Future of NASA's Manned Spaceflight Looks Bleak 452
coondoggie writes "Things don't look good for NASA when the report outlining its future begins: 'The US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. [NASA] is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations.' Today the Augustine Commission handed to the White House the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report, after months of expert review and testimony. Many observers expected a bleak report, but ultimately the future of US manned space flight will hinge on how the report's conclusions are interpreted. Keep in mind too that NASA has spent almost $8 billion of a planned $40 billion to develop systems for a return to the Moon."
How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
... fund a manned space program when you blow all your resources on worthless, unnecessary wars?
Why is it we can afford a f***ing trillion dollars on the f***ing wars, and not put together a credible space program?
I guess there's no profit in it, and our state religion won't allow that. That's why we're not only not going to have a manned space program. It's why we're fucked as a nation in general.
It's just mind-boggling, but there it is.
The end of being the space superpower (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the most important thing can be crystallized:
Without more money, there will be no meaningful human space flight.
As for the details, I agree with the report where it says that Mars is not a good first destination. I concur that the Flexible Path scenario would be pretty smart. There's a wealth of information and experience to be made in exploring the Lagrange Points and Near-Earth Asteroids.
Basically, is the United States willing to cede space to China and Russia?
Re:How can you... (Score:1, Insightful)
Which religion would that be? I can tell you it sure as hell isn't Christianity.
seed the planets (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How can you... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think he's referring to the pursuit of the almighty dollar as our state religion.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Christianity.
More like Christo-Rightwing-uber-corporate fascism.
Which has nothing to do with real Christianity, though the practitioners thereof often make loud noises about their Christianity. Hypocritical lying sacks of shit that they are.
Escape the fishbowl (Score:4, Insightful)
If there's anything robots don't do, it is "look to the stars." It is men who comprehend the insignificance of this world in relation to the vast emptiness of space, and the costs it will take to traverse that scape. It is men who want to watch the enormous Earth grow smaller and wax philosophical. It is men who walked upon the lonely face of the moon and felt enormous elation and accomplishment coupled with their nigh-incomprehensible solitude.
If NASA is having its intercelestial driver's license revoked, it should at least be given the directive to help direct traffic of the private industry. Apparently we need half-insane men and women blasting themselves and their employees and friends off to distant space rocks if humankind wants to travel across this galaxy. We do not need them crashing into satellites and ploughing into nearby cities due to lack of launch pads or proper orbital-traffic readouts.
Re:The end of being the space superpower (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't concur with that. The Apollo program was implemented under chemical rockets.
Apollo was meaningful because it was new. Doing the same thing again with the same vastly expensive inefficient technology would be pointless, and the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Getting humans further than the moon, and back again (eg to Mars and back) with chemical rockets is a joke. Never going to happen.
What about Un-Manned Spaceflight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:NASA is outdated (Score:1, Insightful)
nasa costs peanuts relative to other, less noble, budgetary expenditures
Re:seed the planets (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you have the wrong idea about De Beers at least. De Beers isn't interested in new sources of diamonds. If diamonds were discovered on Mars, they'd probably do everything in their power to stop exploration of Mars. De Beers is all about using monopoly and manipulation to drive up the price of diamonds.
You want to know "bleak"? Let me show you. (Score:5, Insightful)
According to WallStats [wallstats.com], NASA's funding for 2010 is $18.7 billion. According to The New York Times [nytimes.com], the amount of bailout funds committed by the U.S. Government to Bear Stearns and AIG (both of which are fraudulent companies) is $82 billion. That is 4.4 times the amount of funding that NASA is receiving next year. If the manned space program is canceled, let it be known that it was due to debacles such as this.
Re:How can you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
Amen.
That's what real Christianity is. I left out the part about "kingdom... power... blah blah" since it wasn't in the earliest versions of the text and I think it weakens the simplicity of this prayer.
I take Christianity as a religion which says that the right way to live in a world where human error is inevitable is to forgive others readily for their errors and seek to make amends for one's own errors. The behavior of the "Christian" right in America is completely contrary to this concept.
Re:Baseline shuttle extension (Score:4, Insightful)
Moving the ISS to a Lagrange Point would require an enormous amount of fuel, and getting that fuel to orbit. You would need to attach engines, and the station structure cannot handle the force. There is also currently no way of getting supplies and people there. The Space Shuttle cannot leave earth orbit. The ISS is also not built for the radiation outside the earths magnetosphere. Seriously, you cannot just take a spacecraft and put it somewhere it isn't made for.
Fine by me. (Score:4, Insightful)
RS
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:seed the planets (Score:5, Insightful)
Actual NASA guy here. Back when I was a starving grad student, I contracted a bit with a big oil company. News had just come out about the hydrocarbons on Titan, and my boss asked me if those crazy astronomers were serious. I looked into and confirmed that indeed, those planetary geologists (ahem) had evidence of BIGNUM barrels of cryogenic liquid petroleum gas just laying around on the surface of Titan.
I actually did some back of the envelope estimates for what it would cost to bring some of it back to Earth and burn it here in our atmosphere. It was too long term, and several orders of magnitude bigger than even the most ambitious terrestrial oil production project. Not to mention what burning all of Titan's carbon would do to Earth's atmosphere, if it did ever happen.
I'm glad they didn't go for it, 'cause hydrocarbon fuels aren't exactly the awesomest reason to go to Saturn's moons. Some day though, something will come up that DOES pass the cost/benefit test, and there's going to be new wave of pioneers leaving Earth to earn their fortunes.
In the mean time, I'm working to make Ares I as safe as possible with smart sensors and abort logic. If it gets canned, we'll have to do the same thing with the next rocket... and the one after that, too, and....
Wouldn't it be cheaper... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is good for the galaxy... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I had a feeling this was coming... (Score:2, Insightful)
. People have been asking why are when spending $X (what seems like a really big number) on manned space flight when we've been there, done that, and have Y number of problems still back on earth.
Actually I think people are beginning to say why are we spending $X sending humans to do something a robot can do faster, cheaper and more reliably for one tenth the price.
NASA may continue to fund some great robotic programs, but it doesn't capture the public's mind.
Speak for yourself. I distinctly remember as a child poring over the photos and discoveries made by Voyager 1 and 2 and dreaming of what lay beyond that frontier, awaiting discovery by our non-human servants.
And in any case, is that really important? If we TRULY think exploring space is worthwhile for objective reasons, perhaps those objective reasons should be the driver and the inspiration, rather than the light and sound show of human space travel.
Re:Fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, that's not actually true, at least for Apollo, and, second, the Hubble is actually an argument for manned spaceflight. It would not have returned a fraction of the science return it did without the manned servicing missions (which, among other things, fixed the error in the mirror surface).
I predict that the Kepler will be serviced in-orbit as well. I also predict that the 40 years+ of Mars probes will become a historical footnote approximately one week after the first manned mission reaches Mars orbit.
Re:How can you... (Score:1, Insightful)
A "win/win" would be abandoning manned space flight and advancing space exploration (which is different from "human sustainment experiments") for rapid development of robot systems which can much more quickly advance both what we know about space and how we may exploit offworld resources.
I'd like to see our manned programs fail so badly that we are forced to do the smart thing and not send meat tourists into space for many years. For the billions we waste on systems whose costs are bloated by the need to carry and return humans, we could send MANY robot systems. Since the hostile climate of space means humans must be physically isolated from it to perform tasks, they may as well be in a control room on Terra.
Re:You want to know "bleak"? Let me show you. (Score:5, Insightful)
If only NASA was too big to fail......
Re:Keep in mind (Score:3, Insightful)
What gives you this confidence?
What an odd question.
First, I believe it is possible to go to the moon and return, because it was done about 40 years ago. Are you with me so far? If you aren't sure, consider that technology has actually improved just a little bit since then, and the laws of physics are about the same.
Second, I believe that 20 billion dollars is still kind of a lot of money. The Ansari X Prize [wikipedia.org] was only 10 million, and it accomplished its goal of getting privately-built launch vehicles into space.
Third, various companies are already working on launch systems. The existence of a lucrative bounty ought to help motivate them and/or help them get funding, and very well might cause new ones to form. In addition to the value of the prize itself, the publicity surrounding the project ought to increase the chances a company can get funding.
Political ideology?
If you want to call it that... I do believe that the private sector can still innovate and produce new things, and I do believe that competition is more productive than a giant entrenched bureaucracy.
There, I have answered your questions. My turn:
Do you believe that private organizations cannot build launch systems? Do you believe that the NASA bureaucracy can get things done faster than an assortment of competing organizations? Do you believe that the only good engineer all work for NASA or that NASA has some sort of secret knowledge that nobody else has?
Now, consider that all the money NASA spent on X-33 was wasted; the X-33 was canceled as a total failure. Do you believe that private organizations would do worse than that?
steveha
Re:How can you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Atheists realize that every species becomes either space-faring, or extinct. The Earth will not be around forever.
Christians believe that they will be abducted by a sky-zombie and taken to fairy-land. It says so right in this book!
Their views on space funding make sense when you understand where they are coming from, but that doesn't make it a rational or valid stance.
Re:Escape the fishbowl (Score:3, Insightful)
[quote]
This "Send Robots Instead" nonsense is just that -- Nonsense. Mankind's Manifest Destiny may have nothing but an unmarked grave in your hearts,
[/quote]
Your asserted conclusion does not make it so. We can, by leading with robots, learn much and learn it cheaply. We can then use it to eventually send humans AFTER we perfect doing the heavy lifting remotely.
Sending humans early on is an artifact of Cold War penis-waving coupled with the primitive technology of the times. Now, just as we are removing pilots from direct combat by using UAVs, we can remotely work in space. We need to improve robots much more than we need to rush prematurely to send tourists into space. Back in the days when people and wooden ships were expendable, using them to explore Earth made sense. Now, humans are a severe burden on tech development. Master space with robots, and we gain better robots we'll need anyway because space is hostile to humans.
Adventure? Fuck adventure. Pay a commercial outfit if you want to be entertained. This makes sense, because tourism is a powerful commercial incentive. Exploration is not, so leave that to NASA.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd add to that:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Re:This is good for the galaxy... (Score:1, Insightful)
Are you willing to accept the extinction of humanity if it turns out that the problem is that we need to start over?
There's no reason to believe that it'd be better anywhere else, but there's also no reason to believe that we'll ever fix things here on earth. We've only been trying to get along with each other for near on 9 thousand years. Do you really want to risk the odds that humanity will survive another ten thousand years without having some sort of disaster that sets them back to stone age technology?
I'd rather see a huge chunk of humanity in all of its glorious imperfections get shot off frozen into space aimed at some distant star than see us sit around waiting for sociologists to figure out how to overcome human greed in order to make everybody equal. Chances are there aren't even enough resources on earth to make humanity equal and still have enough resources to start colonizing. An earth where everybody had enough to survive and nobody was a crackhead would probably look like Soylent Green.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
we lost all the plans for Apollo and the Saturn 5
Not quite. According to Henry Spencer, what we lost was not the plans, but the know-how to turn the plans into hardware.
There is a whole lot of undocumented know-how. Suppose you want to build some part. What kind of heat treatment was used on the metal? Are you certain you know the exact alloy used, or what might change by using a slightly different alloy? How did the master machinist shape the part... did he have some sort of custom jig, and if so, what did it look like? It's too late to ask him; that was 40 years ago, and you probably can't find him now.
We could, with great effort and cost, recover all this missing know-how, being certain to test everything at every step to make sure we know what we are really doing. And if we did all that, the end result would be a 40-year-old design. We know more now, and we could improve on the design; and the amount of time and money it would cost to reproduce the Saturn V is probably similar to what it would cost to develop a new launch system.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/ [faqs.org]
In any event, what we really need is not another Saturn V. We need a cheap and reliable way to put small payloads into orbit over and over and over. A "space pickup truck" if you will. You can do almost everything by sending up modules and assembling them in orbit, and anything you can't do, you could handle with a few heavy-lift launches; and then use the pickup truck to send fuel, supplies, and crew up.
steveha
Re:Baseline shuttle extension (Score:5, Insightful)
okay this needs to stop.
yes the moon has lots of raw resources. Do any of you understand how much work it takes to make something simple like a metal wall, how many people it takes to dig up the ore, break it into pieces, smelt it down to purification levels, forge blocks, with which to forge the other objects, and the presses to stretch it into sheets. You need 100,000's of tons of equipment to build a simple airtight box that the moon walkers can live in. It would take way to much effort for a simple colony for a few hundred people. It would take a century to pay of that kind of investment. no current government, or business is thinking that far ahead. No investor would back such an endeavor.
We need something better than current ion and chemical rockets. When we figure out that part So it is cost effective to ship a nuclear aircraft carrier there then will a real colony start to be seen that will take advantage of those resources. Since none of those resources included large sources of fuel(or even water to make fuel from) then the moon will sit there for a while.
This isn't star trek. the effort to bring you something simple like a pair of scissors is huge involving the jobs of thousands,
Re:Keep in mind (Score:3, Insightful)
Did you actually read your Ansari X Prize [wikipedia.org] link? "$10 million was awarded to the winner, but more than $100 million was invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize."
So apparently the prize resulted in a 90% loss of investment (in the short-term). Now take into account the fact that there are a lot more people capable of losing $90M than $180B...
Re:No need for manned space exploration (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the nature of our flat Earth, I foresee no leap of science allowing practical travel to the east by sailing west. So any human sailing expeditions out of sight of the coast seems pointless to me.
Re:This is good for the galaxy... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is good for the galaxy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at the mess people create on earth. It's probably best that we keep our distance from other worlds.
Why, because we might make some rocks dirty? Seriously, I want you to explain why we "messy" humans should keep away from other worlds.
exploring the universe can wait until we've mastered being human without killing each other, the air, the seas, and the land upon which we walk.
You're going to be waiting a very, very long time. Odds are that humanity ending would be a precondition for that, but I have a suspicion that wouldn't be an undesirable outcome for you.
Re:How can you... (Score:1, Insightful)
Our Father, who art on Wall Street,
Hallowed by thy buck.
Thy profits come,
Thy earnings grow,
As our corporate overlords will it.
Give us this day our right-ist agenda,
And condemn those who oppose it,
As we rape and pillage the Constitution.
And lead us not into hyporcrisy,
For we are already right there.
Amen.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
If near-to-intermediate-term space travel development for the next few centuries really had a shadow of a chance of insuring us against the catastrophe of extinction as a species, then things would be different, and that would be a premium I'd be willing to support, but I don't think it makes sense today. If attempting to develop space travel were actually bringing about significant development of new technologies useful elsewhere - in excess of those which would occur were the money spent elsewhere, that could defray the costs, but NASA's track record, especially in recent years, is not all that spectacular, as has been noted in TFA. So why not pull the plug? Emotional reasons, mostly, I imagine...
Re:What about Un-Manned Spaceflight? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The end of being the space superpower (Score:3, Insightful)
It proved it could be done. That's pretty meaningful.
Without Apollo, we'd still in 2009 be wondering if putting a man on the moon was even possible.
Now we *know* it's possible, it's just a matter of money.
That's a pretty damn meaningful difference.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
We could simply defer manned space exploration until such time as it becomes less expensive
What makes you assume such time will come without investing in it?
You're suggesting just sitting on our asses and hoping some magical tech will just materialize that will make everything just teddy bears and rainbows.
Re:Escape the fishbowl (Score:3, Insightful)
It's worse than saying "I never need to visit Paris, because there are human beings who have already visited it. I have no need to dive the Great Barrier Reef, because I can watch videos of it on Youtube. In fact, there's no point for ANYONE to go, since we've got footage of it."
Sending humans early on WORKED. It got things done and it has benefited the world, technologically, almost as much as the printing press. Sending probes to crash into the moon was like... the 3rd rung on the ladder. I don't care if you're afraid of the heights, but allowing and supporting those who decide to climb higher than that will be of great importance to your progeny, from an advancement standpoint.
Re:How can you... (Score:4, Insightful)
In any event, what we really need is not another Saturn V. We need a cheap and reliable way to put small payloads into orbit over and over and over. A "space pickup truck" if you will. You can do almost everything by sending up modules and assembling them in orbit, and anything you can't do, you could handle with a few heavy-lift launches; and then use the pickup truck to send fuel, supplies, and crew up.
steveha
Sounds EXACTLY like what the Shuttle was made to do.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every penny is ultra important anymore. We no longer have things like Bell Labs, we can't justify Bell Labs anymore on mere financial terms. What's money got to do with it? Unfortunately, everything. We can no longer afford space programs, because we can't afford taxes, car, life, health insurance and credit card fees. And regulation requiring even more mandatory insurance fees is imminent. Space program? What space program? Who cares? We're in dog eats dog fights over who gets what, how we're gonna dice up the pennies of each dollar we make. In the end we end up not making the dollars because we're too busy fighting over how we dice up the ones we did make. Creativity is the only generation of true wealth of a nation. You can only fight over limited resources so much, no matter how good you get at fighting over it, if there is nothing left to fight over. The first rule of any successful parasite is that you don't kill the host, but let it flourish. We can't produce brainpower because we're still fighting a public vs. private education war - can't afford private/religious schools, and public education is, well, something smells fishy there, because a lot of poor countries can do a lot better job at it.
It's gonna be Japanese(expertise, freedom of creativity) and Chinese(resources, chinese-wall-building-like stamina, centrally focused government of the ancient Egyptian type) only in space as far as massive space stations go, unless they end up in a war against each other. We will be watching as bystanders. Like the British empire is today, watching space shuttle launches at Cape Canaveral, reminiscing of old days glory, when half the world's GDP was funneled to London as colonial income. Good old days.
But do we really care these days for space stations? The energy problem is more crucial. But we no longer have backyards of Oberlin to figure it out, and even if we do, people are too busy working too jobs to make ends meet and don't have the time anymore for it. Look at houses built in the US in the 1890-1920 period, and the decorations on them. Compare ones built in 1960-2000. Who had free time on their hands, and extra resources they could turn to creativity? What about education of their children?
Re:How can you... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sure as hell is Christianity holding back the space program.
Odd. I'm a Christian. I work for NASA. I know several of us who work there. Among my church, most everyone whom I've ever discussed NASA with is interested in or excited about human spaceflight.
What's holding back the space program is the fact that NASA is constantly being jacked around politically, for various reasons. Always has been, and I'm afraid to say, always will be.
Space shuttle? Political jacking around (You need to play nice with the DoD and make your spacecraft serve their inane purposes as well as yours. Oh, and on a tighter budget.) Space Station? Same. It goes on and on.
Christians believe that they will be abducted by a sky-zombie and taken to fairy-land.
Aside from Scientologists, I don't really mock anyone's religion. I think they're all wrong, I think you're wrong, but I try to not be obnoxious about it. Perhaps you were trying to be funny, and I missed it.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Will it drop a spacecraft in your lap? Heck no! Are these technologies and those of the future likely materially improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of manned spacecraft on multiyear (or even multidecadal) missions? Big time.
eh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How can you... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Disclaimer: I am not the person you asked, but the question is interesting to me.)
No tech he mentioned was directly applicable to chemical rocket motors, though all are highly, highly relevant to spaceflight, enough so that I think his point is valid.
But just to answer the question you actually asked, namely how those technologies might be useful for propulsion:
1. Advanced materials engineering is applicable to making a better rocket motor, doubly so if it leads to materials that weigh less and/or can withstand higher temperatures. These same materials are useful in too many other applications to count, but he mentioned the aeronautics industry as a field that requires both properties.
2. Magnetic monopoles, if they exist (which is dubious, but another discussion), and if they could be synthesized in quantity (even less likely) would be applicable to the construction of ion drives, or any other propulsion system that uses magnetic fields.
3. Fusion reactors could be applicable to spacecraft, either as a heat source for a reaction mass (water, for instance), or as a direct drive flame. The latter is much harder to achieve than the former, given that all our research at the moment centers on the idea of a fusion power generator, which can be useful as a heat source, but probably can't be adapted into an engine as such. Either could potentially be a propulsion breakthrough, and would meet the criteria that fission drives never did - namely acceptability to the general public.
I'd argue that R&D in various other fields could benefit spaceflight in the long term, even if we were to cease launching rockets altogether. Where I'd quibble with the GP is that expertise left unused is often lost. One of the reason NASA is struggling today is that they haven't built a new manned spacecraft in decades, and in a way they've forgotten how. You can't just go back and look at old blueprints, you need the people who made those blueprints to explain to the young'uns why they did it the way they did.
So I'd be in favour of keeping a manned space program going, if for no other reason to keep the knowledge needed alive for the next span of human history. I don't expect anything great will result from it within the next century, though perhaps we'll do better in the longer term.
Re:How can you... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what real Christianity is.
'
Christianity is the creativity to be whatever it needs to be. Like the ability to ignore pretty much the whole old testament between when he got mad at us and when he forgave us. As long as you show him your love of course, otherwise you'll still be burning in hell but we try to not think about that much. And the creepy ritual where you eat the flesh and blood of Christ, try taking five seconds outside and realize how fucked up that is. Seriously, it sounds like something out of the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard and christians got the worst case of Stockholm syndrome ever. I got you into this but I love you, as long as you love me and do as I say and accept my "flesh".
Ok, so I realize this is heavy flamebait but I'm seriously tired of people claiming that their religion is "this", where "this" at any time refers to the parts that fits current situation and society and ignore everything else in the book and every other interpretation that's made of the book (crusades, anyone?) and all the parts of it that we know are plain wrong such as earth being the center of universe. Or the wonderful double standard of sometimes quoting scripture as words of god to turn around and say that the gospels and whatnot are second-hand material that needs to be interpreted to understand their true essence. And when the world is evil and noone can claim god is punishing the sinners, there's always excuses for an omnipotent not to intervene, usually blaming humanity. Why he should get away with that crap about bløming the victim when we'd never accept a rapist saying she asked for it is beyond me.
Re:How can you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch it! The two of you are sounding like dangerous subversives.
Re:How can you... (Score:3, Insightful)
"A rising tide lifts all ships."
and it wouldn't cause Free Market Conservatives to go into apoplexy.
If I'm an executive in "Corporate America" and I can layoff 5000 workers, save a little bit for the company over the next few quarters, and get the board to give me a few million in reward money, then I'm just doing the job I'm supposed to be doing. But now we have 5000 people who can't afford to buy anything. That's no good in a consumer driven economy.
The top 1 percent of earners now take home 23 percent of total national income. [wallstreetpit.com] The rest of us are their serfs. We don't mind much during the good times. We have great entertainments. But during the bad times we get mighty riled up and sometimes win elections. We start tossing about ideas with socialistic leanings. What happens then? The Holders of Capital convince enough people that the government is no good. That capitalism is our way of life. So e.g. instead of getting public high speed rail for everyone (similar to how the Interstate system works) we get handouts to Amtrak wanna-be's so they can free-enterprise slow trains and upgrade them as they gain in popularity. Ridiculous. We had that 100 years ago and they're gone for a reason. But I digress.
Unenlightened GREED is our National Religion. Finders Keepers.
The wars have nothing to do with NASA's budget (Score:3, Insightful)
Flame my ass, mod me down, I don't support this level of idiocy that exists here.
NASA does not get a real budget because NASA does not generate votes.
What gets votes are two categories...
The masses through one handout after another, to keep them placated between elections and loyal to their local politicians who "did this for them out of the goodness of their heart"
The money on Wall Street. Those who deliver the real campaign donations through various routes, direct and indirect.
We have seen trickle down economics distilled into its purest form now, we just hand money to Wall Street and its interest.
So, yeah, while the parrot heads all love to sip their half cafe decaf lattes nodding their heads over the wit of "its the war, man" it isn't true. Its a terrible excuse. Are the wars bad? Yes, but parroting that line is exactly what politicians want you to do. Why? Because they are pissing away the money that could have gone to NASA and many other valued science related projects instead on building monuments to themselves in towns across America (the number of buildings/roads/bridges named for LIVING and in power politicians is amazing now).
Sorry ... I hate replies like your every time I see them and every time they get modded insightful. Wars are wrong, but they are an excuse that Congress and the like use to not fund NASA, funny thing is even without expensive wars when was the last time NASA got any real money?
Well? Show me.
Re:How can you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Dollars or not, the opportunity costs of funding space travel are real. We could simply defer manned space exploration until such time as it becomes less expensive (due to development of superior material and construction technologies), we as a society have more resources which may be devoted to its pursuit, and the gains from its pursuit are greater than the gains from, say, building infrastructure like decent roads and water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa (and enabling basic economic development and human welfare) or replacing high-pressure sodium streetlamps with LEDs (decreasing inner-city suicide risks, saving power, reducing emissions associated with that power) or filtering the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or any of millions of other priorities.
Are you kidding me? It's clear that manned space flight is a better use of US funds than building decent roads and water supplies in sub-Saharan Africa. The Africans can build their own infrastructure, assuming they become interested in doing that, and US money can go to serving US interests - as it should be. And there are plenty of interested non-government parties around to replace streetlamps (assuming even that is a good idea). And I'm not sure anyone needs to do anything about the garbage patches in the Pacific or Atlantic. You throw food into the ocean. Something will figure out how to eat it.
And we also ignore that the US can multitask. If it turns out that helping someone with their infrastructure building is useful (say we project that they'll buy more US products than the cost involved), we can do that while simultaneously building a space-faring society.
Re:How can you... (Score:3, Insightful)
"every species becomes either space-faring, or extinct"
Which species are you using as examples in this statement?
You've been modded insightful but I think the modders don't understand the meaning of that word.
There are no examples of any species becoming "space-faring" while there are a lot of species here on earth that have been around for millions of years (us included) and which have no indications of going extinct any time soon (read for several more million years).
There is no rush to become "space-faring" and no real pressure to do so either.
For your other cogent and insightful comments - meh... you're a troll.