not because they are hard, but because not doing so is easy'
Or something like that.
...the Space Administration will be focused on terrestrial science?
Man, some days the jokes just write themselves.
I'll probably attract a zillion flames for saying this, but I think this is great. NASA does a great job on uncrewed probes, and that's a mission that can't be carried out by private enterprise. The shuttle and the ISS, however, are pure pork and nationalism; now that the cold war is over, the politicians cover the crewed space program with a thin veneer of scientific research, but the amount of good science that comes out of *crewed* spaceflight is not in reasonable proportion to the cost. We need to get NASA out of the business of doing things that the private sector can do, because otherwise the private sector will never get off the ground in those areas. Suborbital and LEO space tourism are the killer apps for private-sector crewed spaceflight. Let's unleash their energy and creativity to get that going, rather than spending public money on poorly engineered concepts for going back to to the moon.
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It's important to remember that bailing out banks, bailing out people with mortgages, spreading "stimulus" money around, subsidizing healthcare, increasing the education budget and fighting two wars are all expensive endeavours. With the deficit soaring, I'm not surprised NASA isn't getting the money to develop new launch vehicles. At some point Scudder and his followers will be out and humanity will go to the stars again.
Mallory O'Brian: And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?
Sam Seaborn: Yes.
Mallory O'Brian: Why?
Sam Seaborn: 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.
- West Wing
With the Shuttle put to bed, and now Constellation, NASA is done. Yeah, maybe a few robot probes will go out, but that's not what people get excited about (and are thus willing to fund). If it's not welfare or war, it's up for cancellation with this government. The global warming crowd will still get some funding since that's still seen as a viable power grab (not enough people can add, apparently) but that can't last. It seems the commercial launchers will handle what the Air Force can't for government satellite needs.
So, does an aspiring American rocket scientist try to find work in China or hope to get one of the few jobs with Space X, Scaled Composites, or Virgin Galactic?
Amazing - the one government program even Penn & Teller can't bring themselves to hate is the first to fall. Ah, well, competitive forces at play.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So Michael Steele, Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell are really whites wearing blackface?
NASA should be defunded completely, the launch pads closed, and the whole shebang turned into museums. That would at least bring in a little coin. Our country is broke, getting moreso, with no hope of actually ever balancing the budget while having all our other jobs outsourced, industries leaving, illegal aliens dragging down the charitable services, etc. etc.
Unless we can get our factories coming back, stop the outsourcing, etc., there's NASA and a whole whale of a lot of other things that gov't does that needs to be stopped. You can't tax people that have lost a good-paying tool-and-diemaking job, and are working some crappy-paying retail job, to do things like go to the moon or mars.
Get our industries back. Period. Otherwise, the military can do GPS, the commercial interests can keep launching comm satellites by paying the French to do it, and the military again needs weather info and so can do those satellites too. Everything else is just too expensive for the USA to be doing until we're back working again with GOOD PAYING jobs, not the near-poverty stuff we've been gravitating toward for the last 5 decades.
Right...get a grip zippy.
But the are you willing to pay for it? How much in taxes are you willing to pay for manned spaceflight?
Other than pure sensationalism there is no practical reason for manned space flights. We have learned more about our universe through deep space probes, satellites and planetary probes than we could have ever learned from manned space flights. They also have the added benefit of costing less, lasting longer and not killing anyone!
No, they will cancel actually developing a heavy-lift rocket, and instead just 'look at' developing a heavy-lift rocket. It's much cheaper.
Individually and as a race, we are all going to die. We don't have any chance as a race, and getting off "this rock" doesn't change that one bit.
OTOH, we do have a choice about where we direct resources and what effect that has on the quality of life.
And just how the hell do you expect to fly men to these near-Earth asteroids? The shuttle ain't gonna do it. We'd need to develop a replacement vehicle. Like Constellation - the one that he just friggen canceled funding on.
It's like a parent promising they'll take their kid to Disney world if they can bring home 8 A's on their report card - when the kid only has 7 classes. Only an idiotic kid would perceive that trip to Disney as still being in the cards.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
O.K., one thing. He promised one thing that he is making happen.
Compared to the whoopers like "hope and change", we got more of the same and worse compared to the previous Administration, spending-wise, by a factor of 4. "No lobbyists" promise, guess Barak must of forgotten he made that promise. "No earmarks", yeah, that was a good one, huh? Oh and "transparency" in the debate on health care reform -- wait, I could have sworn -- uh, nope, not even close on this one either.
Barak is about on on the "worse" side of scale of politicians promising things and not making them happen, or conveniently forgetting their promises.
Barak makes Bill Clinton look like an honest up-standing citizen in comparison.
Tell you what - since according to your philosophy we can pick and choose where our money goes - however much of my taxes is going to the military? Send 75% of that to NASA instead. Welfare? Send 90% of that to NASA instead.
I'm perfectly willing to pay for NASA via my taxes if I also get to stipulate what I'm NOT willing to pay for.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
No more shuttle. Space Station to be trashed in 2016. I have never seen a nation as great as ours go backwards so fast. Our Space Program is in shambles, and this is the beginning of the end.
We used to be a can-do nation. We now are can't doers. No vision, no insight. I am deeply saddened by where this is all going.
Unfortunately, a trained human geologist could have done everything that these probes have done, within 2 or 3 hours of setting foot on Mars. The robots simply *can't* do things as well as humans can. Think about that... Opportunity and Spirit have been doing fantastic science on Mars for the past 5 or 6 years, and all that work could have done by a trained human within a few hours.
Don't get me wrong, there are situations where they make sense. Putting a human in orbit around Jupiter, to be irradiated by high energy particles for a few years, would be an amazingly stupid thing to do. But don't kid yourself that the robots can explore Mars or the Moon as well as humans could.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Was Constellation, specifically the Ares booster series, ever going to be practical? Let's assume for a moment that the nay-sayers are right, and Ares would be a huge hole to dump money into that wouldn't yield a usable launch vehicle in a reasonable time frame. If so, canceling the program provides a needed wake-up call for NASA, opens the door for consideration of lower-cost alternatives, and perhaps even gives a boost to the commercial spacecraft industry. In the short term, it helps (if only by a tiny amount) stem the money hemorrhage.
I know it's hard to take, but the question I have to ask is -- do we want to get back to the moon at any cost? Or should we take this opportunity to step back and see if there's a more practical way?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This is a rare opportunity to save on the education budget as well. There's no point in studying math and science if there is nothing to do with your education.
Could this mean we'll see a push with privatization of space travel now?
Maybe NASA is hidebound, and Corporate America can get us there faster. But I'd like something to take a little national pride in.
Hopefully some of our tech-billionaires will step up to the plate.
And you sir are an idjut. Money spent on space gets returned ten fold. Technology spinoffs, research, keeping technically trained people employed, motivated and at home, and the actual dollar amounts we're talking about are piddlingly small. Woohoo, cut NASA completely and you save 0.58% of your federal budget. That'll really change everything in some other way that provides more bang for the buck than ten-fold increase and new knowledge? You make me ashamed to be the same species with your give up and surrender, the Universe is too big for us talk.
As great as Opportunity and Spirit are, let put things into context. In their 6 years on Mars the two rovers have travelled a combined 27km. In 3 days Gene Cernan and Harisson Schmitt covered 36km on the lunar surface and collected 50kg of samples.
Spirit has been stuck in the sand for 9 months (and is now permanently stuck). An astronaut on the surface could have solved the problem in 30 seconds.
So while human missions are orders of magnitude more expensive, they also produce orders of mangitude more data. As for risk, there once was a time where humanity accepted risk as the price of knowledge. Less than 10% of the Magellan expedition made it back home.
From the article:
"In [Constellation's] place... NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away."
The 2020 moon return was a decade away anyways. NASA is getting a small budget increase too and this whole thing could open up opportunity for NASA to follow one or more options from their "Flexible Path" which has a series of steps (including some earth science missions) towards getting human beyond LEO again. I think this could actually be a move in the direction of a better thought out, more useful and more sustainable human flight program.
To me that's a good thing.
First, it's pretty fucking funny that you're using a fictional TV show to argue a point. Anyway:
There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.
Uh, actually, since that money went to going to the moon, it didn't go to renewable energy research, education, etc. Fun fact: the percentage of kids in the United States who don't get enough to eat has climbed steadily since the 60's. Right now it's around 13-14 million kids each year.
So yes, there are a lot of people who are dumber and colder and hungrier because of all the money flushed down the drain into what is little more than nationalism in the name of science.
Don't you think we have certain societal obligations before we flush hundreds of trillions of dollars down the drain putting a couple of guys in a tin can above the earth for the world's most expensive dog and pony show?
Newsflash, folks: politicians, even JFK, don't give a flying fuck about scientific exploration. They care about getting their agendas through and re-elected. Kennedy did what he did because if he hadn't, the anti-communists would have had a field day.
Maybe if we'd spent the money on renewable energy technology, we wouldn't be spewing so much pollution into the air to generate power and heat, wouldn't need to fight two wars in Iraq, etc. If our homes were generating their own power and more efficient, imagine what we could do with all that money not being wasted on a complex power grid? Hmm, maybe go into space?
Please help metamoderate.
And the Soviets had nothing to do with the competitive environment? This rivalry even stretched to our involvement to Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc; both winter and summer Olympics, etc. The space race was just another of many races we had to prove "my dick is bigger than yours, comrade"
In some ways, yes, F-16/18s are a perfectly good replacement for the F-35. However at this point the program really has gone on far too long to be cancelled. Defense doesn't move quickly, and given that most of the US's allies are gearing up to retire their old Hornets and Vipers and eventually take on F-35s it would screw over a lot of American allies to can it.
However, it's nearly impossible to make a reliable projection of what kind of fast jet we should be procuring. Why? Because whatever we buy will be in service well into the 2030s and 2040s, and who knows what UAV technology will look like by then.
Case in point, the F-22. Great aircraft, but can't do Air-to-Ground at all. However, if you're using Predator drones as bomb trucks, maybe all you need is a bunch of F-22s to establish air superiority. In this scenario, F-35s look pretty useless. However, maybe you find yourself up against an enemy with cheap Man Portable radar homing missiles and a system to jam Predator signals. Now your F-16s & 18s are sitting ducks and your Predators are useless. F-22s can take out enemy fighters, but there's probably not any to look for anyways. In such a scenario, the F-35 suddenly looks very useful.
The fact is, fighter procurement is an extremely long-term purchase in an extremely uncertain area. Are we getting it wrong? Probably. But can we say, without a doubt, what we *should* be doing? No way. The best solution, if you have the money, is to hedge your bets with multiple systems. Otherwise, it's just a question of guessing and hoping you get it right.
IAAMP