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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.'"
yup. wow. last line in the article:
That....is disturbing, if that is their view. Maybe next they need to have a war on science again?
In a 'couple of hundred years' we won't have the material resources left for mass migration. Our technology is easily up to the task right now; we are simply too fixated on the bottom line to invest in our own future.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Why isn't the abundance of Helium-3 more of a selling point for the return to the moon? Especially with the recently /.'d mention of the impending shortage earth-side.
Of course we have money. The problem is we spend more than we take in -- and our spending priorities are all over the board.
That, and the NASA budget is a drop in the bucket of annual spending.
Why not cut NHE by 1% or 2%? Across the board?
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
No, Kennedy had *hindsight*. He saw just how much letting the Soviets beating us in a major space goal made his predecessor look like a chump. He didn't want to repeat that public relations mistake.
Right now, no country is seriously planning to do anything genuinely new with manned spaceflight for the next couple of decades. There's no motivation for a president budget a lot of money to try to beat anybody.
Titanium's not tremendously rare on Earth, it's just more expensive because it's a bitch to refine and process. As I understand it, most of the processing steps require either a high vacuum or a completely inert atmosphere to overcome the high reactivity of titanium at high temperatures (around room temp it forms an extremely well-bonded oxide on the surface, which is why it's known to be corrosion resistant.)
As the default state on the lunar surface is hard vacuum, this opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for metals development, if only we were able to get there, and bring along or develop a suitable power source as well.