Voyager and the Coming Great Hiatus In Deep Space

MatthewVD writes "Some time in the next decade, the Voyager probes will run out of juice and finally go silent after almost a half century of exploration. John Rennie writes that the lack of any meaningful effort to follow up with a mission to interstellar space shows the "fragile, inconsistent state of space exploration." It's particularly frustrating since the Voyagers have tantalized astronomers with a glimpse into about how the sun's magnetic field protects us from (or exposes us to) cosmic rays. Have we gone as far as we're willing to go in space?"

Comments

VEEEE GERRRRRR!

[Anonymous Coward]

VEEEE GERRRRRR!

Indeed

[Creedo]

In regards to funding such efforts, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently said:

“Without it, we might as well slide back to the cave, because that’s where we’re headed right now — broke.”

It's rather pathetic that we are willing to waste untold amounts of resources on mindless violence, and yet let programs which could further our knowledge of the universe sit unused on the drawing board.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 35 years old and the most exciting events in space exploration to happen in my life time have been two space shuttles exploding and killing the astronauts, sticking a station in space (that is at the end of its life already), and sticking a little RC car on mars. My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing. In their life times, the world stopped to watch for news of events as they unfolded in space. In our life time, nobody knows the name of any astronauts and the only time there is coverage is when something explodes.

We will have no glorious moments like our parents and grandparents. There will be no amazing massive exploration event in our life time. People are more worried about potholes and "banning" gay sex than they are about furthering the progress of all mankind. So stop getting your hopes up that anything amazing is going to happen. For all intents and purposes, space exploration is dead.

Re:Indeed

[sprior]

I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out...

Re:Indeed

[similar_name]

In an almost perfect world people wouldn't give up on a perfect world. Luckily as a whole we don't. While history has its ups and downs the overall trend seems to be up.

Re:Indeed

[cusco]

Space exploration doesn't make rich people richer **TODAY**. Wealthy people used to think in terms of dynasties, founding colonies and funding explorations that they knew would never pay off until the time of their grandchildren. Today if it doesn't pay off in under a decade it isn't seen as worth investing in. Funding solar power satellites for example with a financial break-even point of 20 years are essentially unthinkable, even if the payoff were enormous.

Re:Indeed

[neonv]

Mindless violence has unfortunately been the fuel for space exploration. The Germans in World War II developed the rockets that gave rise to putting satellites into orbit. The Cold War drove spending on space exploration out of fear of being destroyed from space. Men walked on the moon only from fear that the other super power would get there first. Now that there is no threat of war between super powers, there's no more fear that drives spending on space exploration. Though Space X and Virgin Galactic give some hope that things will change, it won't be at the same rate of development in the forseable future.

Re:Indeed

[qu33ksilver]

Good one. But I'd say that voyager has to be one of the most ambitious projects ever made. I mean a space probe that would keep going deeper and deeper into space for years to come. Thats something to be excited about. Carl Sagan said "If the space is a big ocean lying out there, we have just started to dip our knees in the water". Well, I would want to swim as far as possible into it. Probably there are more important matters back here on Earth, but I would still go for another slice of space.

Re:Indeed

[afgam28]

I think wealthy people still do think in terms of dynasties and legacy. You've got people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet doing a lot of work to leave their legacy on the world. And people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have set up companies with ambitious plans to get into space.

I hope that what we're seeing is just a low point in history, where we're making the transition from government-funded space exploration to private funding.

This may be a good thing. While I think it's great that China is investing in space, we've seen with the United States that governments can quickly lose interest in space and stop funding exploration. Having private companies might be the only sustainable way to fund space exploration.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mean to minimize any urgency to continue space exploration--it's important to lobby and press for pushing the envelope however we can.

However, space exploration isn't dead.

For many years I've been waiting, and continue to wait, for New Horizons to reach Pluto (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/). Assuming this goes on as planned, it will be amazing to finally see Pluto and Charon -- something that, if I'm alive at that time, I can say I'm glad I lived to see. The fact they plan to continue the mission into the Kuiper belt is even more impressive. If anything's carrying the torch of Voyager and Pioneer at the moment, it's New Horizons. The way I feel about it now is similar to how I felt about Voyager meeting Uranus and Neptune in the 80s when I was a child.

Another thing that's fascinating to me to see unfold is private spaceflight. The fact that there is a realistically burgeoning private spaceflight industry in the US is pretty damn amazing if you ask me, and I'm excited to see it continue.

I'm all for large federally funded space exploration research (and research of all kinds) but I sometimes feel like there's a sky-is-falling narrative that's not quite right. Give credit where credit is due.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Define amazing.

To say that "sticking a little RC car on Mars" isn't an achievement is frankly incredibly insulting to the people that designed it. You want bigger? Look at the Mars Science Laboratory which is being dropped via rocket crane because it's so heavy. Quite honestly, sending things to the Moon is easy. Sending stuff to Mars is incredibly difficult and the staggering cost of developing human support systems to do it outweighs the enormous amount of robotic science you could do with the same amount of money.

Oh and let's not forget that Voyager was never meant to end up in outer space. Initially it was meant to explore Jupiter and Saturn, but the mission was extended, extended and extended a bit more. And why not? The hardware was still functioning perfectly. Look at Spirit and Opportunity, they have massively outstayed their welcome on Mars thanks to the engineering that went into them.

So what's out there now? Well, New Horizons is on its way to Pluto as I type with a presumed extension to visit the Kuiper belt afterwards. If they don't send that out of the solar system afterwards, I'd be very surprised. The mission is supposed to end in 2026, but who knows. The way you do something like this is have a mission in the solar system and then find a way to use the satellite after it's done doing your science.

Oh and we're not slouching on launches either

http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-science.html#2011
http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-planetary.html#2011

We're actually launching a lot more than we used to. The difference is we've got other things we're interested in rather than finding out what's in interstellar space - cool prospect as it is.

There will always be new innovation in science and there will always be nostalgic people. What actually happens is somewhere in-between, science marches on, but the visible effects diminish. When we look at space science, you're comparing things that happened over a period of around 30-50 years ago. Think about life 50 years in the future. We will be recalling the days when we went from 2D graphics to 3D graphics, a time when the world wasn't connected via the internet, when a cellphone went from being bigger than a brick to smaller than a deck of cards. In 30 years what will have changed? Probably lots, but will anything in these fields ever rival these first steps?

Re:Indeed

[TheRaven64]

My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing

In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.

Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes. But after that there's the question of motivation. There are lots of reasons to want to get into orbit - it's the ultimate high ground and gives you an unparalleled view of the Earth. Getting to the moon? Well, you can wave a flag, but after that it's a pretty uninteresting lump of rock. Mars? Even if it were made entirely of gold (or something actually useful, like refined uranium) then the cost involved in getting things back from there would make it largely uninteresting.

And the step beyond that, travelling to other stars, doesn't just require better engineering, it requires new physics. If anyone works out how to build a superluminal engine, then you can bet that there will be a huge amount of funding devoted to building it, but until then the problem with space is finding something useful to do there. Even scientific missions are better done by small unmanned probes.

Re:Indeed

[WrongSizeGlass]

"Space exploration doesn't make rich people richer **TODAY**"

It won't make anyone richer today, tomorrow, or ever. Unless you can sell vacuum, space is EMPTY. There's NOTHING there. And the few things that ARE there, are so ridiculously small and far away, it's not worth it. By the time you build big enough steam locomotives... the 20th century happens. Understand? If you had the resources to do anything in space, you don't need to!

The technological byproducts of developing space programs benefit everyone. I can't even imagine what will come out of developing a Mars mission, but on such a long voyage I have to assume it will involve major improvements in recycling technology and significant insights into prevention and treatment of muscle atrophy (and related diseases).

Re:Indeed

[Solandri]

Voyagers 1 and 2 took advantage of a rare planetary alignment which won't happen again until around 2150. Originally both spacecraft were supposed to visit all four outer planets, but Voyager 1 was sacrificed to get a closer look at Titan, which had recently been discovered to have an atmosphere. Without such an alignment, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as ambitious and quite possibly might not have even been built. Pioneer 11 didn't have such a favorable alignment and had to make an almost 180 degree direction change to go from Jupiter to Saturn.

So it wasn't that we were more ambitious about space exploration back in the 1970s when the Voyagers were launched. We just knew we were up against a hard deadline for an opportunity which wouldn't come again for 175 years, and scrambled to take advantage of it before the window closed.

Re:Indeed

[Grishnakh]

Not true; they're all fairly similar.

Star Trek reflected America's boldness and ambition in space and hope for a utopian future. It was revived in the late 80s and early 90s with a spin-off that showed the same thing. Now, 20 years later, we have no entertainment that's remotely similar to this. Most sci-fi these days is dystopian and has nothing to do with human space travel, and usually shows what a bleak and horrible future we're going to have soon (some of it involving zombies).

The WTC again reflected America's boldness and ambition, in building the (then) world's largest building, and two of them. The design was rather fugly, but then again early 70s design generally was unfortunately, but from an engineering perspective they were impressive. It took a long time for anyone to build anything taller. Of course, 30 years after they were built they were destroyed, and 10+ years later we still haven't gotten around to rebuilding them, nor have we built anything remotely similar in this nation in the last 40 years.

The Concorde was not American, it was British and French; however, it too reflected the boldness and ambition of western culture. The fastest passenger plane ever built and flown; however, nothing better was ever built, and the Concorde has been mothballed because 1) not enough people wanted to pay the enormous ticket price and 2) as I said before, we never bothered to try to make anything better which could have been more economical. In fact, air travel is significantly slower today than it was 40 years ago, for everyone, as passenger jets flow slower now to save fuel.

The Space Shuttle was American, and again was bold and ambitious (though rather stupid from an engineering standpoint). Even though it was much more costly than a traditional capsule like the Soyuz (which is why it was stupid), we stuck with it for many years, and finally now we've gotten rid of it, and replaced it with nothing, so we have no more capability to send humans out of the atmosphere; we have to rely on the Russians for that now, and maybe the Chinese in the future.

All four of these are fairly similar: they're examples of big, ambitious projects that western nations took on back in the 60s-70s, which are now dead, and not replaced with anything better or even remotely as good. Instead of striving for greatness and doing big things, we've decided as a culture we don't want to bother because it costs too much or it's too hard, and instead we'd rather spend much, much bigger sums of money on foreign wars and bailing out badly-run companies that don't produce anything of value. Basically, they're great examples showing that Western culture has faded in prominence and is on the way to extinction, or at least to morph into something nothing like the glory days we remember. It's much like the middle eastern Islamic culture: 1000 years ago, that culture led the world in learning, mathematics, etc. Now where are they? At some point, 500 or so years ago, they took a U-turn and went straight back to stone-age thinking. We're doing the exact same thing right now.

Queue the SyFy Channel Original Movie About...

[iPaul]

The voyager spacecraft popping a plasma bubble and sending it to Earth, requiring a heard drinking high school physics teacher (played by Stephen Baldwin) and a heart-of-gold exotic dancer, but former Navy Seal (played by an anonymous starlet), to save the day.

We've probably gone farther

[siddesu]

There is virtually no interest in space among the many people I interact with, my customers, my suppliers, the other parents at school, or my neighbors. My interest in astronomy and space is regarded in the same manner as my telescopes, as a curiosity or mild eccentricity.

I can't imagine that people like these will be willing to commit money, either as tax or investment, in furthering space research, not until they see something that affects them personally and requires return to space.

On the positive side, this something can be anything, even a surprise threat from North Korean FTL probe leaving for Alpha Centauri.

Re:We've probably gone farther

[PsychoSlashDot]

There virtually no interest in anything that isn't personally and obviously of benefit to Joe Average these days. If it isn't a new iPhone app or a new GPS option in their car, or a simpler way to get bigger breasts, or an indisputable cure for baldness, crow's feet, or liver-cancer, Joe Average doesn't want to hear about it and CERTAINLY won't want to pay for it.

Ignorance is bliss, and as long as the digital TV signal carrying Jersey Shores is nice and strong, that's all the technology most people care for.

It's the specials, the freaks, the weirdos who insist on dreaming and asking "what if". We read science fiction and speculative fiction, and we play games that model hypothetical situations and we desperately want to know MORE about many things. Even if human teleportation devices can't be invented in our lifetime, we want to see the steps as the precursor technology is built. But we're not normal.

Re:We've probably gone farther

[Tynin]

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

- Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Ode, 1874

That all seems strangely apropos.

Re:We've probably gone farther

[jo42]

I can't imagine that people like these will be willing to commit money, either as tax or investment, in furthering space research, not until they see something that affects them personally and requires return to space.

Yes. It's far more important to be rich and famous in America. It's far more important to kill brown people in the middle east so that they have oil and gas to driving their fat, lazy, stupid, ignorant asses around in gas guzzling SUVs, Mercedes and BMW douche-mobiles. It's far more important to piss away untold billions of dollars bailing out the greedy fucktards on Wall Street.

Of course, let's not mention all the scientific advances that these people benefit from that came from the space program. After all, God created the cell phone, the car, the air conditioner and all the other bits of technology this ignorant retards take for granted every single day of their useless, uncreative, unproductive lives.

The best part is, these people get to vote for who runs the government, in turn the country and who bullies the rest of the world around. Long live America, land of the free, home of the brave.

Re:We've probably gone farther

[Skylax]

But then strictly speaking the money spent on wars is not really wasted. It is used to pay wages, buy weapons, invest in military research. Military personal then put the money back into the economy when spending the money on houses, cars, laptops, smartphones etc. Engineers, mechanics and so on are payed to design and build the weapons who in turn get payed for it.
Even the fuel wasted by the military is bought from the oil companies who in turn buy new oil drilling platforms which have to be designed and manufactured by engineers and technicians.

The idea that a lot of the technology comes from the space programming is mostly a myth. Take Teflon for example,discovered in 1938, used as corrosion protection in the Manhattan project in 1943 then in 1954 first applied to kitchen products long before sputnik.

The problem is that you can't expect people to be excited or involved in something that ultimately influences them only very little. People are concerned with their own survival (which in todays world becomes more and more expensive) and not everybody can be a spacecraft engineer or scientist.
The main interest of humans has always been to have work and be able to support themselves and their families and if the military-industrial complex provides that you can't blame them for trying to defend it.

We space enthusiasts were lucky for a while that space exploration was fueled by the cold war, when defense interests overlapped with space exploration interests. Without the "need" for ICBMs we would never have built any orbit capable rockets at all.

I mean how do you justify sending a space probe to the heliopause to the common taxpayer? "Please give us your money so that a couple of scientists and graduate students will be able to publish some papers and advance their careers in about 25 years?"
Even among the scientific community the (real) interest for heliopause research is probably very small. The timescales of such projects are just too long. A heliopause probe would take maybe 5 years to develop and another 20 years to reach its destination. That's almost the duration of a typical research career, nobody working in science can afford to wait that long for any results.

The way I see it is, that it is not yet the time for such research. Just like 16th century physicists would not have been able to learn something of subnuclear particles as the technology was not available at the time, we today have to wait for a significant amount of space exploration before we can properly investigate the outer regions of our solar system.
Once we have research outposts on Titan or Pluto that can send their own probes to the oort cloud this sort of research will be much more affordable and simpler.
Alternatively we have to wait for better space propulsion technology so that we can sent those probes faster to their destination.

In the meantime I'm not particulary worried that we will descent into savagery again (at least technology wise). The average citizen has grown too fond of their little tech gadgets and other helpers for everyday lives to just throw it all away. We are at a stage where we will defend with all our strength the right to access the internet and so on and so forth.
The time for proper space exploration will come just maybe not in our lifetimes...

     

Voyager wasn't an interestellar mission

[Gimbal]

I respect Mr. Rennie's effort in encouraging further efforts in deep space exploration, but I think his argument may go a little away from principle. The Voyager probes were not designed to be deep space probes. As I recall having learned, the Voyager probes were designed to photograph the planets and record relevant non-visual data, during the recent "grand conjunction" phase in the solar system.

I'm afraid I must apologize for my evident lack of citations, here. As my own specator knowledge of it holds, and anyone may wish to correct me: It's been a pleasant suprrise that the Voyager probes have continued functioningm, for so many years since after they completed their assigned missions.

Personally, I think it also may serve in making a constructive comment towards the niceties of reliable manufacturing practice in the construction of space exploration systems. "But maybe that's just me" ;}

We need an ongoing Voyager program.

[gstrickler]

Given the long duration to get a probe to the edge of the solar system, and the rapid advances in instrumentation, I think we should be launching a Voyager type probe every 5-10 years. They needn’t follow a single path, in fact, heading off to different parts of the heliosphere makes more sense.

Launch windows will of course determine the schedule and affect the trajectory, but I think learning about the heliopause, interstellar environment, and eventually, the Oort Cloud is vital. Given current propulsion technologies, it will take many years to reach those areas. The best way I see to deal with that is “launch early, launch often”.

And, since each probe will need monitoring for decades, it would make sense to put them into a single, ongoing program, where much of the monitoring and development could be consolidated.

New Horizons on the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite true. We are existing the Age of Reason into the Age of Dark Ages 2. From the proponents of ignorance (ie. intelligent design) to people's tendency to bashing science as "unscientific" because it does not paint rosy pictures for them (eg. AGW) to simple fear of unknown (eg. nuclear). It has been rather sad last 20 years in terms of people's perception of science.

On another note, there is another probe racing for Pluto. It will then go on exploring the Kuiper belt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Voyager 1 is moving a bit faster though so it will remain furthest measurement platform out there until it stops working, but still, new tech is on the way out there too.

After New Horizons, well, don't expect much for at least the next 20 years..

It's ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're in good company judging by how busy the galaxy seems to be.
Yet another minor footnote of a species in the grand scheme of things that did not use their small window between having the technology to try leaving their home planet. And the next global disaster that wipes life off the planet.

Gamma ray burst, comet, meteor, supervolcano, germ, pole shift, nuclear/chemical/bio war, toxic air/earth/water/food, solar flare, global warming, ecosystem collapse, rogue black hole, particle accelerator mishap, nanotech accident, and many other things we can't even predict.

We backup our computer data. But not our species.

Unlikely? Nah. We know at least most of those WILL happen again at some point in the future.
But it would be hard, and expensive, and take a while to even attempt to create a new human location..
So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers.

Lets go watch tv. I've got popcorn.

Re:It's ok.

[0111 1110]

I wouldn't read too much into The Great Silence. It is surprising that there are no bright beacons, unless you consider pulsars to be beacons, but neither the radio silence nor the lack of probes in every star system really prove very much. SETI is a needle in a haystack search. A large number of improbable events would have to occur for us to receive a signal that way. For all we know there could be loud transmissions from Epsilon Indi or Gliese 581, but on a frequency that more or less requires a radio telescope that isn't at the bottom of a vast oxygen-nitrogen ocean. Our atmosphere is virtually opaque to many frequencies and the idea of the 'water hole' meaning anything special to other species is a huge stretch.

Re:It's ok.

[blahplusplus]

"So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers."

It's more like the fact that the vast majority of the population isn't intelligent enough to want it and most of them are struggling (financially) so exactly why would they want to spend something that smarter future generations could do much quicker and efficiently then old human being v1.0?

I think people who rail against events in our time forget how inefficient and slow human beings are. IMHO we should focus in making better human beings and/or robots/AI tools that augment human intelligence. Our main problem isn't that we're not curious, it's that we don't have enough intelligent, responsible and secure human beings on planet earth.

Re:It's ok.

[phantomfive]

It's ok, don't despair, God's got your back.

Why not mass produce probes?

[a_hanso]

Say,

1. Mass produce the science instruments. At least have common designs so that they can be quickly fabricated.

2. Common OS, instrument bus and communications sub system.

3. A common power plant and chassis design.

4. A common Earth orbit departure stage.

I know that the instrument specs for each mission is unique and the propulsion and communication requirements all depend on the probe's trajectory, but I'm thinking that they can do a lot more prefab-and-assembly than they are doing now.

Re:Why not mass produce probes?

[manoweb]

Very unfortunately, that's impossible. There isn't enough Plutonium left for all those probes, and the politics are not in favour of investing in nuclear power plants that can produce it.

Re:Why not mass produce probes?

[tragedy]

Yes, but plutonium 238 seems to have the best performance profile. First of all, it pretty much just emits alpha radiation that can be stopped with a thin layer of shielding. It also has a decently high power density combined with an 87.7 year half life. For long space missions Americium-241 seems to me to the the next best. It actually has a 432 year half life. It only has about 1/4 the power density of pu-238, so you have to use 4 times the mass of the pu-238 you would otherwise need. It needs a lot more shielding than pu-238, but still less than any other option. Strontium-90 has only a 28.8 year half-life, which is probably going to be too short for a Voyager style mission, and it has heavier shielding requirements. It could be useful for shorter space missions though. Planetary rovers/stations, for example. For that matter, it might be useful for powering a manned base as an alternative to a nuclear reactor. A metric ton of the stuff would generate 460 Kilowatts of heat, which you could convert to maybe 230 kilowatts of electricity (using a Stirling engine or something rather than just an inefficient thermocouple RTG). Of course, you can't turn the heat production off in any way, so you have deal with the heat somehow during transportation along with the radiation.

We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[Taco Cowboy]

How many years already the Voyager spacecraft kept sending us valuable data?

And it does all that without any of the super-gigaherz chips nor gigabytes of RAM nor terabits/s connection devices

On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[davydagger]

consumer products != space grade industrial products.

before you start talking about modern consumer electronics which are the best they've ever been, think about consumer grade hardware in the 1990s.

boot times where 5+ min. never worked right. plug and play didn't work, no standards on HW.Drivers sucked.

sheet, we got it easy today.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[Teancum]

The Voyager spacecraft computers are some of the last active computers in the Solar System still using hand-wrapped core memory. I think that says more about the space probe than almost anything else. There might be a couple museums which fire up a computer every now and again with such a memory module, but this is certainly the last one in a production environment. It shows how rugged that kind of design really can be.

Then again, saying it is the last one in the Solar System may not even be accurate, so it might just simply be said it is the last one currently running in the Milky Way Galaxy... unless we meet some alien races to dispute that fact.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[VVrath]

boot times where 5+ min. never worked right. plug and play didn't work, no standards on HW.Drivers sucked.

Those things may have been true of (IBM Compatible) PCs in the early 1990s, but my Amiga would definitely beg to differ.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[TheRaven64]

On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?

In five years, you will be able to get a new one with a higher resolution display, a much faster processor, much more RAM and storage space, and support for the latest mobile network standards. Your current model can do more processing in an hour than the computer on the Voyager probes can do in a year.

In contrast, the Voyager probes were very expensive to produce one-off products and are in a location that is almost impossible - and totally impractical - to service or even get replacement parts to. In other words,they were both built with completely different sets of design requirements.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[amiga3D]

Here we go again. I remember how eagerly my church watched and prayed for the moon astronauts when they launched on their missions. Many of those astronauts were in fact Christians. This same lie appears on every single post here about any scientific topic. I for one eagerly support all exploration of the wonders that the Lord has created. The reason for the dirge of deep space exploration is simple to see and as usual it's all about the God of most people, the dollar. No one has figured a way to make money there in the short term so therefore the interest has to be carried entirely on the Governments dime. With budgets being trimmed and wars to fight that is one small dime nowadays. Personally I think it's foolish not to explore but I don't get to decide.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[mug funky]

if you're not fundamentalist, why are you attempting to excuse your fundamentalist allies?

i don't give a damn about your brand of christianity, or the Apollo astronauts'.

talk to the fucking politicians. the ones that have been fighting resource wars under the guise of ideals and beliefs for so long that they've started believing the lies they use to justify yet another war over resources.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[cowboy76Spain]

Ok, you did pray and care for the astronauts. No problem with that, as long everyone is doing it freely.

The issue at hand is that some of us think that all that praying served for nothing else than for you feeling good. I am not saying that it is a bad thing or that I am opposed to it. I mean that if you wanted to help astronauts, using that time for doing extra work and donating the proceedings for the NASA -or even for improving the funding of the local schools- would have been more efficient. Of course, it was your time and your election to do, but remember that not everyone thinks like you.

The problem now is that people in power are agreeing to reintroduce superstition as a valid alternative for science. If things keep going this way, maybe in a few years when a levee breaks it would not be because of bad engineering/maintenance, but because "that city was full of sinners and God punished them".

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[camperdave]

Did the ipad 3 cost hundreds of millions of dollars?

Yes, in all likelyhood.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[QuantumLeaper]

My Commodore 64 would agree with your Amiga, my C64 and almost all of my 5 1/4 inch disks are still readable and the hardware still works. I used it over 10 years straight and then off and on since then. The hardware still runs great, I even has video game console for the 70s that still work. Modern electronic seem to stink in some ways, maybe just to small to last....

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[flyneye]

Necessity is a mother.

If it becomes necessary to come, they will build it.

I will see it when I believe it.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[flyneye]

We were so poor, we couldnt pay attention.

Our computer was a calculator and a typewriter taped to the television.

Our internet was tin cans and a wire to the outhouse.
We would decode grandmas farting in morse code bit by bit.
Some webpages would take a month of feeding Mawmaw beans and cheese to load in.

You whippersnappers and your internet, Mawmaw eats windows boxes and farts Mac chunks with her intestinal O.S. and talk about a secure connection.Whooee Peeyooo! The other day we fed her at the Pizza Hut buffet and she had the shits so bad we got to watch Netflix.

benefiting the world

[fermion]

The Voyager program, like most of the US space efforts, is creating data that benefits the world. With Voyager in particular, the world has gotten a great value because we not only got data on the outer planets, but also an extended mission that is going to define boundaries that we are able to define in no other way. It is interesting to note that the Voyager program not only was not funded to map the edges of the solar system, but was not even fully funded for it's original mission, to visit most of the planets.

In spite of this limited funding, like so many other NASA project, it met and exceeding objectives. As such it is strange that we are complaining that we have no deep space program when we really never had a deep space program. What we have had are basic program that have been extended as able. We have, for the first time, a defined boundary of the solar system. Now that we know, a formal intersteller mission can be planned. But, as mentioned this is world project, so it should be funded by others in addition to the US.

The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached. The progress we have made has been costly, and I thank past generations for shouldering the cost that has made the US a great place to live. It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.

Re:benefiting the world

[bill_mcgonigle]

It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.

Sorry to say, but they ain't got lots of spare dollars anymore. China is the biggest manufacturing country now - maybe they should take a turn.

There's no real reason NASA has to do all the work for humanity. OK, so the ESA has a few nice contributions, but not in relation to their GDP. And they don't even waste all their money on an absurd military.

Re:benefiting the world

[gstrickler]

The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached.

Despite all the debates and rhetoric about it, entitlements aren't the problem. Social Security and Medicare the two big entitlements are in fact paid for from separate taxes that exceed the amount spent on those programs. Look at the federal budget. Military spending, is the biggest portion, bigger than all entitlements combined. NASA's budget is less than 1% of the federal budget. What's killing us are all the "wars", the overseas wars, the "war on drugs", the "war on terror", etc.

Don't misunderstand me, we need a military, we need defense. But the "war on drugs" is a complete waste, the "war or terror" is out of control, and the other wars are just a way for people supplying the military to get rich while bankrupting the country.

Re:benefiting the world

[VortexCortex]

I thank past generations for shouldering the cost that has made the US a great place to live. It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.

You're either blind or just ignorant. We pay our dues, we give the government VAST amounts of money, with which they squander on needless wars to keep the arms and military-industrial business going.
NASA's funding is a drop in the bucket comparatively, I can see NO REASON AT ALL not to 100% fund EVERY program that comes out of NASA, considering we spend more than their whole budget just to air-condition the troops.

Don't get me wrong, I support the troops and all that bullshit, but I'm not behind the reasoning of their CO, and our congress critters.

Priorites People! Let's throw out all those gas-bags, and keep doing it until they get them straight.

Priorities.

[tmosley]

The government needs that money to kill a few more brown people and to create more enemies to keep us distracted so our leaders stay in power.

New Horizons

[manoweb]

Keep in mind that New Horizons will arrive close to Pluto in 2015 and it's he fastest probe ever, it will likely reach much further distances than Voyager while still operative, so I am optimistic after all.

Re:New Horizons

[DirePickle]

Unfortunately, while New Horizons left at the fastest speed ever, it's currently moving at 15km/s (and slowing) and Voyager 1 is cruising at a bit over 17km/s. Per Wikipedia, when NH is at the distance that V1 is now, it'll only be moving at 13km/s.

Re:New Horizons

[manoweb]

Always the pessimistic side!!! ;)

Re:New Horizons

[Solandri]

It's not pessimistic. You actually don't want it going quite so fast. Voyager 2's trajectory and velocity were set - it had to be moving at a certain speed in order to meet up with Uranus and Neptune. Consequently, the gravity assists had sped up Voyager 2 so much that by the time it reached Neptune, the entire close encounter was pretty much over in a day. They had to pre-program it to take pictures and measurements and store it on tape, hope that everything worked, and wait for the data to be sent back to Earth. By the time we got it, Voyager 2 was already leaving Neptune. There were no second chances, and we were fortunate that some of the pan-slew timed exposure tricks worked perfectly.

The New Horizons flyby of Pluto is pretty much going to be the same thing. All the close-up observations of Pluto and its moons are going to happen on 14 July, 2015. One day. No second chances if it turns out someone forgot to send the command to remove the lens cap. If it had been moving at 17 km/s instead of 13 km/s, we'd have about 25% less observation time. Better to wait a few years longer for the spacecraft to get there, in order to get a few more hours and days observation time.

In the future, with an ion engine, maybe we'll be able to send probes which speed up the first half of the trip, and slow down the second half. That would allow us to extend the encounter times, or even enter into orbit around the outer planet(oid), without extending the travel time to decades.

Re:choices

[I_am_Jack]

But there certainly is some kind of trade off. Effort and resources directed towards ocotmoms and the idle must come from somewhere.

Again, only two choices? Sensationalizing the most extreme of social contract obligations as the only reason we're not funding more deep space research? Puh-leeze. The reason more deep space probes are not being launched is because people don't give a crap. And CISPA will be passed because (IMHO) the Internet blew its collective social activism wad fighting SOPA and everyone has gone back to Minecraft, WoW and Berk memes because they think their effort as 1's and 0's superheroes for a day crushed the special interests (and at least at this point, no one is telling otherwise). The only reason Apollo made it as far as it did is because NASA hired the best and brightest on Madison Avenue to make it an all-consuming interest for Americans. Not a day would go by without something reminding you we were in a race with the Russians and we had to win. As soon as we got there, everyone lost interest. Why? Because NASA sold the first men on the moon as the goal (Kennedy was a tad short-sighted, apparently), not the continued exploration of the moon. As soon as people give a crap and fight for what they want (or what they're told what they want), and if deep space exploration is what they're told they want, then we'll have more Voyager-like probes than you can shake a stick at.

Whatcha gonna do?

[macraig]

Seriously, what are you gonna do to persuade the average human of the critical importance of space exploration and colonization? They can neither see nor reason past the ends of their noses. They would rather argue about abortion and gay rights and whether so-and-so 'had work done' and what sort of debauchery they have planned for Friday night. That's on the 99-percent end of the scale; on the other end you have people who can't see nor reason past their own bloated bank accounts and genitalia.

Re:Opinion Question on Engines

[mosb1000]

You want the greatest specific impulse possible, so an ion engine is the best option.

Blame the b*tards in Congress...

[AliasMarlowe]

I'm 46 and I grew up with Star Trek, the World Trade Center, the Concorde, and the space shuttle. How's that working out...

Your comment sums up quite a lot. The fuck-ups started with defunding of Apollo in the early 1970s, and manned spaceflight has barely progressed since then. The shuttle made for a lot of nice launches and a couple of spectacular failures, but it only went to low Earth orbit. Programs like Hubble and Voyager and so on greatly expanded our knowledge of the universe, but damned little progress was made in manned spaceflight, despite pouring fortunes into a succession of boondoggles (Shuttle, Skylab, ISS, 'nuff said). Recall that even Voyager was just a scaled-back cheaper substitute for the Grand Tour.

I'm only a few years older than you, but vividly remember the Apollo missions. As a kid in Europe, I stayed up weird hours to catch live transmissions from Apollo 8 to Apollo 17. I saw almost every single one of them, and if there had been consumer-level recording technology like today's, I and many others would have copies of those transmissions. I don't recall the Apollo 1 disaster (too young, I guess), but was riveted by the Apollo 13 near-disaster. The decision to cancel Apollo 18 to Apollo 20 was baffling to me then, and remains so today, 40 years later.

Commitment was lost or lacking at a high enough level in U.S. political circles after Apollo reached its stated objective. After that, it was just a question of how soon the money could be diverted to political pork. And that's how NASA's budgets have been allocated ever since. Pork as the real objective, more pork as the means of attaining that objective, even more pork as the main spin-off, and a bit of science or space exploration as an unavoidable but incidental side effect. The objectives (pork) were always achieved successfully, even if the cover stories (science, space) ended in failure.

Re:Blame the b*tards in Congress...

[SuricouRaven]

Apollo was a gigantic PR stunt. The entire nation of the united states turning their collective backsides to the Soviet Union and dropping their pants. Without a political motivation, not many politicians can see the value in pure science. The only possibility I see for the US getting back into manned space exploration would be if China started making a really big deal about getting to Mars first, thus compelling a rapid defence of the American national penis size once again.

Re:Blame the b*tards in Congress...

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians are a reflection of the people they "serve." We're the problem.

Passing the torch...unwillingly

[hyades1]

The US and Russia have funded almost every foray past Low Earth Orbit. Russia might keep going in a very small way, but the US is far too dominated by bean counters and corporate whores.

In 10 or 15 years, the "language of space" will probably be Chinese.

Obligatory but equally depressing xkcd

[kevingolding2001]

I'm surprised nobody else has posted this yet.
65 years

Space is empty

[Hentes]

The reason for not building interstellar probes is that there is nothing interesting between stars. A good telescope can tell us much more than a deep space probe.

Motivation

[ShadowEFX]

What we need is another good scare. The Chinese are well on the way to their own orbital research station (entirely built by them...no comment on where the tech may have come from) and a follow-on exploration of the moon, the Indians are getting their space program going and will probably partner with China in the near-to-mid term, and the ESA and Russia are continuing with the Mars mission planning without us (thanks, Congress!).

Once we start getting left behind...again...it will freak the right people out and we'll get money once more. I just hope it happens before I'm too old to enjoy the new data and pictures.

Forget about deep space. . .

[hexagonc]

Just get some probes on Europa already! If you want to find extraterrestrial life, that is your best hope, probably by a wide margin. Unlike Mars, where we'd be lucky to find single-celled organisms, Europa seems to harbor the possibility of multicelluar life, in my non-expert opinion (although the Wikipedia article pooh-poohs this). I think the discovery of life on Europa would rekindle interest in human space exploration since some biologists is going to want to go there in person with a specimen jar. We might even find a monolith or two on there somewhere!

Telescopes are the way to go

[cowboy76Spain]

I mean, why is everybody so obsessed with the role of Voyager in deep space exploration? Voyager has not given information about any extrasolar system, and when (and if) he arrives at one someday, it will be dead long before.

Instead, space based telescopes are investigating other solar systems and discovering planets each week, right now.

Given that:

*) We do not have a technology that would endure the years of travel, let alone send back information.

*) Probably anything in the near-medium future able to do it will be way greater/heavier than Voyager.

*) We really do not know where to point those probes.

I am not terribly worried about not sending more probes so they just become garbage in the interestellar void. At a later stage, it might make sense, but not right now.