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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.
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.
Cutting NASA with respect to the deficit is like putting a bandaid on your finger while ignoring the sucking wound in your chest.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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
While I agree with you that cuts are necessary, it must be said that Obama is increasing NASA's funding despite canceling Project Constellation. The cancellation seems more politically driven than anything relating to the federal budget. Even if NASA's $18 billion budget were left the same, it would still be only 0.5% of the total federal budget. The real pork can be found in the $901 billion defense budget and the $696 billion social security program.
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I think you're missing all of the collateral benefits that came from the space race. You're probably typing on one right now.
>Cutting NASA with respect to the deficit is like putting a bandaid on your finger while ignoring the sucking wound in your chest.
Actually not. A little bit of money here, a little bit of money there, an earmark there, another over there, and not before long you're swimming in red ink.
It's unfortunate that the republicans had to piss away the equivalent of moon trip in Iraq that we now need to have this discussion. If people don't like this, they need to hold those people who continue to be loudmouths on TV legally accountable for their decisions (Cheney, Rove).
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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!
It got modded troll, but it's 100% true. The Iraq war wasn't a necessary war, at all. It has wasted a trillion dollars, and we have nothing to show for it but a bunch of fresh graves. The money we wasted in Iraq is the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. 9 billion dollars in Iraq is totally unaccounted for, and the Republican deficit hawks didn't seem to care when it happened and they don't seem to care now. We wasted enough money in Iraq to pay for universal health care, AND a trip to the moon.
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....
First of all, the amazing Mars rovers (by far the greatest NASA success since Hubble) were designed and built at JPL by NASA scientists. (wiki) And it's exactly projects like this that will get breathing room when the vanity missions about "getting a man to x" get shelved. Compare this mission to the far more expensive ISS when you're wondering about the best way for NASA to add to scientific knowledge.
I admit that there is great value in evenutally establishing human settlements off the Earth, but these will have to be huge, in order to be self-sufficient. Robots will have to build them before the humans arrive. This is what we should be aiming at. Until we get to that point, it makes little sense to be sending humans to the moon or Mars. What I want is a good robotic sample-return mission to/from Mars. After that, we should resume artificial biosphere research, because that's what Mars needs if anyone serious is to go there.
While your point makes sense, I actually suspect that you're wrong. If you give grants to people to "think of something cool", they might not come up with much. But when you give them an inspiring and difficult mission which is impossible with any known technology, they will come up with stuff which in retrospect will probably be cooler than if the same money were directly allocated for cool-stuff-finding. In NASA's glory days, geniuses mustered all the intellectual energy they had to make the missions work, and the constraints of budget and physics made them come up with brilliant inventions. I don't think there was a more direct path to those same inventions. I think that this is why there are DARPA challenges: It brings in brilliant engineers and forces them to think outside of the box (but with definite goals). This was one of the (few) ways in which the Cold War had a positive side-effect.
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.
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.
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.
In WW2 you got hit by the Japanese and invaded Germany. In 2001 you got hit by a multinational group of thugs and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm not seeing a big difference there. Anyone who can argue that Iraq was unjustified can just as easily argue that American involvement in Germany was unjustified. Of course, they don't, because their views are inconsistent, but I was simply pointing out that both positions are equally "logical".
Actually, we declared war on Japan following their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, and then the Germans and Italians (their allies) declared war on us, thus dragging us into the war in Europe. In the War on Terror, we invaded Afghanistan because their government was providing a safe haven for a terrorist organization that slaughtered innocent people, and then invaded Iraq because Bush lied and said they were trying to gather up WMDs with which they planned to blow us to Kingdom Come.
There is a huge difference between our motives for invading Iraq and our motives for invading Germany.
Japan and Germany were allied. Germany encouraged Japan to attack the US.
Iraq had never had any relationship to Afghanistan or Al Qaeda.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What comes to mind when I say "long term survival of the human race"?
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
This financial crisis basically showed us that the free market cannot be trusted. It is what got us into this mess in the first place. The government listened to the free market worshipers who said that if left alone, the free market would do the "right thing". Everything would price itself correctly and there would be peace and harmony. What actually happened was that we were shown that the free market is a product of human beings and subject to the whims of human emotion. We had an enormous speculative bubble, cause by people assuming the market would keep going up regardless of what the facts were telling them. That was optimism feeding optimism. If the government had not stepped in, the opposite would have happened. Pessimism would have fed pessimism (and did). The markets crashed, but without government assurances and interventions they would have crashed much further. While it would have caused many businesses to fail (and taught them a good lesson) all of the people who made the decisions would have floated down on their golden parachutes while the average American would have been the one to suffer. While that may have made you happy in your ideal world, in the real world it is real people who lose their homes and lose their jobs. It is real people who die when riots happen. This isn't a game you can just start over if you screw things up. It is people's lives you are playing with.
It seems to me that the health care bill would double health care spending (medicare + social security) at least.
The UK pays less per person to insure everyone than the US pays to insure a minority. They do more than twice as much with less. If we went with something closer to what every other civilized nation on the planet has, we'll cover more people with better care for a decrease in spending.
But you are right in the practical sense, the Republicans will ensure that any Obama plan is sabotaged with pieces that will make it horrible. And neither want to touch the AMA or insurance. So we'll end up with what we are leaning towards now, failing to pay your personal money to a private insurance company will be illegal. Rather than the sensible measure everyone else does and make the government the default insurance company for everyone (with the option to opt for better care with private insurance), we'll force people to buy private insurance and spend public money to increase red tape and bureaucracy, not end it. And others have the medical profession run by the government, rather than a private organization with goals directly against the best interests of the people, but whose actions have the force of law.
We could easily cut costs and more than double coverage by mimicking Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or any number of countries in Europe. But we won't. We'll do the worst possible implementation of it for increased cost and no better coverage. And I blame the Republicrats. The Republicans claim government is bad and shouldn't be trusted, while working hard to make it as large as possible. Democrats say to trust the government while every Democrat elected (save Carter) didn't do anything he said he was going to do and so are, by definition, untrustworthy. Both parties do the opposite of what they say, and they only work together when they think it gives more power to the government in a way they can exploit later. When the voters stop playing the two-party game, the US will be the greatest nation again. Until then, it's the race to the bottom, and we are out of the top 10 now (and top 20, and top 30...). I give the US 20 years before people start trying to leave en masse. 30 or so until Mexico starts building a fence to keep Americans out. It can be easily stopped any time between now and then, it just takes moving to a preference or instant runoff ballot.
Learn to love Alaska
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