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DARPA Chooses Leader For 100-Year Starship Project
Hugh Pickens writes "With Nasa scaling back its manned space programs, the idea of a manned trip to the stars may sound audacious, but the 100 Year Starship (100YSS) study is an effort seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible. The goal is not to have the government fund the actual building of spacecraft destined for the stars, but rather to create a foundation that can last 100 years in order to help foster the research needed for interstellar travel. Now DARPA has provided $500,000 in seed money to help jumpstart the effort and chosen Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space, to lead 100YSS. Jemison, who is also a physician and engineer, left NASA in 1993 after a six-year stint in which she served as science mission specialist aboard space shuttle Endeavour, becoming the first black woman to fly in space. Since leaving the space agency, she has been involved in education and outreach efforts and technology development. Rounding out her resume, Jemison also served as a medical officer for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, is a professionally trained dancer, speaks Russian, Swahili and Japanese, and was the first real astronaut to make a cameo in an episode of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation.' Jemison won the contract with her proposal titled 'An Inclusive Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth & Beyond.'"
Bullshit.
The private sector STILL can't get a man into space. If it had been left to the private sector "from day one", the US would never have had anyone try, because the private sector never would have put forth the R&D money to get anything done.
Scaling back NASA is a result of small-minded fools from the right wing who scream "cut cut cut everything we like yeah military!!!" They want to kill PBS, they want to kill NASA, they call numerous things "government waste", but they never want to admit that the biggest waste of government money is sending the US military everywhere to be the world's policeman, wasting $500 billion a year to invade countries, set up military bases, and bomb the fuck out of places where nobody wants us.
PBS gets $422 million currently. That is 0.084 PERCENT of what we waste on the military.
NASA's annual budget is only $19 billion in 2011. And for that you get all this stuff that you fucking take for granted.
We should say fuck the military, stop buying them new toys, and spend the money on NASA instead. We'd be to Mars in 5 years if we budgeted it.
The waste isn't necessarily the military.
It's General Dynamics and Fluor and countless other DOD contractors. My time in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Marine Infantryman was beyond understandably austere. Larger bases has clean flush toilets, clean showers every day, fresh cooked food every day including pop (soda) and ice cream. They had Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway, Green Beans coffee, movie theaters, dance night... Reliable communication back home. Mail delivery every day. Gyms. And electricity. We shat in bags and burned it. We were able to shower at most once a week. Our Staff NCO's had to pay out of their own pocket to get a water pump that worked. We usually lacked air conditioning or heat in our bunks...
All that we lacked is understandable and doesn't bother me at all. What bothered me was that the POG's had it, and bitched if they lost it like it was their right to have it while we ate stuff I wouldn't feed to my dogs.
When it was suggested by a Marine General in charge of such things that they cut back on these MWR (Morale, Welfare, Recreation) activities in Stars and Stripes, there was outlandish backlash from POG's (Person Other than Grunt) about how it would affect them and how they needed these services. Nevermind that he wanted to cut them back to divert the funding for these activities to us that were farther deployed and had practically none of that.
Virtually all of these services are provided by civilian DOD contractors. I think the largest compound in Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan was the Fluor compound.
While there IS waste in military spending, it dwarfs compared to what is spent on unnecessary contractors. Hell, they built a golf course in Baghdad for the Generals to play golf!
What are you, an asshole?
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
It's not the cost of a missile. It's the opportunity cost of a missile. As well as the cost of human life. Do you have any idea how many civilians have been killed by US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last ten years?
... damn, you should have gone to the symposium. These people were not nuts - they were capable engineers and sociologists and educators and authors and astronauts, who well understood the enormity of the challenge (which does in fact edge into astronomic scale).
There were reviews of existing technologies, reports on current research, proposals ranging from modest to blue-sky, discussion about the science that would have to be done. Social engineering was also prominent - any future colony would be a microcosm of human society after all.
Without the Dreamers, you wouldn't have the Planners. It was awe-inspiring to be among the Dreamers for a couple of days, and I begrudge not one dime of the money DARPA spent on it.
Right you are.
I have no idea as to exactly how qualified Jemison is. She may fit the bill on her own merits.
However, it is true that the foundation of Affirmative Action is the suspension of hiring standards in order to fill racial quotas for ethnic groups with lower mean qualifications, especially IQ. It cannot work any other way if it is to be implemented across the board in a society. If AA is enacted, it follows that most (not all) black people in highly qualified positions did not get there solely because of merit. It also follows that organizations like NASA that exist to pioneer very difficult things will be adversely impacted by AA.
Jesus Christ. OK, sure, the fact that she added some variety to the space program after a parade of white men in the 1960s and 1970s undoubtedly helped her career and opened some doors. But read her bio on Wikipedia. She entered Stanford at 16 and majored in chemical engineering, she has an MD from Cornell, she worked in the Peace Corps, she was an astronaut, she was a professor at Dartmouth for seven years, now she's hired by DARPA... yeah, sure, maybe you could get one or two lucky breaks as a diversity hire. But you don't have a career like that without being the smartest kid in your class and working amazingly hard. You don't have a career like that by being below average, you don't have a career like that just by being good, you have a career like that by being better than 99% of everyone else out there, and I guarantee this woman didn't bring down the average IQ of the astronaut program.
To do all of those things and to have some bigoted, asshole internet troll like you say that maybe she's not really qualified, and to suggest that perhaps she just got a pass because she's a black woman... well, what the hell have you ever accomplished with your life, other than to write perhaps the single most racist, sexist comment I've ever seen on Slashdot? Although perhaps you could argue that this is an accomplishment, in a perverse sort of a way. If nothing else, it's eye-opening about just how far we all have to go. Maybe we've got black astronauts and a black president, but we're still a damn long way from the color-blind Star Trek universe that inspired Jemison to become an astronaut in the first place.