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Journalist: NASA Administrator Has Short Memory on Changing Space Policy (spacenews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Recently, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden stated that NASA would be "doomed" if the next president were to deviate in any way from the current Journey to Mars program. Space journalist and founder of the America Space website Jim Hillhouse took exception to Bolden's assertion in a letter to the aerospace newspaper Space News. In the process, Hillhouse provides a good summary of how space policy has evolved during the past five years under the Obama administration.
The course changes by the politics stopped so many good projects, and made it impossible to get anything big done. Just let them finish something. Space projects need time, more than a presidency term.
Bill picked it because it's backwards and is an awkward spot on keyboards. Thus, it is a very important character you have to regularly type in order to use his operating systems.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
You can blame Bush all you want, and I can point to the fact that it was Obama who wanted to turn NASA into a moslem appeasing agency
http://www.space.com/8725-nasa...
Both arguments wont get us anywhere
I don't care if it is Obama or Bush or Clinton or Reagan or ... they are all politicians and American politicians simply can not understand science
Whether or not NASA survive depends on one thing - the WILL for America to push forward its space program - whatever sitting president wants to dick around it shouldn't become a priority
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
From what I remember, there was no concept of directory in the very first version of DOS (no disk but tapes, ...) and / was, and is still, used for passing options to programs. When directories were added they had to choose a separator amongst the available reserved characters. Since / was already used they went for \.
Am I the only one who finds the Jim Hillhouse article difficult to read? Each sentence is packed with so many extraneous details that it's easy to forget the point. Take the following sentence, for example. (Note that this is only one sentence.)
There's a lot happening in that one sentence. The Obama administration is canceling programs. Then the House and Senate are rejecting one proposal and passing another. NASA is being denied a means of reaching space. But then there's a turnaround and two new space programs are created. Oh, and we're told that congress did agree with Obama's proposal for the space station. That was the proposal where private companies would be used for cargo and service missions. Did I forget to mention that the congressional hearings took months but passed with substantial bipartisan majorities? Do you care? Let's also not forget to mention that congress also "designated cislunar space as the destination", but who is that destination is for? I'm not really sure, but I think I've decided that the sentence is about congress, and not about the Obama administration or NASA. I sort of wish I knew that when I started reading the sentence.
The early (at least through OS/2) Microsoft developers and "architects" were VMS guys, which used the forward slash to pass command line arguments. This is how you ended up with, for example, linker arguments like /NODEFAULTLIBRARYSEARCH which could be abbreviated as /NOD. By the time heirarchical directories came around, (and they had seen UNIX) as you say, the slash was already in use, and so the backslash (the UNIX literal escape character) was used instead. A similar thing happened with CR/LF vs LF. As a result of the two, much hilarity has ensued, lo, even unto the third generation of users.
I always thought that option existed because the developer kept losing his node fault library.
Given Boldenâ(TM)s desire to pursue the âoeJourney to Mars,â it would seem only natural that the Orion and SLS programs, the only means currently in development for taking us beyond low Earth orbit, would be doing well since 2010. They are, but not for lack of effort by the Obama administration to underfund them â" proposals that congressional appropriators each year reverse. Since 2012, annual White House proposed budgets for NASA have fallen short of authorized levels by 78 percent and 70 percent respectively for the Orion or SLS programs.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars. Or if you want competition and can't be bothered to fund other big rocket development, you can fall back to the 20-25 ton range and use more than half a dozen or more different rocket systems throughout the world (Falcon 9, Atlas V Heavy, Delta IV Heavy, Soyuz, Angara, Ariane V, and Chang Zheng 5).
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
Bolden is the guy who said that one of his "foremost" tasks is to reach out to the Muslim world.
You might not have noticed. But the world didn't end and NASA is still doing its usual stuff.
Funny, how, once again, dead end, expensive rocketry projects are hyped as being the "only" way. I'll point to the Falcon Heavy as an obvious alternative platform for NASA to go to Mars.
First, Falcon Heavy doesn't exist as a production product yet. Second, until we have a robust and competitive group of commercial rocket vendors it will remain necessary for NASA to make sure we have at least one option available, even if that option is economically non-optimal. Even if Falcon Heavy becomes a working and reliable products (and we have every reason to believe it will), tying yourself to a single vendor is still not a good idea if you can avoid it.
If at the ending of Constellation, Congress had funded deep space projects for NASA rather than the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA could be doing deep space projects now, rather than hypothetical ones some point after 2023.
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts then every day would be Christmas. If you don't have a launch system then you don't have deep space projects. You have to walk before you can run.
Because back in the MS-DOS 1.0 days, / was used for command parameters instead of Unix using the - character. When MS-DOS got sub-directories, they couldn't use / because it was already used for command parameters.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The first version of DOS did indeed have disk support (the letters stand for DIsk Operating System, you know) and in fact required a disk. You could get the original PC in a configuration without disk drives, but in that case you didn't run DOS or the alternatives, CP/M-86 or UCSD p-System; instead you just ran IBM BASIC out of ROM, which the PC would boot to if it couldn't find a disk (that's where you used the tape cassettes). But DOS 1.0 out of the box only supported floppies--and originally you could only get 160K floppies on a PC, at that. Directories were regarded as unnecessary. Directories were introduced in DOS 2.0 along with hard disk support and the PC XT--the 10 meg capacity of the XT's hard disk was regarded as making directories needed to organize it.
> NASA would be doomed
Well guess what. Presidents clobber previous ones' big projects all the time, including previous plans to go to Mars and back to the moon. Obama clobbered the giant rocket that would have taken over for the space shuttle, to save money, and let the Russians ferry us around for some years.
Then it turned out they were still Rooskies.
Now the child of that rocket is back on the fast track, golly.
See, clearing out the previous guy's stuff lets you simultaneously save money and deny him his Kennedy moment coming to fruition. Win win!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Bolden's an ass and a political hack. And, absent a fundamental change, Congress is never going to give NASA enough money to establish a meaningful human presence in space. In the meantime, we flush billions down the toilet with monkeys in a can in LEO, starve real space science nearly to death, and pretend we're going to Mars.
The different presidents have certainly had very different priorities for NASA. Mr. Bolden (the head of NASA), said these are the three things Obama asked him to do with NASA (quoting):
When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Obama] charged me with three things.
One, he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math;
he wanted me to expand our international relationships;
and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good
> NASA is still doing its usual stuff.
Usual stuff like NASA now depending on Russia to put Americans in space because Obama gutted NASA?
TFA leaves out one important change to NASA policy brought by Obama early in his administration. This is not a joke or a smear -- it really happened.
Bolden is the guy who said that one of his "foremost" tasks is to reach out to the Muslim world.
You might not have noticed. But the world didn't end ....
It sure as hell hasn't improved.
Just another day in Paradise
I don't know about that, but the Paris attacks did demonstrate that Obama's point of view that gun control will stop these attacks is so wrong it isn't even funny.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Usual stuff like NASA now depending on Russia to put Americans in space because Obama gutted NASA?
Not much different than what they were doing with the Shuttle, except that it's cheaper.
The White House made first tried excuses ("work with the best engineers from around the world") . Then they sent out a spokesman who said only that he, the spokesman, didn't know what Obama had told Bolden. The spokesman said he didn't know, he didn't say that Obama had not directed NASA to make caressing muslim egos their "foremost priority".
Bolden apparently DID know what Obama directed him to do.
"I don't know" is really not "yeah, no".
I don't know about that, but the Paris attacks did demonstrate that Obama's point of view that gun control will stop these attacks is so wrong it isn't even funny.
Oh please. If a group of suicide bombers/gunmen stormed an American restaurant or gig, they'd have killed enough people to make their point before any of the concealed carriers knew what was happening.
There's a huge difference between a lone nutjob with a handgun and a hunting rifle and a squad of trained terrorists with automatic weapons.
And even if you declared martial law and made every US citizen patrol with their own automatic weapon, the terrorists would just resort to suicide bombs anyway. Although they'd have already destroyed civil society, so maybe they wouldn't even bother.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You do realize that you didn't actually disagree with anything I said right?
France has strict gun control laws, they have now had three attacks in the past (8?) months with automatic weapons.
Australia has strict gun control laws, and is an island, but still has attacks (Sydney Cafe attack).
But in the US, if we just increase gun control, it will solve all our violence problems (according to Obama and many of the Democratic party). The evidence says that no amount of gun control will stop the attacks, they will still happen even if every gun in the US is melted down, so why are we trying to take the guns awa from people who have never hurt anyone with their gun?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
1. Schedule: SLS is only a few months behind schedule (was due to fly by end of 2017 now planned for mid 2018) - and only because the Obama admin keeps choking it for cash and slow-walking the entire effort because the President is thin-skinned and hates that congress (including many democrats) ordered him to build it. Falcon9H on the other hand is several YEARS behind schedule and currently has a less-certain first-launch date.
Odds are good that Falcon Heavy launches in 2016 and can maintain a price point an order of magnitude before that of SLS. I think it's sick how the politicians can massively fund a competitor to the Falcon Heavy (while SpaceX funds development of the Falcon Heavy on its own dime) over the objections of NASA at vastly greater cost to the US and then have people like you gloss over those economic issues.
But if we just completely halt development of SLS, we would have over the next three years enough money (around $10 billion) to fund some serious deep space projects.
2. Class: SLS is a monster rocket, larger and much more capable than the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Falcon9H will struggle to carry as much as a Delta4H to the same orbits. In lifting capacity, the Falcon9H is a fraction of even the early version of SLS. In VOLUME, the Falcon9H is even worse. An SLS could replace the entire manned part of the ISS in just 2 launches.
First, that greater capacity comes in 2023 or later. It also comes at a vast cost.
The argument by spacex fanboys is that you can just divide the mass of what you want to launch and launch on a bunch of smaller rockets. This is a variation on the "mythical man month".
But it is true. You can do that. You don't need huge fairing size or payload size for most of the schemes that NASA wants to do. For a manned mission to Mars, the biggest indivisible payload is the human body. Even the heat shield can be assembled from smaller pieces in orbit. And the vast majority of payload is propellant which can be put up on the many 20-25 tons rockets out there.
Orbital assemble and fueling are technologies we need to develop further, whether or not we have the huge rocket. The huge rocket is not needed on the other hand.
2. Class: SLS is a monster rocket, larger and much more capable than the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Falcon9H will struggle to carry as much as a Delta4H to the same orbits. In lifting capacity, the Falcon9H is a fraction of even the early version of SLS. In VOLUME, the Falcon9H is even worse. An SLS could replace the entire manned part of the ISS in just 2 launches.
Falcon Heavy puts 50 tons to LEO. That's double what Delta IV Heavy does. And it looks like Falcon Heavy will do it at a lower total cost than Delta IV Heavy.
Further, you are making the half century old mistake of assuming capability is more important than utility. It doesn't matter how wonderful your rocket is, if you don't use those capabilities.
I'm not anti-spacex, just trying to knock some of the pot residue off the fanboy arguments. Truth is: we're gonna likely end-up with a mutant version of Constellation: Instead of a 10-meter diameter super-monster Ares V unmanned cargo launch vehicle partnered with crews on the skinny pencil Ares I, we are likely to see missions involving the sortof-monster 8.5-meter diameter SLS partnered with crews flying on Falcon (some missions can optimise SLS by flying unmanned and maxing-out the up-mass then having the crew and their capsule meet the SLS payload on-orbit as was the plan for Constellation)
I don't think we will end up with any part of the SLS. Due to those lower funding levels, the SLS is a bit more resistant to being scuttled, but I believe that will happen anyway. There's just too much money being squandered to do the SLS and have a viable space program. When in addition, we see vastly lower costs from Falcon Heavy, then I think the political support for SLS will evaporate.