Slashdot Mirror
Armstrong, Cernan Testify Against Obama Space Plan
MarkWhittington submitted a story about the first man to walk on the moon testifying yesterday that President Barack Obama's plans to revamp the human space program would cede America's longtime leadership in space to other nations.
NASA is insignificant compared things he has done and not done.
DADT is still the law of the land.
We poured even more people into Afghanistan
We still have Guatanamo Bay
We have deficit spending that is simply unbelievable, its beyond stupid now
We sitting around watching Iran build the bomb all the while apologizing to them and also ignoring them slaughtering their people
We have a Justice Department who wants to not to read Miranda rights to people it calls terrorist.
Do I need to go on?
Hell, NASA is a rounding error in our budgets. It would be paid for in one Senator's pork many times over.
Damn, no wonder this guy got in, people are stupid
and this all Obama has done to make your blood boil, damn your a great little sheep.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yeah I'm sure all those families who've lost loved ones do to NASA's incompetence, really feel sorry for NASA....
Get a grip douche bag.
Will Obama's "Commercial" Human Space Program Need a Bail-out Bigger than GM?
May 13, 2010 (LPAC)—As the Congress is forced to try to rally itself to make decisions on the future of human spaceflight, Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan told members of the Senate Committee on Commerce Tuesday afternoon, that NASA, itself, has little confidence that the crazy plan to have private companies ferrying American astronauts to low Earth orbit, will succeed.
Cernan and Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong, who also testified, were briefed, for two hours last week, by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the Administration's "plan" to kill NASA's Constellation program. Cernan said that Bolden expressed his concern that the private companies "might have to be subsidized" by NASA until they succeed. According to Cernan's account, which he said was based on notes he took during the conversation, Bolden said it "may be a bail-out like GM or Chrysler — it may be the largest bail-out of all time," when the companies run into difficulties and out of money.
Cernan said that, based on his own experience, the program for private enterprises to safely launch astronauts into space within five years, and more cheaply than NASA can do, will, in fact take a decade, and cost two to three times as much as they predict." He told the Committee that there will be "unplanned delays, costing unallocated billions of dollars." He cited a study by the Aerospace Corporation, which projected that it would cost $10-12 billion, not the $6 billion the White House is allocating, to develop, test, and fly a new crew vehicle. And these costs do not include the necessary infrastructure, Cernan explained, including simulators to train the crew, changes needed to Mission Control in Houston, or the ships and command for sea-based rescue required for the returning craft.
His recommendation: stretch out and add to the Shuttle flights, to close the gap "on the front end," and "knock three, four, five years" off developing Orion, to close the gap from the "back end." Neil Armstrong added that he saw no reason not to continue to fly the Shuttle, and that since the design for Constellation was optimized for safety, the Constellation vehicles should be completed. Neither astronaut saw any value in Obama's offer to develop an "Orion lite" version, that would be taken to the station unmanned and just used for emergency escape. The Russians already provide that very well, with the Soyuz, they both pointed out.
Leaving aside embarrassingly idiotic queries from chairman Rockefeller (D-WV), and lies and obfuscation by greenie "science" advisor John Holdren, there was no defense of, but much skepticism concerning, wrecking the nation's manned exploration program.
from astar: It is fun that Holdren appears in the climategate emails urging on Jones that everyone must be "true believers" in global warming. No one wants to say any more that Jones is an attractive sort. But it is interesting to think he might have once been in fact, as opposed to perception, respectable. And then you think about what happened and you consider what politicians (oops, respectable scientists) like Holdren might have done to his environment in the past. And now you get to see something similar going on with respect to NASA maybe. And even some of the same players.
Ok, so you've answered the questions as well as any toddler could. Now see if you can answer them in an adult capacity -- it does the discourse no good to simply play stupid through it all, but I can and will assume that your playing dumb is going to be the extent of your argument, so I'll go ahead and help you fill in some of the blanks you left.
1. There is nothing to learn by operating on a mannequin. There is no life-saving knowledge or function to be taught in such an operation. Dummies may help with first-aid exercises like CPR and the heimlich, but when it comes to a surgeons knife, knowing HUMAN biology is paramount to any human procedure. Sending a programmable rock into space gives us geological information on a dead planet -- which is an enormous waste of time if "gathering information" is all we can do, because if we refuse to USE it for man-served purposes, it becomes, in effect, USELESS.
2. Toolsheds are meant to house the expendable. There are no safety codes required to build a toolshed, because it's not a dwelling. What good is it to send anything to Mars unless we start developing ways to send something back from Mars? If we're only planning on sending automated mining bots to Mars, how do they send anything back? Is it worth the price and technology to learn how to send a rover to Mars, then have it climb back into a lander and pilot itself home? Is it imperative that a mission ends with the return of samples, rather than simple alien-world-based analyzation? Eventually. Is it a high priority? No -- because we can do robo-analyzation via remote -- and at that point the practical use of any of this exploration is emminently dead. You won't build a toolshed the same way you build a house because -- if you build a $100,000 toolshed, you might as well live in it. If NASA keeps having its goals set on building toolsheds, we'll never have proper, habitable dwellings, because the funding, mission, and focus are all wrong -- so planetary exploration is at a dead end. There needs to be a mission-critical reason for bringing a payload home from a planet. Putting a human inside of a shuttle would immediately provide that reason.
3. We can't look into the brain of a goldfish, but we do know some of their basic motives. Perhaps exploration, perhaps seeking contact with others of their own kind, or just taking a chance on a better life. Naturally, a fish should avoid leaving their comfortable dwelling, where all basic needs are cared for, to venture out into an atmospherically-deadly, unknown, inhospitable world. They still do it, and are famous for doing it. Meanwhile, the fish which I'll assume you think are "smarter" simply live in the glass bowl until they are dead.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.