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How President Jimmy Carter Saved The Space Shuttle (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Eric Berger has published an account in Ars Technica about how President Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle program. The article is well worth reading for its detail. In essence, around 1978 the space shuttle program had undergone a crisis with technical challenges surrounding its heat-resistant tiles and its reusable rocket engines and cost overruns. President Carter was not all that enthused about human space flight to begin with, adhering to the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe. His vice president, Walter Mondale, was a vehement foe of human space flight programs, maintaining that money spent on them were better used for social programs.
If it weren't for pussy weakling Republicans willing to sellout to Iran he would have had a second term and our great Nation would be on a solid progressive course.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Star Trek is fiction, you realize. That ship taking pictures of Jupiter right now? Kirk isn't on it.
Never pet a burning dog.
Since discredited by what? I think there might be some bias in the reporting there, because it should say "since credited by 4 decades of remote robotic exploration"
the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe
Hah. What? Robotic space probes are bloody brilliant for exploring the universe, and they've done far more of it than could have been achieved if we'd had to send a meatbag along for the ride.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
“You’d have to be an idiot to get up in front of people and say, ‘I’m now going to trash $5 billion even though we’re that close to the finish line, and I’m going to quit human spaceflight.’
Carter was not such an idiot.
It would take Baby Bush to be that idiot and leave manned flight to the Russians.
Maybe Obama is also an idiot for not trying to revive a gutted NASA while the capability was still there, but he would have had to fight being blocked all the way.
The shuttle was a terrible program. It set the space program back thirty years by cementing in the public mind the idea manned spaceflight must always be far more expensive than the value of any possible benefit.
And the idea Carter is some sort of hero because he was too weak to say "Let's not throw good money after bad..."? Ugh.
In fact, when I look for any successes in space exploration (and no, low earth orbit does not count as "exploration"), all I see is robots and what I see is that many of them are wildly successful.
It seems the story writer is an idiot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... held back usable, affordable space flight for several decades, this was one program that was not worth saving.
That's obvious in hindsight. For those of us old enough to remember the shuttle when it was new I can tell you anyone who thought that about the shuttle at the time was mostly keeping it to themselves. Yes it was a dead end but it took a while to realize that. That happens sometimes. At the time the shuttle seemed like the next logical evolution of spaceflight.
Unless, of course, all you care about in space flight is the feeling of awesomeness while getting exactly nowhere.
Manned spaceflight has had tremendous benefit to humanity. The amount of technology development that has come from the manned program has been tremendous due to the challenge of the task. The information value of manned spaceflight is easy to overlook but it should not be. We've probably gotten more economic benefit from manned spaceflight than from probes and I would argue that the scientific value has been at least equal.
The argument of probe vs manned space flight is an idiotic one. We need both. Probes can tell us things that would be hard to learn or take MUCH longer and are quite economical for many mission profiles. But there are many things we can only learn though manned spaceflight and the technology and economic side benefits tend to be bigger as well. We need both and to present it as an either/or really is doing all of us a huge disservice in the long run.
Since discredited? Been to Mars lately?
Mars is a planet entirely populated by robots.
We built the robots and sent them there, but it is still a planet entirely populated by robots.
The problem is that you hit material and physical limits. That's the end of the space fantasies, you neck-bearded virgin. Look at air travel, same thing there too, a lot of development in a short period, then... coasting. We don't even have the Concorde anymore, you four-eyed sci-fi writing nerd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
I'm sorry you're so emotionally invested in dead fantasies and metal boxes that go into space that you can't see the reality that's right in front of you.
And in case you don't get it, here are those realities:
1) Manned "space exploration" is a joke, it always was. Vannevar Bush knew it, why don't you?
2) Space is a dead end, it's a deadly empty radiation-blasted vacuum with less in it than a vacuum tube.
3) There are no space spinoffs, the technology came first.
4) It's over, finished, done. The Space Age fantasies will never, ever happen. Ever.
"adhering to the since discredited notion that robotic space probes were adequate for exploring the universe." Uh, forgot a source for this one. :) Not only are robotic probes "adequate" but they are essential, since humans are fragile bags of water that can't withstand heat, cold, radiation, or lack of oxygen.
I wonder how much more knowledge about our solar system we would have if we hadn't wasted so much money and political capital on human space flight. And please don't tell me we are going to send humans on a generation ship to Wolf 1061c. (maybe frozen embryo's to be raised by an AI but that's it)
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Reagan scared the crap out of a lot of the rest of the world.
Which only a fool thinks is a good thing. But there are a lot of fools who fantasize about other people being submissive toward them because they're scared. The problem is that scared people don't necessarily act submissively. They often respond aggressively as well.
Put in a Cold War context, the Soviets and the US were in a Mexican standoff, with both sides having their hammers cocked and fingers on the nuclear trigger. In that situation you don't want to alarm anyone, but that is exactly what the senile fool did.
That summed up the election right there, Americans didn't want another 4 more years of someone who could be attacked by a rabbit.
I voted in that election, and I remember it well. You capture the way people were thinking accurately, but not critically. Anyone can be attacked by a (possibly rabid) animal; it wasn't a real issue. There were three actual substantive things people were reacting to in the election: (1) stagflation, (2) the Iran hostage crisis, (3) the energy crisis. While Carter's leadership style might leave a lot to be desired, it's hard to criticize his actions in any of these situations.
(1) Stagflation was the result of his and Paul Volker's successful attempt to ward off imminent hyperinflation by a combination of austerity (reducing the federal debt-to-gdp ratio of 3.3%) and sky high Federal Funds rates. Economic growth resumed pretty much in sync with the reductions in Fed interest rates, in fact under the last Carter budget (Presidents in their first year govern under their predecessor's last budget). Arguably milder steps might have done the job without causing the recession, but the fact that inflation continued even as the Federal Funds rate hit 20% suggest that weaker measures wouldn't have worked.
(2) Carter's handling of the Iran crisis is probably what brought his presidency down, but it came down to this: the military was still dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam war and couldn't execute the rescue mission successfully. Contrary to popular myth Carter actually raised military spending, from 282 billion under the last Ford budget to 303 billion under the last Carter budget. Yes, some big programs were eliminated or trimmed, but ironically operations and maintenance was a major area of increased spending in Carter's budgets.
(3) The second oil crisis was caused by the Iran Iraq War. In response Carter deregulated oil prices, which caused domestic production to rise and imports to fall.
In short, Carter was the kind of president people think they want: honest, prudent, and responsible willing to do unpopular things because they were right. Had two of the eight helicopters in Operation Eagle Claw failed instead of three, he'd be remembered very differently.
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