So the fact that space is really big is a reason to be worried about running into somebody else while you are "out there"? The argument given that I was responding to is that space is a finite resource that should be limited and therefore private individuals need not apply for going into space.
I am arguing precisely the opposite, that it is an "infinite" resource by most measures and it is not something we need to worry about running out of any time soon. Even near-earth space is something where there is plenty of room to maneuver around in and it will be some time before a "space traffic control" will be acting like the air traffic controllers do in the Earth's atmosphere. It will be some time before that starts to happen. This is also a completely separate issue from clearing out from Earth orbit any kind of space debris that may be up there at the moment.
By far and away one of the most influential computer games that I ever played was called simply COMBAT, a real-time mutliplayer computer game played on teletype terminals (yes... I played it originally on a printer originally designed for use in a news bureau and had yellow paper printing only capital letters and control codes like backspace had to be manually entered with the "control" key directly.... none of this sissy backspace key BS).
Porting this game to a modern system would be sort of pointless as there are now many other very excellent shoot-'em up multi-player computer games, but for what this did and the kind of user interface that it had was simply amazing for the era. It required a whole bunch of imagination as it was more like sitting in a mission control room for a 1960's era NASA mission that lacked a TV camera in terms of piloting your spacecraft. All of the controls had to be entered as text keyboard entries at a command prompt. Some people simply couldn't really figure out more than how to get onto the game and get wiped out, but there certainly were some very skilled players over the years and even some teams that formed which became very potent.
I don't know if this game was ported to other computer systems of the era (early 1970's before microcomputers) and it really didn't make the jump to the microcomputers in part because of its multi-player real time gameplay. Computer games of that nature didn't start to happen again until internet connections were pretty common.
The south pole research station has a working garden... something that the researchers routinely head into from time to time that work there "overwinter". Growing stuff isn't that hard, but it might make life a whole bunch easier if a nuclear power plant or two was built there.
My point is still that it isn't environmental or technical issues that are keeping us from these places, but rather political issues that are keeping us from building settlements in these places by force of the government and guns that will be pointed our way if we try. It certainly wouldn't be worth blowing a billion dollars on a major development project in Antarctica when some stupid court back by a division of Marines can wipe out that development effort.
The problem is that these debt instruments never really get paid off, or rather get paid off in a circular fashion where the debt is being paid off by increasing the debt. It is a Ponzi scheme writ large representing trillions of dollars in debt.
The U.S. Federal debt is now so large that taxes cover interest alone, and even that isn't quite enough. All discretionary spending is now financed entirely by debt. That is what most people are complaining about here and why the issue of debt gets raised whenever government spending is concerned. It is now all play money that might as well have the word "monopoly" or "Parker Brothers" printed on it instead.
BTW, I agree that generally "the markets" tend to consider government securities to be rather stable, but that isn't always true. Bonds issued by the State of California at the moment are considered high risk... which is one of the reasons why that state is having some very real problems taking care of its state level budget. Other states are also having a huge issue right now too.
Getting back to the point mentioned by the original poster on this side thread, paying down the debt isn't even a consideration for the federal budget. It doesn't really matter what the system is for how that money is put into the federal treasury, the fact is that the debt really isn't being paid off in the long run and just gets larger and larger. To explain this, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mfMG66LtVU
Where do you possibly get these figures? For most rockets, the propellant costs are statistical noise in its development. The catering budget for the press corp at KSC during a Shuttle launch is more than the fuel costs to launch a Shuttle.... just to give a comparison here. It is not really a huge problem in terms of the fuel costs. Put it another way: The energy budget for travel to orbit is roughly the same as it is for travel from London to Sydney in a commercial jetliner... actually a bit less. It sure doesn't cost $200k for that kind of ride. I'm not saying that a trip into space will be cheaper than an intercontinental airplane trip, but it doesn't have to be substantially more. $20k might just be something fairly realistic.
Armadillo Aerospace is already offering rides into space (admittedly sub-orbital, but still going into space) for about $100k, and this does include life support, propellants, and even the costs for a pilot. I think there is still substantial opportunities to implement economies of scale and drive costs down considerably. Virgin Galactic is charging $200k for their trips, and they are openly admitting they are laughing all of the way to the bank for that price.
Going to Antarctica has one huge problem facing it: A armed stalemate between the major powers of the Earth that is only being resolved by pretending that nobody can go there. The reason Antarctica isn't being settled and colonized has nothing to do with technological issues, but entirely because of political issues that could erupt into World War III if serious exploitation and militarization starts to happen there. Keeping it a scientific playground is also something that is better for this planet for multiple reasons. Using this as an excuse is a tired argument and one that really doesn't hold water. If you can show me how I can get clear title to a hunk of Antarctica, I'll take that title and move my family there tomorrow. Seriously!
I wouldn't mind becoming the oil baron of Antarctica, and there are billions, perhaps trillions of dollars worth of resources there. At the same time the environmental damage caused by extracting those resources may not be worth the effort, but I'd make a pile of money in the process. The technological ability to live there is already proven as there already are permanent outposts in several locations on that continent and even roads that connect those places.
As for colonizing the ocean floor, from everything I've seen it is by far and away much more complicated living that far down than it is to even go into space.... at least to low-Earth orbit. It isn't nearly as simple as you are suggesting and on top of that the legal issues are just as complex if not more so for underwater real estate. Perhaps somebody could force the issue, but getting rights to hunks of land underwater isn't nearly as easy as you would think. Most property rights end at the shore. Yes, there are mineral leases and other things you can do for temporary access to a spot of seafloor, but not something permanent. You can't build a habitable place if some thug is going to take it away from you tomorrow.
A robot might be useful, but having a skilled technician on site who doesn't have to deal with time delays as a result of distances and can grab another sample immediately after forming a reasoned hypothesis is something that a robot can't do.
By no less than the authority of the Mars Rover program himself has suggested that he would take an astronaut over robotics any day. Robots are useful for initial surveys and to head into situations that are dangerous, but having somebody there or at least quite close is going to get you infinitely much better science than trying to do science from an air conditioned office on the Earth and having to strain to figure out what exactly it is that you are seeing or having to deal with equipment that is broken before you even start the investigation.
I'm not saying that all robotic exploration ought to be halted, but robotic exploration is something that is done in conjunction with people, not something isolated by itself. It is also something that has diminishing returns until you get somebody up there. Dr. Harrison Schmitt did more real science on the Moon during the three days he was up there than most of the science that covered what was on the Moon previously. Arguably he did more there during that time than the rest of the robotic missions to the Solar System combined... except for the fact that there was so much low hanging fruit to be grabbed with robotic probes that some really cool things were discovered in spite of the limitations of robots.
The only think that stank about Apollo 17 is that Harrison Schmitt wasn't able to do a follow-up investigation based upon what he found. Well that and no other scientist was permitted to go to the Moon.
I'm not so sure if you can count the Genesis modules produced by Bigelow Aerospace as "habitable volume", but the rest of the numbers are available including the Russian modules. The data with links can be found here:
Most of which are purchased by large banks with money borrowed from the Fed. How do you think most of these treasury securities are being paid for?
Yes, I can buy T-bills, but only a bank can have the government give them money that in turn is going to be sent right back to the government in order to be spent. Then again, what isn't being created in this fiat manner is being sold to the Chinese government.
While Energia certainly has roots established as a government agency, it is most certainly as much of a private company as Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. In terms of comparisons, that is the proper comparison not something like Armadillo Aerospace or perhaps SpaceX.
My comparison to Richard Branson is that he is holding all of these "astronaut clinics" and acting like he is much involved with space, yet his company has yet to actually put anybody "up there", even into a sub-orbital trajectory. Eventually he is going to get there, but he hasn't done it yet.
Energia, on the other hand, has put people like Anousheh Ansari, Richard Garriot, and Charles Simonyi into orbit (to name a few that have gone up). I'm just saying that Energia is certainly going to be able to pull this one off. If Boeing announced that they were going to send people into space and dock with a commercial space station, they would be just as credible.
Oh yeah, Boeing did announce such a thing, didn't they?
Space is big. Really really big. You ought to read Douglas Adams some time to see just how mind bogglingly huge space is and noting that there is a whole universe "out there" to explore that we have only just started looking at.
If you are worried about satellite debris, you ought to thank the U.S. federal government for much of that (along with the Russians and Chinese). Experiments that deliberately detonated nuclear bombs in space along with crazy schemes to spread flakes of metal in mid-Earth orbit to aid in telecommunications are still up there. Many of the problems in space are self-inflicted by the governments of this world.
Besides, LEO is the one place where orbital debris is really not a huge problem as well. The exosphere extends up to that altitude where enough air particles do eventually cause the debris to rain back down upon the Earth. It is the mid-level orbits that are the biggest problem as at those altitudes the debris doesn't come down.
As far as if "they screw it up".... I take it that you don't do much driving. You are by far and away in much more danger going down an interstate highway with 1 ton vehicles driven by teenagers lacking common sense than you are to ever be hit by debris falling from space or even being hit by a rocket made by a rank amateur. Life is dangerous, so live with it. And you want to use this as an excuse for why I can't go into space?
So you think it is a good idea for banks to borrow money from the Fed... created out of whole cloth... only to in turn "lend" this newly created money to the government for the privilege of earning a couple percentage points off of that money?
Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic scheme to pull money out of the government..... where can I sign up? Oh that is right, I can't.
It should be noted that the percentage of the federal budget going to NASA is now about 0.1%. I concur with Lord Ender here where if 57% of the federal budget was going to NASA, either the war in Afghanistan is going real well (not needing any more money) or NASA is flying solid gold spacecraft with diamonds as rocket fuel.
NASA would also be accomplishing some really cool things for a trillion dollars per year for outlays. If only that were true.
NASA is done. They did their great thing back in 1969 and then have been coasting for a long time.
I think the metaphor is excellent as NASA is done as an agency. Unfortunately like all government zombies sometimes it is takes awhile for the polticians to realize that it is already dead except for the burial. NASA has been dying since the Nixon administration, it is time to put a steak through its heart and end it for once and all.
The bigger question, is what changed in our business environment since the 70's that made places like that no longer viable?
Legal changes to commercial corporation laws that encouraged "mergers and acquisitions". Indeed there became and still are whole departments of major corporations that have this title which do nothing but try to raid a company to boost short-term profits.
If a company tries to put aside money for long term economic health, that company quickly becomes a huge target for a hostile take-over where the company doing the purchase will shut down the R&D departments and raid the patent porfolios to try and make a few extra bucks.
The laws as they were written in the 1960's and early 1970's tended to discourage this practice and instead encouraged more competition between companies in the marketplace in terms of who made the better products. As for how those laws were changed, let's just say that the flow of money from stock brokers to Congress isn't anything new. Donating $10 million to a re-election campaign of a prominent Senator so they can introduce a bill that will make you a billion or more dollars sounds like a very sound kind of investment. And you really think a Senator is going to turn down that kind of money even if it screws over his constituent's grandchildren?
I put it more bluntly: NASA got to the Moon because of Lyndon B. Johnson. His control over the U.S. Senate was near legendary and that was political power he didn't give up when he made it to the White House. If you wanted to serve in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat during the 1960's (and most of the 1950's), you had to go through LBJ. The Republicans were irrelevant for the most part during that era.
It was LBJ who put the bug into the ear of JFK to consider the whole idea of sending somebody to the Moon, and it was LBJ who also laid out the system for having nearly every congressional district in America having at least some part of the Apollo program. That was no small feat, and of course his old district in the U.S. House of Representatives certainly didn't get missed out when it landed the largest plum of them all: The Manned Spaceflight Center (now called the Johnson Spaceflight Center.... they know where the funding came from).
The public losing interest? It was more like LBJ lost his political control over the process but it was far enough along by 1967 that NASA was able to essentially coast along and nobody was willing to cut the program before the astronauts landed on the Moon. After that happened, we got the kind of NASA that we have today: bureaucratic and mostly without a mission.
By law NASA shouldn't even be involved with commercial spaceflight any more. That supposedly ended with the Reagan administration, but only now has it been realized to any substantial extent.
The role that NASA is playing right now is for providing seed money to encourage commercial organizations to build spacecraft that NASA needs, along a model similar to how DARPA encourages many companies to develop military technology. If NASA does more of that, I'm entirely supportive so far as it meets the overall objectives and goals for NASA including, oh I don't know, the exploration of space.
I would like to see NASA streamlined into more of a scientific and engineering research agency. There is no need for NASA to be flying trucks into space where there are plenty of other people willing to do the job and for a whole lot less money.
On a side note, the main Rep against the authorization was Gabrielle Giffords, wife of STS-134 shuttle commander Mark Kelly.
It is also noteworthy that Gabrielle Giffords is also the sub-committee chair over the Aviation and Space Subcommittee. In other words, she is directly responsible for all legislation involving NASA including appropriations bills. That she doesn't support the leader of her own party (Obama) and that they needed to pass an appropriations bill through the Senate speaks volumes about what she has been able to accomplish.... almost nothing.
The budget hearings were so incredibly one-sided for certain pet companies that it was obnoxious.
This particular legislation is about the best compromise that can be made given political realities at the moment. The earlier version that was written up by members of the House was by far and away worse.
This version has a provision for continued development of a new "heavy lift vehicle" and supports the COTS program including efforts to commercialize Earth to LEO manned spaceflight. Ares I is good and dead, but ATK does get some money in their direction too.
Most of the major space advocacy groups are in support of this bill as it really seems to get the job done. It isn't perfect, but at least it isn't a total abomination like was proposed earlier that would have killed off almost all science projects at NASA.
If it was purely manned vs. unmanned spaceflight that was the center of the debate, that would be fine. I find it horrible that the science budget for NASA is being cut in favor of sustaining pure pork for manned spaceflight.
Besides, travel into low-Earth orbit by astronauts is a solved engineering problem. If NASA was doing something new and original that would be a dramatic cost savings for getting that accomplished, I might support some research along those lines. About the only thing that the Constellation program was trying to prove is that they could take a shuttle SRB and fly somebody into space at the top. And that passes for innovation worth billions of dollars? If you are going to spend that kind of money, at least have something to show for it when you are done.
It would have to be RKK Energia. As the only commercial organization to have actually sent people into space, they certainly have the expertise, training facilities, engineers, and even the travel agents already lined up to be able to pull this thing off.
Richard Branson can claim a whole bunch of things and pretend he has his own space agency, but these guys are doing it right now. They're ramping up production of the Soyuz spacecraft anyway. In fact, I swear that this company forgot that there is a global recession going on as they are expanding production and hiring a whole bunch of people to help build their vehicles. Of course it helps if you are Russian if you want a job there.
Why worry about something huge that everybody can see in their backyard when there are going to be a couple thousand "microsatellites" all about the size of a basketball that you can't see until after it has hit you?
It is a nice sentiment to be worrying about orbital debris and I also agree that it is a problem, but insisting on applying a special and unique standard to just commercial space stations is insanity at its finest. If anything, something large of that nature is more likely to absorb impacts better and be able to survive in a harsh environment where a whole bunch of debris is present.
To insist that all orbital vehicles also include a requirement that they must have capabilities to be deorbited is a wise move. Of course it doesn't help that China, Russia, and America have deliberately blown things up in space and spewed shrapnel deliberately.
Only a former communist would think of selling spaceflight trips to a socialist American government because that government can't pull its head out of its own behind to be able to build a working vehicle that would get its own astronauts into space. As of June 2011, the USA will be without any sort of manned spaceflight capability..... all of it will be done by flying Soyuz spacecraft out of Kazakhstan.
Yeah, there might be some American companies who are suggesting they can fly a spacecraft of their own, but leave it to Congress to screw that up royally. A nice bi-partisan effort is making sure that only the best pork will flow to the proper congressional districts even if nothing ever actually gets built and the heck with anybody else trying.
Don't let the government throw its money away if you think flying into space is a bad idea. But please just don't tell me I can't spend my own money to do that if that is something I choose to do. People throw money away to do silly things like take a submarine down to the deck of the Titanic in order to hold a wedding. If they want to do something equally silly by flying into space, why are you being such an ass by telling them or myself that I can't do that?
Slashdot Mirror
So the fact that space is really big is a reason to be worried about running into somebody else while you are "out there"? The argument given that I was responding to is that space is a finite resource that should be limited and therefore private individuals need not apply for going into space.
I am arguing precisely the opposite, that it is an "infinite" resource by most measures and it is not something we need to worry about running out of any time soon. Even near-earth space is something where there is plenty of room to maneuver around in and it will be some time before a "space traffic control" will be acting like the air traffic controllers do in the Earth's atmosphere. It will be some time before that starts to happen. This is also a completely separate issue from clearing out from Earth orbit any kind of space debris that may be up there at the moment.
By far and away one of the most influential computer games that I ever played was called simply COMBAT, a real-time mutliplayer computer game played on teletype terminals (yes... I played it originally on a printer originally designed for use in a news bureau and had yellow paper printing only capital letters and control codes like backspace had to be manually entered with the "control" key directly.... none of this sissy backspace key BS).
Unfortunately, the best reference I can find that talks about this game is Slashdot itself on this thread: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=238223&cid=19477595
Porting this game to a modern system would be sort of pointless as there are now many other very excellent shoot-'em up multi-player computer games, but for what this did and the kind of user interface that it had was simply amazing for the era. It required a whole bunch of imagination as it was more like sitting in a mission control room for a 1960's era NASA mission that lacked a TV camera in terms of piloting your spacecraft. All of the controls had to be entered as text keyboard entries at a command prompt. Some people simply couldn't really figure out more than how to get onto the game and get wiped out, but there certainly were some very skilled players over the years and even some teams that formed which became very potent.
I don't know if this game was ported to other computer systems of the era (early 1970's before microcomputers) and it really didn't make the jump to the microcomputers in part because of its multi-player real time gameplay. Computer games of that nature didn't start to happen again until internet connections were pretty common.
The south pole research station has a working garden... something that the researchers routinely head into from time to time that work there "overwinter". Growing stuff isn't that hard, but it might make life a whole bunch easier if a nuclear power plant or two was built there.
My point is still that it isn't environmental or technical issues that are keeping us from these places, but rather political issues that are keeping us from building settlements in these places by force of the government and guns that will be pointed our way if we try. It certainly wouldn't be worth blowing a billion dollars on a major development project in Antarctica when some stupid court back by a division of Marines can wipe out that development effort.
The problem is that these debt instruments never really get paid off, or rather get paid off in a circular fashion where the debt is being paid off by increasing the debt. It is a Ponzi scheme writ large representing trillions of dollars in debt.
The U.S. Federal debt is now so large that taxes cover interest alone, and even that isn't quite enough. All discretionary spending is now financed entirely by debt. That is what most people are complaining about here and why the issue of debt gets raised whenever government spending is concerned. It is now all play money that might as well have the word "monopoly" or "Parker Brothers" printed on it instead.
BTW, I agree that generally "the markets" tend to consider government securities to be rather stable, but that isn't always true. Bonds issued by the State of California at the moment are considered high risk... which is one of the reasons why that state is having some very real problems taking care of its state level budget. Other states are also having a huge issue right now too.
Getting back to the point mentioned by the original poster on this side thread, paying down the debt isn't even a consideration for the federal budget. It doesn't really matter what the system is for how that money is put into the federal treasury, the fact is that the debt really isn't being paid off in the long run and just gets larger and larger. To explain this, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mfMG66LtVU
Where do you possibly get these figures? For most rockets, the propellant costs are statistical noise in its development. The catering budget for the press corp at KSC during a Shuttle launch is more than the fuel costs to launch a Shuttle.... just to give a comparison here. It is not really a huge problem in terms of the fuel costs. Put it another way: The energy budget for travel to orbit is roughly the same as it is for travel from London to Sydney in a commercial jetliner... actually a bit less. It sure doesn't cost $200k for that kind of ride. I'm not saying that a trip into space will be cheaper than an intercontinental airplane trip, but it doesn't have to be substantially more. $20k might just be something fairly realistic.
Armadillo Aerospace is already offering rides into space (admittedly sub-orbital, but still going into space) for about $100k, and this does include life support, propellants, and even the costs for a pilot. I think there is still substantial opportunities to implement economies of scale and drive costs down considerably. Virgin Galactic is charging $200k for their trips, and they are openly admitting they are laughing all of the way to the bank for that price.
Going to Antarctica has one huge problem facing it: A armed stalemate between the major powers of the Earth that is only being resolved by pretending that nobody can go there. The reason Antarctica isn't being settled and colonized has nothing to do with technological issues, but entirely because of political issues that could erupt into World War III if serious exploitation and militarization starts to happen there. Keeping it a scientific playground is also something that is better for this planet for multiple reasons. Using this as an excuse is a tired argument and one that really doesn't hold water. If you can show me how I can get clear title to a hunk of Antarctica, I'll take that title and move my family there tomorrow. Seriously!
I wouldn't mind becoming the oil baron of Antarctica, and there are billions, perhaps trillions of dollars worth of resources there. At the same time the environmental damage caused by extracting those resources may not be worth the effort, but I'd make a pile of money in the process. The technological ability to live there is already proven as there already are permanent outposts in several locations on that continent and even roads that connect those places.
As for colonizing the ocean floor, from everything I've seen it is by far and away much more complicated living that far down than it is to even go into space.... at least to low-Earth orbit. It isn't nearly as simple as you are suggesting and on top of that the legal issues are just as complex if not more so for underwater real estate. Perhaps somebody could force the issue, but getting rights to hunks of land underwater isn't nearly as easy as you would think. Most property rights end at the shore. Yes, there are mineral leases and other things you can do for temporary access to a spot of seafloor, but not something permanent. You can't build a habitable place if some thug is going to take it away from you tomorrow.
A robot might be useful, but having a skilled technician on site who doesn't have to deal with time delays as a result of distances and can grab another sample immediately after forming a reasoned hypothesis is something that a robot can't do.
By no less than the authority of the Mars Rover program himself has suggested that he would take an astronaut over robotics any day. Robots are useful for initial surveys and to head into situations that are dangerous, but having somebody there or at least quite close is going to get you infinitely much better science than trying to do science from an air conditioned office on the Earth and having to strain to figure out what exactly it is that you are seeing or having to deal with equipment that is broken before you even start the investigation.
I'm not saying that all robotic exploration ought to be halted, but robotic exploration is something that is done in conjunction with people, not something isolated by itself. It is also something that has diminishing returns until you get somebody up there. Dr. Harrison Schmitt did more real science on the Moon during the three days he was up there than most of the science that covered what was on the Moon previously. Arguably he did more there during that time than the rest of the robotic missions to the Solar System combined... except for the fact that there was so much low hanging fruit to be grabbed with robotic probes that some really cool things were discovered in spite of the limitations of robots.
The only think that stank about Apollo 17 is that Harrison Schmitt wasn't able to do a follow-up investigation based upon what he found. Well that and no other scientist was permitted to go to the Moon.
I'm not so sure if you can count the Genesis modules produced by Bigelow Aerospace as "habitable volume", but the rest of the numbers are available including the Russian modules. The data with links can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_station#Past_and_present_space_stations
Such a chart would be interesting to see. I'll have to see what I might be able to come up with.
So, we really do have a stargate program at Cheyenne Mountain, don't we? Good to know!
Most of which are purchased by large banks with money borrowed from the Fed. How do you think most of these treasury securities are being paid for?
Yes, I can buy T-bills, but only a bank can have the government give them money that in turn is going to be sent right back to the government in order to be spent. Then again, what isn't being created in this fiat manner is being sold to the Chinese government.
While Energia certainly has roots established as a government agency, it is most certainly as much of a private company as Boeing or Lockheed-Martin. In terms of comparisons, that is the proper comparison not something like Armadillo Aerospace or perhaps SpaceX.
My comparison to Richard Branson is that he is holding all of these "astronaut clinics" and acting like he is much involved with space, yet his company has yet to actually put anybody "up there", even into a sub-orbital trajectory. Eventually he is going to get there, but he hasn't done it yet.
Energia, on the other hand, has put people like Anousheh Ansari, Richard Garriot, and Charles Simonyi into orbit (to name a few that have gone up). I'm just saying that Energia is certainly going to be able to pull this one off. If Boeing announced that they were going to send people into space and dock with a commercial space station, they would be just as credible.
Oh yeah, Boeing did announce such a thing, didn't they?
Space is big. Really really big. You ought to read Douglas Adams some time to see just how mind bogglingly huge space is and noting that there is a whole universe "out there" to explore that we have only just started looking at.
If you are worried about satellite debris, you ought to thank the U.S. federal government for much of that (along with the Russians and Chinese). Experiments that deliberately detonated nuclear bombs in space along with crazy schemes to spread flakes of metal in mid-Earth orbit to aid in telecommunications are still up there. Many of the problems in space are self-inflicted by the governments of this world.
Besides, LEO is the one place where orbital debris is really not a huge problem as well. The exosphere extends up to that altitude where enough air particles do eventually cause the debris to rain back down upon the Earth. It is the mid-level orbits that are the biggest problem as at those altitudes the debris doesn't come down.
As far as if "they screw it up".... I take it that you don't do much driving. You are by far and away in much more danger going down an interstate highway with 1 ton vehicles driven by teenagers lacking common sense than you are to ever be hit by debris falling from space or even being hit by a rocket made by a rank amateur. Life is dangerous, so live with it. And you want to use this as an excuse for why I can't go into space?
So you think it is a good idea for banks to borrow money from the Fed... created out of whole cloth... only to in turn "lend" this newly created money to the government for the privilege of earning a couple percentage points off of that money?
Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic scheme to pull money out of the government..... where can I sign up? Oh that is right, I can't.
It should be noted that the percentage of the federal budget going to NASA is now about 0.1%. I concur with Lord Ender here where if 57% of the federal budget was going to NASA, either the war in Afghanistan is going real well (not needing any more money) or NASA is flying solid gold spacecraft with diamonds as rocket fuel.
NASA would also be accomplishing some really cool things for a trillion dollars per year for outlays. If only that were true.
NASA is done. They did their great thing back in 1969 and then have been coasting for a long time.
I think the metaphor is excellent as NASA is done as an agency. Unfortunately like all government zombies sometimes it is takes awhile for the polticians to realize that it is already dead except for the burial. NASA has been dying since the Nixon administration, it is time to put a steak through its heart and end it for once and all.
yeah, Bell labs & Xerox PARC never happened.
The bigger question, is what changed in our business environment since the 70's that made places like that no longer viable?
Legal changes to commercial corporation laws that encouraged "mergers and acquisitions". Indeed there became and still are whole departments of major corporations that have this title which do nothing but try to raid a company to boost short-term profits.
If a company tries to put aside money for long term economic health, that company quickly becomes a huge target for a hostile take-over where the company doing the purchase will shut down the R&D departments and raid the patent porfolios to try and make a few extra bucks.
The laws as they were written in the 1960's and early 1970's tended to discourage this practice and instead encouraged more competition between companies in the marketplace in terms of who made the better products. As for how those laws were changed, let's just say that the flow of money from stock brokers to Congress isn't anything new. Donating $10 million to a re-election campaign of a prominent Senator so they can introduce a bill that will make you a billion or more dollars sounds like a very sound kind of investment. And you really think a Senator is going to turn down that kind of money even if it screws over his constituent's grandchildren?
I put it more bluntly: NASA got to the Moon because of Lyndon B. Johnson. His control over the U.S. Senate was near legendary and that was political power he didn't give up when he made it to the White House. If you wanted to serve in the U.S. Senate as a Democrat during the 1960's (and most of the 1950's), you had to go through LBJ. The Republicans were irrelevant for the most part during that era.
It was LBJ who put the bug into the ear of JFK to consider the whole idea of sending somebody to the Moon, and it was LBJ who also laid out the system for having nearly every congressional district in America having at least some part of the Apollo program. That was no small feat, and of course his old district in the U.S. House of Representatives certainly didn't get missed out when it landed the largest plum of them all: The Manned Spaceflight Center (now called the Johnson Spaceflight Center.... they know where the funding came from).
The public losing interest? It was more like LBJ lost his political control over the process but it was far enough along by 1967 that NASA was able to essentially coast along and nobody was willing to cut the program before the astronauts landed on the Moon. After that happened, we got the kind of NASA that we have today: bureaucratic and mostly without a mission.
By law NASA shouldn't even be involved with commercial spaceflight any more. That supposedly ended with the Reagan administration, but only now has it been realized to any substantial extent.
The role that NASA is playing right now is for providing seed money to encourage commercial organizations to build spacecraft that NASA needs, along a model similar to how DARPA encourages many companies to develop military technology. If NASA does more of that, I'm entirely supportive so far as it meets the overall objectives and goals for NASA including, oh I don't know, the exploration of space.
I would like to see NASA streamlined into more of a scientific and engineering research agency. There is no need for NASA to be flying trucks into space where there are plenty of other people willing to do the job and for a whole lot less money.
On a side note, the main Rep against the authorization was Gabrielle Giffords, wife of STS-134 shuttle commander Mark Kelly.
It is also noteworthy that Gabrielle Giffords is also the sub-committee chair over the Aviation and Space Subcommittee. In other words, she is directly responsible for all legislation involving NASA including appropriations bills. That she doesn't support the leader of her own party (Obama) and that they needed to pass an appropriations bill through the Senate speaks volumes about what she has been able to accomplish.... almost nothing.
The budget hearings were so incredibly one-sided for certain pet companies that it was obnoxious.
This particular legislation is about the best compromise that can be made given political realities at the moment. The earlier version that was written up by members of the House was by far and away worse.
This version has a provision for continued development of a new "heavy lift vehicle" and supports the COTS program including efforts to commercialize Earth to LEO manned spaceflight. Ares I is good and dead, but ATK does get some money in their direction too.
Most of the major space advocacy groups are in support of this bill as it really seems to get the job done. It isn't perfect, but at least it isn't a total abomination like was proposed earlier that would have killed off almost all science projects at NASA.
If it was purely manned vs. unmanned spaceflight that was the center of the debate, that would be fine. I find it horrible that the science budget for NASA is being cut in favor of sustaining pure pork for manned spaceflight.
Besides, travel into low-Earth orbit by astronauts is a solved engineering problem. If NASA was doing something new and original that would be a dramatic cost savings for getting that accomplished, I might support some research along those lines. About the only thing that the Constellation program was trying to prove is that they could take a shuttle SRB and fly somebody into space at the top. And that passes for innovation worth billions of dollars? If you are going to spend that kind of money, at least have something to show for it when you are done.
It would have to be RKK Energia. As the only commercial organization to have actually sent people into space, they certainly have the expertise, training facilities, engineers, and even the travel agents already lined up to be able to pull this thing off.
Richard Branson can claim a whole bunch of things and pretend he has his own space agency, but these guys are doing it right now. They're ramping up production of the Soyuz spacecraft anyway. In fact, I swear that this company forgot that there is a global recession going on as they are expanding production and hiring a whole bunch of people to help build their vehicles. Of course it helps if you are Russian if you want a job there.
Why worry about something huge that everybody can see in their backyard when there are going to be a couple thousand "microsatellites" all about the size of a basketball that you can't see until after it has hit you?
It is a nice sentiment to be worrying about orbital debris and I also agree that it is a problem, but insisting on applying a special and unique standard to just commercial space stations is insanity at its finest. If anything, something large of that nature is more likely to absorb impacts better and be able to survive in a harsh environment where a whole bunch of debris is present.
To insist that all orbital vehicles also include a requirement that they must have capabilities to be deorbited is a wise move. Of course it doesn't help that China, Russia, and America have deliberately blown things up in space and spewed shrapnel deliberately.
Only a former communist would think of selling spaceflight trips to a socialist American government because that government can't pull its head out of its own behind to be able to build a working vehicle that would get its own astronauts into space. As of June 2011, the USA will be without any sort of manned spaceflight capability..... all of it will be done by flying Soyuz spacecraft out of Kazakhstan.
Yeah, there might be some American companies who are suggesting they can fly a spacecraft of their own, but leave it to Congress to screw that up royally. A nice bi-partisan effort is making sure that only the best pork will flow to the proper congressional districts even if nothing ever actually gets built and the heck with anybody else trying.
Don't let the government throw its money away if you think flying into space is a bad idea. But please just don't tell me I can't spend my own money to do that if that is something I choose to do. People throw money away to do silly things like take a submarine down to the deck of the Titanic in order to hold a wedding. If they want to do something equally silly by flying into space, why are you being such an ass by telling them or myself that I can't do that?