NASA Funding Boost, But No Shuttle Extension in Obama Budget 133
adeelarshad82 writes to point out that details have been provided for President Obama's proposed $18.7 billion in funding for NASA in 2010 (up from $17.2 billion in 2008). Quoting: "The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation research. Yet it also remains fixed to former President George W. Bush's plan to retire the space shuttle fleet by 2010 and replace them with the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly astronauts to the space station and return them to the moon by 2020. The outline does make room for an extra shuttle flight beyond the nine currently remaining on NASA's schedule, but only if it is deemed safe and can be flown before the end of 2010."
Good To See Grownups In Charge (Score:5, Insightful)
No idiotic talk of planting a flag on Mars.
* Continued funding of robotic exploration of everything outside of the Earth/Moon
* A focus on the meat and potato tech that is fundamental to our long term presence in space. Orbital construction, long term living in space, space science, space manufacturing, long term maintenance of equipment in space
* An eventual permanent base on the moon
Not enough money. (Score:5, Insightful)
But still good.
Anyone suggesting extending the shuttle program is advocating extending a clearly unsafe and inefficient program.
Instead, we should ramp up production to get the new systems in place ASAP. That it was scheduled with a gap in the first place is just shameful. It may be too late to avoid the lost air time, but I'd say we should try, and pay what we have to. The NASA budget is small potatoes, and incredibly important as we become more dependent on orbital systems.
Re:Ares or DIRECT (Score:5, Insightful)
No, "they" said nothing about that meaningless debate. Administrations generally don't design rockets in the federal budget.
Prediction: the heavy lift Ares V or its moral equivalent (Ares IV, DIRECT, yada yada...) will never be built. I will refer back to this in half a decade and you will acknowledge my brilliance.
The new budget commits only to Orion and it's launch vehicle (Ares I). That's the bare minimum necessary to replace the Shuttle in its LEO ISS crew transport and resupply role. Finishing Orion and Ares I is the politically easy thing to do because without it Obama would have to explain the end of US manned space flight, which is politically difficult.
Ares V, on the other hand, is several years down the road and a much bigger commitment. What's been done to-date can be dropped and quietly swept under the rug. It's not a 2012 issue and after that it doesn't matter, just as long as the NEA gets its dough.
Re:Good To See Grownups In Charge (Score:5, Insightful)
The grownups are also bringing back Earth science [nytimes.com].
As for the shuttle, Hubble, ect, I always feel like I'm betraying an old freind when I trade in my car but the smell of fresh leather more than compensates.
Re:OCE?AN (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What NASA needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which won't happen until and unless we get a heck of a lot more competent in working in space. No giant Roombas. No magical lasers (with or without sharks). That is such a huge task (volume! volume! volume!) that our puny forays in LEO are just the very beginning of utilizing space.
In order for us to get anywhere near the tech to do that, we have to have a repeatable, sustainable presence in space. That's not what we're getting anytime soon.
Re:Good To See Grownups In Charge (Score:4, Insightful)
What we don't want is Mars on a shoestring budget. If it comes down to axing robotic explorers, satellites to observe the Earth and the universe, reliable transport for installation and maintenance of said satellites, etc., to fund a Mars mission, then sending a few people to swoosh their feet through the red dust should wait.
Why does no one care about ISS or a permanent moon base? Are they inherently dullsville, or has the space science community done a lousy job selling itself to the public?
Been there, done that. (Score:5, Insightful)
While your raking your brain on that, let's go with your entertainment theory and assume people are not interested in science and just want to watch heroics. My prediction is that these people would not be interested in a Mars landing for the same reason they were not interested in the last man on the moon.
Why? - Because it's a rerun, they would simply shrug and say something like "what's the point, we've been to the moon already". The enourmous technological gap between a moon landing and a mars landing would be lost on them because they are not interested in men on Mars anymore than they are currently interested in men on the ISS. I was born the year after sputnik and grew up in the 60's, the Moon landing did indeed make the world stand with their collective jaws on the ground, but for the type of people you are describing the show ended with Apolo 11's return to Earth.
Let's Just Go Private Already (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, those damn dems (Score:5, Insightful)
They would never get us to the moon, or put up the ISS. Instead, they would do something like build the Shuttle.
Re:Good To See Grownups In Charge (Score:4, Insightful)
No idiotic talk of planting a flag on Mars.
While flag planting is in itself unsustainable, it is still worth noting that the Apollo program, the classic flag planting exercise of early NASA, did greatly advance our knowledge of the Moon and as a result, the origins of both the Earth and the Solar System. My take is that unmanned probes would not have generated the science or the same quantity and variety of return samples. The unmanned program would have had a much smaller price tag however. In history, earlier phases of exploration were highly dependent on flag planting as a component. You couldn't claim territory unless one of your exploration groups visited the location.
The points you mention seem entirely reasonable. If the cost of a flag planting mission to Mars were much lower (at least an order of magnitude), then it wouldn't be such a serious issue. You can do useful work in such circumstances. Even if the effort doesn't generate infrastructure on Mars, it could exploit Earth orbit infrastructure.
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope not! I see nothing wrong with your having a picture of the last man so far to step on the Moon in your screensaver, but I do hope he's not the last man ever!
Re:Not enough money. (Score:2, Insightful)
The shuttle's key advantage is nobody else has one and it looks good -- it's going to be harder to keep the non-geek public's attention on NASA when they step "backward" to pure rockets that everyone else has, and instead have the much less flashy real-science front'n'center in the media.
I'm a geek - I'm fine with it. But not having the photogenic big white bird is going to be a PR challenge for NASA.
Re:Ares or DIRECT (Score:5, Insightful)
Dems have never been thrilled about 'spending money in outer space'"
Uhm... Do the initials "JFK" and "LBJ" ring any bells for you?
Dems have done plenty for spaceflight as well, and both sides like to use it as a chopping block when they need to cut spending, because voters are generally too short sighted to see the benefits.
Re:Yeah, those damn dems (Score:5, Insightful)
They would never get us to the moon, or put up the ISS. Instead, they would do something like build the Shuttle.
Politicians only want power - for themselves and for the country. Back then Shuttle was a major military project (or at least it was sold as such.) If anyone told Congress that the STS will be used to fly school teachers to LEO (and kill everyone about every 50th flight) the program would have been dead. At that time manned spaceflight was seen as something that only superpowers can do, and if the USSR sends people and stations to LEO every other month you couldn't just sit on your Moon laurels. Besides, STS was presented as a "space bus", something that can fly every other week and practically for free.
Today the understanding is completely different. First of all, military does not want manned deliveries of their hardware, neither up nor down. Secondly, LEO proved to be just a place devoid of any particular usefulness except to a couple of scientists. Thirdly, having (or not) a manned spaceflight capability today will not affect USA's standing (whatever that is, considering the financial crash etc.) China and India and even NK can send rockets and people up, and who cares any more? Military might of a country is now determined by automated weapon delivery systems (ICBMs and antimissiles, for example) and, as always, by nuclear submarines. ICBMs are related to manned flight vehicles, but only in part, and that technology can be retained and improved without worrying how it affects people on board (who are not there.)
So I am not so sure that Obama - or any other president, to that matter - will not abandon spaceflight. There are very few voters on LEO; most voters keep their nose to the ground. When economy crashes and burns, when sky high taxes rob people of their wages and their homes, when nobody can afford to risk it all and open a business, when homeless people and armed gangs roam the streets, hardly anyone will question the president why he hasn't shot a hundred billion dollars of *their* money into the air for no gain to them, the voters. A single statement like "I decided to disband NASA, close all its projects down and transfer their funding into the new Emergency Assistance Fund that helps you personally" will do the job. Remaining 0.03% of population (scientists and /.) will be summarily ignored.
I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
... look forward to the day when Space sets the national agenda in the Hearts And Minds, as it did during Kennedy's term in office.
NASA gets 18 billion and change this year.
The DOD got over 400 billion in discretionary spending in 2008.
I called my dad on the anniversary of Apollo 8, We talked about how he'd heard the broadcast in his youth, the state of the space program and the future of manned spaceflight. He's of the opinion that the next boots on the moon will be Chinese. I'd prefer to think otherwise... but he thought Ellen Tigh was a Cylon at her very first appearance... and hey, they need it more than we do.
More money for Space is always a good thing. Look at what NASA has given Americans in terms of national pride and the world in terms of scientific advances.... then look at the price tage of the Joint Strike Fighter and its price/performance ratio compared to current ready-to-fly equipment. Look at the price tag of our post-Clinton "nation building." Tell me the world wouldn't benefit more from NASA being tossed, say... an eighth of the DOD budget.
Hell, for the price of invading Iraq we could be holding national lotteries to see who gets to be on the next colony ship to MARS.
Our only hope as a species is to get off of this rock before we turn it into Venus Junior. The only agencies that can get us there - Roscosmos, NASA - can't even begin to try for lack of adequate funding.
Which, ultimately, stems from lack of adequate political incentive.
In terms of securing a future for the species, every dollar spent on NASA increases our chances more than any 100 million spent on "defense" (from what? Asteroids? Global warming? Some kind of superflu?). Unfortunately, that money isn't going to be spent until every television channel and radio station is broadcasting a "time till The Big Rock hits us" countdown.
It's Watchmen all over again.... and while I'm grateful that Obama has bumped the NASA budget.... he's no Ozymandias.
Re:Good To See Grownups In Charge (Score:4, Insightful)
My take is that unmanned probes would not have generated the science or the same quantity and variety of return samples.
I can offer you an opposite example. Martian rovers are crawling the surface for years now, looking at every rock and every feature of the landscape. They observed martian weather for two seasons, recorded and reported every detail of it. A manned expedition, OTOH, would be able to only set up a camp, visually inspect some places of interest within a circle of couple of miles, do all that inside of a month or two, and hastily depart back to Earth. No way they'd stick around for years, they'd go crazy or die from hunger or suffer accidents, etc. But robots don't have such problems, and once you designed one robot you can make a thousand of them at little incremental cost. Robots are perfect tools for meticulous, boring work 24/7; a human on Mars would be likely able to remain outside only for a few hours per day, with remaining time spent on maintenance of the camp, eating, washing, resting, sleeping, documenting, communicating...
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good To See Grownups In Charge (Score:1, Insightful)
By the time that I discovered that there is a "Robot Exploration v.s. Human Exploration" debate I realized that it would be pointless to argue for robots. The best way for a "robot fan" to win the argument versus the "human fan" is to wait a few years.
Human exploration was the right thing in the days when digital cameras was science-fiction, when fuel cells and high-energy batteries were new and cutting-edge, when computers were the size of a refrigerator, when a big computer memory could store a few tens of kilobytes at best and when programming meant assembler coding.
Low earth orbit space tourism is the near future of human spaceflight. Get a small hotel up there and sell the experience to billionaires. In little more than a century, some little rich brat is going to be bragging to people how he or she was made in space. =)
Humans will still not have visited anything more remote than the Moon.
Re:Yeah, those damn dems (Score:3, Insightful)
Encourage your boys to run for office. We still have the final say, and if we had people run for office who don't want to be there, but see the importance of changing the system, we could get ourselves out of this mess. Too often though, we the people become apathetic. It's understandable, but still sad.
Bollocks!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, sure, we can DOUBLE (yes you read that right, DOUBLE as in TWICE as much as last year) the amount of money we give to "foreign aid" and get not so much as a thank you in return but allocate more money to NASA to keep shuttles working, nope, not yours. DOUBLE?!? DOUBLE??!?!?!? Yeah, that'll bring down the deficit. *bangs head on keyboard*
Re:Ares or DIRECT (Score:3, Insightful)
Temporarily cutting space exploration funding during a rough patch will set things back a few years, but shouldn't have any massive long-term effects.
It certainly isn't great, but you honestly can't say that about many areas of the government.