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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.