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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.
How about we explore the forests and oceans first. There's lots of scientific knowledge to be gained right here on earth.
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
With modern CGI techniques, surely faking moon landings should be getting cheaper?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
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.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
You do realize this argument is really stupid. The basic argument goes that doing something difficult and useless is really helpful because you solve all these engineering problems along the way that are helpful for other areas. If true, then doing something useful and difficult would be much more helpful. Why not develop super efficient engines for various modes of transportation? Why not build great high speed rail that could connect cities at super sonic speeds? Doesn't sound possible? Not really, but neither did putting a man on the moon. Difference is, this one would be something when we were done.
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!
Granted, there are a *lot* of wastes in government I would like to see go away before government-funded manned spaceflight, but the US deficit is growing *dangerously* large. If the partisan divide is too great to eliminate anything else, something has to go, at least temporarily, before our social services go completely by the wayside, or much, much worse. I'm not saying that this is anywhere near the best choice. But these days, our country is divided that nothing else can be agreed on. Our politicians are at one another's throats instead of making compromises we need to survive as a nation. In addition, heroism aside, I think that the unmanned and orbital space programs like Hubble, rovers, and the ISS are much more critical for scientific discovery than manned missions. While less of a symbol, they produce immense amounts of useful scientific data. The Bush administration's Mars plans would likely have occurred at the expense of these programs. So there is no good answer. If civilian agencies take up the slack and begin performing the exploration, then there may be some hope.
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.
It's rather interesting that Buzz Aldrin has a completely opposite view of the new plan:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/buzz-aldrin/president-obamas-jfk-mome_b_448667.html
... The President courageously decided to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015. And he directed NASA to spend a billion per year on buying rides for American astronauts aboard new, commercially developed space vehicles-that's American space vehicles. Other NASA funds will go into developing and testing new revolutionary technologies that we can use in living and working on Mars and its moons. ... For the past six years America's civil space program has been aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That's the plan announced by President George W. Bush in January of 2004. That plan also called for developing the technologies that would support human expeditions to Mars, our ultimate destination in space. But two things happened along the way since that announcement, which became known as the Vision for Space Exploration.
First, the President failed to fully fund the program, as he had initially promised. As a result, each year the development of the rockets and spacecraft called for in the plan slipped further and further behind. Second and most importantly, NASA virtually eliminated the technology development effort for advanced space systems. Equally as bad, NASA also raided the Earth and space science budgets in the struggle to keep the program, named Project Constellation, on track. Even that effort fell short.
To keep the focus on the return to the Moon, NASA pretty much abandoned all hope of preparing for Mars exploration. It looked like building bases on the Moon would consume all of NASA's resources. Yet despite much complaining, neither a Republican-controlled nor a Democratic-controlled Congress was willing or able to add back those missing and needed funds. The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when. At the same time, there was no money to either extend the life of the Space Shuttle, due to be retired this year, or that of the International Space Station, due to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean in 2015, a scant handful of years after it was completed.
Enter the new Obama administration. Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official. Augustine's team took testimony and presentations from many people with ideas on what way forward NASA should take (that group included me). In October, it presented its report to the President and to Dr. John Holdren, Obama's science advisor and a friend and colleague of mine. The report strongly suggested the nation move away from the troubled rocket program, called Ares 1, and both extend the life of the space station and develop commercial ways of sending astronauts and cargoes up to the station. And it suggested a better way to spend our taxpayer dollars would be not focused on the Moon race, but on something it called a "Flexible Path." Flexible in the sense that it would redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons. Many different destinations and missions would be enabled by that approach, not just one.
But with the limited NASA budget consumed by the Moon, no funds were available for this development effort -- until now. Now President Obama has signaled that new direction -- what
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.
Better go look at the budget. Obama's budget *increases* NASA spending while removing its most visible mission. Basically, he plans on creating the next Lockheed or Boeing at taxpayer expense.
Quite the opposite, actually. The current Constellation program favors cost-plus non-competitive contracts, while the new plan uses fixed-price commercial contracts with multiple companies competing and developing in parallel, with companies only getting paid for meeting milestones. For example, a number of companies are currently under "CCDev" contracts for developing commercial crew vehicles and technologies, and only get paid the full amount if they meet all of their milestones by the end of 2010. You can read more about this in the budget documents:
http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428356main_Exploration.pdf
The good news for sure is an increase of $6 billion over the next five years. It stresses new technology and innovation (to the tune of over $1.5 billion), which is also good. A lot of NASA’s successes have been from pushing the limits on what can be done. It also stresses Earth science, which isn’t surprising at all; Obama appears to understand the importance of our environmental impact, including global warming. So that’s still good news.
The very very good news is that half that money — half, folks, 3.2 billion dollars — is going to science. Yeehaw! The release specifically notes telescopes and missions to the Moon and planets. That, my friends, sounds fantastic.
NASA’s Constellation program – based largely on existing technologies – was based on a vision of returning astronauts back to the Moon by 2020. However, the program was over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies. Using a broad range of criteria an independent review panel determined that even if fully funded, NASA’s program to repeat many of the achievements of the Apollo era, 50 years later, was the least attractive approach to space exploration as compared to potential alternatives. Furthermore, NASA’s attempts to pursue its moon goals, while inadequate to that task, had drawn funding away from other NASA programs, including robotic space exploration, science, and Earth observations. The President’s Budget cancels Constellation and replaces it with a bold new approach that invests in the building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration
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....
It got modded troll, but it's 100% true.
No, it's one 100% troll. For one thing, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with NASA's budget. For another, picking on wars is like shooting fish in a barrel - you could just as easily argue that getting involved in WW2 was unnecessary for the US.
It has wasted a trillion dollars, and we have nothing to show for it but a bunch of fresh graves.
First off, that's the (estimated) combined cost for both wars, so you're wrong right off the bat. Second, the figures provided by the various "counter" sites are, for some reason, never sourced. If you can provide the raw data to support that claim, I'd very much appreciate it - nobody else seems to know how to find it. Third, there are plenty of things that you can "show for it" - the problem is that you apparently don't think they've been worth the cost.
We wasted enough money in Iraq to pay for universal health care, AND a trip to the moon.
Canadian healthcare - for a population one tenth the size of yours - costs $120+ billion per year. At a cost of roughly 700 billion over 7 years, the Iraq war wouldn't even be enough to fund OUR healthcare, let alone yours. You're living in a dream world. Wake up.
So you're saying Canada can afford 120 billion a year for health care, and the U.S. can't? It doesn't seem to be bankrupting them.
In 2008 alone you spent $386 billion on healthcare, so apparently you can afford twice as much as Canada.
Why is it that I seem to know more about your country than you do?
It's totally inconceivable to imagine that when the Japanese Astronauts, the Chinese Taikonauts and the Indian Hehenauts live and work in their respectable moon-bases, we Americans are still stuck in the bottom of the gravity well.
The worst of all is this --- Not only are we stuck here, we rather waste time debating if we want to give the degenerates free healthcare than find ways to send our troopers to the moon.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
In 2001 you got hit by a multinational group of thugs and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
We got attacked by Saudis based in Afghanistan, so we invaded Iraq.
We could have simplified logistics and saved a bunch of money by invading a much closer country like Jamaica. It would have made the same amount of sense under your logical analysis.
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.
They were allies, declaring war on one was declaring war on them all.
Iraq did not support those who participated in 9/11. Saddam was a horrible human, but his crazy was of a different variety than those who crashed planes into buildings.
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.
I actually agree! But I hope you realize that this is a project that would have to take at least 50 years. Also, it's too much to ask to build self-replicating robots. But the materials for the Martian biosphere have to be mined and processed by robots on Mars, and this will be the greatest technological hurdle. (Those robots, or at least their "sensitive parts" could be made on Earth and shipped.) But you know, designing and building such robots would be a useful thing for us on Earth as well, so I honestly think we should start working on it.
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'd say coming down out of the trees was probably a mistake...
In fact we should return to the trees. By my math, raising the living level of 6.8 billion people by three meters yields a net increase in the human living level by 20.4 billion person-meters. We could achieve the same net increase in the level of human life by sending 53 astronauts the 385,000 km to the moon, but it's important to note that would do nothing for the median level.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ares I was a piece of pork which should have long since been canceled. I'm glad it's gone. Everyone knows there are currently two US boosters (three soon enough) in the same weight and performance category and part of Obama's plan is to use those to go into LEO. This makes sense.
What no one has discussed, either in the pro Constellation crowd or those against, is what the propulsion package will be for Flexible Path. I'd like to see some of the ideas behind DIRECT refined so we end up with a moderately economical, scalable launch architecture for really heavy payloads. COTS is not likely to develop this on their own, they're happy at 25 tons to LEO and under. It's where their profit is. Note, I'm choosing to be optimistic on Flexible path being funded and implemented.
It looks like Orion Lite from Bigelow/Boeing/Lockheed is the front runner for crew transport. I'm not sure how much commonality is possible between it and a future Orion Heavy used for lunar or martian missions. Hopefully building one makes it easier to build the other.
I'm really surprised no one has brought this up in the health care debate:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
Anyway, I'm from Thailand, so I don't really care either way things roll. If the US doesn't bring its health care system up to the level of other industrialized nations and becomes paralyzed by preventable chronic conditions, it will be good for Thailand's "health tourism" industry.
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.
Except that Germany declared war on the United States the following week. And IRaq declared war on the US when..?
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
And you are... or if you prefer... willfully dishonest as you ignore facts on the ground.
Need I remind you that it was THIS ADMINISTRATION (via Christina Romer) who published this rather well known graph that predicted what the unemployment rate would be with/without the '09 stimulus bill... and even with it... the actual has come out to be WORSE than they had predicted it would be without.
Now... could it be that the economy was so much worse off than they knew... perhaps... but that doesn't exactly paint them in a very competent light, now does it? I mean... if they cannot be trusted to know how bad something is... how can we trust them to be able to fix it? (hint: don't do either!)
The fact is... Keynesian economics have never actually worked as proscribed... in fact, they've even gotten their implementation completely wrong and are driven more by what they want than what actually works... and what's worse is they've instead made things far far worse than they would have been than if they had sat on their hands and done nothing.
Remember... I'm not talking about perceptions here... I'm talking about what then canidate Obama, and later President Obama and his administration said they could/would do. I'm sorry for holding them to what they said.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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
When I was 6 years old my parents moved to Titusville, Florida right across the Indian River Lagoon from the VAB. I grew up watching Saturn V's, Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Shuttle space vehicles thunder skyward. I went to school with the sons and daughters of real "Rocket Scientists". I'd say the number one reason I got into the engineering field was the excitement and allure of these kind of epic and difficult endeavors. What inspires people to go into engineering today ? I only worked on Spacecraft and launch systems for 10 years before I got into other things, but would I have been inspired at all by a presidential challenge to build a better battery, or an energy efficient home ? I somehow doubt it. So I would argue that not only does going to the moon spin-of useful technology it inspires the youth of today and tomorrow to achieve great things in engineering !
... while he was writing about the hopes he had on the space exploration and everything. It makes me sad. In some way I'm glad he's gone so he doesn't have to see this.
Having actually attended a lecture at JPL that Carl Sagan gave on exactly this topic - his views of space exploration, I am fairly certain he would be over joyed at this announcement.
His key point in the lecture was that space science - that is, genuine space exploration - did not require manned flight and was far more economical without it, but was politically dependent on manned flight in the U.S. Thus, support for manned flight was indeed necessary to support space science, but only because of the unfortunate realities of space science funding in the U.S.
Up until now his observation remained valid. He would be thrilled to see this extremely costly and anti-productive link broken.
The cries from the "Oh no! Obama is abandoning space!" crowd underscore the fact that manned space flight is a deadly political anchor on actual space exploration.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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