Funding Promised for Trips to Moon, Mars 560
image77 writes "NASA's new administrator, Michael Griffin, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Tuesday the space agency will have the necessary funding to send astronauts back to the moon and to Mars. Delay states "We will provide the funding necessary to get us where we want to go.""
Just Set Up The Apollo Prize (Score:5, Interesting)
Cut out all this funding-cycle political crap for crissakes. Yes, yes, I know there are lots of people employed by NASA and its contractors who want the return of the glory days.
Go get a real job and stop destroying the US's pioneering heritage, and don't you dare lobby my Congressman with your time and travel paid for by my taxes.
"Cede the Moon"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Another Space Race (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"forgetting" (Score:3, Interesting)
Attacking the accuser is an old game, and both sides love to play it.
Regarding the current investigation into DeLay. I don't think there's much there. Certainly less damning than the campaign contributions which Al Gore was alledged to have raised from donors in Communist China back in the 1990s. This will ammount to a tempest in a teapot.
DeLay will stay in office, Howard Dean will manage to raise a few extra bucks for future campaigns by beating the drum over DeLay's alleged "corruption", and life will go on. Can we get back to talking about NASA?
Re:Way to stay on topic! - Slashdot politics (Score:4, Interesting)
Even pro-Republican posts that are 100% on the mark are given "troll" or "offtopic" because the left-leaning majority on
Anything anti-Bush, anti-Fox, and anti-Republican is immediately greeted with cheers by the intolerant
Welcome to Slashdot - the geek arm of the Democratic National Committee.
(Wait until you see how quickly this gets modded as "troll" or "flamebait" because I spoke the truth, thus proving my point! Mercy me that Ipost against the
The heck with NASA... (Score:3, Interesting)
Opening up real space exploration would be simple: make it legal for private companies to build nuclear thermal rockets. [nuclearspace.com]
We're talking real space ships here. With that much power, you can afford to make them big, redundant, safe, and reusable. No more wimpy foam and composites - build it out of steel and have more engines than you need.
Relative costs ... (Score:3, Interesting)
You would have to duplicate all those mechanisms on the Moon to get things going. Good luck funding that bill of goods when all those materials are available on Mother Earth.
Every colonization model to date has been based on getting to raw materials. But it also has a component of sustainability. You could bring people off ships to work in the new world. They could farm the land or fish for sustinence.
It could very well be feasible after spending multiple TRILLIONS of dollars to eventually get something self-sustaining. But
I think the moonies will have to finance this one. I suggest the formation of extra-terrestrial exploration companies financed by private bonds (independent of the US Treasury). The Terrans would rather concentrate on upkeep and maintenance of the spaceship we already have
Re:Just Set Up The Apollo Prize (Score:3, Interesting)
I see a lot of problems with NASA--but it will also take a government funded entity like NASA to do it. Government is the exact RIGHT entity to take on projects that don't have a pay-off in the near future but that benefit society.
Businesses are really great. But they are designed to make a profit and not to benefit the most people with the least money. There is a lot of necessary overhead is businesses to manage and procure money.
Again, NASA is bloated and not as efficient as they could be. But parts of NASA have managed the impossible. You just need to get the political hacks and bureaucrats out of the organization. Many of the greatest engineers and scientists have not been driven by money. An organization like NASA is a haven for them to just work on the thought problems and not be concerned with pushing a resume. Maybe NASA can't be fixed, but you aren't going to get to Mars without the government paying someone to do it. If you make it an external company, then you are picking one company to receive benefits that other companies and taxpayers won't. At this scale, you don't necessarily get any efficiency with a corporation.
I don't like the Mars mission because it isn't driven by science--and the money could be better spent creating an infrastructure in space first. Also, it's something that Bush wanted, so you know all the money will be missing and it will be somehow, a minor clerks fault who endagered lives by pointing out that the hydrogen tanks are leaking. But don't gripe about the money unless you first speak out about the collosal amounts of funds spent on military and corporate welfare.
I want to save taxpayer money too. But let's not get all huffy about a Billion $ Mars Rover when we have 25 stealth bombers that are pretty much useless.