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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."
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.
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.
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
There is no shortage, only a culture that is unwilling to pay scientists and engineers the same wages that are available in medicine, law, and finance.
If you want scientists, give kids an incentive to become scientists. You can only trick them with dog and pony shows like manned space "exploration" for so long.
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.
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.
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
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.
I suspect it worked because the government considered it important enough to pay for.
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.
or "To send a robot where no robot has gone before" doesn't exactly sound quite as exciting as the original phrase.
Also, don't forget that part of it is our own damn fault.
I find it incredibly hard to blame a 20-30 year old for deciding not to go into the sciences, simply because of the horrible conditions that graduate students are forced to endure. Graduate students are paid poverty-level wages, and do the vast majority of the work for which their mentors take credit. The actual "studying" is usually done within the first two or three years, while PhD students usually work for 7-8 years on their degree.
After the PhD's done? A modest wage increase, and the even further humiliation of being a PostDoc.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yeah because people who like money and aren't interested in science will make great scientists. Marketing people and bank managers? Total wasted talent. Each one is a potential Einstein just languishing in the wrong profession.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Did you even spend 1 second at that wikipedia link?
Look at the pie graph of spending. Entitlement programs, i.e. welfare - that is, social security, medicare, and other mandatory spending - make up well over 50% of the total. Defense clocks in at around 25%. Given our current deficit, *completely eliminating* defense spending would not even *balance* the budget. Why? Because all the BIG spending is on entitlements.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.