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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.
Of all the things that Obama is doing, am I the only one who feels that him killing NASA really struck a nerve? It's literally the only thing he's done that made my blood boil.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
dont we have bigger issues than who has the biggest space penis??
...which has been overambitious and underfunded.
We haven't had a decent space plan since getting to the moon. We have had some lofty goals, but never proper commitment or funding. We've also had changing directions every administration or so.
Perhaps the worst thing about Obama's plan is that it is a little more in line with reality instead of wishes?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
We haven't had a decent manned space plan. Galileo, Cassini, Spirit & Opportunity, and plenty others worked out very well.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Apparently this is a troll because someone disagrees with you.
+1 Inconvenient Truth, IMO.
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What is it with this administration that everyone who disagrees is a racist? Was it not Hillary Clinton who said that disagreement is a fundamental principal of a democracy?
Unfortunately racism is alive and well in the USA. But to call everyone who disagrees with you a racist is to cheapen the entire civil rights movement.
Like any bureaucracy, NASA existed only as long as it pleased its political leaders. The result is a space agency that's known for stunts.
Put a man in orbit. First! {Grab genitalia and grunt here).
Put a man on the moon. First! (Grunt repeatedly here).
Seriously, if NASA's main missions now were spaced based power, Zero G industries, low-grav hospitals, a satellite based internet, a space based mirror climate control system, or any of *thousands* of practical, profitable, useful projects, would we even be having this discussion?
Instead, NASA is all about Texas and Florida political pork, controlled by politicians and shaped to *their* ends. Market based solutions, as bad as they are, would still be better than techno-military welfare that we can't afford.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The only reason for manned flight is to get to a place worth colonizing. The only place worth colonizing is Mars. All other missions can be done better, cheaper, faster, with robotic craft. So Obama has it exactly right. There is no reason to go back to the moon (Bush just wanted to use it as a military base and didn't even make progress with that). Armstrong is an old guy who was trained as an engineer and made one flight that put him in the history books. That doesn't mean that he knows much about the long-term space policies we should follow. And you notice that he is still thinking of space as a playing field for international competition rather than cooperation. This is the '60s talking.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
it makes no sense to send people into space... until we know of someplace we can permanently stay.
robots are faster, more accurate, more durable, can stay out there virtually indefinitely, and are 3-20 orders of magnitude cheaper.
from a scientific perspective, low-earth-orbit (the only place we're sending people) just isn't that interesting. virtually all space-related scientific data comes from unmanned probes and robots.
until we're talking about settling another planet/moon, people in space are just tourists. so why is the government funding it?
http://kered.org
Look guys, do you know that the Government will spend $1.60 per dollar it takes in in revenue this year? That works out on a $4 Trillion-some budget to be ~$1.4 Trillion dollars of additional debt.
The future?
$1 Trillion each year in the red. Nevermind the unfunded liabilities of medicare and medicaid.
That means:
You have to CUT! lots of spending has to be cut! If you want those programs to go ahead regardless, then send in a cheque and help them fund it! Just my opinion, Regards
him killing NASA really struck a nerve
Except that he isn't killing NASA. If you RTFA you'll see that his proposal is for NASA to go to Mars, and get out of the business of low-earth lifting.
In other words, he is supporting the outsourcing of some of what NASA currently does. Why his predecessor didn't propose the same is beyond me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Armstrong and the other astronauts got to walk on the moon. What do I get for billions of dollars thrown at more human spacetravel? Nothing.
I'll take the robots and the science instead, please.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise a kid
Its funny - this is a rabid capitalist country, and yet when is proposed to allow commercial space flight to take over the boring operation bits everyone is up in arms. Whenever I hear astronauts talking about this my mind jumps to the infamous Mandy Rice-Davies - "well he would, wouldn't he".
Let NASA get back to some real research, not shuttling (sorry) people to the space station.
Who on earth believes that the government is more efficient than private enterprise at the operational level ? So set guidelines, safety regulations, create an environment where commercial enterprises can see an opportunity, and let us solve the problem. If that's done the country will not "cede America's longtime leadership in space", it will just be done more efficiently outside of the government.
Why should I as a large contributor to the government pay for someone to drive a bus into space ? What grabs my attention (and probably Joe public's for the last 30 years) is Hubble, Spirit + Opportunity, Pathfinder. The only time the shuttle breaks into public awareness anymore is when there's an accident.
And while long term we do need to have an off-Earth safety net - its not going to happen in my life, and a few people on a non self-sufficient beachhead doesn't do anything except waste money.
We haven't had a decent manned space plan. Galileo, Cassini, Spirit & Opportunity, and plenty others worked out very well.
This is really the crucial point. We have done some first rate science without having any meat on board, and in most cases, we couldn't have done it with meat on board because meat is just not tough enough to do the job, and launching the necessary equipment to keep meat alive in space for years at a time is prohibitively expensive, and meat wouldn't serve any actual practical purpose in most cases.
Mind you, I am an enthusiastic supporter of manned spaceflight, but let's be reasonable and make sure we're putting people into space because we need them to do specific jobs that machines can't do, not just because it's cool to put people in space. All of the proposals for manned spaceflight I've seen in recent years start with the unquestioned and unsupported assumption that putting meat in space is a good thing. Seldom ever does anyone start by saying that accomplishing X would be a good and useful thing, and X requires a human presence in space, which probably shouldn't be surprising, since there isn't actually much of anything we need a human presence to accomplish right now.
The bottom line is that there is no end of productive scientific projects we could pursue with robots for a fraction of the cost of a handful of much less productive manned projects. Moreover, the more we learn about the solar system through robotic probes, the more likely we are to discover actual reasons for a manned presence in space.
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