US Space Policy Update Urges International Cooperation 66
eldavojohn writes "The recent shift in NASA's spaceflight goals has caused great stress in the space community and those related to efforts in space. A White House update to the policy is said to emphasize cooperation with the international community and looks to be a move away from individual nations competing in space. Instead, the document urges intense competition (PDF) in the commercial sector and reasons that 'The United States considers the sustainability, stability, and free access to, and use of, space vital to its national interests. It is the shared interest of all nations to act responsibly in ways that emphasize openness and transparency, and help prevent mishaps, misperceptions, and mistrust.' Space.com also notes that you can submit your comments and thoughts to the task force Obama appointed to determine new directions. No doubt this avoidance or departure from another Space Race will have a lot of people concerned that the US is out of the game."
WHAT game?!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hate to break it to you, but NASA hasn't been "in the game" in almost 40 years now. You want a perfect illustration of the last time they were fielding a real team? Just look at their historical budget [wikipedia.org]. Notice a pattern after 1970? Yeah, that's when they stopped being the Yankees and started becoming the Mets.
Good new direction (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Quest for Glory was wayyy better.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Get your ass to mars (Score:4, Interesting)
China steals 5 pieces of tech for every 1 they build
This kind of thinking is why the US and other western countries are going to fail in the long term.
Just like Japan in the 50's, China right now is largely perceived as being a country that makes cheap knock offs of products that are invented in the US or Europe, with no real innovation of their own.
The reality of course, is that we mostly only see the cheap crappy products that importers are willing to import - China actually has some pretty good tech of their own that does not get exported.
They are already the main producers of our favorite tech toys - iPads, iPhones, etc etc.
When I lived in Japan I was always surprised to see how far behind the "latest and greatest" consumer goods were back in my own country (eg. video cameras) compared to what was available in Japan. I would be very surprised if this is not already the case with stuff coming out of China too - we only see the goods here that importers are willing to import, which seems to be mostly the cheap knockoff stuff.
China is now greatly out-pacing the rest of the world in terms of growth in scientific research [scidev.net], and it already massively exceeds Japan - 125,000 in 2009 vs 72,000 from Japan) it will only be 6 or 7 years before it passes the US too.
The we keep believing the myth that the only the US or Europe is capable of producing innovative products, the further behind we will slide in science and technology, until we wake up one day and wonder why it is that the only thing that we are producing is the very goods that we used to ascribe to third world countries - ie. agricultural and primary products like ore ore and coal, with perhaps a few Britney CDs thrown in too.
The amount of money that was spent to reach the moon during the space race was astronomical - and justifiable at the time due the the cold war. To really get back in the space business properly, there has to be a good commercial reason to get there, and it has to be private companies that do it. What we should really be doing is encouraging more private enterprises to get into the field by having more schemes like the X prizes, which has so far been very successful at helping drive private industry into the field. The problem with large publicly funded NASA driven projects is it just generates way too much pork barrel inefficiencies, with relatively little return for all that public spending compared to what can be achieved by private companies for the same money.
I would like to see someone actually start trying to do something like actually capture an asteroid (or use some of the existing hunks of rock) at one of the Lagrange points as the basis for industrial mining, processing and fabrication of stuff in space - as ultimately this is probably going to be the most affordable way to build substantial structures up there, as opposed to pushing up every single component on rockets at thousands of dollars per Kg. Perhaps it is time for an X prize type competition for the first company who can actually make something from stuff that is already out there in space, so we can finally start building real space based industries.