Cool NASA Tech That Will Never See Space 324
coondoggie writes to tell us that with the "new and improved" NASA budget on the way it looks like many of the cool projects NASA has in the works will never see the light of day, let alone space. The biggest cut looks to be the Ares heavy lift rocket but other cuts include a new composite spacecraft, deep space network, inflatable lunar habitat, and an electric moon-buggie.
NASA needs more budget. (Score:4, Insightful)
Jumping to Conclusions Mat? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
With the cut of Ares and other international status seeking nonsense, NASA can concentrate on their roots of science, exploration, and aeronautics.
Nothing left? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_sagan/ [wikipedia.org]
Re:NASA needs more budget. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe NASA could sell or license some of this "cool tech" to private industry. The private sector would have more to work with and the space agency would get more money for the projects they are left to focus on. And maybe some of the specialists at NASA could fork their own companies with the technology, keeping more people employed.
Maybe they already do this. But the tone of the post makes it sound like they don't.
Re:FY2011 NASA Budget (Score:2, Insightful)
That is one thing they don't seem to look at when looking at how much something in the space program costs.
Almost everything built is built in the US by US workers. Thousands of good paying "MANUFACTURING" jobs will be lost.
It will also hit Mississippi, and Louisiana as well as Florida, Texas, Alabama, and yes California.
Hey Obama kept his campaign promise as was posted in Slashdot.
Re:What does this mean for manned exploration? (Score:3, Insightful)
The main problem, I think (admittedly, among others), is that unless you're doing an all-out, money-is-no-object sort of thing like the 60s moon race, major projects take more time than changes in political leadership are willing to stand still for. So NASA ends up dithering back and forth every 3-6 years with a new project: manned mission to mars, shuttle replacement, low-cost capsule system, probe-focused unmanned space exploration, etc. I mean, Constellation was only proposed in 2005, with bids chosen by 2006--- then reviewed for cancellation in 2009.
Re:What does this mean for manned exploration? (Score:5, Insightful)
>If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.
They'll go broke putting meatbags in space and learning the same lessons we have, while we're focused on robotic missions and investment into private enterprise, instead of a purely government approach.
On top of that, the Mars mission is still on. While China or India attempts to put a meatbag on the moon, the US will most likely be on its way to Mars. The US isnt ceding anything, its just spending its money more wisely along with the "trophy" of Mars. Turns out Bush's incompetence wasnt limited to just economies and wars, but to also signing checks his ass couldnt cash.
Funny how the "fiscally responsible" Republicans want my tax dollars to keep subsidizing useless jobs in Florida and Texas and keep a runaway project like Constellation going to the tune of an extra 3 billion a year in cost overruns! Dont confuse the politics of pork with space exploration. Meatbags are too expensive to ship around all the time and moon base fantasies turn out to be too expensive in real life.
Re:NASA needs more budget. (Score:3, Insightful)
>It's sad really and NASA is definitely who should get more budget. It's the idiotic short-sighted quick-profit thinking again.
How come Bush's promises of massive explorations with no funding backing isnt stupid, but when Obama has to clean up Bush's mistakes and bring Bush's BS promises to a real budget, then suddenly he's the bad guy?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Philosophically inclined geeks (Score:2, Insightful)
Stop spending so much on the military... (Score:5, Insightful)
The US military is something like ten times larger than the next country's military spend for goodness sake. How about easing off on the military spend and using the money for peaceful exploration of space.
Do you really need a military budget that big?
Re:NASA needs more budget. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe NASA could sell or license some of this "cool tech" to private industry. The private sector would have more to work with and the space agency would get more money for the projects they are left to focus on. And maybe some of the specialists at NASA could fork their own companies with the technology, keeping more people employed.
Maybe they already do this. But the tone of the post makes it sound like they don't.
The problem is that there's little immediate return on investment.
Sure, give it a few years and we get nifty things like GPS and freeze-dried ice cream... But in the short term it's just pure science. And nobody likes pure science anymore.
Re:FY2011 NASA Budget (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm one of the most passionate people you'll find about space exploration but I'm glad constellation has been cancelled - it's about time.
Why? It wasn't about building a Big Dumb Booster which is blatantly what is needed, but about a jobs program. If you really want a program to create jobs regardless of if they are useful jobs then employ people to go around breaking windows - lots of skilled jobs in the window fitting and glazing industry created there for minimal government spending. The government creating jobs is only useful if it can be demonstrated that the benefit outweighs the cost; and I'm sure that attracting uyour best and brightest to a technological and operational dead end is a bad idea.
If they'd have kept Ares V simple I could have been behind it, but it was way too complex. Yes rocket science is hard, and the idiots were man rating a cargo system.
No NASA has failed yet again, the reason private companies work is that if they don't perform (by fair means or foul) they will fail; NASA has failed completely here with the constant delays and cost overruns, yes rocket science is hard, but we're talking consistent failure here and I'm not convinced the culture at nasa accepts the guil for their failures. I don't believe NASA hasn't delivered in the rocket engineering department since Columbia first orbited. I'm fully aware of how mind-bogglingly amazing an achievement the STS is, it's an awesome piece of engineering, i just want more like it.
I know this post comes across as an angry troll but I am genuinely passionate about getting us into space and I don't think that NASA has the economic wherewithal or technical push to make this happen anymore - everything I hear about NASA implies a mix of a jobs program and a company filled with managers at the expense of engineers.
No getting into space is a technical and economic problem - i.e. if we could afford it, we could have space hotels and moon bases, if we had some really advanced technology that might make it cheap enough so that we could afford it. I never saw how constellation would address either of these issues, so good riddemce to it.
As for the jobs programs, if they're truly skilled engineers then they'll find well paid useful work in the rest of society,and an influx of good engineers should kickstart more economic growth. If they can't outperform people working in the rest of industry and contribute to the economy, then what were they doing in the first place in NASA?
Meaningless talking point. (Score:2, Insightful)
How come Bush's promises of massive explorations with no funding backing isnt stupid, but when Obama has to clean up Bush's mistakes and bring Bush's BS promises to a real budget, then suddenly he's the bad guy?
Blah blah blah... Obama isn't cleaning up anything. The guy is a stiff.
Seriously... all this talk about Obama "cleaning up", and what has he really done? It's just a talking point, utterly meaningless.
Re:What does this mean for manned exploration? (Score:3, Insightful)
yeah, because the chinese are the only ones going to space? come on.
and do you realize that russia is already launching hardware to ISS? and that the europeans have a thriving space program? you know, those people that we already work with on so many other things?
get real.
So speaks the Party of Science (Score:2, Insightful)
and Texas
That's OK, they're all Republicans anyway.
And you wonder why we think all of your science based policy is a joke. First you X NASA to screw with Republicans, and now what, you are going to do global warming legislation to torture us some more? Really, is any science offered by the Left Wing actually true?
The way you talk, is there any reason that I should believe you?
Re:Stop spending so much on the military... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, we do, so that we can control oil resources and help companies like Halliburton be very profitable. We've decided as a society that we don't care about future energy sources, and we're going to stick with oil no matter what, so we have to use a giant portion of our GDP to fund a military for the sole purpose of maintaining access to that oil. Later on, when other societies develop energy sources not involving oil (such as electric cars, better nuclear power, solar power, tidal power, etc.), we'll still be driving around in old gas-guzzling vehicles looking for food with a collapsed economy while nations like China, India, and Russia are leading the world in technology and space exploration, and have prosperous economies.
Re:That's disappointing, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
If the budget was being balanced, you'd have a point.
Re:What do we need NASA for now? (Score:3, Insightful)
"When I told my 10-year-old daughter that Obama had killed the program that was her best chance to travel to the Moon or Mars, she literally started crying. How am I supposed to keep her interested in math and science in school when the only thing she's ever wanted to do has been taken away from her?"
Wait, so it's Obama's fault that you're a bad parent? First, there is still a NASA and a space program. Second, help the kid find some other interests. We live in a world of almost an infinite number of things to study, to learn, and to do. Help your kid broaden her horizons a little bit.
Re:NASA needs more budget. (Score:3, Insightful)
The point wasn't that NASA lacked enormous achievements. It was just pointing out absurdity of "space programme wouldn't exist without NASA"
Re:FY2011 NASA Budget (Score:3, Insightful)
That reads proposed budget. Doesn't mean it's the actual budget, it's just what the current monkey in the whitehouse wants. It's congress, a bunch of monkeys, that write the checks. The congress critter in the states that will be affected carry a lot of weight on if the NASA budget will be cut. Yeah, they are idiots too, but they are our idiots.
So I wouldn't say the fat lady has sung on any of these projects yet. She maybe warming up in the bullpit but by god she hasn't sung yet.
This is esp. true since the current monkeys ratings are in the toilet. People are starting to see him for the inexperienced idiot he is. Besides, I doubt all these projects are dead. They will be shelved until some monkey comes along with the foresight to that certain money needs to be spent at home instead of sending it to hordes of people that don't deserve it, or to finance and get us out of a cluster fuck that the previous idiot got us into.
Yeah, I know some of this comment could be construed as racist but I honestly don't' give a fuck anymore.
Re:NASA needs more budget. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Philosophically inclined geeks (Score:2, Insightful)
"and trying something different like private enterprise and more robotic missions."
We've been wasting time with Robotic missions for too long already. That is largely why getting to the moon is such an expensive endeavor as it is. The entire point of NASA is to get people in Space. I'm not the sort who believes everything should serve a purpose today, some projects take time to bear fruit. But I don't support spending billions to take atmosphere readings from objects that are far away with robots unless it is at least part of a plan to accomplish something useful.
As for private enterprise, they are the reason everything is so expensive in the first place. NASA doesn't develop any of this crap, they are a backdoor to export tax dollars to your favorite defense contractors. The other side of the coin is what we are wasting trying to avoid the bad PR of someone dying in space. Build it, test it, send it up with Chinese volunteers. It would be a lot cheaper to agree to pay their families for life than to effectively build and test every bolt and screw ten thousand times.
If you really want to do something that makes sense. Issue a public apology for getting involved in things that are none of our business and pull out all military forces stationed outside the United States tomorrow. Then cut our PEACETIME military budget from $300B to more like $50B.
$250B a year will go a long way toward building our economy and that isn't even counting what we are wasting in pointless holy wars.
Re:What does this mean for manned exploration? (Score:4, Insightful)
Science is made by meatbags. Scientists are meatbags that don't hope to earn much money or fame (save for the very few that get a Nobel prize). No, our motivation is the science and the great things it can do for humankind. Specifically, my research is related to technology that can potentially be used on spacecraft/deep space probes. But if I knew it will only be used so that a rich banker can go to LEO, fuck it, I can go back to a job in industry and make about twice the money I make now. I can easily imagine that manned exploration of the Moon and Mars would similarly invigorate and inspire tens of thousands of US scientists, not to mention the other people involved, and the american public in general. The american nation could again have a big, common dream that transcends their short existence.
The Moon is very important because we can learn how to survive there, and then use that experience ans science to build a base on Mars. Yes, the Moon is in many ways harsher than Mars, but as far as things we can learn, it is still very useful, and the proximity of Earth is very useful in case of unexpected problems. Besides, if Constellation is out, Mars is out, too. It's *not* on.
Finally, I'd like to emphasize the need for manned exploration of Mars and other remote objects, as radio-delay makes robotic probes severely crippled to the point of being useless, compared to humans. A human can find ways to dislodge a stuck wheel, for one thing.
Re:thousands of jobs lost in Florida, Alabama and (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks to me like the biggest, underlying source of mess is that NASA is financed from federal budget, but with funding of particular projects bringing great benefits to specific areas / contractors. So of course their representatives will fight for what's good primarily to them, not to space programme as a whole...
ESA seems to be set up more sensibly in this regard. Each memberstate decides how much it wants to pay, so that is the way in which they can have a say when it comes to assigning projects.
Re:Meaningless talking point. (Score:1, Insightful)
Umm... his economic policies might have had something to do with the highest stock market gains since WW2 during a president's first year?