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Cool NASA Tech That Will Never See Space
coondoggie writes to tell us that with the "new and improved" NASA budget on the way it looks like many of the cool projects NASA has in the works will never see the light of day, let alone space. The biggest cut looks to be the Ares heavy lift rocket but other cuts include a new composite spacecraft, deep space network, inflatable lunar habitat, and an electric moon-buggie.
reflecting on how this kind of tragedy can happen, and how it relates to our very rational, ends-oriented world, should read Horkheimer and Adorno's (in)famous Dialectic of Enlightenment and its much heralded account of how the very nature of rational Enlightenment thinking carries the danger that we'll fail to enter into "a truly human state" as a world, instead descending into "a new age of barbarism" marked by things like anti-intellectual mass culture, multiplying high-tech wars, short-sighted exploitation, and other modern ills that appear to destroy society and the planet.
It was written back during the Nazi+Emerging Cold War era, but it remains as relevant a warning today as ever.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
With the cut of Ares and other international status seeking nonsense, NASA can concentrate on their roots of science, exploration, and aeronautics.
An overview "Fact Sheet" on the proposed FY2011 budget for NASA has been published by the OMB at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/factsheet_department_nasa/ The Constellation program is cancelled, and this could mean thousands of jobs lost in Florida, Alabama and Texas at the major human space flight centers. The savings from the cuts will be reinvested in new R&D for future exploration.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Maybe NASA could sell or license some of this "cool tech" to private industry. The private sector would have more to work with and the space agency would get more money for the projects they are left to focus on. And maybe some of the specialists at NASA could fork their own companies with the technology, keeping more people employed.
Maybe they already do this. But the tone of the post makes it sound like they don't.
Developers: We can use your help.
The inflatable structures are able to handle projectiles better than the stiff walled structures since they have some give to them and can disperse the energy across a larger area. The fact that they pack well is just bonus.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
The shuttle is retiring. There's no stopping that. No more external fuel tanks are being manufactured, the rest of the parts chain is shutting down. When the shuttle is gone, America loses manned access to space. And it appears we can't even manage to cobble together a bloody capsule to put atop a normal rocket. This leaves only Russia with manned space capabilities. (I don't know if the Chinese really have anything they'd consider flight-worthy right now.) The Indians and Japanese have their own programs but I don't see much happening in the near future.
The Constellation program sounded like a real soup sandwich. Canceling it would be a good thing if it paved the way for something done right. But that's not happening. Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.
You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we couldn't even begin to imagine at the outset.
There's so much more we should be doing up there. The shuttle was just farting around in LEO. We should end it to do something better, not end it to abandon a manned presence in space. If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm kinda concerned about Weyland-Yutani's business practices though
I dunno, their motto isn't all bad: "Do no evil. On Earth."
The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake. How about easing off on the military spend and using the money for peaceful exploration of space.
Do you really need a military budget that big?
Like, I've pretty much had it up to here with this myth of "private industry" as the salvation of everything. Banks were private industry, and they screwed the pooch not once, but three times in the last 30 years, to the tune of multiple national, no, worldwide economic meltdowns, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and for what? So we can have the pleasure of driving ourselves into the ground with more debt?
By contrast, NASA put a man on the moon.
I'm going NASA over private industry, any day of the week.
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