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Obama Outlines Bold Space Policy ... But No Moon
The Bad Astronomer writes "In front of a mostly enthusiastic audience at NASA's Kennedy Space Center today, President Obama outlined a bold, new space policy. It's a change from his previous policy; the Constellation rockets are still dead, but a new heavy-lift rocket system is funded. He specifically talked of manned asteroid and Mars missions, but also stated there would be no return to the Moon. This is a major step in the right direction, but still needs some tweaking."
$6B for five years? $1.2B a year. Less money than Microsoft is losing on Bing. Less than 5% of the annual revenues of Mars candy. For humans to stretch the limits of the frontier, to go to Mars and the Asteroids this is all? This is bold? What deep commitment.
I honestly liked it better when he didn't care enough to pretend to try. Do it or don't do it. Don't go halfway into it and set everybody up for disappointment. This is important stuff.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think he's probably right in terms of what a government research program should have as its goals. IMO, the purpose of government research on this scale is to drive forward technological development and give the private sector a kick in the pants.
We've already been to the Moon, that technology was developed during the 1960s. We could probably do it better now, but the advancements wouldn't be nearly as significant as what is required for a manned mission to Mars. Leave the moon to the private sector, we should expect to see a private company touching down there within a decade or maybe two. Mars is still a pie-in-the-sky target, let's point NASA at that.
In 2 and a half years when Obama is replaced by the next guy we can recycle this whole thing over again. Each administration takes over and points NASA in yet another direction killing off whatever the current direction is. Next administration will probably kill the heavy lifter project and replace that with a direct shot to mars.
Got Code?
I have to disagree. The best way to "learn" how to do long duration deep-space flights is a moonbase, don't you think, not a first-try, no-exit-strategy, let's hope everything works shoot-'em-to-Demos one shot.
Bush was going to Mars too, so my concern is not alleviated that we're still talking fantasy appeasements while starving the program.
what is the point of going to Mars if we have no capability of setting up a base there? No capability of any rescue? The moon is our kindergarten - a place to learn about how to live for long periods of time in extremely harsh environments. It is close enough that rescue or other aid may be possible. It is close enough that there is greater flexibility in the mission. The sad thing is that what we did in a handful of years in the 1960s is going to take us a decade or more 50 years later.
You can bet that when the Chinese land on the moon and start talking about setting up bases there'll be a renewed call for the US to end up on the moon again post haste. I can tell its going to be like toddlers and toys. One wont play with a toy until he sees someone else enjoying it and wants in on the action.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Yeah, "Asteroids" is easier for the public to understand.. barely. But whether it is an asteroid or a comet is a completely flexible decision. The NASA studies all refer to "Near Earth Objects" as you do.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Bumper sticker, no. Speech, well, you need the right president.
Where Bush had a space program that made him look good but would never accomplish anything, Obama has one that has folks scratching their heads but which might just take space travel out of its 40-year coma.
And no, I'm not blaming W for the mess that is NASA. Every President since JFK has put politics over real accomplishments in this area, though Bush was just a little more cold-blooded about it.
Obama isn't truly American. He does not share the American dream. He doesn't see things eye to eye with his fellow Americans. He doesn't even care
Look up his life history - he is living the American dream. I don't know how anyone can claim he doesn't believe in it as that is what made him president. How many other self-made men have become president?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
We have a two party system. There is no third option. The country had a choice of sticking with the party that ran the country for 8 years or going with the other party. There was nothing else. Sure there are third party candidates here and there but none of them have any real support of the population to put them as front runners or even on a ballet. That is why we have President Obama
Also what is a true American? I live in the United States and I don't even know what the definition of a true American is.
Is being a true American standing up for your rights when their trampled on? Is it serving in the military? Is it pushing yourself everyday all day to be a self made individual?
They called John McCain a true American hero during the 2008 election but all I saw was an old generation of ideas and values that didn't work in the modern world.
George W. Bush was called a real American because he defended us against terrorists at all costs. Does blowing billions of dollars on something that has no return on investment make someone a true American?
And whats this American Dream? I recall it being that if you worked hard and played by the rules you can do whatever you want. Well it feels like the only way to make money in this country is break all the rules and let others do the hard work while taking all the credit. Is this the new American Dream? Is this a true American?
How many other self-made men have become president?
He was created by the media and its obvious that he's in way over his head.
Quite apart from the national security issues, there's a lot of science to learn out there or on the way. As Kennedy put it: "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
But no, what we need now is a President to look up into the evening sky and see bright Mars. To wonder what it might be like for men to walk on it, to explore and harvest the vast resources of space - and then shrug, crack a beer and catch the game on ESPN.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No - he created himself by carefully managing the media. The media did not pull him out of his bed at 4 am and tell him to run for the senate and then for presidency. And managing the media is a skill that you will find in almost anyone who has successfully run for higher office.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
...To be a true American one must feel proud every single time...America is the first (and so far) only country in the world ...Obama isn't truly American. ...
That pretty much sums it up I think. I am an American and I am NOT proud of everything my country does. The fact is, I'm an American, really and truly; Obama is a real, true American, and the fact that we can disagree with you (or that you are allowed to disagree with us) is one of the the few accomplishments Americans actually can be proud of.
The fact is, one doesn't have to feel an overwhelming sense of stunning self-satisfaction for simply having been born into this great nation; America -isn't- the only nation on earth and never has been, and like it or not you've got a lot more fellow Americans than you think you do.
It's crap like this that makes me sick of my fellow Americans and, in many cases, their smug, self-satisfied pride at being born into such a great heritage.
That said, I think Obama has bigger fish to fry (yes, bigger than another trip to the moon). For one thing, I'd like some form of profitable employment and so would thirty percent of other voting age Americans who are unemployed or working part time at Wal Mart (or whatever the number is this week). I'd like to see America claw its way back to the top of the world powers, a position nobody thinks it still has. And I'd like to see America stop bleeding its jobs to its enemies in China, India, and Mexico.
Once we do that, and we're in a position to afford such frills as a moon trip again, I'm all for it.
And while we're at it, he's no true Scotsman, either.
There is a tiny bit of good thought in this: We will finally discuss space radiation and advanced propulsion systems.
Without a nuclear propulsion system that works, a mars mission or a mission to anything but a close flying asteroid is foolhardy.
We have built them before (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA).
This is how engineering works:
1. Find elephant
2. Take SMALL bite.
3. Chew bite.
4. Spit out bones (of dead mars crew in slow rocket)
5. Continue until elephant is gone
It is rare that we get a huge leap in technology where physics is involved.
We have been working on the fusion reactor for 60 years. No breath holding or life betting on this one. Trust me. You don't want to build the next Tokamak and try and power Chicago with it.
Stated otherwise: You don't build a boat and test it by taking a transatlantic voyage.
Additionally, the moon part of these missions isn't really about "going" to the moon. It's about *building* on it. What we did before was the equivalent of a day trip in the woods.
Going to mars with chemical rockets is like taking a backpack into the woods across an ocean with only a Columbus style sailing ship back across that ocean to call on for help.
The moon is close, relatively speaking. The moon can be landed on, and then escaped from, with 40 year old technology as it sits. If you build an Apollo era lunar module as an escape capsule, you're done. You only have to live in it for a couple of days.
Mars CANNOT be escaped from with ANY technology currently available. Period. And building a habitation on mars makes the job significantly more difficult. Everything about Mars is harder and will require more time and money with much larger potential for failure and longer lead times.
If you build a habitation (read beginnings of colonization) on the moon, you may be able to build some things which can be tested in a "real" environment prior to getting to a place where you have no help.
There is almost no possibility of resurrection of your (scientific/monetary/personnel) outlay on mars. This is less true with the moon.
And the moon is still a huge challenge. Did I say huge? I meant *HUGE*.
We haven't been to the moon. We touched it, for a brief moment. Do we need to make it to Mars, HELL YES.
But we need to be smart about it.
McCain could have been a fucking Gandhi -- which he wasn't, by a long shot -- but as soon as he chose the dumbest person on planet Earth as his VP, I would sooner have chosen a random 12 year-old child as candidate, or even that pornstar who elected herself. Hell, I would have picked you, and I think you're a pretty dumb dude.
Something must have gone very very very wrong, somewhere.
Well, that much is obvious - the Bush presidency.
Did he nearly die choking on a pretzel? Is he starting an underfunded, ill conceived war while cutting taxes for the wealthy and destroying a budget surplus? Is he suspending basic rights like habeas corpus and performing searches and seizures without warrants? Is he staffing FEMA with idiots, and then doing nothing while they fuck up a hurricane response? Is he nominating some inexperienced random woman for the Supreme Court? Is he standing on an aircraft carrier during some publicity stunt, claiming mission accomplished and the end of combat operations WEEKS into a war that has now lasted seven years?
Give me a fucking break. I have my issues with Obama, but you're comparing the former editor of the Harvard Law review with a guy who would've flunked out of college if his father wasn't running the CIA.
We have a two party system. There is no third option. The country had a choice of sticking with the party that ran the country for 8 years or going with the other party. There was nothing else. Sure there are third party candidates here and there but none of them have any real support of the population to put them as front runners or even on a ballet. That is why we have President Obama
That's also why we had President Bush. Twice. Well, three times actually.
So yeah, good luck with that.
No going back to The Moon.
Never mind that The Moon is our stepping stone to missions further out in our solar system.
What? He think's the ISS is an appropriate waypoint on our way out?
NOT
EVEN
CLOSE!
This is what happens when you put someone who understands nothing more than fundraisers and Chicago Cronyism (aka Chicago Politics) in a position to affect the financing of people several orders of magnitude more intelligent and important to our world than he is.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
We have a two party system. There is no third option.
No, you won't find any reference to a "two party system" in the constitution or anywhere in U.S. law. We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
As for the moon; it's so close and so big that an unbiased observer might call our system a double planet. You won't find anything like this in the solar system and even though we're towards the small end of the planets, we have one of the biggest moons. There are some good things in Obama's plan, but the fact that his plan avoids the stepping stone God dropped in fron of us just because we've stepped there before is absolutely insane. Don't be surprised if India or China or Samsung gets man on Mars first by not avoiding the obvious. Yes we can explore space without using the moon but, did the polynesian's discover Hawaii without exploring neighboring Polynesian islands? Did the Europeans venture to the New World without exploring the Mediterranean?
Dude you do not know what you are talking about.
The moon is not a stepping stone, it is a hole. More specifically, it is a gravity hole that will require more fuel to get out of. It would be much easier to completely bypass the moon.
If one could make fuel on the moon, then it would be a good idea to build a base over there and use it as a stepping stone. But although this has been researched to death, nobody has figured out a practical way to make fuel on the moon. So as things stand currently, there is nothing on the moon that is at all useful for a Mars mission.
So the logical thing is to go straight to mars. Or if assembly is required, to assemble everything in earth orbit and go straight to mars.
I guess people are a bit disappointed that Obama didn't turn out to be the reincarnation of Lincoln and FDR, as he was made out to be at some point, but he's by no means as awful as the previous guy.
You are calling 4 manned trips a year to LEO a "workaday" program? Where it takes 12 years to get a space station completed? The shuttle directly limited spaceflight development by being dangerous, expensive and overly complex - leading to the 4 trip per year limit. Keeping up our presence in LEO going is important, absolutely, but spending 1 billion per launch to do so is not.
Commercial companies are developing the tech for manned LEO, so we really shouldn't be designing our own. To do better missions further out, we need a heavy lifter - exactly what Obama is proposing. By requiring the design to be finalized by 2015, it gives a deadline so that it is not just "pork barrel funding" - but still enough time to include some new tech like on orbit refueling (could greatly expand our working distance from earth). It has timeframes, goals, and roadmaps - it just isn't based on old, already-used tech, so he can't say exactly what the booster will be like. I think it is significantly better than the Constellation program - less expensive, same goals, better tech, more likely to actually happen.
Actually, it doesn't make sense to stop to refuel on the moon even if we could manufacture fuel there. It requires considerably more delta V to take off from Earth, land on the moon, take off again and fly to Mars than it does to just take off from Earth and fly to Mars. Even if the fuel was free (delivered by aliens or God) and just sitting in tanks on the moon ready to use, it would make no sense to land there to pick it up.
Sorry you got troll rated, because "the American Dream" is what students of propaganda call a "glittering generality".
It's not so much *clever* as *unassailable*, because it means whatever the hearer choses to project on it, at least as far as specifics are concerned.
We associate certain broad values with the phrase, of course. Freedom of conscience and individual autonomy, for example. That makes the accusation that "so and so does not *share the American Dream*" ironic, because the implication is that the American Dream is *compulsory*. If the best you can do when attacking somebody is to say he "doesn't share the American dream",
I'd say that *you* don't *want him* to share the American dream. You don't think he's entitled to freedom. It amounts to calling him out for his lack of *conformity*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Recently? There is only one: William Jefferson Clinton. Read the early life section, his father was a traveling salesman who died when he was young, the mother left the kid with the grandparents to study nursing. In college, he worked as an intern, and received a Rhodes scholarship to study his graduate school.
I find it ironic that the conservatives in this country constantly bash the progressives as being elitist, when in actuality, both it's the Republican presidents that we've had who have grown up in a life of privilege and elitism and the Democratic presidents who grew up without the silver spoon in their mouth. It demonstrates just how clueless our society really is, when they believe a some asshole who is saying inflammatory things for the sake of ratings without trying to find out the truth of the matter.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Actually, it's Barack Hussein Obama (Hussein is his middle name). I don't know where you're from, but everywhere I've ever lived it's very unusual to refer to someone by their full name, unless you happen to be a parent scolding your child - "Barack Hussein Obama, you get in here this instant!"
And since the only Hussein that the average American has ever heard of is Saddam, the regular use of Obama's middle name is nothing more an attempt to use the ignorance and xenophobia of the American people to garner support for the GOP.
The two party system is defacto because of the rules of the election where winner takes it all. Different election mechanisms produce radically different outcomes. It's not the voters fault if they behave rationally.
Moon mission on the other hand is clear business decision where derailed project had to be killed and easiest way to justify the cancellation is to abandon that goal. Eventually when dust settles moon will be back on the agenda.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We have a two party system. There is no third option
There were six Presidential candidates on my ballot, and five of them were on the ballot in enough states for it to be possible for them to win; Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Socialists, and the Constitution Party.
You only think you have a two party system because the corporate media says so, and refuses to cover the other three big parties. The reason? It's legal to contribute to more than one candidate in any race, and for the corporates to bribe two candidates with campaign cash is a lot cheaper than bribing five.
Make no mistake about it, the mainstream media propagandize for their corporate masters.
Free Martian Whores!
No, you won't find any reference to a "two party system" in the constitution or anywhere in U.S. law. We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
In a sense, it is in the Constitution. It is the natural result of a winner-take-all voting system where voters' preferences are distributed like a bell curve.
Having three (or more) parties is inherently unstable. It will always be in the interest of any party to capture more of the moderate vote (the middle of the bell curve) since that's where most of the voters are. Therefore, the party will move towards the middle. This can quite easily be seen in the change the parties make from primary season to election season.
One party will position itself as slightly to one side of the middle, and the other will position itself slightly to the other side of the middle, each laying claim to that entire side of the bell curve.
If there is a third party, it will find itself either pinched between the two, or on the fringe. If the third party is successful, then one of the two original parties will be either pinched between or on the fringe. So you can have a third party, but since this configuration is unstable, one of the parties will be eliminated. This is exactly what we have seen in American history.
So it might not be directly required by the Constitution, but as long as we have the winner-takes-all voting system, it is the inevitable result.