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NASA Unveils Sweeping New Programs For Next 5 Years
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that after terminating the Constellation program, which was to develop rockets to return humans to the moon, NASA has announced that instead it will focus on developing commercial flights of crew and cargo to the ISS and long-range technology to allow sustained exploration beyond Earth's orbit, including exploration by humans. 'We're talking about technologies that the field has long wished we had but for which we did not have the resources,' says NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. 'These are things that don't exist today but we'll make real in the coming years. This budget enables us to plan for a real future in exploration with capabilities that will make amazing things not only possible, but affordable and sustainable.'"
"Among the new programs is an effort known as Flagship Technology Demonstrations, intended to test things like orbital fuel depots and using planetary atmospheres instead of braking rockets to land safely, a program that will cost $6 billion over the next five years and will be run by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kennedy Space Center in Florida is to get $5.8 billion over five years to develop a commercial program for carrying cargo and astronauts to the space station. These new programs will be 'extending the frontiers of exploration beyond the wildest dreams of the early space pioneers,' added Bolden."
Sounds like NASA's gone low-tech using brooms to sweep away the old and introduce the new stuff rather than simply unveiling new programs.
NASA does a hell of a lot more than just launch people into space. This new budget will give NASA a leg up on real cutting edge R & D in new technologies. All the billions of dollars going towards getting men to the Moon will be spent on next generation rocket tech and many other exciting fields.
How many of us grew up wanting to be scientists an engineers because we thought NASA was the coolest thing since the Super Nintendo?
We have a terrible shortage of scientists in the US and a culture that ill-supports our nerdy kids. NASA serves an an inspiration not only to them, but to children all over the planet to get into the sciences and excel. The trickle-down technologies that come from NASA research are just a bonus.
NASA is at its best when it's researching and developing new technologies to achieve the previously unachievable. Obama's nixing of the Constellation program was a good move as it was a program based entirely off of existing technology. NASA's budget overall has increased, and their renewed focus on future tech will inspire budding students to take up engineering, computer programmers, physicists, mathematicians, and other difficult fields. This will certainly reap rewards long into the future.
I feel inspired
Eventually getting us off this slowly dying rock? Doy? Extinction WILL eventually happen if we stay here...the sooner we get out into the stars, the greater the chance our species has for surviving.
Of course, the counter to that argument is that we've fucked up Earth so badly, is it really a good idea to inflict ourselves on the rest of the planets out there...
Living With a Nerd
Someone thought of a way to drive our economy, create new jobs, set up new business opportunities, and create a whole sector of global wealth, all without raiding some shithole country in Farthest Outer Asia. I'm floored.
Smell that? That's sarcasm.
Getting off this slowly dying rock, global warming and other man-made disasters aside, is not going to be a matter of survival for many thousands of years to come. During which we will hopefully acquire the technology to _actually_ pull it off, compared to the current situation in which, simply, we have nowhere near the skills to do such a thing.
so, in short:
1) We can't establish a permanent self sufficient extraterrestrial colony anywhere at the moment, and even an Apollo or Manhattan size project won't make this possible for quite a while. We really can't go anywhere at the moment, not even within the solar system, not even on the Moon.
2) We *will* eventually have the technology to do that in a not-so-near future. This Flagship Technology Demonstrations thing is a step in that direction.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
'extending the frontiers of exploration beyond the wildest dreams of the early space pioneers,'
NASA underestimates dreams
I'm seeing a lot of talk about figuring out how to do things that we might want to do, maybe, at some point.
You know why Apollo worked? We set goals and a date, and the figuring out took care of itself.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
We fucked up earth because we have little experience. We'll get it right eventually.
Agreed that this isn't anything that will need to happen soon...but we have to start developing the technology and methods that will eventually lead to it at some point, so why not now?
If we took half the money we spend killing people and instead used it to research space flight, we would be MUCH further along at this point.
Living With a Nerd
I'm glad to hear that something is happening. After hearing about the budget cuts from the government for the space program, I was worried about where we were headed in Science and Technology. Kudos to NASA for putting something progressive together.
- xserv
"I love lamp."
Why would it be mankind's goal to not get extinct? It is a desire for many by unconscious processes in the brain as developed through evolution (Citation needed), but is it necessary to make it a conscious goal?
damn if they aren't doing a good job apologizing for putting NASA on the back burner. Effectively ending US leadership in space is about the sum of it, with all the required "forward looking" related buzzwords. Yet for every politico speak buzzword fest there is the followup of "no long range plan"
In other words, there ain't money for rocket science. Really, until some other nation lays claim to the moon or really starts being pushy in space our space program is going to be full of double talk and expectations. So, uh, yeah, they have the resources now to develop x,y, and z. Well duh, your not doing any expensive launches your bound to have money for other things. The problem is, research is not exciting to the public. It does not capture the imagination. So NASA will fall further from the public's eye which will make it easier to keep marginalizing it.
It does not generate sufficient votes in an entitlement first generation. Why spend money to go to the moon when we can use the money to provide entitlements which generate votes which keeps us safely in office.
Hell, NASA's budget ain't larger than a rounding error in the overall scheme of things. To tell the American public with a straight face there ain't money to do that is astounding. Whats worse are all the people running to defend it. We just spent more money shoring up some major banks than we spent in the last ten years on the space program! The stimulus package had more pork than NASA has budget.
What those articles do is nothing more than spew a well rehearsed apology for going nowhere.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why is it that I always see this argument ("get us off this dying planet") coming from the people who seem to have the least knowledge of the planet's history and life's history on this planet? And most importantly of all, they have ZERO understanding of the timescales involved (hint: in 7 BILLION years there will be nothing even remotely related to humankind existing anywhere near our solar system).
IMHO, at this technological point all efforts should go towards establishing a fully inhabitable and equipped space station.
Not a web of tiny corridors, but a large building, sith actual rooms, artificial gravity, etc.
First step? Reduce a hundredfold the price of pushing stuff into orbit.
almost everyone knows this one is close (by generational standards) to toast, there's just no valid discussion re: survival/re-creation.
the notion of discovering a 'new' habitable planet is all the rage amongst the greed/fear/ego based population. not very likely any time soon enough.
never a better time to consult with/trust in your creators, who can change everything in the wink of an eye, whilst providing more than enough of everything for everyone/everywhere without any infactdead personal gain motive since/until forever.
these days are well documented in all of the spirit based manuals. see you on the other side of it (the big flash)?
Members of the U.S. House panel with direct oversight of NASA vowed Wednesday to oppose White House plans to cancel the Constellation moon rocket program, calling the proposal a “deficient” idea that could jeopardize U.S. leadership in space exploration.
The criticism, from both Republicans and Democrats, underscores the difficulty that President Barack Obama faces in convincing Congress of his plan, which would terminate Constellation and instead rely on commercial rockets to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
I predict that the usual political sausage factory will preserve some part of Constellation. Look how long the F-22 lived on life support.
I'd like to see serious devotion/development into nuclear propulsion tech.
There's BILLIONS of dollars in potential earnings from manned space flight in the private sector. First it will be ventures like Space Ship Two that send people up for a couple hundred grand a pop. In a few years there will be the first private orbital manned private spaceflight. There's ideas for hotels, private moon missions and much, much more.
NASA has successfully pulled this load for 50 years (of course Apollo more than Shuttle). NASAs turn at the forefront is over. Its time for the private sector to start doing the manned flight inspiring.
Are they hiring janitors? For Mars??
for every astronaut we send up into LEO, we can probably send 40 cutrate probes all over the solar system. hell, as the predator drones in afghanistan show, not even the military needs pilots anymore
the point is: the days of needing pilots and astronauts is over. everything can be done remotely for orders of magnitude of less cash outlay, for much greater amounts of quality science
instead, send probes, hundreds of them. send 20 to saturn. send 40 to jupiter. lose a few. who cares? get them up there fast and keep cranking them out. fire and forget. FOR FAR LESS MONEY, ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, THAN A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM TO THE MOON. do quality science remotely. do it on a giant scale
to hell with sending men to the moon, to hell with sending women to mars, enough of that pointless cold war chest thumping. let india and china play that idiotic nationalist game of who has the bigger penis now. sending human beings into space, for the foreseeable future, is a vanity, a conceit, a waste of money and time, like a rich guy buying a ridiculously expensive car just because he can
lets give up the puerile boyhood scifi fantasies, and start doing real interplanetary on a massive scale... for far less money!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sith rooms? What, the anti-google? I don't know that I want a sith room in orbit above me. Who knows what shit the sith might drop on us.
Why is it that I always see this argument ("get us off this dying planet") coming from the people who seem to have the least knowledge of the planet's history and life's history on this planet?
I said "slowly dying"...which, given the way we are affecting things (I don't mean global warming, I mean pollution), it is not out of the realm of possibility that Earth won't be able to sustain human life in a few thousand years. Regardless of pollution, we will also eventually use up all of the available resources on this planet, which means unless we have the technology to live on (or at the very least collect resources from) other planets, we will be screwed. The kind of technology necessary to move or collect resources isn't going to be developed overnight, which is why we need to start now.
Why is it that when people make assumptions about others around here, they almost always post those assumptions as an AC? Sack up and log in.
Living With a Nerd
As per the lack of NASA manned space funding...
from "The Right Stuff"
No Bucks, No Buck Rogers" or in this case "No Buck Rogers, No Bucks"
NASA paved the way with huge, expensive spacecraft. It's time now for the USA to put private sector ingenuity and efficiency to the Space sector. The US government should put some nice Tax incentives in place for space companies to keep them in the USA, thus keeping incentives for engineers and scientists to stay here.
It isn't a waste of money if it pays for itself in Private hands!
Brought to you through a no-bid contract to Lockheed Martin.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
The whole "shortage" thing is just a ruse to justify going overseas - that's all.
Any business person who says that there's a shortage is BS'ing.
I can't tell how many times I've worked with folks with graduate science degrees who were there because they couldn't get a job in their field or because being a programmer paid a hell of a lot more than being a scientist.
I used to work as a contractor at NASA writing real-time GN&C software for space vehicles. I was very young, but I do recall watching TV when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. It didn't really mean that much to me, but it was one of my earliest childhood memories. July 20th is an important date for me, personally.
Years later, I did very well in math and science classes, so my engineer/pilot father pushed me towards engineering as a profession. I planned to be an EE, but fate and transferring between Universities forced me into Aerospace Engineering. When I was eligible to transfer into the EE program, I chose to stay put and concentrate on aircraft design, fluids and viscous boundary layer CFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics. At graduation, none of the aircraft producing companies were interested in me due to lower grades (I worked 25+ hrs/wk and paid my way through school with ZERO loans). I was offered a job at a NASA contractor writing GN&C software. Non-CS graduates were better in that role - we weren't interested in doing every trick the compiler or hardware allowed. We wrote highly maintainable, solid, boring code that worked. Our error rate was/is the lowest in the world, at a price in productivity. In 5 yrs of that job, I introduced 1 error. I probably wrote a total of 8,000 LOCs. That counts 4,000 initial values for a big new failure mode module. I was highly specialized and knew my marketability was very limited in coding. I was an expert at software development processes with very low error rates, however.
Took a few C/C++, OO, and other classes during that time and found a position writing cross platform code in the mission control center rebuild for the space station and shuttle updates. That taught me *NIX operating systems and cross platform GUI programming. Highly marketable skills at the time. I was the Windows and OS/2 porting expert on the team and responsible for bringing the software into the new MCC's world-wide, Canada, Russia, France, etc. As the new development for the project was completing, the NASA sponsor added me to a list of critical skills required to continue the project. Basically, it was a job for the life of the project. I worked for the "development" contractor, not the "run/maintenance" contractor company, so by doing that, he was taking huge political risk for him and me. He was very politically powerful and anywhere I worked within NASA (we had team members at JPL, AMES, Huntsville, and Goddard in addition to ESA folks), I'd be pulled back at least part time to work on the project. He never asked if I were interested in the position either. I left and have been working in the private sector since mid-1996. I pay more in taxes now than I earned at NASA.
NASA is a highly political entity, both externally with congress/funding and internally with the different teams getting the best resources.
NASA provides welfare for engineers and a way to get political favors for congress. Nothing really new has come from the manned space program in years. All the new propulsion crap being rehashed now was ground tested in the 1950s. Until they take 5+ experiments into space and let them be proven in around moon flybys, I won't be convinced we aren't wasting money. NASA is too afraid of failure to risk anything now. Failure appears to congress like throwing money away, regardless of how much knowledge is gained as part of the failure. OTOH, going into space is hard. People will die. Expect it. Commercial space science can take the risks that NASA can't. The people who go into space and don't survive should be certain to have iron clad life insurance policies. The only people getting rich off space technologies today are the spies selling secrets to foreign governments.
was to develop rockets to return humans to the moon
I'm confused. How did they get here in the first place?
Just because they don't like it here, does not mean that we have to send 'em back on NASA's dime, dammit.
I mean, what have the Lunar humans ever done for us?
Watched the first Moon landing live [sic] on TV?
When I was a kid, there were only two* things I played with: Hot Wheels, and Major Matt Mason, Mattel's Man In Space. I was either going to be an astronaut, or a race car driver.
*Up to a certain age.
i welcome all the budding dr. nos out there. if you have a lot of cash to blow, go ahead and do it on a space fantasy. what the hell do i care?
however, my comment has to do with what nasa does with our public money, and a national program of unmanned space probes certainly makes the most sense, for many reasons, not least of which is that it can be really cheap: lots of science bang for very little buck
there's no reason to give that up because some rich dude has a space fetish
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
NASA cannot do anything long term because they have no long term funding - every year their funding is up for the chop in the name of political expediency. Since almost ANYTHING NASA can do is long term, this means they really cannot do anything.
So, here's my proposal as to how to fix this. This would require Congress passing a law, but once the law is passed, Congress is out of the loop.
1) Create a class of bonds - NASA bonds.
2) The money from selling these bond SHALL BY LAW only go to funding NASA.
3) Any technological spin-offs from NASA developments funded by these bonds SHALL be owned by NASA, SHALL be licensed to industry under reasonable and non-discriminatory rates, and those license fees SHALL be used to repay the bonds.
4) Interest rates on the bonds SHALL be based upon the license fees above - no fees, no payments. In this sense the "bonds" aren't "bonds" in that they can fail.
5) IF NASA can convince the market the bonds will be profitable, THEN the bonds will sell well and NASA will have a steady source of funds. If NASA cannot convince the market, then the bonds won't sell to the market.
6) However, if you are truly a star-struck geek, you can still buy the bonds, even if you don't think they will pay off, if you feel that the work is worth the risk of losing your money.
7) Since the funding is now voluntary, nobody can reasonably complain about "their money being wasted" (not that will stop them).
8) If NASA starts doing things that people don't want to fund, the bonds will dry up, and NASA will (hopefully) get the message.
9) For those who will claim this is just "NASA, Inc." - not quite. A company MUST make a profit, and failing to do so can be actionable by the shareholders. This setup purposefully allows NASA to NOT make a profit.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The reality is that the closer you are to the money, the more you'll make. It doesn't make sense
Sure, it does. You have more visibility, more negotiating power, and being "closer to the money" means it takes less effort to redirect some of that money in your direction.
No, it doesn't even work that way. The sales guys don't even have to expend effort to redirect money in their direction: they get obscene commissions on the sales they make, sometimes on top of high salaries.
The engineers (or whatever job it is) who make it all possible are seen by management—which is usually made up of former salesmen, or people in the same social circles as the salesmen—as interchangeable cogs, who can simply be swapped out if they start to get too uppity about pay. Because it's not them who will have to work three times as hard to both pick up the slack of the work not getting done because they let go someone who had been there for 10 years, and train that person's replacement, while still getting all your own work done...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
sith?
isn't a freudian slip when you say one thing and mean your mother? :-)
Ya gotta have the throw weight to do anything in space. Orbital braking and fuel depots are cool but mass into orbit rules. We need to develop a really big booster so all the boys can orbit their toys. I did not see this addressed in any of the cited articles. I want a big booster first. Then we can play with the finesse stuff.
What, me worry?
I mean NASA is seriously fucked up at this point in time. Every time they try and do something the rug is pulled out from under them. I know it's cynical but when I was growing up watching all this I really thought space would be accessible to a greater portion of the population than you can count in less than a minute.
It's seriously fucking disappointing and I just can't even read this stuff from NASA anymore cause it's more of the same 'were gonna do this we're gonna do that' blah blah blah.
NASA has gone from being a 'can do' organisation to a 'gonna do' organisation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
because when the day comes to send actual people into space, we will know WHERE TO FUCKING GO and everything WILL BE REMOTELY SET UP ALREADY
what do we lose? a little science about how our bones degrade? ok, i can deal with that loss of science... because we did 10,000x that amount of science in other fields for 100x less money instead!
fuck the idea of astronauts for the foreseeable future. 100% serious
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If we took half the money we spend killing people and instead used it to research space flight, we would be MUCH further along at this point.
If we took half the money we put into entitlement programs and put it into getting better education, we would be much better off. Instead, we shunt money to people who WON'T do anything with their lives but suck on the gov't teat and spit out kids to get MORE money. Then THEIR kids do the same thing. Welfare reform is a joke. People just move to places when the money dries up. And yes, I KNOW people like this.
when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
i want to see RPI managing 5 probes on venus, i want to see lehigh managing 10 probes on the moon, i want to see northwestern managing 15 probes on titan. i want to see carnegie mellon and case western arguing over which of their probes gets to prospect the interesting block of ice on ganymede, because they both spotted it at the same time. i want to see caltech sending out an email saying they don't have enough researchers to manage their 50 probes. i want MIT sending out an email worrying about running out of places to explore. i want to see bickering about coveted slots on launch windows when mars is closest to the earth. i want traffic jams of probes in space and on other planets
hell, i want to see AP Space Exploration 101 at Stuyvesant High School, managing their mars rover with a twitter-like interface, high school students deciding where to go and how to get there. i want to see Brooklyn Tech hack Stuyvesant's mars rover and drive it off a cliff. a few red faces, and no one worries that much about the loss, because we are cranking out dozens of probes a month
AND WE CAN DO ALL OF THIS FOR FAR LESS MONEY THAN ONE OR TWO MISSIONS OF MEATBAGS TO MARS
the day of the astronaut, for the foreseeable future, is over folks
bring on the era of cheap, quick, mass produced remote probes as the dominant face of spacefaring in our lifetimes
we are in the embryonic stages of space exploration. your firefly and star trek fantasies, i'm sorry, are many centuries away. please lose the false, extremely expensive assumption that people in space is necessary for a space program. sending bags of meat into space, in your lifetime, is nothing more than a display of vanity by the rich. its not real science, and it can simply be ignored by our public entities as a valid pursuit
but if you are really, really attached to the idea of meatbags in space, then go glom yourself onto the rich assholes with space fetishes wasting their disposable income on the conceit. but for the rest of us, enough with the boyhood fixations. let's roll up our sleeves and do easily achievable mass quantities of interplanetary science the best and cheapest way possible: probes. lots 'em. right. now.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
or "To send a robot where no robot has gone before" doesn't exactly sound quite as exciting as the original phrase.
Of course, the counter to that argument is that we've fucked up Earth so badly
Oh, we haven't harmed the earth, it will do just fine without an ecology, or even without any life at all. It is we, ourselves, that we are fucking.
We wouldn't be the first to "ruin" the earth, either. The very first life here poisoned its atmosphere, filling it with the poisonous oxygen. Guess what? They're dead, Jim. The oxygen that they themselves created killed them.
Free Martian Whores!
for coming around to the superior approach
spread the word, evangelize with me
we need to wake the fan boys out of their star trek fantasies and the false need for putting bodies into space and get to work instead on inexpensive, rapidly deployed, unmanned probes. lots of them, quick, cheap, easy. fire and forget, lose a few who cares, crank them out by the dozens
there's lots of science to be done, a lot more cheaply and a lot more easily and faster than one pissing and breathing meatbag on mars which only achieves a vanity, not real science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't think NASA or the powers that be understand this simple statement:
I WANT TO GO TO SPACE.
Lots of us do. I would put a large bet on saying that more than one of us would be an astronaut for free because it's exciting and inspiring. With the manned space program gone, the sky really IS the limit.
So much for all that final frontier stuff...
Warren Ellis: "The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species."
Research is great, and I think NASA should do it, and I hope they continue to do it.
But not at the expense of actually doing things.
The way I'm reading the spin is we basically canceled our space program so that we can think about having another one some day.
That's fucking depressing.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
and i look forward to the day when we can sustain ourselves offworld
until such a day when we have the infrastructure and cash outlay to afford that, unmanned probes will establish the science and probably build the actual facilities that will help us realize that goal
then we can worry about the next adage we need to fulfill: "keeping all your breeding pairs in one star system is a retarded way to run a species"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Go disposable as others have said men in space are political not science. Man rated hardware just costs too much. Not that I don't love the right stuff. Large dangerous machines that go fast are needed.
What, me worry?
... To explore strange new worlds; To seek out new life, and new civilizations; To boldly go where no man has gone before.
But there seems a lack of definition and that worries me. There has to be concrete goals to make this work. It's all good and well if we develop a new ion engine that get's you to Neptune in 5 years, but not so good if it really can't put anything less than a probe there. Where are we going is the question?
we do what we can afford. and if we can send out 100 probes, or 1 meatbag to mars, for the same price, its a no brainer to send out the probes, and to hell with the meatbag
and those probes can do the science and find where to go and set up the facilities that will be needed to support humans when we finally DO get humans out there
"But that doesn't mean we sit on our butts and expect the technology to magically appear."
what the hell is that supposed to mean? sending out astronauts is the only way to advance technology? what of all the science the probes will be doing, at much greater quantity, at much less cost?
"Did Balboa or Columbus wait for diesel-powered cargo ships to do their dangerous trips? Did Lewis and Clark wait for a transcontinental railroad to magically appear?"
no, but if they had probe technology, you would have never heard of balboa, columbus or lewis and clark, because what those guys discovered would have been discovered centuries before they were even born
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is not about science. It is not about competing with anyone, either. Drive to push our boundaries doesn't necessarily has to stem from virility, as you seem to imply. Women do it too. Testing one's powers against increasing challenges is normal part of living, growing, maturing and finally (when failing at it) admitting own approaching demise. It is something we normally do instinctively, because we can, as long as we can. That is what living beings do. Collecting more astronomic knowledge is very well justified, especially for us geeky types, but primary goal of space exploration from the beginning was to empower, enable ourselves to travel further and to survive in harsher environments. As such, it appeals to almost anybody and consequently it gives the scientists and engineers aureole of heroes. Without such feats, without giving masses what they want, the thrill, the excitement, we are just tolerated inferiors or unintelligible villains who will be done out with when next religious hysteria arises from everlasting realization that humans are mortal.
Living off the land in space is the big issue. It's sad NASA still seems obsessed with bigger rockets and Cheap Access to Space (CATS). In 1980, NASA had a great plan, outlined here, which would lead to the Design of Great Settlements (DOGS):
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"""
What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly- elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today.
"""
See also my comments here:
"Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space: Both CATS and DOGS are needed... "
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/f65a889ca9a6b2c1
"""
So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossipped about by academics.)
Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't make sense, as much as people have touted various suggestions. The closest might be He3 mining for aneutronic fusion if we otherwise had that technology, but even that issues (energy) is probably more easily solved through conservation, energy efficiency (e.g. R60+ home insulation), and photovoltaic and wind etc. alternate energy modes (which are rapidly proving cost effective for many applications, and will be only more so with new processes and materials over the next twenty years). Asteroid mining turns out to not be that useful, since recycling is a much better idea. Zero gravity turns out to not be so valuable after all for
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
a probe is merely an extension of a human's senses
if you send a probe, a human being is still evaluating, deciding, and learning, just as if he were standing on an alien surface
yes, with a time delay for radio signals. as if whatever a meatbag is learning, deciding, and evaluating on an alien surface isn't also time delayed when being relayed back to earth! and how much more does it cost to send the guy instead?
think of the military guys sitting in a cubicle farm in nevada killing al qaeda assholes remotely from predator drones. why do you need those actual guys sitting in the actual drones? YOU DON'T! what are you gaining by doing it remotely? what are you losing by doing it remotely? THINK! drones are the model for space exploration in our lifetime: more bang for the buck, very little is lost, plain and simple
and what of the massive price reduction? sending 1 meat bag to mars=sending 100 probes around the solar system. why don't you see that the tradeoffs between meatbags and probes obviously and overwhelmingly balance out in favor of unmanned probes?
think of sending probes as the same as sending astronauts, but the astronaut is sitting in a room in cape canaveral using a probe to see, hear, feel, and touch FOR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS MONEY
why don't people see this? because of fan boy sci fi fantasies, that's why. everyone wants to be an astronaut. 5 out of the 5 million who want to be astronauts will actually get the chance. but with drones, 5,000 out of 5 million who want to be astronauts get to do real space science... remotely instead. so think of what your boyhood fantasies and your mental deathgrip on the "need" to send meatbags into space is costing you in terms of your real chances, in your lifetime, to do real space science
the fan boys have inculcated star wars and star trek as the only cognitive model that makes sense to them. you adhere to the idea of astronauts out of passion, not logic and reason. SOMEDAY, we'll go into space. and our probes will have, in the meantime:
1. decided the best place to go
2. made massive strides in science and technology
3. even set up the infrastructure and facilities waiting for our arrival
compare that with the emotional but expensive and impractical and limited idea of actually going there in person first. its poor strategic thinking
face facts: we only have extremely primitive spacefaring technologies. work with what you got, and resign yourself to the fact that firefly is centuries from now, and will never occur in your lifetime
you get probes instead. work with what you got. if you instead waste your resources on investing in the idea of meatbags in space instead, you will satisfy some sort of atavistic fantasy life, but you will also see far less discovery and far less science in your lifetime, because the simple truth is that your financial and technological resources are limited
it really is a no brainer: no more astronauts. stop wasting your time and money on that conceit, please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So lets reform welfare laws so that they only provide money and support for unemployed residents of Mars or Alpha Centauri. As lazy as they are, many welfare recipients are quiet resourceful, I bet they could McGuyver some kind of spacecraft and extrasolar tenement housing. This solves so many of our societies problems that I am amazed that we haven't pursued this before.
and it is obviously fucking stupid to send a meatbag into space instead of 100 probes for less money
i'm angry because i am seeing less scientific discovery in my life time because some macho posers have boyhood astronaut fantasies
i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
YOU are seeing less space science in your lifetime for the sake of a chest thumping conceited vanity, so get angry if you care about space exploration and science
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bull. Our species has survived much worse than what is happening right now and will survive. Extinction of the species is not a given.
I've got three buddies that prove a species can survive a hell of a lot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_iguana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bearded_Dragon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_uromastyx
Those species go back at least 20-30 million years, the Uromastyx and Dragon's skulls go back 290 million years and I'm very optimistic that humanity will survive at least another million.
Even if AGW leads to an ice age, humanity will survive, it survived other ice ages when the only environmental changing technology we had was fire.
the positives for manned space exploration. can you think up any more? your list is rather meager
now, do you want me to trot out the list of positives for unmanned exploration a third time?
compare and contrast, arrive at the obvious superior solution. however, it seems you have a mental block on what should seem obvious, so here's a thought experiment for you:
why is the us military using unmanned drones above waziristan?
could they use piloted aircraft instead? why aren't they then? make a list of the positives and negatives of both scenarios. work it out in your head. if course its not 100% analogous to space exploration, but if you begin to understand why unmanned drones driven by guys in cubicle farms in nevada is superior, then will at least begin to understand the simple truth about the obvious superiority of unmanned space exploration too
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
meat bag
(i keed, i keed ;-)
point taken. but i'm arguing on slashdot, not presenting to congress: rhetorical flair trumps polite integrity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Apollo program was unique in many ways. One of which is that you can look up at night and see the moon. I'm all in favor of establishing a permanent base on the moon: the idea that you might live up on that white ball sparks imagination. It would provide a good testbed for true deep space manned exploration, as well as a good launching/supply pad for such missions. Mars will NOT duplicate the moon experience: it doesn't have the "look up and see" component, and I think a permanent colony will be far more inspiring to folks than the "Wow, an astronaut set foot on object X and made a speech!". The idea that we can LIVE long-term somewhere other than Earth is inspiring -- the idea that we might commute there is even more inspiring -- and the idea that we can follow up on exploration (the Moon) with settlement is also inspiring.
BUT, robotic missions can be inspiring, too. Think of the Mars rovers, Hubble, Voyager, etc, which all spark the imagination. You just have to pick the right kinds of missions, which would not all be "make a radar map of object X" -- useful for science no doubt, but not very "I'm going to become an engineer/scientist/space-worker".
Read science fiction and see how often manned exploration is preceded by robotic exploration. And you'll also often find commercial interests, too: mining colonies, etc, and NASA can provide the seed for commercial interests. (Which will then take on a life of their own, beyond NASA's budget.)
however, manned is just too expensive, right now
also, you're overplaying the control delay issue, really
there's little in space exploration that is time critical (well, timing on propulsive fires to enter orbits properly is extremely time critical, but that's all programmed and automatic anyways)
we're not remotely shooting al qaeda thugs running away, we're looking at rocks, which have been sitting there for millenia, and will be waiting for millenia. sure, the commands to properly prospect that rock might take 2 weeks rather than 2 minutes by human hand, but who cares? plus, he's tightly coordinating with earth anyways, so all of his actions are control delayed bureaucratically
getting someone up there to prospect that rock means you are sending out one hundred less unmanned missions. i'd rather have 99 more missions with horrible time lag than one guy who can prospect a rock faster
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Like a fully operational battle station?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
damn if they aren't doing a good job apologizing for putting NASA on the back burner. Effectively ending US leadership in space is about the sum of it, with all the required "forward looking" related buzzwords.
I don't understand how people can keep saying things like this. Specifically the part where you use the progressive tense, like you aren't describing the status quo.
NASA is already on the back burner! Hello? NASA's budget is increasing under the new plan. You can argue the increase is inadequate if you want, which is just another way of saying the current budget is even more inadequate yet.
So, uh, yeah, they have the resources now to develop x,y, and z. Well duh, your not doing any expensive launches your bound to have money for other things.
Yes, duh, having a program that is overbudget and underfunded to begin with means you can't do other interesting things. Constellation has already resulted in interesting projects being killed. Now we can develop the things we should have been developing all along. If we hadn't been wasting time on recreating Apollo just so nostalgia hounds can say that we're doing something, we might actually have some of the tech being talked about.
That people can actually try to paint developing new technology that will expand our space capabilities like it's a bad thing compared to doing the same thing as 40 years ago is just mind boggling.
The problem is, research is not exciting to the public. It does not capture the imagination.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but neither does the hypothetical future of recreating the past. Hell, people stopped caring about the Apollo missions before the project even ended.
On the other hand, the Mars rovers seem to have captured a lot of people's imagination.
Why? Because it's something we had never done before! I think you highly overestimate the PR value of re-doing the same thing we did half a century ago, just to prove we can.
Especially when it's still fifteen years off at best.
What those articles do is nothing more than spew a well rehearsed apology for going nowhere.
And I see this and every other defense of Constellation as nothing but a self-deluding apology for doing nothing we haven't already.
It's just a sad attempt to regain the lost glory of the 60s, when we truly were leaders, yet in reality an even sadder admission that we can't do any better than recreate the past.
Maybe the new plan won't pan out. Maybe none of the new technologies that will be developed will ever result in their actual use in a real mission. But I do know it's a plan that has the potential to expand our horizons. Constellation, even if it was a smashing success, would not.
The enemies of Democracy are
Like a fully operational battle station?
A fully armed and operational battle station, I think.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
it is to do everything you want to do with manned missions, to achieve every noble goal you passionately write in your comment, MORE CHEAPLY
all you are doing is engaging in a false dichotomy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Reviewing how it is that Congress is authorized by the Constitution to fund NASA, 'cause it ain't.
NASA has become extremely beaurocratic and has shown low efficiency in recent decades. To get the taxpayers dollars worth, I'd suggest part of the budget be used for funding private sector innovations, either as direct investments or as awards for various milestones like the X-prize. Make NASA teams compete with private enterprises and then fund what shows results and efficiency.
Shame that if Bolden, or any civil servant, publicly disagrees with the administrations plan they violate their employment contract. There are a lot of NASA employee's that do not like the new direction they just can't say so publicly.
I think most educated citizens are hip to the idea of a bunch of super smart people basically getting paid to do nothing but making cool stuff to do in air and space. To put things in perspective, NASA's entire budget consumes maybe one day worth of everyone in the USA working and I think its reasonable to get people to give up a day for something that adds to the entire national identity and experience.
So why don't we do a 5% tax on imports, and use that for NASA. Against an import spectrum of about 1T per year, would be, what, 50B for NASA, and that should be plenty of money to fund both manned and unmanned science missions.
This is my sig.
The actual #'s are instructive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
The "killing people" sector of the U.S. budget dwarfs the "suck on the teat" portion, many times over in real dollars, and the more so when you consider the current military expenses for open-ended wars that aren't being paid for with current funds, the hidden costs in "non-military" parts of the budget related to veterans etc., and that programs like Social Security are directly funded (for now) by specific taxes. The military expense is relatively (and absolutely) HUGE, like $ billions versus millions.
I won't defend the freeloaders for a second. But if you want moral outrage, there is a lot more money being ripped off from or misspent by the military. Eliminating every penny of welfare programs well spent or not would not make any real difference to fixing the deficit or reducing taxes. It's just some blood the pundits sprinkle in the water to keep their own financial interests going. Now, if we dealt with just the folks ripping off the military, or eliminating some really stupid expenses like maintaining a nuclear arsenal STILL capable of destroying the world over and over and over -- that's real money. We spend more than the next dozen countries combined on defense.
A diplomat friend mentioned yesterday that we still spend millions maintaining tactical nukes in Europe. Why? Basically, the Army just doesn't want to give them up. The price of a few warheads could fund some serious science.
Of course it was military competition that ignited our interest on rockets in the first place, not reaching the Moon.
If that's all I can get, it's better than a perpetual backslide.
Other than not recreating Apollo, we aren't backsliding. We didn't have anything like the ISS (which thanks to Constellation funds being freed up now has an extended lease on life). We now have multiple private providers of launches coming on line. We have rovers on Mars and more probes and telescopes exploring our solar system and the cosmos than ever before.
Our progress is undeniably disappointing, but we aren't backsliding. As far as I'm concerned the things we're losing all count as steps forward. :P
I want more; I want to see a (small) Martian colony in my lifetime. Not going to happen, but I can dream.
Well if you're going to dream, you should be dreaming in the direction of the new plan because it's the only one with the potential to make that plan a reality. Constellation is not and never would be a stepping stone to a Mars colony. It wasn't even a stepping stone to a Moon colony. Putting bootmarks on the moon and then taking off is all it was going to do.
No, if you want to see a Mars colony, then you need the R&D the new plan is going to do. We'll need large structures and habitats, larger than are economical to lift from Earth in one shot. In-space assembly, check. We'll need, ideally, a lot of materials already built when humans arrive. Automated mineral excavation and factories, check. Well need a way to supply our astronauts on Mars with a steady stream of supplies, meaning we'll need cheaper ways to ship mass from earth to mars. New propulsion systems, check. It goes on.
If you're a dreamer, and dreaming of the future, the kind of future we were thinking of back when landing on the Moon was new, then the new NASA R&D-based plan is exactly what we need.
If you dream only of the past, then Constellation was the program for you.
Me, I dream of the future.
The enemies of Democracy are
At issue is not the redistribution of income, it is whether or not the jobs create wealth. If the gov't pays someone 100K a year, and they produce 120k a year of genuine goods and services, that's a 20% ROI and you can create those jobs indefinitely.
There are two reasons to avoid government investing is that:
First, it is a sort of a theft in some people's eyes, when the gov't competes against people it can use the power of tax law and its printing press to secure capital for projects, and thus be at an advantage against those who must use their own resources or turn to capital markets. If the government continually does private sector work, then, this competition will actually cause capital markets to dry up because no one will want to accept the risk that any profitable enterprise might be created by the government.
This leads to the second problem, and that is, when the government takes on the role of investor, it also must take on the risk. If the government is not investing, all it has to do is profit via taxation on those who were successful, and leave the ruin and failure of the vast majority of businesses to others. If it does invest, though, bad investment choices by the government will invariably lead to its collapse or at least some social turmoil. Indeed, if we view the Iraq War as an investment by the government, many people would view that as a sort of a mistake. But what if the government blew that kind of money all the time and on things that people did not want or technologies that did not work.
Ultimately, we could look at a failure of the Soviet government to invest in the research needed for communications technologies such as computers and fax and copiers as a significant reason for their downfall. To some extent, they were so caught up in the 1960s style era from which they had their greatest successes that they didn't even notice NATO nations pulling away in the 1970s and 1980s through the application of computers to every aspect of the production and management of goods until it was far too late.
Conversely, western governments didn't have to do anything, but cherry pick taxes from economic winners. It's not that socialism or capitalism is morally superior, it is that capitalism is physically superior for the longevity of governments simply because it requires governments to do less and absorb less risk.
This is my sig.
your goin to dump that shit out in space my friend
when my soda, coffee, and case of whiskey arrives we can discuss the details, more than likely I will just try to hold my shit for three days. Remember this ain't a submarine, we should be growin buds, and purple haze at the shift changes!
It's more the other way around. Current seat price on the Shuttle (which is already pretty darn expensive) is something like $100 million, perhaps a bit more. The Discovery class probes are around half a billion dollars. This is as close to "cut rate" as NASA gets. That's five astronauts in space. You're off by a factor of 200.
Whereas your argument is based on passion and some nice hand-waving:
when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
...
AND WE CAN DO ALL OF THIS FOR FAR LESS MONEY THAN ONE OR TWO MISSIONS OF MEATBAGS TO MARS
That's a great sentiment, but so far you haven't convinced me of anything. And if you can't convince me, I guarantee you that you will be unable to convince the various Congress folk that fund these projects, much less the project engineers that manage them. So if you want your dream to come true, prove that it's possible. Prove to me that we actually can launch dozens of probes for dirt-rate cheap and get some valuable science out of them.
Yah see, the reason why NASA's cut-rate probes are prohibitively expensive still is because autonomous space robots (probes) really are not cheap. To design a vehicle that can survive in space, you have to use exotic materials in your thermal blankets to help manage the thermal conditions of your spacecraft. You have to use advanced, complicated control algorithms on all of your motors that control your booms (solar panels, antennae, etc.) so that you get the pointing accuracy you want. Hell, half your screws have to be made from titanium just so that they will be strong, light, and non-reactive.
It's all fun and games to say that we COULD build spacecraft for crazy insane cheap, but in reality, it doesn't really work that way. You made the point that when putting men in space you have to account for all of their biological flaws. That's true. However, when you put unmanned craft in space you have to account for all of their non-biological flaws (ie inability to come up with creative solutions, inability to react to new situations, inability to understand what context it is operating in). The best method of doing this so far, is to develop lots of computer code to account for as many situations as you can think of. Well, that works out as long as you have the computers on board to support such heavy operations, which adds mass to a system. Also, it means you have to debug, test, and retest your code, which increases the time of development significantly. On top of that, both manned and unmanned missions have to be launched into space. The most recent figures that I know of show the best option to be about $10,000/kg, so don't go kidding yourself into thinking that anyone is going to be launching a probe for $200 that they hacked together in their backyard. It just doesn't work that way yet.
Now, I am not saying your method shouldn't be tried. In fact, it already is. Look into the various cubesat projects that universities around the world are working on. Hell, students are developing small spacecraft for a few thousand bucks and piggy backing them on GPS launches and the like. They don't get much past a few hundred kilometers of altitude, but its a start. The problem is, however, that of the few hundred cubesats launched, something like 20 have been successfully tracked and operational. That's the price you pay for cheap in space. If you don't invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in reliability and testing, well, your probes die. Like you said, if they are cheap enough, it's nothing to worry about. However, an "approximately less than 5%" success rate isn't going to get you anywhere no matter how cheap your probes are. So, sure, your idea could
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Except for the depressing lack of summary CEO executions.
MORE CHEAPLY
Says you.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
1. something that needs to eat, drink, breathe, piss, and shit
2. or something that needs DC current
you tell me which is cheaper
are you feigning incredulity or do you genuinely lack enough cognitive facilites to deduce the fucking obvious?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and the main reason is that government doesn't work. In, Ireland we have much more government intervention and they've ruined the country. Government = skank
They're unaccountable, mediocre minions of old 'failed god's' as Steve Jobbs would have said. They're a farce.
& Ireland is now under huge state control as all of the banks or almost all, are set to be under state control or already are, making our country the skankiest of all.
If you come to Ireland, stay for the nightlife, people, nature, but don't stay too long for the skank, country's full of it.
Obama's idea to commercialise space exploration is brilliant - provided the funding, and legislations, and legal protection does work it's way to commercial enterprise.
Healthcare though, I'd resist it. Sounds like skank to me!!
1. something that needs to eat, drink, breathe, piss, and shit
2. something that needs DC current
you tell me which is cheaper to send up
are you feigning incredulity or do you genuinely lack enough cognitive faculties to deduce the fucking obvious?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
McNeally, Ellison, Gates, Brin, Branson, etc.
New billionaires have big egos, and it only takes one!
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
why can't you see something as insanely obvious as the fact that a probe is a hell of a lot cheaper than sending up something that needs to support a human being?
what is your iq? why can't you process the simple cognition required to understand this kindergarten level exercise in compare and contrast?
"i want studies! i want scientific proof! i want a demonstration!"
dude, none of these things are a replacement for THOUGHT
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This kind of reminds me of Deception Point by Dan Brown. Anyone else?
Where do you get the idea that US car companies don't invest in long term research and development? I worked at Ford in the 1990's, developing advanced technologies for manufacturing. My projects included new ways to measure the quality and appearance of paint so we could ensure the cars we produced looked pretty in the showroom, stayed pretty on the road, and endured all sorts of hostile environments. That involved technologies like ultrasound, lasers, and robotics; things that weren't part of the cars themselves but were important for improving cars from the rust buckets of the 1970's to the durable bodies of today.
I was working in short term R&D with a focus on technologies that would take 2 to 5 years to implement. But we also had long term R&D, Ford's Scientific Research Laboratories. They developed things like better catalytic converters and hydrogen-fueled vehicles. And they supported lots of university research on technologies that could take decades to reach the road. So I'd be interested to see what evidence you have that the foreign companies did research and the domestic companies did not.
Because we never went there in the first place lol.. Assholes
for basically confirming you are a complete idiot
you honestly can not perceive that a fucking probe would, by obvious simple logic an elementary school kid could understand, be more expensive?
life support:
food
water
air
waste management
electrical (huge amount needed)
probe:
electrical (much tinier amount needed)
these simple, plainly obvious, easily comprehensible, mundane, face value facts honestly escapes you?
are you going to babble at me about a geocentirc universe again as if that is even a remotely appropriate analogy? i mean seriously WTF? am i arguing with an 11 year old here? LOL
you are not bright, or a very good troll: its hard to feign stupidity in a sustained manner as you seem to be doing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With this change, isn't NASA becoming more of a technology R&D shop than a aerospace shop?
I can see this direction spells for competition with ARPA, DOD R&D and NSF in the future.