Slashdot Mirror
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."
It looks like the U.S. will never get back to the space. I just wonder why they waste so much money on projects they abort soon.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Constellation, particularly Ares, was a boondoggle that was years behind schedule and was never going to get us there. Now we can work on Mars and do it in a feasible manner. Commercial companies like SpaceX can handle the LEO stuff, and maybe even heavy lift. Also, it gets rid of ATK, who should have never gotten another contract after blowing up Challenger.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
Yep. There's a reason why some folks referred to Ares as Porklauncher I.
I cringed when I heard Alalbama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, say the launch of Falcon 9 as a display merely replicating what "NASA accomplished in 1964." I guess he forgot that Ares IX didn't even accomplish that -- nor even equalling the accomplishment of the 1960 flight of Mercury-Redstone 1A. Ares IX took an extra shuttle SRB (not the actual 5-segment solid booster planned for Ares I), avionics from an Atlas V, and a leftover roll-control system from a Peacekeeper missile. This Frankenrocket was topped with a fake 2nd stage and capsule and was a suborbital plink.
Falcon 9 had a fully new 2-stage rocket with all the pieces -- engines, avionics, control -- in place except a payload, and it achieved orbit to within a high degree of accuracy on its first flight. And the whole Falcon 9 development program came for less than the cost of JUST the Ares I Mobile Service Tower.
The sooner the Constellation work ends the sooner NASA can start spending that money on something that will get us somewhere.
...but then you gave a few examples which have nothing to do with going to the moon. The idea of stepping stones comes from our recent experience on Earth where the places we were going to already had resources we could use (air, water, food). Space isn't like that. The rules are different. If you want an analogy imagine us as the first humans leaving Africa, but going to Antarctica instead.
The moon was a logical step which we have gone beyond. There is no point going back down a 2km/s gravity well for the sake of putting soil under our feet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Not really. They can pack the pork on robotic missions as well. The key difference might be the amount of pork which can be piled on to a single project. But without the extras of manned flight, there is bound to be more projects so it will likely equal out.
Even so, keeping the goals and projects but extending the time line would continue getting the work done. I would prefer my tax dollars going to NASA for manned flight then some of the other places it goes.
So according to you, the millions of people who currently want jobs but can't find them don't deserve to live? I mean, its not like there are people who do want jobs but have been unemployed for over a year.
My point is the rather severe problems we have should be attended to before we shoot the Moon. If it was as simple as walking out of a cave, that'd be another story. but it's not like that at all, and your metaphor is not well received.. If you can't imagine yourself in a less fortunate position, there is something wrong.
The Admin and the Engineer
Absolutely! Particularly enslaved are those unable to work due to, say, debilitating diseases! If only you could convince them to die of starvation quietly, they would truly cast off their yokes of slavery and croak totally free! No?
And then there are those poor over taxed "innovators" like, say, Bill Gates, who wouldn't know innovation if he tripped over it, fell down the stairs pulling it behind him and if it landed on his face with a bone crunching impact. Poor tax molested Billy and his bunch of jolly henchmen! I mean just think how many more poorly thought-out rehashes of technologies and ideas invented in 1960s could we have if he paid less then zero in taxes (since near $0 is what Microsoft and many other pan-national conglomerates already manage quite handsomely as it is)! The mind boggles!
I take issue with 2, 3, and 4.
2. There's lots of space at the bottom of the ocean. It's a lot less dangerous, and a lot cheaper, too. See my point? Space is a barren hell hole that makes the barren hell holes on Earth a paradise. I don't know what you've heard, but... Space... it's not a nice place.
3. You are mistaken... wrong headed here... it's humanity that is doomed sooner or later, not Earth. Earth is a rock. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Even after the Sun novas, there will still be Earth... just quite a but different than it is now... maybe not all in one place either. People are what matters about Earth, and little else (my cats, too!).
4. The point of housing those that can't afford it is not about economic advancement. It's about being human. You should try it.
The Admin and the Engineer
Ya it's too bad that guys that work hard and innovate like Sergey Brin are not in any way financially rewarded in America.
OTOH when a kid can inherit 9 billion bucks tax free when his dad dies in 2010, I agree that kinda kills any financial incentive that kid had to contribute anything to humanity and he'll probably just spend the rest of his life consuming rather than producing.
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.
You have to do that kind of thing every now and then to prove the status of a dominant empire, though. It's pointless in and of itself, but it's a status thing, which is why China is pursuing it so aggressively. If they do it, it will be an implied challenge for the US to repeat the feat to prove that they are still strong.
I would guess the deep abyss of certain places in the ocean are more deadly. You have vast amounts of pressure, I'm no rocket surgeon or brain scientist, but I think that's a lot harder to deal with then the vacuum of space. Actually if you were exposed to those pressures you would be crushed and dead instantly, where you could survive at least 20-30 seconds in space and live. Plus there are giant squid.
*DrugCheese rants*
I guess so. They've lost the dream, they've lost the initiative, they've lost everything needed to get off the earth. The future is either overseas, or with the private sector. The only question is, "When did the US cede dominance in space?" I say, it was when they decided to build a stupid fucking space plane, and fly it repeatedly, when a space plane is OBVIOUSLY NOT a viable method of moving deeper into space.
I hated the idea of a space plane when it was first publicized. Morons. Space planes don't explore space - they only explore planets and atmospheres. Every real exploratory space ship should carry something LIKE a space plane, for deployment when a really intersting planet is discovered, but no one with a dream of space exploration even things of winged craft.
"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
Repeat the feat? That would just be another waste. If we go back to the mooon at all (and I hope we do) I want to see a BASE STATION built, with personnel stationed there permanently. Hydroponics, mining, extraction of atmospheric gases, as well as water - you know, built a habitat for a few thousand people, then grow it to a few million people.
But, what I REALLY want to see, are manned missions to the Mars and the various moons that might be made habitable with a minimal effort. (Minimal effort, meaning the erection of domes, and/or digging into the surface, as opposed to some moronic effort to put a base on a gas giant, or a hot planet, like mercury.)
Nope, I don't want to see a stupid scrap of cloth hung out on some barren rock. I want PEOPLE there, to transform the barren rock into something useful.
"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
Exploration for the sake of exploration should be done by robots and probes. Manned spaceflight should be for industry, like mining the asteroids, building factories in orbit.
When China lands a man on the moon all it will do is show the US that China had the budget to throw money down that well, like we did from 1961-'72.
This is fine, until someone else puts a permanent base there. Then they will have the high ground; literally. The gravity well on the moon is so much less than earth, that kinetic weapons will work so much better from it. Hence, it is a strategic imperitive that someone will utilise the moon for a weapons platform at some stage.
What about the USA buying rocket technology from ESA ? Ariane is an excellent vehicle with a great record.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
We currently have our multi-core, 64-bit processors and 8+GB of RAM in our computers at affordable prices only because of AMD and Intel rivalry for the almighty dollar. If AMD never existed, Intel would never needed to develop the technology they currently use.
I believe you are unwittingly making the opposite point you were trying to. You are describing the virtues of competition in a free market. This bears no resemblance to the Constellation projects, which are (like the Shuttle) a government run development program. Government is good at stimulating early-stage tech industries with its purchasing power (especially the computing industry, from punched cards to supercomputers), but developing those technologies itself? When has a government ever been good at that?
Compare: Ares was projected to cost in excess of $40B to develop. SpaceX with a few hundred million dollars of funding has developed the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, both of which have now gone to orbit. We are talking about a few orders of magnitude difference in development cost. Ares would have cost more per pound to LEO than the Space Shuttle it's replacing. Why are people arguing to keep it?
NASA needs to hire companies like SpaceX to get astronauts into orbit. It needs to focus its technologies on what lies beyond: Interplanetary-capable craft, in-situ resource utilization on the Moon or Mars, automated precursor missions, and so on. All of this is consistent with what Obama's proposing. Nobody is proposing the end of manned spaceflight. There's a lot that needs to get done, and shelling out the majority of NASA's budget for a new rocket to get people into Low Earth Orbit, when much cheaper commercial alternatives exist, is a plan only a Senator from Alabama could love.
Just how stupid can you be? If I lose my legs, I have insurance. If I die, my family will benefit from insurance as well. And you should examine how humans really work once you step out of retardedland: humans do not decide to choose to live in a society to work towards a "common good" or "help each other". Humans are animals who do what's best for them.
The trick to a successful society - often forgotten by loserboy nerdy politicians - is to balance it so that everyone striving to obtain advantage for themselves will result in a net gain for the community. If this doesn't happen, people will simply find a better community to live in or one which requires their skills so that there is reciprocal gain.
No-one does stuff to "help other people", no-one with half a neuron anyway. I'm not a blood donor because I like to help other people, but because giving blood is actually good for me. Apart from the health advantages, I get a medical check 4 times a year without me paying money for it, and keeping the blood bank supplied with my type increases the chances that there's some available should I need it. If someone else is helped by this, their luck. But I don't do that for them, I do it for myself.
Your "common good" does not exist. Get over it once the kindergarten kids are through with brown-swirling you.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
It's much cheaper to simply launch your weapon on an ICBM or launch a stealthy weapons platform in space than it would be to go to the moon and set up a giant frickin' laser. If there's ever weapons on the moon, they'll probably be used for fighting other people on the moon.
Besides, there's that whole outer space treaty that makes the moon a neutral zone like Antarctica. Hasn't been too many wars on that continent, and it's a lot nicer than the moon.
The moon is three days away. We've been there and we should go back.
The reasons aren't just financial and the technology gains we've made in space exploration have more than paid the costs. The US economy has ridden on the shirt tails of the space program for decades and cutting off funding for critical research is myopic and will be detrimental to future economic growth. The problem has been the bureaucracy that is NASA and while I applaud the efforts to privatize most of LEO stuff, there still needs to be a core vision and mission statement for the organization.
I hate to say this but there were two main reasons we went to the moon in the first place. 1) We had the memory of a beloved president, assassinated in his prime, to keep the vision burning in the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Going against Kennedy's vision was political suicide after November 1963. 2) We had a mortal enemy going for the same objective. The high ground was space and we wouldn't let an enemy sworn to wipe us off the face of the planet get there before us. Things like the Cuban Missile Crisis were still in everybody's collective minds at the time. There was no way that Congress wasn't going to fund it. And even despite having serious set backs, it was done. After it was done, people lost interest.. Why? No further vision. Yes we had a space shuttle but it soon became boring to the public and LEO just doesn't get people inspired. There's no drama in launching a satellite from the Space Shuttle.
In all of this, and it's forgotten to by most people, the government is funded year by year and every two years there's an election so setting goals that are more than a year out is becoming more and more difficult. Political winds change, budgets expand and contract with every new priority. I'm sorry, if Obama got up and did a speech like Kennedy did in the 60s, 1/2 of the political pundits would tear it apart and the other half would say "yeah, but we got this Oil mess in the Gulf, maybe next year." Bush couldn't get ti done because of other priorities. So in the four decades since Apollo 11, we've had SkyLab, the ISS, Apollo/Soyuz and hundreds of shuttle missions. All LEO, nothing leaving Earth's gravity for manned space flight. Yes, we've sent lots of probes but again, that's a drop in the bucket in terms of funding. When
Yes, privatization is a necessary goal, put NASA in the driver's seat of spurring innovation in those areas. Not managing it. Also set long term manned exploration goals, the Moon is one of those
things but not to just go back but to colonize and develop the skills and systems necessary to spend 3 years in space. To do that you need leadership with vision, that can motivate and set an agenda that subsequent congressional budget arguments can overcome. I doubt, seriously, that unless those other conditions that originally pushed us to the moon are in play, that we'll not go to Mars or back to the Moon.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The first problem with the libertarian argument is that free markets exploit only that which is profitable. Discovering that which is profitable is often a thing done by or for governments. If you look at the history of innovation over the past hundred years, almost all of it would have been impossible without the direct involvement of government. The computer was developed for the defense industry, as were rockets, jet propulsion, modern nuclear physics, refrigeration, microwaves, radio, the list goes on and on.
Lately the profit motive behind going to space has been more or less limited to tourism. A visit to the moon by NASA, especially an extended manned one with the intention of exploiting the moon's natural resources and discovering the problems of long-term hostile-environment extraplanetary colonization could provide the very sort of research that would create a profit motive for private industry to exploit the moon.
The second problem with the libertarian argument is that the companies developing these technologies already are private industry, they are merely funded by the government.
The third problem is the cost. If you compare government spending in any given year, 3bn is a drop in the bucket, but it's a drop in the bucket that could result in MEN WALKING ON THE FREAKIN' MOON. What part about MEN WALKING ON THE MOON did you miss?
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.