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Space Station Funding Safe - For Now.
SRMoore writes "Some good news from Congress today. Looks like the International Space Station will get its funding this year. (At least from Congress)" Well, there are plenty of bloody battles to be fought before next year's budget is finally passed, but according to the CNN article SRMoore pointed us to, the House vote in favor of funding the space station was 298 to 121, so construction will probably continue for at least another year.
People in Turkey don't have safe houses to live in, and we're trying to put people into orbit?
Here goes the Mir all over again.
Look - I'm not denying the importance of starting to get out into space...but what are we accomplishing, relly, with this station? I mean, it's good enginerring 'practice', but there's not that much science to be gained... I mean not compared to a project like the 11-billion$ SSC (Superconducting Super Collider), which congress cancelled a few years back...Everybody seems so keen on this space stuff that they tend to ignore what scientific value you can get from it...
>There is plenty of information available on just about every candidate available for anybody who wants to look for it.
And if I do spend that time, there's a vanishingly small chance that my vote will affect the result. Moreover, the candidates that do appear by the time I vote (given that I don't live in New Hampshire or Iowa, and even the ones who show up there are the ones with big money orgs behind them) will be Tweedledee and Tweedledum as far as I'm concerned.
Read David Freidman's "Hidden Costs" for his analysis of why voter turnout is as small as it is here.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
OK. I am the biggest fan of space you can find. There is nothing--NOTHING--I would want more than a healthy, amazing, mind-boggling space program. That is why this story strikes an emotional chord with me.
A few weeks ago the VA-HUD appropriations subcommittee slashed most of the good projects NASA is working on. It cancelled all Mars missions past 2001 or so, cut funding to the Deep Space missions that were SO great for science, and cancelled several future astronomy missions. Further, recent deliberations have failed to restore any of this fundin.
But it left two programs virtually unscathed: the ISS and the Space Shuttle, the two bloated NASA programs that matter the least.
I have a great fear that within a couple of years we will have a (so-called) space program consisting of only these two projects, and none of the bargain-basement science missions that give us so much gain for the buck.
I also have a fear that two years from now the taxpayers are going to be outraged by the failure of the ISS and the waste of BILLIONS and BILLIONS of their dollars.
My wish: NASA would cancel the ISS, free up 2.something billion dollars, and spend all that money on science missions and a manned mission to Mars. Yes, a manned mission to Mars--we could afford it without the ISS.
It's a sad time.
-M
It is patently false that there was no opposition to going to the moon. There was considerable opposition from every end of the political spectrum. Kennedy himself found the idea causing him such political trouble that he even publicly offered to cooperate with the Soviets on the project (with, more than likely, the quiet hope that they could be blamed if the effort failed). While it is virtually impossible to find anyone today who was opposed, this is because the program became such a (short lived) popular success.
Now, I don't happen to think the fact that the world is not a utopian paradise is sufficient reason to scuttle the space program. Europe was no utopian paradise when the "voyages of exploration" began in the sixteenth century. Even so, I think we should be looking for ways to profit from manned space flight, otherwise we should leave space to the robots.
I've heard the argument about "machines can't think," and true as this is, you should take a look at what it costs to make a long space flight survivable for a human being. You can put a lot of brains in a robot for what that costs.
I laughed out loud at the scene at the beginning of the movie Apollo 13 when Lovell calls to his kids and they were all sitting on the stairs. I was a kid on the stairs those July nights in 1969, pretending I was down in my room, listening to everything as it happened on the TV. I will never forget it.
Apollo was lousy science (in space exploration terms, not in technological development terms), but it sure had me dreaming of the stars and dying to be a scientist/engineer.
I see the future of man in space in the very long term. It took almost 100 years for Europeans to follow the explorers into the "new world." The distances and difficulties and costs of this expansion are so much greater that I do no think 1000 years out of line for the length of time it will take to have interplanetary trade and civilization, but I think we should continue to try.
"A man's reach should always exceed his grasp." Help the poor, yes. But don't put everything on hold until poverty is gone. Society doesn't act. Individuals act. Select your priorties and put your effort in there. Give others the freedom to do the same. The world can and will become better if you do.
I've mixed feelings on this one; on the one hand, it shows that congress still has some interest in the space programme, but on the other hand the station is a phenomenal waste of money.
If I were Dan Goldin, I'd do my damdest to get together the $50 billion needed to establish a permanent base on Mars
During the Space Race, no qualm was made about going to the Moon. Politicians kept underlining how important the Space Program is for Humanity: it is an expression of our innermost desires for exploration, and a trait of curiosity that marks the entire race. In truth, they just wanted to win the pissing contest with the Soviets.
Is the Space Program important? You betcha. It's an inalienable right of Mankind to pursue it. In the long run, it can have a dramatic influence on the survival of Humanity itself as a species.
But the results don't come during a single mandate, so it keeps getting cut and cut again... Fortunately, it has also forced NASA and other agencies throughout the world to innovate and become more creative. We're far from sending another billion-dollar Viking when we can send a little robot that'll do just fine.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
That's one done. Now all that needs to be done is to try and get the Miltary budget down to almost nothing. And we should be in the clear.
Murphy(c) 4 3l33t pReZi
I have to agree with the previous poster. I am greatly in favour of having a real space program, but what NASA has been doing for the past 15 years is not a real space program.
The ISS is years late, billions over budget, and will only have a fraction of the capabilities originally intended.
It's tragic to think that we have seen no significant advance in our space capabilities since the late 70s.
BTW, for a great novel that harps on the same theme, read Homer Hickham's Back to the Moon. It's a great story and it is very strong in the technical details (Hickham is a retired NASA engineer; his childhood was the subject of the movie October Sky - the absolute best geek movie ever).
Check out Linux University
It's easy to diss the potential value of the pure research projects that will go on up there but I think just the technical achievements involved in getting the station up and running & supporting life will have all kinds of useful applications down on earth.
just my $.02
And you have the right to make a donation to your favorite private space exploration organization. Alas, you don't have as much to give, thanks to taxes. We've settled into a situation where each of us pays money the government without getting to tell the government how to spend our money. Instead, we only have the crudest methods for influencing how it will be spent: we vote every few years among a tiny pool of candidates (with very little information about those candidates other than whatever can be gleamed from mud-slinging ads) for the one we hope will use our political and economic power the most wisely.
I say abolish NASA and most of the rest of the government, along with the taxes that support it. Let people choose directly for themselves how their own resources are spent (i.e. feeding the hungry, educating kids, exploring space, subsidizing tobacco farmers, etc) according to their own values.
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Have a Sloppy day!
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The proposal to kill the Space Station comes up and is killed every year. It was never a serious threat. What is a serious threat is that the $1 billion in cuts to NASA's budget were included in the bill and passed (here). These were targeted specifically at the non-manned missions, so the NASA cuts we were all debating a few weeks ago went through.
It's interesting that nobody complained about the poor and education in the US while flinging $750k missiles at another country. Especially when you consider that the conflict was of little strategic value to the US and that they will probably pay a lot for rebuilding the area.
But when a historic project with plenty of scientific and economic spinoffs for the US costs a lot there is a lot of complaining and threatening to cut off funding.
The Apollo program ran efficiently, made progress remarkably quickly, and truly pushed hard on the technology envelope of the time, all reasonably close to budget.
Had the congress not eviscerated NASA in the mid 70's, and NASA continued progressing at the pace and efficiency that it showed during the Apollo program, I'm convinced we would now have the following things:
to and from the moon.
station there.
even with landings on one of their moons.
Those who say that space research is a waste are just plain ignorant. The benefits to humankind that fall out of space research far outweigh any reasonable cost, if the research could be done as efficiently as the Apollo program was.
It is sad that NASA is now so under funded and that NASA along with the rest of government is so burocratic and lumbering that it can just barely manage to keep moving on a space station that is puny and unimpressive even compared to what we were accomplishing in space in the 60's!
And even the funding of the space station is a constant source of political fighting.
It is true that the space station is being handled so inefficiently and is such a token effort that the benefits if this particular station might not outweigh the costs.
This is a true pity, since it need not be that way.
NASA likes everything gold-lated, large, late, over-budget, under-performing.
If we want space stations, abolish NASA and give the taxes back to ordinary people. Repeal the Treaty on Space/Moon, let people homestead the moon and mars the way they did Oklahoma.
Then we will have space travel.
Until then, don't hold your breath. The laws of bureaucracy are just as binding as the law of gravity.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."