President Trump Is Sending NASA Back To The Moon (npr.org)

President Trump has formally told NASA to send U.S. astronauts back to the moon. From a report: "The directive I'm signing today will refocus America's space program on human exploration and discovery," he said. Standing at the president's side as he signed "Space Policy Directive 1" on Monday was Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last two humans to ever walk on the moon, in a mission that took place 45 years ago this week. Since that time, no human has ventured out beyond low-Earth orbit. NASA doesn't even have its own space vehicle, having retired the space shuttles in 2011. Americans currently ride up to the international space station in Russian capsules, though private space taxis are expected to start ferrying them up as soon as next year.

Comments

Re:Credit to the Russians...

[jwhyche]

Can't blame this one on Trump. This is the result of the last two idiots in office that decided to cancel the space shuttle program before we had a working replacement. Not that the shuttle was a shining example of success ether. But cancelling it before we had a working replacement was a stupid in a special order of magnitude.

He's Doing No Such Thing

[nealric]

Until there is an actual, specific, and funded plan, all Trump is doing is shooting his mouth off again.

GW Bush cancelled the Space Shuttle, not Obama

[jmcbain]

The Space Shuttle program was cancelled by George W. Bush in 2004. See:

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/q...
• https://www.nasa.gov/missions/...

Re:Good luck with that 30% cut to NASA's budget

[Verdatum]

NASA was the entity doing quite a lot of the cutting edge research on earth-science, merely because it had to remain useful, but couldn't afford lunar or planetary missions. From that, it did indeed learn quite a lot about the mechanisms that drive global climate change. Now, if you want to shift those responsibilities back to NOAA where it was originally intended, that's fine, but then they need sufficient budget to run their experiments, and the ability to work with space agencies (NASA or otherwise) to facilitate any space-based research they feel to be useful. As is, Trump is talking about cutting their already underfunded budget. As is, we only have three weather satellites in operation; they are all way past expected lifetime. The most recent one sent up malfunctioned last year, and it's replacement was ordered to be destroyed by Congress just last September in order to save on storage costs. If we lose just one more, we stand to have blackouts in coverage, which is terribly dangerous for tactical reasons.

As far as NASA overspending, well, you generally need to in situations where you are innovating and pioneering technology. SpaceX and such is able to save a ton of money by reading NASA publicly available research, and learning from them what things work and what things do not. As far as the contracts, they all get renegotiated constantly. Rarely does a contract run more than 2 years without investigating the feasibility of doing a rebid. But sure, privatized spaceflight is fantastic. Once it gets off the ground, then NASA's job should be to fund the massive investigatory projects that require the resources of a world superpower to accomplish. Commercial companies are only able to act when the pure-monetary-profit-potential is immediately evident.

Re:Good luck with that 30% cut to NASA's budget

[Tenebrousedge]

Venus is in no sense what tipped us off to the atmospheric properties of CO2. Those were established by Tyndall in the late 1850s, or Arrhenius 1896 if you want the whole theory. Neither mention Venus. The origin of studies into climate change was the evidence of changing climate here on Earth, i.e. Ice Ages, with evidence beginning in the early 19th Century. Alternately, if you were referring to when AGW became well established, that would presumably be Keeling 1959, just after the founding of NASA and launch of Sputnik.

I'm not sure if you're referring to some more specific events, or if you're just weak on the history of AGW, or both.