The Upside of the NASA Budget 283
teeks99 writes "There are a lot of articles circulating about the new changes to the NASA budget, but this one goes into some of the details. From what I'm seeing, it looks great — cutting off the big, expensive, over-budget stuff and allowing a whole bunch of important and revolutionary programs to get going: commercial space transportation; keeping the ISS going (now that we've finally got it up and running); working on orbital propellant storage (so someday we can go off to the far flung places); automated rendezvous and docking (allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit). Quoting: 'NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it. The Agency now sees its role as doing interesting things with people once they get there, hence its emphasis on in-orbit construction, heavy lift capabilities, and resource harvesting hardware. Given budgetary constraints and the real issues with the Constellation program, none of that is necessarily unreasonable.'"
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Mexico did once send a killer whale to the moon for $200.
Re:Survival of mankind (Score:1, Funny)
So NASA's job should be the colonization and terraforming of Mars?
No, thats not what NASA should be focused on, it should be focused on what it used to do best, develop and test aviation systems. Including space
So (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit
So NASA's building a version of Voltron?
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit
So NASA's building a version of Voltron?
They don't say so explicitly ... you have to read between the lions.
Re:Stupid, really (Score:5, Funny)
OMG brilliant!
Build a cylindrical wall surrounding the launch complex and the outbound trajectory. Put a hefty airlock at the bottom, at ground level. Make the wall tall enough to poke out of the atmosphere. Install really big vacuum pumps.
Move the spacecraft into the wall through the airlock. Get everyone out of the walled area. Close the airlock and evacuate all the atmosphere from the walled region. (Pump it into the surrounding open air.)
When the walled in area is a hard vacuum, from ground to space, launch! The FAA has no say, because there's no atmosphere! The EPA has no say because there's no air!
The spacecraft never undergoes aerodynamic stress during launch and can be any dang shape you want! Spherical ship? No problem!
Note to all slashbots: I am joking. Maybe.
Re:NASA-National Aeronautic and Space Administrati (Score:3, Funny)
Shouldn't their whole mission be getting people and stuff into the air and/or into space?
No, that's the job of NAPSA, the National Aeronautic and People in Space Administration. I can see how you would get confused, though.
NASA's job is to look out for the USA's space-based interests. It's not clear what having people in space does for us at this point. Putting people in space was useful once, because it was the alternative to cold war: a space race is much better for development of technology than throwing the nation's money at arms manufacturers. Right now we would be better off developing better launch technologies, whether that's vehicles or stationary machines.
We're gonna need a whole body of laws to deal with space travel
...the development of which is a job for some group of nations, e.g. the U.N., not for NASA; NASA's job there is to advise the policy-makers, the people who actually sign treaties.
Leave science to scientists (lets face it, the current NASA is a quasi-military organization). Leave profit to corporations.
Wait, who's going to put stuff in space, again? Universities don't have that kind of money after paying all the administrative salaries.
Let the new NSA give us a path to the stars,
Oh, the space elevator? Why didn't you say so? Regulations are the opposite of a path, they're obstacles, however justified.
Re:Stupid, really (Score:4, Funny)
Even more brilliant... collect atmospheric C02 and use it to pump the platform up. When the platform clears, keep pumping that evil C02 into space.
It's the pneumatic space elevator of global warming stopping!
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:2, Funny)
I was trying to figure out how that post got modded "insightful".
Of course I might be wrong, ...
Ah, there we go...
Re:Economy of Scale (Score:3, Funny)
One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job
Um. We're actually not sending men anywhere. That's the problem.
We're are so far less advanced now than we could be, if only we'd spent the money doing useful things instead.
Ah yes, like sending a robot to Mars to get stuck in the fucking sand. Not to discount the great work that NASA has done with the Mars rovers, but they've spent a year trying to get Spirit out of about six inches of sand. A man and perhaps a small shovel would have done the job in half an hour.