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NASA Gets Its Marching Orders: Look Up! Look Out!
TheRealHocusLocus writes: HR 2039: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act for 2016 and 2017 (press release, full text, and as a pretty RGB bitmap) is in the House. In $18B of goodies we see things that actually resemble a space program. The ~20,000 word document is even a good read, especially the parts about decadal cadence. There is more focus on launch systems and manned exploration, also to "expand the Administration's Near-Earth Object Program to include the detection, tracking, cataloguing, and characterization of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects less than 140 meters in diameter." I find it awesome that the fate of the dinosaurs is explicitly mentioned in this bill. If it passes we will have a law with dinosaurs in it. Someone read the T-shirt. There is also a very specific six month review of NASA's "Earth science global datasets for the purpose of identifying those datasets that are useful for understanding regional changes and variability, and for informing applied science research." Could this be an emerging Earth Sciences turf war between NOAA and NASA? Lately it seems more of a National Atmospheric Space Administration. Mission creep, much?
Hopefully this is a sign the space race is back on. Far more to do out there, then to squabble back here with, who can destroy the world the most number of times with their military, a real dead end and I mean dead end. Something is needed to drive humanity, to focus it's efforts and who is the greediest and most selfish or who can kill the most, are insanely, stupendously pointless and self destructive of society.
Making use of the resources of the solar system, is not about bringing stuff back to earth, it is about humanity expanding it's horizons further out. The difference between dwelling upon your genitals (hollywood et al) or dwelling upon your mind (NASA et al).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
That mission is exploratory, not studious. NASA's job is to explore the atmosphere (pretty much done) and space (barely even scratched the surface). NOAA's job is to study the ocean and atmosphere. So NASA goes and finds it, then hands it off to NOAA for detailed study. NASA is inherently concerned with "getting there", while NOAA is concerned with "what's there". If NOAA wants a better look or needs new instruments installed in an otherwise unreachable or hostile environment (space), then NASA is their go-to agency to get that job done.
NOAA's on their own for deep sea research, though. And that's stupid. Have the NASA physics geniuses build better vehicles for every environment, let NOAA's geological geniuses do the boring data mining and science from the tools the vehicles deliver. (And, yes, the "real" science part is boring compared to the part that consists of blowing things up in a controlled manner in order to eject a large amount of mass out of the Earth's gravity well. Whee!)