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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.
dont we have bigger issues than who has the biggest space penis??
But we have to do it. How else will we have money in the budget to bail out bankers and pay for their billion dollar bonuses?
...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.
Buzz Aldrin disagrees
Neil Armstrong Vs. Buzz Aldrin Over Obama's Space Plans
CBSNews URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002451-503544.html
Who do you think would win in a fight, Buzz Ald(I won't even finish the question)
Killing NASA by increasing its budget certainly counts as change though. Most of the earlier presidents focused on improving NASA by decreasing its budget.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Constellation would have done more to kill NASA than anything in Obama's new plan. Constellation was already over budget and behind schedule. If a fully developed Ares rocket had been dropped in NASA's lap, it wouldn't have been able to afford to operate it. So what do you think the next admin would do with NASA if it had been allowed to continue, accumulating delays and going further and further over budget?
The new plan is the best chance NASA has had in a long time to get back on its feet and stop languishing in LEO. Developing the higher technology needed to go beyond LEO and the moon is what NASA should be concentrating on. Let commercial companies deliver stuff to ISS and LEO.
(One a side note, it seems to me that almost everyone who hates Obama's plan forgets that there would have been just as long, if not longer, gap in US human spaceflight ability WITH constellation. We're not exactly losing a whole lot by giving commercial companies time to produce their human ferrying ability, as opposed to giving NASA time to work on Ares-1)
With NASA buying rides at a few tens of millions each vs. billion+ per launch there will be a lot more money for accomplishing things besides putting stuff into orbit on a rocket with a NASA logo on it.
So I'm all for the new plan. My biggest worry is that congress will screw up the whole thing trying to protect their pork.
As I came back from lunch today, I saw a single retiree-looking gentleman standing on the corner of Saturn and NASA Rd. 1 with a sign protesting the Obama plan. That's here at JSC, home of the astronauts.
I dunno, maybe more people will join him once work lets out. As someone who works in this industry, I still remain on the record saying that the current plan is the best one NASA has had since the Shuttle was a dream given form*.
* Not quite the form it should have been, though.
Humans in space? Colonies on other worlds? Ending the cosmic equivalent of having all of our eggs in one basket? We're one natural disaster away from complete annhilation of our race. I'd kinda like to have at least a few people offworld just in case.
And we still would be if all we did was build a giant rocket that could, at best, send a handful of people to the moon or eventually Mars.
The technologies the new plan is set to develop much more directly tackle the issue of humans surviving -- not just visiting long enough to plant a flag, but actually surviving -- than Constellation does. Constellation does absolutely nothing but let us put more boot prints on the moon. Yay. When we finally decide to send astronauts to Mars, there should already be robotically assembled habitats and a factory processing ice for oxygen and fuel waiting for them. We should have everything in place so the astronauts can stay on Mars for a year, or even more. It should be the foundation for a permanent settlement on Mars.
If you're serious about this "eggs in one basket" problem, and are serious about humans permanently occupying other planets, then you should be all for the new NASA plan like Buzz Aldrin is. He wants a permanent base on Mars, not a boot-and-flag mission.
Manned missions for their own sake, or to try to recapture lost glory by repeating what we've already done, is just wankery.
All this talk of "Unmanned missions are just as good!" is pretty unconvincing when reports come back that the latest rover mission may be failing because it's stuck on a 3 inch rock and can't wiggle it's way off . . .
Yeah, only 6 years of nearly continuous operation on a budget that is comparable to a manned Low Earth Orbit mission, and vastly less than any manned mission to Mars would be, and where even the stuck rover can still perform useful science, surely shows how unconvincing the argument for robotic missions is.
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