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Rep. Bill Posey Introduces 'Back To the Moon' Bill
MarkWhittington writes "In an attempt to rationalize and give focus to NASA's human space flight program, Rep. Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, has introduced a bill that will direct the space agency to send astronauts back to the Moon with a goal of permanent habitation of Earth's nearest neighbor."
How does this advance the Republican goal of balancing the budget?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
While I'm firmly of the stance that we need to drastically reduce spending (almost) across the board, this is the type of project I wish money would go to if it's going to be spent.
Trying to be ambiguous as to not divert the discussions focus, but spending on an endeavor that will ultimately benefit the entire nation as well as be a boon to science seems like a better use of funds than programs heavily favoring a specific subset of the nation. (Take that how you will, I have no particular program in mind.)
How about paying the government deficit that is about to default in a month so humans can habitat Earth first
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet. To leave this planet, we must advance the state of the art. To advance the state of the art, we must spend money on human space exploration/colonization.
Deficits will never go away, and neither will the fact that the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How about paying the government deficit that is about to default in a month so humans can habitat Earth first
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet. To leave this planet, we must advance the state of the art. To advance the state of the art, we must spend money on human space exploration/colonization.
Deficits will never go away, and neither will the fact that the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
I agree that we need space exploration but as an Australian I am not going to demand that it be funded by US taxpayers. The fact is that Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were funded by the cold war and this funding is long gone. It was gone in the early 1970s and its not coming back. Fortunately a lot of good research and development was done in the 1950s and 60s. Launches are cheaper and more reliable now. Maybe the gap has been closed and exploration money can come from private sources. I think that is the only way space exploration will get beyond flags and footprints.
I hate to say it but nationalism and religion were the drivers of exploration in the past. Maybe this will happen in space.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet. To leave this planet, we must advance the state of the art. To advance the state of the art, we must spend money on human space exploration/colonization.
Deficits will never go away, and neither will the fact that the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
If your worried about the sun going nova, then take a couple of deep breaths and relax. We've got time. Although I strongly support the space program, we would do better as a species if we realized that we're NOT getting off this rock anytime soon and we'd best spend some energy keeping what we've got habitable.
Supporting the space program could be done without materially increasing the deficit (NASA takes up some tiny fraction of the US budget at present). But it really bugs me when congresscritters put up stupid bills like this one. You get all sorts of earmarks and pork embedded in it, you get NASA (or whatever organization) pulled in all sorts of usually contradictory ways. You get things changing from year to year. If someone came up with a bill that funded NASA with x% of the Federal Budget for 50 years, maybe I could go for that but the current bill is just grandstanding and appeasing his constituents.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nope. Outer Space Treaty makes it impossible to recover the costs of exploration, since you're not allowed to actually claim anything up there as belonging to you.
Note also that the relevant government is required by that Treaty to authorize and provide supervision to any private party going into space from their soil.
For that matter, any activity in outer space can be blocked (at least temporarily), by ANY signatory to the Treaty at their discretion.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This bill is an attempt to revive the failed SLS space launcher based on space shuttle parts. Here's the relevant text in the bill:
(3) The 111th Congress, in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010, called for the development of a heavy lift capability of greater than 130 metric tons consisting of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) to pursue exploration, yet fell short on explicitly stating a clear destination.
(4) The 112th Congress has reaffirmed this commitment to the development of a heavy lift capability.
A few months ago a senator from Utah tried to get NASA to stop looking for alternatives to the SLS (such as SpaceX) by citing the 130 ton requirement. Now they're trying to pass a new bill with stronger wording to force NASA to spend money on the SLS, which happens to be built in their states.
... if he didn't have a purely selfish agenda because it would just happen to directly benefit his state/district economically long before we'd even get there, and even if it gets cancelled later and we don't.
You mean an event that will not happen for millions of years as in 2029 and 2036? Just because the likelihood is low doesn't mean it won't happen tomorrow. Frankly, humans themselves are a *lot* more likely to make Earth uninhabitable and a lot faster than a million years.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
A socialist like Kennedy wanting to get to the moon by a socialist government program, I can understand. But a Republican? Surely we should just wait until GE or Boeing just picks up and goes with private money and objectives. It will be much more efficiently run, and no taxpayers will be robbed to give a (literally) free ride to socialist astronauts.
After reading all my Pournelle and Niven in the 70's, I've been waiting 40 years for the power of free enterprise to get me a ticket on the Pan Am Space Clipper. I'm not sure what the hold-up is; probably, the corporations are still too highly taxed.
The Earth is a lot tougher than we are, and will be here for a long long time, so "man is destroying Earth" isn't a reason.
If you mean that the pile of crushed metal is still 'technically' a car sure we aren't destroying the earth. We are destroying the environment we absolutely need to survive. That's pretty much what people mean when "we're destroying the earth".
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The largest employer in his district is the Weber County School District, but otherwise I'd have to agree with your position on Rob Bishop. The guy is a sell-out, and is partly responsible for a $3 billion earmark (nearly the only one in the current budget) for the "SLS" launch system (often dubbed the "Senate Launch System") to essentially restart under a new name the Ares V project.
It is useful to note that the ATK plant was in his Utah State House of Representatives district before he was elected to his current seat in Washington, thus has a rather cozy relationship with the people in that company as well as many neighbors who work for them as well.
One legitimate issue that needs to be addressed is in terms of how to keep domestic production going for the Ammonium Perchlorate, which is a vital chemical needed for general defense purposes. That is the primary chemical used in solid rocket boosters, and is used for most of the ICBMs in the arsenal of the United States (as well as the missiles in submarines). Right now, those missiles aren't being built, so there is a need for at least somebody, somewhere, to be using this chemical so that the factories making this rocket fuel can keep going for when the ICBM fleet needs to be refurbished for the next generation (the fuel is unstable and does need to be replaced periodically).
My personal solution to the problem: Rather than disguising a NASA program as something other than a make-work jobs program to keep the factory workers at these chemical plants employed, why not simply get into the business of making 4th of July fireworks and literally give these "missiles" to every city in America for their annual celebrations? $3-$4 billion would make a whole lot of fireworks, and it could at least be enjoyed for pure entertainment purposes by most Americans if they want to see their tax dollars literally burned up every year. You could even keep rocket developers busy, where they would be able to "test fly" their designs on a regular basis. That is much more to say that to have a bunch of rocket developers design a vehicle that will never fly due to an eventual shift in priorities, political parties, and mismanagement that usually accompanies most NASA rocket development projects.
"Nope. Outer Space Treaty makes it impossible to recover the costs of exploration, since you're not allowed to actually claim anything up there as belonging to you. "
Thankfully most countries with desirable launch areas aren't signatories of that treaty, rendering that null and void.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Kennedy was more conservative then reagan, poppa bush, or W. Back then they could balance budgets. Now, we have uneducated masses voting in neo-cons who speak of balancing budgets, stopping illegals,and getting to the moon, but do the exact opposite. Sadly, these followers ignore results and simply listen to rhetoric. Neo-cons have fucked up education in America. Hell, reagan and W grew gov more than all other president EXCEPT for lincoln and FDR who were dealing with real issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, right. Because the current greedy business model we have down here has a bright future.
...the "Federal stimulus for Florida's 15th congressional district to get Bill Posey re-elected" bill.
Unlike the Democrats, right, who are totally busy solving that deficit problem? US seems to be screwed either which way.
A metaphor for spousal abuse does seem a more appropriate name for the relationship between Congress and NASA.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
In a country which is trillions of dollars in debt, which apparently cannot afford to offer national healthcare like others do in the UK and Canada but CAN afford to bail out the heads of banks who've screwed the US population out of their children's future can somehow come up with the rationale to send people to the moon because? Common sense is clearly gone today. I don't know what the hell anyone in government thinks anymore
Recent evidence would seem to suggest that said greedy people do not wind up contributing in a meaningful way, but instead wind up finding every edge case they can to try to skim off the productivity of others.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That's right! Man will never fly! You tell them!
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Uh huh...to quote Mel Brooks bullshit bullshit aaaaand bullshit. maybe you'd care to explain how a full 2/3rds of corps paid NO taxes this decade or how GE, who paid paid NO taxes in 2010 and in fact got a REBATE and is now using those funds to fire Americans and build overseas with the head of GE actually having the brass balls to say "We've globalized around markets, not cheap labor. The era of globalization around cheap labor is over. Today we go to China, we go to India, because that's where the customers are."
BULLSHIT and EVERY single time of growth in the history of this country TAXES AT THE TOP HAVE BEEN OVER 70% full stop. We have had unprecedented tax breaks for the top 1% for THIRTY YEARS and NOTHING has gotten better. NOTHING. So peddle the rep fantasy somewhere else, we ain't buying it no more. America WILL BE COME NATIONALIST the only question is how violent the change over will be. China is about to drop their US dollars so the game is over friend, time to pay the check.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Many of the top "new" aerospace companies are already siphoning off the cream of the crop from many of these companies, including operations in Houston. That talent isn't going to waste, and I'd have to agree that there is a deep talent pool which does need to pass on the lessons learned from one generation to another. That is indeed a huge issue, so I don't want to minimize that.
Still, those involved with the manned spaceflight program at NASA have a dismal record of getting anything accomplished, where the last new design to actually make it into space has been the Space Shuttle, started in the Johnson administration and approved during the Nixon administration in terms of real funding. If the experience of nearly a dozen failed launcher projects is lost, it could even be said to be a good thing after a fashion. Something is certainly missing from what needs to happen as the object of the whole exercise, getting people into space, seems to be lost completely anymore. If the same worker bees keep shifting around from one nameless company to another, perhaps the whole system needs to be rethought.
I'm also going to acknowledge that there ought to be a transition after a fashion, as radical moves can throw out the baby with the bathwater. The question is more in terms of how gradual, and what it really means in terms of a privatized spaceflight system in America. Merely becoming another contractor to NASA doing what was done by government employees isn't really privatization, as opposed to a company who sell spaceflight services to NASA as a customer but also sells those same services to many other people who are not even government agencies. More significantly, private companies don't have to "spread the wealth" by putting offices in key congressional districts, but rather make the decision in terms of where to locate facilities based upon hard economic decisions to remain profitable.
The U.S. federal government is hitting a brick wall in terms of finances, and the train wreck is going to do far more than take out NASA. For myself, I wish that America had the money and the political will among the politicians in DC to be able to continue to fund NASA as it has for decades, and perhaps even go up to the 1960's levels of funding. Unfortunately cold hard reality is such that NASA is going to be an easy target with a weak constituency ripe to be wiped out in a budgetary compromise.... especially when programs like Head Start, Medicaid, and Social Security are also going to be hammered hard. If T-bills lose the AAA bond rating quality, expect that to get much worse before it gets better.
Just so you know, the US isn't going to default its debt. Thats silly speculation from the conservative press thats led to a bit of nervousness from some isolated quarters because the statuatory debt limit is being reached.
But its just a debt limit, its got nothing to do with defaulting what so over, because pushing the default button would nuke the economy and the whitehouse knows it. It simply won't happen.
The US economy is still held to be a low risk of defaulting, simply because it doesn't need to, as it can just go austere instead. Or raise the limit.
Of course austerity is going to suck, because spending cuts wreck economies that are slumping, but life goes on.
If you ask me, its about time the US pulled out of a few wars and cashed in that peace dividend.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
a rock on a collision course with the earth. It may or may not be large enough to "destroy the earth" - but it doesn't need to be that big to "end life as we know it" on earth.
And yet, even after surviving an asteroid impact sufficient to destroy "life as we know it" or a full-on nuclear war, what remains of Earth will still be a million times more habitable than Mars.
We simply don't need colonies in space to ensure the continuance of the human race. If going all survivalist is what lights your fire, just build a sealed bio-dome in a mineshaft in Texas. It will be orders of magnitude cheaper, you'll get free oxygen and dirt to start with, and as a bonus, you'll get to find out whether it's even possible to build a self-sustaining colony. And if that answer turns out to be "no" (as it did for Biosphere 2), you can jump out the escape hatch without needing a working billion dollar rocket and a nine-month wait.
Space is not magic fairy dust which will make unworkable science or uneconomic technology spring into life. If sealed colonies in a can are possible, they're possible right here on Earth, for cheaper.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC