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NASA Safety Panel Finds Concerns With the Journey To Mars (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel issued its annual report on various space agency programs. The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding. It suggested that NASA's plan to launch the first crewed mission on the Orion, which would use the heavy lift Space Launch System to go around the moon, in 2021 was unrealistic given current, anticipated funding. The panel also suggested that lack of a clear plan for the Mars program is compromising its viability. It also suggested that the decision not to return to the moon should be revisited in view of the desire of international partners to do so and the need of low gravity surface experience in advance of going to Mars
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding."
Then the panel is considering the wrong things. The areas of concern regarding a journey to Mars are many, all much greater than any funding consideration. Basically, sending people to Mars with current technology is a stupid idea. The moon is _right next door_. Let's figure out how to live there first.
Yes, Congress funds projects, not the President.
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding.
They needed a panel to figure this out? Shit, I have nothing at all to do with NASA and I thought that was bleeding obvious from the cheap seats where I sit. The Apollo program required funding about 4X what we see today as a percent of federal budget. I don't really see us getting back to the moon within my lifetime (much less mars) without a very substantial budget increase. It's been 40 years since we landed on the moon and we haven't been out of low orbit since. I see nothing in the current plans that will change that.
no, and sticking nano on the front of it doesn't make much difference.
You know how barometric pressure used to be given in inches of mercury? well that was the number of inches you could suck a pool of mercury up a straw (don't do that!) before you end up with a vacuum at the top of your straw and you are sucking away and nothing is rising any further because the pressure of the atmosphere won't push it up any more. Turns out you can't suck it up that far before it would rather not go any further. If you use other fluids the same kind of thing happens, but more so, because mercury is heavy. For water I think it is about 13 meters For the atmosphere itself the distance you can suck it up a straw is exactly the height of the atmosphere!
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized.
When you are spending taxpayer money it is ALWAYS political. This was true back during the Apollo era too. We just ignored it because of the Cold War.
The real problem is that to fund something like a space program you either need to be doing it for national security (see Cold War) or there needs to be economic opportunity. The economic opportunity is actually there but unfortunately the benefits are indirect and long term which makes it a hard sell to politicians who only care about the next election cycle.
Let's go back to the moon and stay in high orbit.
Let's stop pretending humans can survive in deep space or or Mars.
It doesn't take a week of reading articles @ JPL to realize we're not built for longterm weightlessness or different gravities.
Let's send remote devices that can do our bidding now.
Maybe one day when we start either manipulating our DNA or build ships with artificial gravity....but landfall is going to be unhealthy
and not in anyone's lifetime that can even see this page. It's all a con.
End of Line.
Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, but humans relate to the experience of another human far better than what can be done remotely via camera and sensor.
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, which was hardly one of the most peaceful years on record, the whole world stopped and watched. An entire generation of aerospace engineers was energized and motivated. It was a seminal moment in a turbulent era that defined what humans are capable of when we try.
The Apollo program was worth 10x what we paid for it, and as a highly taxed citizen of the US, I'd happily pay to see my generation's moment when we step onto another planet for the first time in our species existence.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, ...
Perhaps not as much science for the money spent, but perhaps more flexible science. With robotics, you have to decide *all* the science up front and bundle it with the machine. Humans can do all that and improvise and adapt. We can go places, see and do things robots cannot. Of course the reverse is true for really human-hostile places - for example, I do not want to be the first man to land on the Sun.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
President puts forward the budget and congress approves.
If you support the President you blame congress.
If you do not like the President you blame him.
Truth is that President Obama did have the killing of the constellation program as a plank in his platform. Frankly none of the HHLV that have been proposed over the last decade or so seem like great ideas. They mostly seem like recycling old programs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
somehow, become politicized.
There has never been a time in history when it wasn't politicized. NASA was never all that popular, even in the heyday of Apollo. I think the highest it has ever been was during Apollo 11.
So trip to Mars is dangerous? Go figure...
Any given thing should be cheaper now (in real terms) then in the 1960s. And it is...if you look at SpaceX.
SpaceX is doing things that have already been done. They aren't breaking major new technical ground. They are breaking new economic ground by improving already existing technology. Don't get me wrong, that's SUPER important but SpaceX isn't going to send us to Mars. They aren't working on that problem in any meaningful way because they can't. No private company can make a credible business case for going to Mars. The economic and physical risks are large and mostly unquantified, the cost is enormous, the technology needed is substantial and well beyond any one company to develop, etc. No business could possibly hope to do it.
The ONLY institution with enough money and the ability to absorb the risk of pure exploration is a nation state. They might contract SpaceX to do something but the only realistic route to the first boots on Mars is through NASA or some other nation's equivalent agency.
President proposes a budget, Congress does whatever the fuck they want with it before passing it on to the Senate. NASA funding is heavily affected by pork considerations. And this year it seems they forgot to under-fund commercial crew.
Constellation deserved to die, its only official mission was to be an ISS ferry, and it required killing ISS to fund it. Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions. (And yes, I know they're planning to use Falcon 9 for commercial crew.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Careful, you might be committing a nanoaggression with that statement.