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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."
'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.
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
What leadership? You mean continuing to launch one $700 million shuttle after another and constantly making promises that they never delivered on? The U.S. hasn't led anything in human exploration since Apollo. All they've been doing for the last 40 years on that front is delivering animations of ships and missions that never pan out and holding press conferences about how *one day* we're going to the moon and/or Mars (promises which get pushed back every few years). The cancellation of Constellation was just a tacit admission of what anyone with eyes, ears, and any memory at all has known for a long time.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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