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NASA Ends Plan To Put Man Back On Moon
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Times Online: "NASA has begun to wind down construction of the rockets and spacecraft that were to have taken astronauts back to the Moon — effectively dismantling the US human spaceflight programme despite a congressional ban on its doing so. Legislators have accused President Obama's administration of contriving to slip the termination of the Constellation programme through the back door to avoid a battle on Capitol Hill."
At this point in US space travel's history it seems like we're in a transition period. The old technology has finally caught up with itself and now without the Shuttle we must pay the penance for its mistakes and not having proper plans afterwards. Rushing into a new manned programmed for what seems like no good reason other then to just do it will be a waste of money and take awy from developing tech. Spend the next 10 years using robots for science (the area NASA/JPL does very well with) and develop new propulsion, energy, life support etc for a new manned directive in the future. In the meantime let commercial ventures work out some new low cost delivery systems. Any plan for a moon base would involve robot systems paving the away ahead before humans regardless so let's focus those funds long term rather then making a couple of special interests happy.
Yep. All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
If Congress is really mad that the Obama administration is shutting down the moon program, then there is a simple way they can handle the situation. They can vote to fully fund NASA's programs. So far, all I hear from Congresscritters is lip service. If they really want to send humans back to the moon, then show us the money. Talk is cheap. Space hardware is not.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
I really don't have a problem with this. We've already been to the moon several times and have found that it is, in fact, a giant rock. I really see no reason to go there again without some kind of purpose in mind. For example, constructing some kind of permanent base there.
This is a symptom of the "winner gets the spoils" approach to administration in the US. Every administration is supposed to set new policy in every direction, which comes from the system where every new President appoints his people to jobs all over the executive. This frequent revision of policy makes sense for short-term issues, especially ones central to the election (say DOJ anti-drug projects or FTC business regulations) but is an absurd way to manage scientific and engineering projects which naturally have timescales much greater than 4 years. Having every president retask NASA (or the agency of your choice) leads to enormous waste as projects are cancelled and new projects are started so they can be cancelled by the next administration.
[blockquote]An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Times Online:[/blockquote]
Isn't it odd that these days, more and more, Americans have to find out what their government is doing from foreign newspapers?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
If not us, who? If not now, when?
There's a "use it or lose it" concept with government money. If your project fails, it's likely to never get funded again. If the project comes in under budget, the amount it didn't need gets subtracted from next year's budget. Basically, if there's no funding for it now... it's pretty easy to assume it may never be funded again.
Going to the moon now would have been Apollo all over again, with little to gain. The moon has been done and we should leave it to commercial and new scientific activity now.
If we, as a species, want a project of comparable difficulty (compared to Apollo from the 1960 perspective) then we should send a human crew to Titan.
But the problem is how to fund it. The cold war and the US taxpayer funded Apollo. The Soviet people helped in their own unique way, by showing how not to do it. A new space program would have to be a global exercise, with contributions from many countries. If we decide to have just one war less then finding the money should not be a problem.
For a couple of decades we have been avoiding an important question: why do we want human beings to go into space? We should think hard and come up with some answers pronto.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Social insurance and spaceflight are not mutually exclusive.
I imagine if you swap two wars for a space program, we could be halfway to Mars by now (at least).
Seriously, there is no place on Earth as deadly as the surface of the Moon or Mars. There is no place on Earth that costs as much as a hundredth, maybe a thousandth of the cost of just getting to the Moon, much less Mars, much less staying for any period of time.
The same could have been said of America or Australia from the perspective of Europe, before colonisation.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
Why be interested in that, when you can keep fighting in silly wars that no-one can win, when you can keep bailing out finance sectors and car manufacturers even though their business models clearly got them into trouble in the first place.
Sorry, my rant toggle must have been on, and I didn't notice.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Yep. All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
No one is interested in the Moon unless we'll build a base there. No one wants to pay for another trip back to the Moon if we're just going to plant the flag and come home again. Been there, done that.
Do something new and different, or don't go at all.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Umm...things like Social Security, Medicare and Unemployment aren't real welfare, just social nets. People paid into SS, Medicare and Unemployment and that is why they get them, true welfare programs, like Aid for Families with Children go to people who never really paid into them.
It looks like the U.S. will never get back to the space.
I don't quite understand how "Not going to the moon" translates to "Not going to space."
Space is a lot bigger than just the moon. Also wasting money and time trying for human transport to the moon is...a waste. It would be much better used trying to, I dunno, try different things?
I just wonder why they waste so much money on projects they abort soon.
See, I don't get this. It's like saying "Well, we've tossed in billions upon billions of dollars down a hole with no end in sight already, why don't we just toss a few billion more in there?"
They're stopping the program since it's a *waste of money* that's taking away from other viable programs. I don't understand why people want the government to keep throwing money at the same outdated plan in the vain hope that, somehow, with enough money, you'll hit some magic point where the money spent actually becomes economically sound.
Man, shit. Give me 10 million dollars ever year and I'll show you a productive space program. Trust me. I'll always project completion 5 years in the future.
> If the return on the investment was actually knowable...
I know the US was the undisputed tech leader during the NASA era. We aren't anymore. Correlation doesn't always mean causation but in this case it almost certainly does.
> Discovery is not going anywhere. In the meantime, the neighbors' kids are hungry and sick.
Uh huh. By that 'logic' we wouldn't spend a dime on any R&D until we had made the world a utopia where nobody was ever wanting for anything. But of course we don't have the wealth to even attempt such a thing and the sort of socialism needed to try would destroy the world's productive economies. R&D is the way out you fool. We can argue whether we should be spending our R&D on space, safe nuke plants, green bullshit or whatever but saying R&D can't happen until we have heaven on Earth is a sign of a unserious person.
> Yes, that is EVERYONE'S responsibility. If you disagree, save up your cash, and please go live on the Moon.
No it isn't everyone's responsibility. First off, care to explain why society shouldn't be telling prospective parents "If you can't feed em, don't breed em!" I don't object to private charity to help those who have the unusual/unexpected happen to them but I do object when the State trys to do it. For they always make things worse, creating an entitlement mentality such as you exhibit.
And if we could, many of us WOULD go to the moon to escape the sort of civilizational suicide folks such as yourself represent. But we can't. After all, even Columbus's three ships (fully equiped and manned) represented the sort of inventment few private sources could have managed and space, for now, is a lot bigger job. Of course the potential rewards are equally greater if we but had the imagination to seize it.
Going to the moon and then losing the will to plant a colony will almost certainly be remembered as the moment our civilization failed. It would be like Moses leading his people to the Promised Land, them looking over the mountain and saying, "Nah, too hard we are going back to Egypt."
Democrat delenda est
federal income taxes != taxes
gas, state and local sales, state income, property, &c
thanks for playing
I don't think the case for visiting the moon (and Mars) is compelling enough for the current economic climate.
There will never be a good economic climate to fund space exploration.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Morons like you traded all that for a welfare state
Yes, because you have to be moron to prefer taking care of actual people rather than making big, symbolic, and above all, expensive gestures.
Going to the moon was never more than President Kennedy's dick waving; he wanted to show the world that his testicles were bigger than those of the Soviet leaders, so the US spent huge amounts and took appalling risks with the lives of astronauts in order to plant a flag, using what now seems to be stone-age tools. Big achievement, but not hugely useful in itself; unlike the modest Sputnik, which ushered in the era of satelite communication and all the blessings of Sky TV (oops, there we go on the sarcasm again, sorry about that).
Having a proper, well equipped and well-funded space station would be useful, and a base on the Moon might in time become useful too. I would vote for going to Mars as well, but not in the haphazard way we went to the Moon, and it should ideally involve all nations capable of contributing to the project: the US, China, Russia, India, countries in Europe, and who knows, in South America and Africa as well - it will take many years before we are ready to go to Mars, and hopefully both Africa and S.Am. will have overcome their current struggles by then.
My point is the rather severe problems we have should be attended to before we shoot the Moon.
The problem with that otherwise insightful meme is that there is a finite sum of money available for all projects and it is suggested that at some point in our future the Earth will be so densely populated that it will take ALL the money just to keep people alive and there will be no spare cash for space exploration. It will also be political suicide to pull the plug on "worthwhile" Earth-bound projects to fund space programs because people will die. At that point we are doomed as a species because we have to get off this rock.
That point may not have arrived yet, but at this point in time we DO have sufficient spare cash to decide to build a base on the moon, and from that experience perhaps Mars next, and we can do that without robbing the money from projects that keep people alive.
It's now or never (for some values of "now").
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I think your rant may have been well placed. With the international treaties against nations laying claim to space objects, and agreements not to send any armed space vehicles, it doesn't allow for war there. On the other hand, if a nation were to do exactly that, they would have the upper hand.
Imagine some rogue nation develops a significant space program, *AND* arms it. There would be no way to defend against it, or for other nations to fight against it. Of course, with the way things usually go, the rogue nation would be the US, swearing to defend the neutrality of space through superior force, and in such stop evil nations from having a space program.
Since we can't militarize space, there's no incentive for military involvement in space, except for spy and communication satellites, which are run happily from the ground.
I've argued quite a bit, if nations of Earth were to stop wasting their resources on crap they are now, we could have a significant space presence, with a strong step towards deep space exploration. We will never learn how to do it unless we work at it. ... and for a car analogy. If we had looked at the M. Brezin car 1769, which could do a whopping 2mph, and said "this is too slow, it will never be worth pursuing", we would still be traveling on foot, horseback, and by horse drawn carriage. Today, we look at space travel and say "it will take too long to get anywhere", so we don't try. 6 months to Mars? Of course it is, we're still in the Bronze Age of space travel. We've discovered a little, but we have an awful long way to go.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It seems to me that the human race needs to work on improving its skills in robotics in space exploration and many other areas. We are seeing them used in deep sea disaster recovery and warfare and it is time to see them used in positive projects. With an aging population exoskeletons need to be commercialized. Space exploration by robots is the next step and the technology developed there is going to help us get through the next few years of difficulty we are going to be experiencing.
Space dominance for welfare is a fair trade, but when the 'defence' budget is over 700 billion, with no actual threats to american soil. Makes you wonder if that money couldn't be directed to more useful things.
Gotta fight wars?
Dude, I'm unpopular with a lot of slashdotters for defending the troops. But, really, Iraq wasn't a "gotta fight" war. Afghanistan was, but we've done it all wrong. We should have just done a punitive expedition into Afghanistan, punished the Taliban for harboring Al Queda, then got the hell out. But, nooooo, we have to play some silly game of "nation building".
Aren't we the morons? Those Afghanis have been right there, in the same place, for thousands of years, defying any and all comers - most recently the Soviet. When the invaders go home, those Afghanis just go back to growing poppies, herding goats, and whatever else they do in those hills of theirs.
Gotta fight wars. Crap, I could have fought that Afghan war for less than pennies on the dollar, and avoided the Iraq war altogether.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The US budget is $18.3b for NASA in 2010 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget. and The United States currently pays around $20 billion per year to farmers in direct subsidies as "farm income stabilization"[10][11][12] via U.S. farm bills - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a federal government entity designed to supplement regular oil supplies in the event of disruptions due to military conflict or natural disaster, costs taxpayers an additional $5.7 billion per year. and who knows how many billion on protecting its gas corporations - http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm. Space research is cheap, repays in technology dividends and uplifts people. Subsidies encourage the status quo and defer the inevitable.
It's never been the National Aeronautics and Mars Administration. We're talking about blowing off putting an American on the Moon and Mars, not everything higher than a dozen miles off the surface of Earth. We got space really close to Earth we can still discover stuff in, still expensive, but at least we can afford it. And one thing NASA is relatively good at is probes. Are Voyager, Viking or Pathfinder style missions chopped liver? No! They're fucking awesome. NASA rules... even on their relatively tiny budget.
The Admin and the Engineer
The reason why we can't put men on the Moon is that we never really had that capacity. Yes, we managed to put a few people there at enormous expense, but that was simply not sustainable; technology is only now starting to near the point where maintaining a presence in the Low-Earth Orbit might be.
But, rather than look at the problem and even trying to understand the reasons, you blame it all on the poor not starving as they should, like a right-wing tool you are. Moron.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No, just the R&D that costs trillions with no foreseeable return.
There are plenty of returns for all the R&D even ignoring our eventual need to expand beyond this planet.
If the trillions of present day dollars that went into the space race alone were just diverted to pure R&D to better humanity do you think the accomplishments would not have been similar, if not better? Saying we would never have happened upon velcro or microwaves without NASA just because that is historically what played out is simpleton logic.
There are definitely some things we learned from the space race we probably wouldn't have learned nearly as quickly other wise. But we are past that. There should be diminishing returns technically from near earth limited space exploration like any other technology. The automatic justification should be revoked and hard ROI criteria should be set for any future programs of significant costs.
... until we come up with a space propulsion system better than the rockets and ion drives that we currently have. Despite the talk, putting humans in a tin can for 3 years 30 million miles from earth is not realistic for medical or psychological reasons. Unless a system can be developed that can get people and materials around the solar system in months rather than years or decades then we can forget about colonising or exploiting it in any realistic manner.
I'm not much into society working towards a common good,
So, you're stuck in the Cro-Magnon, every-man-for-himself era, and completely believe that everyone who ends up on hard times should just be left to rot? I call that being a selfish bastard myself. It's particularly amazing, given this attitude, that your offspring lived to their teens and twenties; from your statements so far, I'd figure you for the sort to let them figure it out after they left the teat.
especially when 1/2 or more of society are worthless shits anyway.
This, I have a hard time figuring out what kind of statistic makes this anywhere near a half-reasonable argument; I can't recall a time where unemployment got anywhere near 50%, or the homeless rate for that matter; and if you go by wages alone, that's not a matter of choice for most anyone who isn't a professional athlete, who can hold out for an extra few million a year. Minimum wage is minimum wage, and if an employer sticks to that as the entry wage regardless, the people are pretty well stuck. This is why labor unions exist, a group of people in a common trade working for the common good, so that people with their skillset don't become the aforementioned worthless shits. Taking the other extreme, the number of people who make significant advances in anything useful, that's been in the range of 0.001% of people, and certainly nowhere near 50% of all those even living now.
That business of society working towards a common good mostly means that hard working people are supporting lazy asses
You mean the undertaxed executives, directors, and the like, who directed needless layoffs to justify employing people in 3rd world countries (by their arguments, to support the people in those countries and the economies there, which by your arguments, is something that is un-Darwinian), or otherwise unjustifiably firing employees just to save a few bucks? Those are hard-working people? Or do you count corporations who rape their employees as people now, since the Supreme Court gave them pretty much the same leeway as you or I would in campaign contributions? Even so, they would be in the minority, and they significantly take advantage of tax breaks issued by the government; I would posit these as in the same class as single mothers taking advantage of tax breaks, who would probably fit in your class of the aforementioned worthless shits of this country, ultimately rendering that argument invalid.
This isn't to say that there aren't those taking advantage of the system; in fact, those that are make a pretty good argument for their inclusion in the species ongoing; they've adapted and survived. But the fact that those people exist does not, by any means, indicate that programs in support of (intentionally or otherwise) disenfranchised people is inherently wrong; and the unsupported figures you present in support of that argument are bigoted and wrong.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
they also earn 99% so they should pay 99% to be fair right??
Yes, no threats so long as you ignore the three thousand lives we lost, the two towers and several buildings around them, and a chunk of the Pentagon. No actual threats indeed.
Yeah, and a multi-billion-dollar strategic fighter jet or a missile defense shield is exactly what's needed to fight that kind of threat...