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Buzz Aldrin Pressures Obama For New Space Exploration Initiative
MarkWhittington writes: While he has initiated the social media campaign, #Apollo45, to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is also using the occasion to campaign for an expansion of American space exploration. According to a Tuesday story in the Washington Post, Aldrin has expressed the wish that President Obama make some sort of announcement along those lines this July 20. The idea has a certain aspect of deja vu. Aldrin believes that the American civil space program is adrift and that some new space exploration, he prefers to Mars, would be just the thing to set it back on course. There is only one problem, however. President Obama has already made the big space exploration announcement. Aldrin knows this because he was there. President Obama flew to the Kennedy Space Center on April 15, 2010, with Aldrin accompanying as a photo op prop, and made the announcement that America would no longer be headed back to the moon, as was the plan under his predecessor George W. Bush. Instead American astronauts would visit an Earth approaching asteroid and then, decades hence, would land on Mars.
I'm all for having a thriving, privatized space program. However, we still need the government to be involved and run their own end. We'll never get anywhere if we rely on just one side.
The latest election cycle showed that all the candidates trying to look like they are for debt reduction was willing to kill NASA altogether.
This is despite that agency funding is minuscule compared to the rest of the federal government. NASA has become an easy target for politicians to beat up on, since the swing voters and the right don't see any benefit coming out of the agency.
Thanks to this myopic thinking the US now depends on Russia to man the space station.
We'll get to Mars...just in time to see the beginnings of the first Chinese colony, New Beijing.
You're funny.
Some politicians would benefit from returning from the moon to earth, and not thinking about traveling from earth to the space. There are many issues that are many times cheaper to resolve, and would improve the world, the real world, in a meaningful way. I am all for the space exploration and new technologies. All of such endeavors need to be financed with private voluntary contributions.
In 2010, Obama made the announcement... it's now 2014... all they've done is cut NASA funding.
We Americans want to feel big and tough from our couches. We want to see our military kick the shit out some other "evil" country from the comforts of our homes, sitting on our fat asses in front of the big China made screen TV.
Science? Space? That's for the godless "elites".
Spending money on idiotic wars is fine.
Spending a small fraction of that on space is a "waste".
We Americans are like my alcoholic uncle. Bitches to his kids to turn off the lights when not in the room - even the fish tank has to be turned off - but he spends his money on booze and doesn't see the problem.
If we spent the resources that were litteraly blown up in wars on space, we would have been to Mars and have all that technology and prestige of having sent people to Mars.
Nope, we're known for killing people, being bullies, and for being a bunch of scientifically illiterate Bible thumping morons.
Fuck! I'm cranky this morning!
Ha ha! Fooled you!
I remember watching Apollo 11 land it's about damn time we did something useful.
Asteroid Capture, YES !!
Permanent Lunar presence for Helium 3 extraction YES
Marooning people on Mars to die ? I can't express how wrong that is.
What's the point of having a "plan" when it changes every four or eight years? It takes longer than that to complete a large technology project; the only way to accomplish it is to have a beloved leader start it, then quick shoot him - so it'll be completed in his honor. Come to think of it, we'll never get past the "beloved leader" part. What's the last time we had anything other than the lesser of evils?
I remember him pressuring GWB about space which started the send a man to Mars in the first place.
Buzz did an AMA yesterday on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
He elaborated a bit on why he thinks NASA should target Mars, and the short version is that NASA is spread thin with a tiny fraction of the budget it once had to venture to the moon. NASA needs a passion project on which they can fire on all cylinders and do something big. We can visit an asteroid, and few will raise an eyebrow. If we go to Mars, it'll be a landmark achievement that the world will make note of. It's a dream that can focus and revitalize the space program, whereas the asteroid visitation is simply aiming too low as the overarching goal for NASA.
True, but NASA needs to focus on what they do well (or at least what some would say they used to do well), innovation, problem solving, advanced research, etc. And hey need to let private companies handle the mundane stuff such as launch to LEO. We've seen how bad things can go (Constellation & SLS) when NASA tries to do it all. Focus them on building a (likely modular) spacecraft for transit to the Moon/Mars/Asteroid/etc and the associated hardware/technology to get us to those places safely. And let private industry compete for the fixed contracts to launch it into orbit. NASA has already burnt more than $10 Billion dollars trying to just develop a new launcher when they could have bought almost a hundred launches (5,850 tons, or about the weight of a military Frigate) for the same amount of money
He should post something on kickstarter and then donate all of the money to NASA. It seems to be working out for LeVar Burton.
I gotta disagree with you bud. An entire generation of folks were inspired by the Apollo program to dream and become todays scientists/engineers etc. The world NEEDS lofty goals like this. I think that too many folks focus on "What NASA got us" and not on the value of the less tangible items (inspiration and willingness to push the envelope of human acheivement).
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The market is what makes engineers and scientists. NASA created some market niches earlier than they would have existed, and it did create a few on its own. The least likely is satellites. The DOD created the friggin' Internet.
Also who ever decided to become an engineer because of the moon launches? This is pop culture: every kid wanted to be an ASTRONAUT, and their idea of an astronaut was a fat man in a white suit with a hose and a fish bowl on his head, playing in outer space! Nobody looked at that and went, "Wow, I want to design a new super armatron to manipulate heavy materials via shuttle so I can repair a space research lab's solar panels!" They might have seen something like that on TV and decided they wanted to blast the thrusters and throw shit around with the giant machine arm, but that's about it.
People have this uncanny ability to rewrite history. Look at the Lebanon war, where people said the fighting "came out of nowhere", and "would be over in a few days." It kept being "almost over" for almost 20 years, with some people in hotels in the next country over, waiting because they were sure that THIS week would be the week the war ends. What does history say? It says everyone could see the rising tensions (no they couldn't) and the breakdown of the economy (that had been happening for decades), and people started to flee the country because they knew the fighting would start (they fled the country immediately *after* it started), and holed up for a long and protracted war (which nobody actually believed--they thought this was just a big, three-to-five-day skirmish). People who lived through this shit and wrote it in their diaries immediately, a week or two after the war, talked like all these deformations of history were what actually happened--even though their own diary said absolutely the opposite.
Put away the romantics and come back to earth. Reality's down here.
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The other day, I googled the 7 Wonders of the World... we talk about them from time to time, and marvel at them, but the list is far from agreed... there are the 7 wonders of the ancient world, and newer wonders often mentioned such as the Taj Mahal. There is a list of wonders put forth by civil engineers, and the Golden Gate bridge is on that list.
What I found most interesting is that human footprints on another world isn't even considered. And when I think of wonders, I have to believe that walking on the moon makes all other human wonders pale in comparison. I, too, was absolutely enthralled by the space program and the Apollo missions. I've watched Apollo 13 like 20 times. I was too young to remember the first moon landing and Armstrong's first steps. I do remember being in kindergarten and being hustled into a cafeteria so the entire school could watch a moon landing on a 19 inch black and white television. I remember building a model Saturn V rocket with my dad, with all the stages were removable. For one of the launches, I dutifully discarded the stages as the rocket took off, and I remember thinking the mission was doomed to failure, having seen 90% of the rocket gone in the first 10 minutes. How could they have made such a mistake I thought...
Anyway, fast forward to today, and I have several friends who are convinced the moon landings were faked and have an elaborate conspiracy theory supporting their assertion. My daughter even explained to me that the cameras wouldn't have worked in space (she just got done with a photography course where they posited this theory). Historians claim that the whole thing was just a cold war artifact. Lots of people make the argument that the money would have been better spent on social programs (as if we had just added the Apollo funding to the supertanker of money already spent on such programs would have just made the difference, and we'd be living in a utopia now if only our swaggering leaders had just thought of the children!)
Rarely mentioned is the fact that having humans walk on another world is perhaps the greatest achievement mankind has ever accomplished. It is more often written off as a publicity stunt. Lost is the inspiration a generation got from that endeavor. And that generation is getting old now and the state of the world and the indifference to the achievement discourages me and others of that time no end.
Getting off this pale blue world is a thing our society should value highly, as like it or not, the longevity of our species depends on it. And while we are currently in the wooden sailing ship stage of our ability to explore space, that should in no way discourage us to continue to push those boundaries. Humans should walk on Mars. We should capture and study asteroids. We should send probes to Europa in search of life. We should do these things, as Jack said, not because they are easy but because they are hard.
Meanwhile, Nasa's funding is abysmal in comparison to all of our other spending. A tiny fraction of our budget, seemingly shrinking every year. I am depressed.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
There's a reason why chimps where the first in space - man was not needed. Maned space exploration is a PR move.
There was a reason, and I'm surprised you've completely missed it.
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In Bush's original terminiation of the space shuttle program the US was supposed have a shuttle replacement by this year. Now the earliest is 2018 with some suspecting more like 2021 or so. The recession and tea party politics stretched out replacement spending programs. NASA has order Soyuz seats through 2017 at a very high price. Russian factories need a three year advance order to build new capsules and rockets.
The rated lifetime of the ISS somewhere between 2020 and 2030. Russia is not committing past 2020 due to neo-cold war politics. A catstophic failure like that of the solar panel position bearings a few years back could end the ISS because there isnt launch capacity for large replacements. The tea party faction in the US is blah toward the space program and ISS too.
Except for a few people, nobody cares about Mars. Only need to see what the politicos and major decision makers are working on. Also from http://www.projectrho.com/rock...
"The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach."
A manned mission to Mars has always been 20 years away and been presented like this for past 50 years (like fusion energy power plants are 10 years away which been presented like this for past 60 years). After a half century, maybe a different approach? Sorry I don't see how Orion or Musk's Dragon can reach Mars (supplies, food, machine shops to repair when things break down, radiation, microgravity, etc.). Then we got advocates always promoting their "One legged stool" http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.c... for the Next Big Initiative.
Of all the stuff I read, Dennis Wingo in his book Moon Rush discusses real driver should be industrial expansion, "Deals of this size are done all the time, and think what having access to and rights over a billion kilos of platinum would do for your corporate portfolio." Wingo also discusses background of major programs Apollo, SEI, Augustine commissions I and II, and why certain decisions were made (and why many times nothing happened after). http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
mfwright@batnet.com
The problem with our space program is not the goal(s). No, not at all that. It is the short sighted edicts from certain key members of congress (and their staff) forcing NASA to build the slow motion train wreck pork rocket to nowhere that is the SLS (Senate/Shelby Launch System).
If the vast resources on that program, especially the ones in said senators district, were re-purposed to manage and support a multi-vendor fix price milestone based competition like commercial cargo and commercial crew to station but this time with the goals to:
1: Provide deep space launch services
2: Develop and deploy deep space habitats and propulsion systems
3: Deliver logistics to these mobile outposts
We would have a sustained and robust infrastructure to explore the asteroids, the comets, Mars, Venus, etc.
NASA has tremendous talent and resources that can do so much more if only the policies and direction were in line with the fact that launching to LEO or even GEO is now a road well traveled, and beyond GEO is not such a leap if we just leverage what we have so far and build on that.
No need for a big fracking rocket done the old way as if it was never done before, with cost plus and an army of oversight.
Now when we get to needing new stuff like in space nuclear rockets and reactors, building really big outposts, or outposts on new worlds, we'll be in uncharted territory.
The in space outposts are not such a big leap from ISS except:
1: Extra stresses due to propulsion
2: Way more radiation beyond LEO
3: Long duration may require artificial gravity (spinning)
4: If something goes wrong your on your own, it's a long way from home
All these are solvable we just need to put the resources on them for real and make it happen.
Yep we need those resources set lose to address these issues now. Not a decade or two from now when SLS grinds to a halt giving us a rocket we can't afford.
With that combined budget we would be living in weather domes on the Moon by now and launching interstellar probes to find Earth 2.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
NASA and the air force were one of the first major buyers of integrated circuits. The funded R&D to make electronics more compact and less massive. They kickstarted the miniaturization of electronics. Since then, American firms have been a leader in this trend with huge economic benefits.
It's been there for years only needing "a few weekends of work" but he's always watching TV on the weekends instead of being in the garage.(Car analogy for /.)
good one, I'll remember this.
mfwright@batnet.com