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Neil Armstrong To NASA: You're Embarrassing
astroengine writes "Neil Armstrong, Apollo legend and outspoken critic of NASA's current direction for human spaceflight, was joined by three other space experts to address Congress on Thursday. It wasn't pretty. Amongst the other criticisms was Armstrong's tough statement: 'For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable.' He might have a point, but Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, suggested the shuttles should be brought out of retirement to fill the U.S. manned spaceflight gap — a suggestion that probably rolled some eyeballs."
decay comes after living beyond one's means.
nasa is a reflection of the government.
the government is a reflection of the people.
and it's 20 years, not 10.
america, and a large part of the world will know what it means to live beneath one's means for decades to come.
A guy who walked on the moon thinks manned space flight is a good idea. Full story at 11.
In all honesty, manned space flight makes no sense right now, as it's not something that can be done half-assed. With the current state of American finances (and the petty squabbling surrounding it) , NASA will never get the investment they need to put a human anywhere that matters. Robotic and satellite exploration, however, is not out of reach at all. We need to do more of, and we need to invest more in it if we (the US) are ever going to maintain some innovative power going forward. Space exploration is the right thing to do, but we don't yet have the knowledge or technology to make meaningful manned missions.
My other sig is clever.
In broad, total-budget-allocation numbers, it is unequivocally the case that the US seems to have backed out of a great many 'big picture' projects in favor of a mixture of foreign policy adventuring and financial jiggery-pokery.
In that sense, Armstrong is correct.
However, it must not be forgotten that Armstrong is also speaking in his capacity as one of the White Elephants. The people we sent to the moon pretty much to show Ivan whose dick was bigger. An impressive feat of engineering(that conveniently aligned with the Cold War enthusiasm for big missiles); but not really a high point for science. Those unassuming little RC cars on mars that survived so long did a fair bit more extraterrestrial data gathering, and a combination of orbital and improved ground telescopes have done extraordinary deep-sky work...
So far as Armstrong is arguing that there is something rotten in the US, he is correct. However, I can only take them seriously so long as he stays there, rather than expanding into a lamentation over the decline of the impressive, but scientifically dubious, in favor of unsexy but productive and increasingly robotic space work.The fact that it's easier to find money to save gamblers from the consequences of their own folly than it is to explore the universe is sad. The fact that tinned-monkey 'space exploration' is being supplanted by increasingly sophisticated robotic systems is not.
NASA sure has its problems, but I think Congress can be blamed for most of the embarrassing things.
I'm thinking pork barrelling, micro management, underfunding of stated goals.
When I think of the Mars landers that were planned for 3 month mission and 1 may still be running *years* later, I am in awe of NASA.
No, they both suck, just on different levels and in different ways.
No, try again. As the poster above you points out: the Bush Bailout cost more in one year - nay, in ONE LUMP SUM PROGRAM - than NASA's entire budget for the entirety of its existence.
And what did the Bush Bailout get us? Pretty much nothing except a bunch of Republican fat-cats lining their pockets after claiming their businesses were "too big to fail."
NASA is not a reflection of "government." NASA is a reflection of what happens when you give an agency - ANY agency, whether public or private - an order to do grand things on a shoestring budget and then start hacking away at the budget even further.
The final three planned moon missions were all canceled by Nixon and the Republicans, who had their hate on for the space program because it had been put in place by JFK (Nixon had an especially heavy hate on for any remnants of that administration, as he had lost to JFK previously). This behavior has continued more or less apace every time the Republicans held either the Presidency or at least one house of Congress.
As has once been said: NASA is an agency with an undeniable problem. The problem is not the will to do what they are assigned to do. It is not the capacity and intellect to get the job done. No, the problem is that it is an agency assigned to tasks that require a 10-15 year program to set up and accomplish, while being overseen and funded by a bunch of assholes who are generally replaced on a 2-year cycle and who are perpetually looking to be seen as "cutting government waste" and wanting instant gratification. For god's sake, we build in a 10% overage "just in case" fund for every construction project, but Congress won't do the same for NASA's programs!
You want to see NASA do well? Give them a task, assign realistic funding (and a percentage for overruns when they happen, because something unexpected always happens) for the task, lock the funding in place so that future Congresses can't touch it, and GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.
He didn't say this to NASA, but to congress.
No, they both suck, just on different levels and in different ways.
They do both suck, but Bush funded NASA more than Clinton and Obama combined. For all the fucking up Bush did, hurting NASA isn't part of it.
Your comment about the Clarke story is interesting, because its largely true - WW2 saw over 38,000 of the top two allied aircraft produced (the P-51 and the Spitfire), with build times down to a couple of days per aircraft.
Today, the USAFs top air superiority aircraft is the F-22, which costs a whopping $180M per unit, and takes over two years to build. It costs that much, and it takes that long, because it is an aircraft with significant technological advances in it - and it also shows in its operational performance, with significant maintenance hours per flight hour (the last figure I heard was it took 100 maintenance hours per flight hour to keep the F-22 flying).
And the USAF only has 190 or so of them. With no more coming.
What do you think would happen if we pitted a modern equivalent of the P-51 against the F-22? Take a cheap-and-quick-to-build airframe, put 10,000 of them in the air, and keep the replacements coming. What would the outcome be?
Eventually, through sheer numbers, the F-22 would fail in its task - there are only so many missiles it can carry, which means there are only so many enemy it can remove from the equation per sortie - and the operational tempo would have to be kept high enough that the enemy doesn't enjoy air superiority over your bases and supply chain while you re-arm and re-fuel, which means a high availability rate for the aircraft would need to be kept.
You are going to lose F-22s on a steady, but maybe very low, rate - perhaps 5 or 6 a sortie, against 300 or 400 enemy destroyed. But that enemy can afford to sustain those losses, because it can replace them while you cannot, every F-22 lost is an F-22 you cannot replace. Every F-22 that cannot complete a mission due to mechanical failure is another aircraft that needs to take up valuable maintenance time.
As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all of its own. Its how the Soviets defeated the tank battalions of the German army - the German tanks were technologically advanced (power steering, active suspension systems etc etc - a leap ahead of other tanks of their days) but the Soviets produced their T-34s in vastly superior numbers, alongside the massive output of the US Sherman tanks...
Here's the thing that gets me. We bailed out AIG, GM, Chrysler, Goldman Sachs, GE, Bank of America, the list goes on and on. We gave them Trillions in direct cash infusions and 0% interest loans. Essentially every member of the financial sector and virtually all large businesses were saved because of either being directly saved or we saved their financial counter-parties. As soon as someone starts talking about raising taxes on the decision makers in those big corporations a few % all of a sudden it's class warfare. I agree there's class warfare going on, but it seems clear that my side is losing.
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Maybe they should be run like CERN.
Basically have a big bank account that the government(s) dump money into each year and then leave it up to NASA to decide how to spend it.
That way if some wingnut gets in and decides to defund it, they'll just loose funding for that year or two and can live off the savings during that time.
The Democrats seriously have a lot of people brainwashed to think they're for the little guy.
The bailout was bipartisan and not targeted to Republican supporters.
Citigroup, the largest recipient, in fact donated much more to Democrats than to Republicans.
The other side is better funded.
but the real blame goes to the american people. exactly such as yourself, or people like you.
to think that one half of america is an innocent bystander while the other half is a lying, self deceiving bunch ....it's indicative that you have your head so far up your ass, the taste of old copper pennies fills your mouth.
The reason I disagree with this is that the American people are lied to and propagandized to such a degree that they have no basis on which to make informed decisions about government. They are taken advantage of at every turn by self-interested politicians and media outlets. Where can they get good, honest information about what various government agencies are up to, and what policy outcomes are? TV ain't gonna tell 'em! Local news is just that, and the national stuff is high level overview, and mostly just what the government wants us to hear anyway. And the politicians are too concerned with funding their next campaign and getting elected to be bothered with any kind of honest assesment.
So people are left to their own devices. Some will go out of their way to find out what's going on (even then it can be tough). But many people are too busy with taking care of the kids and keeping a job to really understand what is going on and how to respond. And even if they do, how do they affect change? It's hard to get anything done in Washington without an army of lobbyists. It's hard for the average citizen to challenge the military/industrial complex, or Wall Street, or Big Oil. So you can blame the American people if you want. And I might agree with you if we had a real, functioning republic with real, adversarial media. But we don't.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Their different thinking is more easily explained by the fact that they left this planet and viewed it from a distance, than because they feel themselves political tools.
After the first couple dozen F-22s are lost, and the first several thousand enemy planes, the enemy will be reduced to sending barely-trained newbies up to fight. The kill ratio will get larger and larger.
The Tiger II tanks weren't all they were made out to be, prone to failure and poorly built especially near the end of the war. Tactics used by the Germans didn't help, storing rounds in the turret, using it in sandy environments, and letting themselves get flanked so the light side armor could be hit.
Contrast: The 1,900 American M1 tanks used in Desert Storm. I think we may have had one damaged due to enemy tank fire. The M1's armor, firepower and night vision (plus tactics and training to use them effectively) made the enemy tanks almost completely ineffective. Almost all losses were due to friendly fire. You could have thrown ten times as many Iraqi tanks at them, and the results would have been the same.
This is not surprising given that the U.S. military spends more annually on air-conditioning than the entirety of NASA's budget.
When talking trillions of $ in government spending, it's thoroughly and completely embarrassing that an accomplished org like NASA has to scrap for a few billion
Neil Armstrong is a true American hero and patriot, and I'm glad he had the opportunity and guts to tell Congress the very sad truth that under the current administration, our government has allowed NASA to completely fall apart. According to Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA) the ENTIRE 2008 BUDGET of NASA (NOT just the shuttle) was $17.3 Billion. This administration has wasted over $800 Billion in failed stimulus, all while castrating this agency which has provided America with so much technology that has been carried in to the private sector and our daily lives, as well as the non-tangible benefit of the PUBLIC PRIDE that our successes there have brought.
These days, our government spends over $11 BILLION PER DAY and BORROWS over $4 Billion of that money.. That's right - EVERY DAY.. Although I'm not in favor of INCREASING this number, it seems that NASA did an INCREDIBLE GOOD with what amounts to about 0.004% of the annual budget of our government, especially when compared to the money we WASTE on STUPID POLITICAL PAYOFFS to companies like Solyndra, getting HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF OUR DOLLARS as payoff to political friends of Obama. If anyone thinks that $17.3 Billion can't be shaved off the top to save NASA, they're very wrong.
I'm not an "Obama Hater" just to be an Obama hater.. I'm a GOVERNMENT WASTE HATER, and am just as against the $800 bailout that Bush initiated before he left office too. We need to stop taking partisan sides and blaming the other side, and we need to look at our priorities and fix the problems and restore pride in America. If we had any leadership in Washington today, we'd have a "Kennedy-like speech" in which we'd be challenged once again to stop looking to government for help, and be told that by the end of THIS DECADE that we would land AMERICANS on MARS, otherwise we're going to be RENTING research facilities up there from the Chinese in 20 years.
-Steve
BothSidesAreWrong@cherokeesystems.com
-Steve Tired of voting for the "lesser of two evils?" Come talk about it on www.bothsidesarewrong.com
The hell he did. He inherited a BOOMING economy with a MASSIVE surplus. I'm so fucking sick of this bullshit false equivalence. What you have said isn't just a lie. It's mendacious to the extreme.
Stock market peaked in March, 2000. The dotcom burst was well under way by election day. As you might recall, half of the valuation for all publicly traded companies went away by late 2001. That in turn dropped tax revenue considerably, since so much (around 20% of the 2000-2001 fiscal year) was dependent on capital gains. So no massive revenue surplus in fiscal year 2001-2002.
The original poster is correct.
Bush tried to enact stricter controls long before the crisis, but was continually rebuffed by the likes of Chris Dodd (the guy who got the favorable CountryWide loan) and Barney Frank. The latter is the guy who in response to a 2003 Bush proposal for tighter accounting of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac said they "are not facing any kind of financial crisis" and wanted to "roll the dice a little bit more" in relation to such institutions.
There's enough blame for all sides, corrupt Republican and Democrat politicians, and Republican and Democrat supporters lining up for their handouts from said politicians.
I just find it funny and sad how the Democratic Party has managed to brainwash much of the public into thinking they are for the little guy instead of the bankers and corporations. The uninformed automatically think it's the Republican politicians lining the pockets of their fat cat friends, not knowing the Democrats do it at least as much.
Unmanned spacecraft require just as much science and engineering, and is a better investment.
Just another ignorant American.
Dear Mr. Cernan,
While I respect your contribution to the space program, you're wrong. Specifically, with respect to the Space Shuttle, it is too late. They've been pulled out of service, stripped of flight hardware, and decomissioned. Contracts have been cancelled. Staff has been layed off. Necessary support infrastructure and hardware has been mothballed. It's done.
In addition, required airframe inspections were postponed in order to complete the final missions by the deadline. So, even if we were to renew all the contracts, re-hire all the staff, and pull the ground support harddware out of mothballs, a recertification of all three airframes would be required. This takes time; and, for the duration of the recertification process we would have no launch vehicles. Given that we did not have facilities to do more than one full tear down and inspection at a time, (or have not had the capability for a considerable period of time), the recertification would be drawn out until at least two airframes were inspected, sequentially -- flight rules require a second shuttle be available on standby in the event of an on-orbit accident.
No, Mr. Cernan. As embarrassing as it is to have no capability, returning the Shuttle to flight, now, is not the option. Our best option for NASA designed hardware is a return to flight leveraging proven components and technology, in the form of the SLS (or whatever you choose to call it) If you want it sooner, get it funded faster. And although your past arguments make it clear you find commercial options distastefully, I feel you should review your decision. One option is the ULA Atlas V+ Boeing CST-100. Another option is to use the Lockheed Orion on either ULA vehicles (Atlas or Delta) As these contractors are the people who built and maintained the Shuttle, they're already intimately familiar with the manned space flight requirements. Frankly, they're likely to be ready before SLS.
Finally, You should not be so quick to dismiss alternatives such as SpaceX. Yes, it is rocket science. Yes, these are the "new kids on the block", upstarts some may call them. Consider that SpaceX is hiring many experienced people from both NASA contractors and NASA itself. Consider that the work being done by SpaceX is under contract to NASA and the Air Force, and is under constant review by NASA and Air Force personnel. Consider that their designs, while new, are based on existing works. They may be the "new kid on the block" but they are clearly leveraging the industries 5 decades of experience.
Yes, that is what I meant by "completely devalued." Thank you for confirming your reading comprehension to be of the average level for the republican redneck retard fringe.
You, my friend, are a bigot. Re-read your post and replace "republican redneck" with any other slur and maybe then you will understand. You are quick to defend the target a racial slur, but you are too stupid to even recognize that you do the exact same thing. You speak of the "fringe" without realizing that you are on the fringe yourself, so much so that anyone even close to the middle of America is viewed as the "fringe" by you.
Reading your posts and realizing the willful ignorance and raw hatred that contributes to them is depressing.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
What do you think would happen if we pitted a modern equivalent of the P-51 against the F-22? Take a cheap-and-quick-to-build airframe, put 10,000 of them in the air, and keep the replacements coming. What would the outcome be?
A massacre of the P-51 because the F-22 does not exist in a vacuum. P-51s would be shot out of the sky in massive quantities by modern anti-aircraft defenses, other fighters, and destroyed on the ground by attack aircraft that can level operating bases with a single sortie. How are your P51s going to operate when their bases are turned into smoldering ruins?
Furthermore your notion that you could bring 10,000 P-51s to bear, to be generous, and absurd hypothetical. Real wars don't work that way.
If Congress had let rocket scientists design the shuttle, instead of lobbyists, not only would NASA have achieved the design goals, but it would have been a safer system, and we would have been able to afford to invest on new technology and follow-on systems.
ATK(Morton-Thiokol)/Lockheed/Boeing, and their congressional Pork-Piggie enablers killed the goose that laid the golden egg. And as a result, yes, NASA looks embarrassing. But they can hardly help the design constraints that were forced upon them by IGNORANT LEGISLATIVE FIAT. And Neil Armstrong should know better, for fuck's sake~!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The best definition of "bad policy" I've ever heard is this: one that leads to a position where you have no good options.
Baling out Wall Street was a bad option. Letting the economy collapse because liquidity dried up would be a bad option too. Judge which is the worst. The sensible thing looking back on these no-win situations is not to criticize the choice taken, but the path that led up to that choice.
The same goes for NASA's retirement of the shuttle without a successor. The path to that decision is littered with programmatic missteps. First, the entire program was predicated on an unrealistic projection of the demand for the vehicle. This put the agency under financial strain, which no doubt accounts for its repeated failures to develop a successor craft. Had the possibility of stretching the program until 2011 and then having NO manned access to space been taken seriously twenty years ago, perhaps we'd have followed through on a patient, long term replacement program rather than a series of crash programs that, well, crashed.
So the upshot of kicking the shuttle replacement can down the road for twenty years is we're faced with nothing but lousy choices. Either continue the very expensive shuttle program, which by this date probably should also include a recertification of the orbiters given their age; or bum rides off the Russians (if they happen to be flying) as we undertake yet another crash program in Shuttle replacement. You can bellyache about the decision to retire the Shuttle, but if we'd managed things sensibly we'd have its replacement ready to fly NOW.
That's bad policy for you. Seems like a good idea at the time ("look, we cut the space budget and we're still flying"), until you find yourself with nothing but bad options.
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Reminds me (sadly) of the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Superiority" which describes a country at war that keeps developing ever more astonishing weapons in fewer and fewer quantities eventually leading to its defeat by its technically inferior enemy. (Probably was written before WWII where huge technological leaps clearly affected the war's outcome: A-bomb, radar, enigma).
Actually it was the Nazi's who were doing most of the innovations at the time, Germany was the country that had invented the tank, they invented long range missiles, and jet planes. However they were both heavily out-produced by the Allies, (in particular America which wasn't having it's factories bombed on a daily basis), and Hitler made the fatal mistake of fighting a two front war with one of them being a winter campaign in Russia. You should also realise that the Enigma machine was a German invention. The major reason that the Allies were able to crack the code was that despite procedure an intact Enigma was recovered from a surrendering German submarine. What won the war.was PRODUCTION.
I would like to see human beings land on the Moon. The US is probably the only country in the world which terrific combination of resources, $$ and the experience of having done it before.
It might sound dreamy and unreal - but I think in addition to helping technology grow by leaps and bounds - it also helps a society share a dream. In the episode "1968" of the TV Mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon" US is shown as a nation in turmoil. RFK is assassinated as is Martin Luther King Jr. There is the Vietnam war abroad and the rioting and protests at home.
The first manned lunar flight - Apollo 8 - takes place. Even in times as troubled as those , the nation rejoiced. People felt happy and felt that they were a part of something special. As is shown in the TV series - a woman writes a telegram to the astronauts "You saved 1968"
The whole world celebrated Apollo 11. It is an iconic moment in history even now.
We have undergone a communication revolution - people can be brought "closer" to space flight. Lets land a human being on the moon. Or an asteroid. Or maybe Mars ( given the current situation it sounds far fetched )
Let us be a part of a time which will be remembered by history.
If any lawmaker / lobbyist is reading this - I would request you to try your hardest to push this through Congress.
it's a decision you wont regret - you'll be proud of it.
"perhaps 5 or 6 a sortie, against 300 or 400 enemy destroyed"
I'm pretty sure that if the F-22's used missiles, ran out, afterburned back to base to reload, rinse, repeat, there would be zero loses. But I get your point in general.
I think your point is accurate as long as the 2 sides have technologies which are separated by some small gap. In your example, both have the technology of military flight, and the difference between the two techs is X. But at some point past X, there are zero fatalities for the advanced side. If, for instance, we had a world wide grid of satellites with pin point accurate lasers and radar/tracking technology that could see through clouds/stealth, no amount of planes could hurt us (unless you want to get into absurd numbers:))
What happens in that situation, isn't that the enemy attempts to out produce you, but they resort to guerilla tactics.