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Former Astronauts Call Obama NASA Plans "Catastrophic"
krou writes "Talking to the BBC at a private function held at the Royal Society in London, former astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan both spoke out about Obama's decision to postpone further moon missions. Lovell claimed that 'it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology,' while Cernan noted he was 'disappointed' to have been the last person to land on the moon. Said Cernan: 'I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership ... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence.' Neil Armstrong, who was also at the event, avoided commenting on the subject."
American can, should, must and will blow up the moon.
I'd rather have health care than a trip to the moon for 4 people.
Maybe if we hadn't squandered a trillion dollars on the unnecessary war in Iraq we could afford things like going to the moon again.
You've got to cut something if the country is too politically polarized to raise enough revenue to cover expenditures. Sending tourists to a dry barren rock seems pretty low on the priority list, especially when robots can achieve the same science goals at a small fraction of the cost.
Bringing men to the moon currently wouldn't add anything of value. It was possible in the '60s, doing it now would not bring any advancement. Space money is better spent on research for new propulsion systems and ways to get off the Earth. When that is done, THEN go to the moon.
We face no external threats, militarily speaking. It's time for us to discard our empire.
And what "empire" is that exactly? Do you demand we let go of Puerto Rico?
Other than that we have a number of military actions in areas where we are supporting democratic governments - Iraq and Iran - that are not in any way part of a U.S. "empire" (for better or worse).
As for the lack of military threats, I suggest to tell that to the people attacking our military and citizens. Perhaps they will stop once they realize they do not exist.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think you're missing all of the collateral benefits that came from the space race. You're probably typing on one right now.
if the republicans got elected the same thing would be going on - very little funding to NASA etc... Now, I can't help but wonder if both sides are really just one side... The all have two things in common. They got elected, and they want to stay elected. That's politics 101.
Why don't more private rich guys step up and fund moon missions?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
You think he's typing on Velcro? Myself, I am typing on a keyboard. They were around before the space race.
The idea that space exploration is giving us (humanity as a whole) good value for money is, frankly, ridiculous. The billions and billions of dollars spent has of course brought some benefits and some cool inventions. But spending that same money on other kinds of research would with a very high probability have yielded more benefits. But I do agree that it would have yielded less fame to the old whiners from TFA.
Aldrin is arguing against a repeat of "Flags and Footprints" on the moon. He is right. The best option you and I have of going into space is a self sustaining space transport industry.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
A child on the Ghanaian Space Agency base on Europa asks her father, "Almost every nation on Earth has built outposts and colonies in the Solar system except America. What happened to them, Daddy?".
"Oh, they decided to stay home and play Dark Orbit instead."
there's probably a few others i'm missing
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That's the conclusion of an independent fact-checking organization known as PolitiFact.
The organization's nonpartisan assessment is expected to be widely quoted by supporters of NASA who are trying to reverse Obama's decision on Capitol Hill. "
Like many politicians before him, Barack Hussein Obama broke a campaign promise. He outright lied in order to get the votes independent voters.
Many news wires are now reporting that Obama broke his presidential-campaign promise to fund Constellation. In response, his supporters (of whom many are African-American) -- e. g., Beelzebud -- are pumping messages into the blogs and online forums to defend Obama.
It's only a pyramid scheme if America ceases to exist.
IT's a pyramid scheme because it depends on the activity of new workers to pay for old ones. Because there are not enough new workers, social security, like many other entitlements, is imploding.
It -could- have not been a pyramid scheme had the USA not embarked on almost 50 years of free trade madness. Because of free trade, the USA had to continuously devalue the dollar to stay at least somewhat in the game, and would devalue again, if the asians weren't foolishly buying as many of them as can be printed. So... savings values face a constant erosion, people look for growth stocks to compensate, more money flows overseas, the dollar is devalued more to compensate, repeat loop, and the country gets gutted.
This is my sig.
I find it interesting you call him a gadfly, the definition of which is "One who upsets the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or attempt to stimulate innovation by proving an irritant."
Did you even read his post? The space program should be about innovation and reaching towards objectives that are meaningful and new. Not about repeating what was done decades ago and abdicating all other goals due to the excessive and expanding costs to showboat without accomplishing much of import.
The constellation program has become a joke and it's shameful to see the people involved with it scrambling to save it for purely self-serving reasons, they'd rather see our space program circle down the toilet as long as they're getting paid.
We need vision, we need to stretch, we need to adapt.
But I think the US Government is right to cut the apron strings between manned lunar exploration and public funding.
One of the biggest issues for lunar activities is going to be infrastructure. That means getting electricity, oxygen, water, food, etc. There are lots of really great theories as to how to do this. What we need is to do is actually start trying these out.
There's uranium on the moon. How do we get to it? How do we use it in a nuclear reactor on the moon? Are we better off with solar? What do we do when we're rotated away from the sun? If we build lots of solar power stations, how do we get the power from there to a moon base?
There's water-ice on the moon, in theory. How do we get to it? How do we use it to create oxygen and water? Do we build our moon bases right next to it? What's that going to do to our ability to get in and out (this water-ice is usually located in dark cold craters which are not necessarily the best landing spots for ships). How do you build a water pipeline on the moon? We can supposedly get oxygen by heating moon rocks. Is that more or less efficient?
How about food? Growing vegetables is nice, sure, and animals are inefficient but tasty. But do you want to stick with a vegetarian diet in order to live on the moon?
Developing the technologies for that is going to cost big money--and that's just so people can live on the moon. Then we have to talk about making money from the moon.
Part of the issue with mining the moon is that there really isn't anything up there that we can't get down here on Earth. About the only thing I've heard of is Helium-3 which may be useful in Nuclear Fusion. But getting the Helium-3 from the Moon to the Earth is going to be pricey. Some ideas, such as fusion plants in orbit may make that cost go down, but you still have to get the electricity to the grid on Earth and if you come up with an efficient way to do it, why not use solar instead of fusion?
So you don't want to mine stuff on the Moon and send the ore back to Earth because it will always be more expensive than just mining it on the Earth. What you really want to do is mine it, refine it, make products out of it, and use those products on the Moon. Here's where private industry comes in. Yeah, they'll do that stuff if they have a market. But for there to be a market, there needs to be entities there to create the demand. Those entities aren't going to be there unless there's some kind of infrastructure in place for them to survive.
For example, I've commented previously that I think the Moon is a great place to build space ships. You have gravity on the Moon, unlike in Earth orbit, so you don't need any fancy system to transport, say, molten iron from point A to point B--let it flow downhill like we do on Earth. A dropped screw isn't going to go whizzing around the planet for the next 100 years, it will fall to the ground where it can be picked up. But the gravity on the Moon is 1/6th that of the Earth. So you can use 1/6th the fuel to lift an object into lunar orbit than you would into Earth orbit--or you can lift something six times heavier. And going outside the Earth/Moon environment will need less fuel if you leave from the moon than if you leave from Earth.
But, again, you need that infrastructure before you can start doing such things. Private industry is not going to pay for the R&D of that infrastructure. They might be willing to pay for the R&D of how to mine and build stuff on the Moon if a customer will come along who will pay them for the finished products (whose prices will contain the R&D). That someone is going to be a Government entity (US or otherwise).
There are now threads of private funding for human activities in low earth orbit. These threads should be encouraged to grow.
FTFY.
By the way, most of that isn't entirely "private" funding. One of their biggest customers will still be the good ol' US
That's based on the assumption that the whole point is to do science, while we stay at home and watch it on TV.
Revive the Constitution.
I don't understand.. look at all the computational power, design automation and advancements in basic materials science since 1969. We should be able to send care packages to the moon via FedEx today.
Personally I would rather see better space based telescopes and remote probes than manned missions in the near term. For the money its just more interesting and provides the highest cost/benefit returns in terms of research/knowledge.
At some point mass production, machine intelligence and less global availability of cheap labor will rapidly start to push more and more people out of the workforce as production becomes more and more automated.
Forget the manned missions to mars... hows about an attempt at something impossible like building a large (>1million ppl) city on mars or terraforming the whole planet. No new tech needs to be invented to get people to mars and back so whats the point in shooting that low? Maybe I watch too much star trek and expect too much or maybe you can't empty a lake with a bucket.
The Obama Plan calls for the US to trade in 30 years of on orbit experience launching a 100 ton Space Shuttle, to allow some rich adventurers to rediscover Gemini technology. It makes absolutely no sense.
One of the things we learned about the Shuttle was that it was a disaster for the US space program. You can have a hugely expensive launch vehicle or you can have a space program. That's the dichotomy that NASA has faced for the past 30 years. We found that out in light of the fallout from the Challenger accident. In 1990, we should have been putting together a cheaper replacement for the Shuttle. Instead, twenty years later we still haven't done so. This is the greatest failure of the US space program, that we chose the Shuttle over a manned space program.
Buzz Aldrin is a well known gadfly and has little influence compared Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan, and Harrison Schmidt.
I doubt that is true. But you believe what you want.
The thing that bothers me here is we've had numerous plans to go to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere. The last such one, Constellation which for all practical purposes was the Ares I launch vehicle with some fuzzy destination goals. None of the leadership at NASA under Griffin would ever be accountable for the resulting failure.
Obama might be setting the US up for another space program failure. He certainly has been turning gold into lead in various other areas of government policy. There's no reason to expect that his magic touch would work differently for NASA. But the killing of Ares I (and Constellation due to its dependence on the vehicle) was necessary. Sure the lack of long term goals is throwing up all sorts of warning signs for me. But not as bad as the announcement of the Ares program.
I completely agree with Aldrin and simply don't understand that anybody is willing to put this story up on the news. When Bush introduced the new plan 6 years ago a lot of people at NASA were rightly protesting against it. Rightly so. We don't need to go to Mars, nor need we go to the moon without a good reason. That money better spent elsewhere.
What comes to mind when I say "long term survival of the human race"?
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
What comes to mind when I say "long term survival of the human race"?
Keeping Earth habitable, as opposed to popping a few tin cans that need constant resupply into orbit and calling it 'colonisation'.
Space has a lot of vacuum, a few rocks, almost no oxygen or water, and zero biomass. Exactly how is that supposed to contribute to human survival?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC