Slashdot Mirror
Space Policy Guru John Logsdon Has Good News and Bad News On NASA Funding
MarkWhittington writes According to a story in Medium, Dr. John Logsdon, considered the dean of space policy, addressed a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. The author of a book on President Kennedy's decision to go to the moon and an upcoming book on President Nixon's post-Apollo space policy decisions had some good news and some bad news about NASA funding. The good news is that funding for the space agency is not likely to be slashed below its current $18 billion a year. The bad news is that it is not likely to go up much beyond that. If Logsdon is correct, static NASA funding will mean that beyond low Earth orbit human space exploration will remain an unrealistic aspiration. American astronauts will not return to the moon, not to mention go to Mars, in the foreseeable future.
Dupe of a story just 5 down.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
NASA got a budget increase larger than they asked for this year.
Cool it with the clickbait.
Exploration is not realistic while the manned spaceflight budget is dominated by ISS. Kill ISS and free up over $3 billion a year.
But the government won't play a role in it.
The good news is:
We can send up 20 Astronauts this year...
The bad news:
They have to pay $1 Million for each bag they take with them....
See, they should have flown (Favorite Airline that doesn't charge for bags)...
and you would be able to double the NASA budget and have plenty of money left over. The F35 comes to mind, but many other unneeded and excessively costly weapons systems could be cut back in order to boost NASA funding.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
At the rate we are going we will be lucky to be able to even launch our own astronauts into orbit. SLS is an expensive joke.
I foresee a future of space exploration funded by the super-rich, because it's cool and they can, but also organizations with a speculative interest. I'm thinking of asteroid mining - robotic at first, but if an asteroid is captured and brought near earth, manned operations will probably take place at some point.
Looking back at the earlier days of Earth exploration, specifically "new world" and Antarctic, there were no guarantees of success or even survival; and while Columbus was state-funded, the mission was of a primarily commercial interest. Shackleton's and Scott's, however, were primarily for exploration - scientific curiosity. As long as we have people like Elon Musk, there's a chance for manned exploration. Even a high-risk manned mission to Mars would have plenty of willing volunteers, as long as there was a chance of safe return (I do think it would at least have to be planned to be round-trip).
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
It's real simple. Quit spending money on all the military hardware that has done zilch for our national security over the past sixty years and move into STEM education, space and undersea exploration, fusion power, genetics, and a number of other things which actually might build a future for us, instead of repeating the "broken window fallacy" on an epic national scale. We spend more on "defense" than everyone else put together and can't even manage to beat the Taliban.
All the Chinese have to do is land a man on the moon -- even if it's a one-way trip -- and NASA's budget will skyrocket when they believe that the Chinese will have the high ground. It will become a defense program -- and you KNOW those have unlimited money, even from Republicans... hell, especially Republicans.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Americans are reactionary. Until China embarrasses the USA by taking a tinkle on Neal Armstrong's flag, they will not care.
Table-ized A.I.
The Chinese have some pretty high aspiration in this regard. Just because we've lost the way, doesn't mean NO ONE will do it.
There is plenty of money to be had for NASA, Congress simply needs to do its job better to get it. Stop monkeying with the tax code and make corporations actually pay income tax and there will be plenty of revenue. Stop giving already profitable industries tax credits. Big Oil is going to get 20 billion in tax credits, deductions, and actual subsidized dollars handed to them. Take 15% of that and hand it back to NASA and they can fund, for example, any of the several proposed follow-on missions for Cassini and send an airship to Titan to do further and more detailed exploration of one of the more earth-like bodies in our solar system, and make use of the single window of opportunity we will have prior to 2050 to get there. Or create a corporate version of the alternative minimum tax so that no Fortune 5000 company gets to skate tax-free and then use those funds to begin a program of not just Lunar exploration, but the establishment of a permanent base on the moon. But most importantly, if we don't better fund the Near-Earth Object search, none of the other things will matter at all.
I don't see how that is good news. NASA has been incredibly wasteful and inefficient in their use of funding (just look at the space shuttle program). The well run programs NASA runs don't excuse the crap they are doing.
We know how to get stuff into orbit. We've done it many different ways many different times, both privately and publicly funded. We also know how to keep people up there for extended periods of time.
We can keep re-inventing the wheel when it comes to gaining access to space and/or invent a new tin can for people to hang out in one there, or we can pause a bit and define the next challenge. I mean a real challenge and not parlor tricks for the 6PM news or episode of some science show on Discovery. I think one reason space exploration is where it's at is because it's boring.
We need another challenge like Apollo.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The ONLY reason that Dr Ethan Siegel pops up on slashdot nearly every day is, that he is
WRITING A BOOK. AND so he has to PROMOTE it.
Don't let yourself get sucked in by this guy.
He only wants get get published and strike it rich on your dime.
The same or better information can be found at longer existing and
well established sources.
They did plenty of science on the space shuttles, including these experiments: http://www.space.com/12150-6-c...
Makes sense if you pay attention to the great grandfather of space exploration. As Sir Isaac Newton said, "What goes up must come down".
"...the public, when surveyed, thinks that NASA gets something like a quarter to a third of the US budget. Perhaps we should show the world what we could accomplish if we really had that level of funding?"
No. We need to educate the public what percentage of federal budget is spent on NASA. We first need to show the brutal truth of what's going on, and those who closely follow space activities have shown misinformation among themselves (not that it is all their fault, it seems federal policies are delibrietly made confusing).
mfwright@batnet.com
No more money for space but we keep dumping money into our military and security programs. Just another way religion and religious zealots are hampering the progress of humanity.
It’s fair to ask, if NASA is getting 50% of the world’s funding and the rest of the world is going to the Moon, why is it unreasonable to expect that we would go as well? There are two possible answers. Perhaps the rest of the world has an unrealistic impression of the complexity of the problem and their own capabilities. Or, perhaps our own space agency has turned into a bureaucratic morass that is incapable of finishing large projects without spending ridiculous sums of money. For sure the former is a factor, but there is plenty of evidence that the latter dominates.
I think we are victims of the unstoppable hand of history in this case. NASA built the pyramids. They drove the golden spike. They defined the nation for all future generations. But once they were done, we could not throw the heroes out on the street, and we certainly could not let them keep the checkbook. So everything that has happened in human spaceflight since about 1970 has been one big retirement party and career transition program. It’s a colossal waste of time and money to pretend otherwise.
But hope is not lost. There are many bright and hungry people out there who can make the next giant leap given the right support structure and incentives.
Neil Degrass Tyson won't be happy about this. He has been talking about the need for increased funding since the Clinton adminstration. And not just from states with special interest groups/senators with facilities in their state supplying jobs. I remember in a recent video he said he's tried all he can (and sounded like he was giving up) to get interest to go up and make the people want for more exploration. Sad no one listened to him.
The house gop would quit trying to keep NASA as a jobs program. We need to kill SLS and use private launchers who can do the job for a fraction.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who is the rest of the world that is going to the moon? As it is, America will be on the moon by 2022 if the GOP will quit trying to destroy spacex and bigelow aerospace.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Call it the Mars Gap.
The Commies will own Mars! They will be able to look down on us! They (borrowing from a nearby post) might tinkle on Neal Armstrong's flag, Old Glory!!! It will be a space Pearl Harbor.
Choose the language correctly and the argument essentially makes itself.
"If Logsdon is correct, static NASA funding will mean that beyond low Earth orbit human space exploration will remain an unrealistic aspiration."
So the only option for anything human beyond LEO is NASA? Chinese not able to ever, ever do it? Russians? India? Europe?
It's worth notizing that it it's highday nasa was about laying the foundation for the weaponization of space and not doing science, ie their science budgets are likely much much bigger now then in the days of manned lunar flight and even back then the science types never truely needed nor wanted the manned missions, it was the military and political fractions that wanted it.
Of cause this is not how it got sold in pop-sci edutainment magazines and tv-shows, but in less frivolous circles it's always been assumed that long range exploration were about robotics and that the only real goal for manned exploration at this stage is the medical effect of zero gee exposure.
Until subsurface cities are economically feasible and have been tested going to other planes is not going to happen as anything other then a stunt and ocean exploration is sort of a forgotten field with way less money to burn then what nasa pays Energia to keep the ISS operational.
The problem here is that manned exploration serves no real purpose and probably wont for another century.