Neil Armstrong To NASA: You're Embarrassing 409
astroengine writes "Neil Armstrong, Apollo legend and outspoken critic of NASA's current direction for human spaceflight, was joined by three other space experts to address Congress on Thursday. It wasn't pretty. Amongst the other criticisms was Armstrong's tough statement: 'For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable.' He might have a point, but Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, suggested the shuttles should be brought out of retirement to fill the U.S. manned spaceflight gap — a suggestion that probably rolled some eyeballs."
Unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
A guy who walked on the moon thinks manned space flight is a good idea. Full story at 11.
In all honesty, manned space flight makes no sense right now, as it's not something that can be done half-assed. With the current state of American finances (and the petty squabbling surrounding it) , NASA will never get the investment they need to put a human anywhere that matters. Robotic and satellite exploration, however, is not out of reach at all. We need to do more of, and we need to invest more in it if we (the US) are ever going to maintain some innovative power going forward. Space exploration is the right thing to do, but we don't yet have the knowledge or technology to make meaningful manned missions.
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I have to agree that the current state of the US economy pretty much rules out meaningful human space exploration at the moment. Economic cycles being what they are things could be very different in 10 years. The problem is that a new manned spaceflight program is long term. There is nothing to stop NASA from planning for manned spaceflight now, to show some ambition and state what they intend to do. That way when an upswing comes they would be in a better position to move forward.
Time after time NASA seems
Re:Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Space exploration is the right thing to do, but we don't yet have the knowledge or technology to make meaningful manned missions.
We didn't have the knowledge or technology prior to 1961 either. But spending money to learn how to do those things was the right thing to do.
IMO the goal of our space programs isn't just to put humans into space. It also serves to dump piles of money into US science an tech development. Our space program is an investment in the US that allows us to maintain a technological edge. We've lost hope of outproducing developing countries like China, out best chance now is to keep ourselves ahead of them technologically. We can't do that unless we are keeping our scientists and engineers working and advancing our sci/tech industry.
TL;DR: We must do this in the name of SCIENCE!
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That's why we have the Department of Defense. And, it has the added benefit of getting to use the technology to kill people on the other side of the planet rather than just meander aimlessly through space. /s
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IMO the goal of our space programs isn't just to put humans into space. It also serves to dump piles of money into US science an tech development.
I guess that's why the NSF's (National Science Foundation) budget has expanded greatly while NASA's has not. Because the NSF does US science better. We could just end NASA and redirect the funding to the NSF.
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Science was outsourced to China as well. Soon there will be nothing but service jobs in North America.
Repeat after me -- "Do you want fries with that?"
Robotics is an even greater sci/eng investment (Score:3, Insightful)
Unmanned spacecraft require just as much science and engineering, and is a better investment.
Re:Unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
"We didn't have the knowledge or technology prior to 1961 either. But spending money to learn how to do those things was the right thing to do."
But that of course is the debate.
We should spend money to explore space, fix diseases, take out 3rd world dictators, rebuild nations, build high speed rail lines, research electric cars, take of the mentally ill... and so on and so forth.
Advancing science is hardly a trump argument to do something. Not saying it is not a worthy goal, but virtually all such goals are worthwhile. To many exploring space is nothing... a who cares proposition. No different from government spending on operas.
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What a lot of people do not realize is NASA never really 'had' the money for the moon shots. The Air Force had it all. Every single missile was 'on loan' from our defense program. They had the money to do the research and get contractors to build the lander/capsule. The people, the money, the resources were coming out of our defense program. It was THAT big it didnt even make a dent in it.
NASA has always been 'underfunded'. The 60s we were in a good spot where we had enough missiles to wipe out our en
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> "A guy who walked on the moon thinks manned space flight is a good idea. Full story at 11."
I love how fat, worthless, lazy fucks like you sit around and judge somebody who chased a dream and made something of themselves.
So what happens to the rest of his post (a whole paragraph)? Are you going to comment on the points he made, or are you simply going to quote him out of context while building up a strawman?
Sorry Mr. Armstrong (Score:2)
As a former "booster" of the space shuttle myself (way WAY back when I believed the promises being made about it), it was ridiculously expensive for the capabilities it brought. If they had kept the Satun Vs rolling off the production line, we would probably have had a HUGE space infrastructure by now with a colony on the moon and an outpost on Mars!
Reminds me (sadly) of the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Superiority" which describes a country at war that keeps developing ever more astonishing weapons in fe
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Now, as to the benefits of continued
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Back in the days when a country went somewhere, planted a flag, and claimed the whole landmass it probably would have been worth it even if it didn't pay off for a few centuries. Now, with most foreign policy initiatives leaning towards the welfare and compassion angle, you're probably right.
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I think we have to ask ourselves if a moon colony is worth the cost. Sadly, the answer is "probably not".... The challenges here on earth: global warming, feeding the world population, satisfying our energy needs...
Did you know that the popular environmentalist movement was largely kicked off by a single image? This one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg [wikipedia.org]
It's because of the challenges here on earth that we need manned space missions. They give the perspective required to take whole earth problems seriously.
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Your comment about the Clarke story is interesting, because its largely true - WW2 saw over 38,000 of the top two allied aircraft produced (the P-51 and the Spitfire), with build times down to a couple of days per aircraft.
Today, the USAFs top air superiority aircraft is the F-22, which costs a whopping $180M per unit, and takes over two years to build. It costs that much, and it takes that long, because it is an aircraft with significant technological advances in it - and it also shows in its operational
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That's not entirely fair - the T-34 was superior to German tanks in a number of ways. It was fast, difficult to spot be
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Ahh no.
Every F-22 would take out 8 P-51s per fight if not more. They could carry external weapons so maybe 12 per plane. The thing is that yes you could build them at that rate for a while but you couldn't get pilots at that rate.
You would have zero air to air kills since the f-22 would stay out of reach of a P-51 class air craft. The factories that made them would be pounded into rubble because those air craft couldn't defend them. The bases that they flew from would be nothing but craters. The pilots woul
At that rate of loss, think pilots (Score:3)
After the first couple dozen F-22s are lost, and the first several thousand enemy planes, the enemy will be reduced to sending barely-trained newbies up to fight. The kill ratio will get larger and larger.
The Tiger II tanks weren't all they were made out to be, prone to failure and poorly built especially near the end of the war. Tactics used by the Germans didn't help, storing rounds in the turret, using it in sandy environments, and letting themselves get flanked so the light side armor could be hit.
Contr
Stupid fantasy fight (Score:3)
What do you think would happen if we pitted a modern equivalent of the P-51 against the F-22? Take a cheap-and-quick-to-build airframe, put 10,000 of them in the air, and keep the replacements coming. What would the outcome be?
A massacre of the P-51 because the F-22 does not exist in a vacuum. P-51s would be shot out of the sky in massive quantities by modern anti-aircraft defenses, other fighters, and destroyed on the ground by attack aircraft that can level operating bases with a single sortie. How are your P51s going to operate when their bases are turned into smoldering ruins?
Furthermore your notion that you could bring 10,000 P-51s to bear, to be generous, and absurd hypothetical. Real wars don't work that way.
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"perhaps 5 or 6 a sortie, against 300 or 400 enemy destroyed"
I'm pretty sure that if the F-22's used missiles, ran out, afterburned back to base to reload, rinse, repeat, there would be zero loses. But I get your point in general.
I think your point is accurate as long as the 2 sides have technologies which are separated by some small gap. In your example, both have the technology of military flight, and the difference between the two techs is X. But at some point past X, there are zero fatalities for th
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Reminds me (sadly) of the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Superiority" which describes a country at war that keeps developing ever more astonishing weapons in fewer and fewer quantities eventually leading to its defeat by its technically inferior enemy. (Probably was written before WWII where huge technological leaps clearly affected the war's outcome: A-bomb, radar, enigma).
Actually it was the Nazi's who were doing most of the innovations at the time, Germany was the country that had invented the tank, they invented long range missiles, and jet planes. However they were both heavily out-produced by the Allies, (in particular America which wasn't having it's factories bombed on a daily basis), and Hitler made the fatal mistake of fighting a two front war with one of them being a winter campaign in Russia. You should also realise that the Enigma machine was a German invention
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There was also the British invention of RADAR, which was a huge technological lead for the allies.
Yes and No. (Score:5, Insightful)
In that sense, Armstrong is correct.
However, it must not be forgotten that Armstrong is also speaking in his capacity as one of the White Elephants. The people we sent to the moon pretty much to show Ivan whose dick was bigger. An impressive feat of engineering(that conveniently aligned with the Cold War enthusiasm for big missiles); but not really a high point for science. Those unassuming little RC cars on mars that survived so long did a fair bit more extraterrestrial data gathering, and a combination of orbital and improved ground telescopes have done extraordinary deep-sky work...
So far as Armstrong is arguing that there is something rotten in the US, he is correct. However, I can only take them seriously so long as he stays there, rather than expanding into a lamentation over the decline of the impressive, but scientifically dubious, in favor of unsexy but productive and increasingly robotic space work.The fact that it's easier to find money to save gamblers from the consequences of their own folly than it is to explore the universe is sad. The fact that tinned-monkey 'space exploration' is being supplanted by increasingly sophisticated robotic systems is not.
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Those unassuming little RC cars on mars that survived so long did a fair bit more extraterrestrial data gathering
Opportunity is still going.
Blame congress? Because those Mars landers were am (Score:4, Interesting)
NASA sure has its problems, but I think Congress can be blamed for most of the embarrassing things.
I'm thinking pork barrelling, micro management, underfunding of stated goals.
When I think of the Mars landers that were planned for 3 month mission and 1 may still be running *years* later, I am in awe of NASA.
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LEO is not the same as Lunar orbit. When the private companies get there, then we can talk. (and I'm sure they will, eventually, cheaper and more efficiently than any government agency could do it)
time for private space flight (Score:2)
it's going to be cheaper and faster in innovation that the endless pork NASA projects that seem to cost more than the GDP of most countries
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The problem is that private space flight isn't profitable, beyond some space tourism to LEO. If you're looking for private enterprises to venture beyond low orbit (without NASA contracting them to), you can forget it. There is no gold in them hills and no money to be made by going to them.
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The problem is that private space flight isn't profitable, beyond some space tourism to LEO. If you're looking for private enterprises to venture beyond low orbit (without NASA contracting them to), you can forget it. There is no gold in them hills and no money to be made by going to them.
I'm pretty sure that there is gold, or at least rare metals, in them there hills but that the current cost of getting them back to Earth is prohibative for private space flight. It would probably be better done by automated systems anyway.
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The problem is that private investors expect a return on their investment. Is there such thing in space exploration, besides launching satellites and the dubious 'space tourism' proposal?
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today it costs $50 million for a quick space tourism flight. as the money is invested the cost will drop.
same with computers. 50 years ago it was huge supercomputers that only governments and large corporations could buy. now cell phones are more powerful
in fact the pace of innovation has increased as more consumer dollars have been spent on technology
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I get that, but space tourism is a very thin slice of space travel. Who will invest in actual exploration, particularly planetary and edge of the solar system probes?
Sure, getting them to the top layers of the atmosphere will be cheaper. But I fear there won't be a financial incentive to more further than that.
To Congress (Score:5, Informative)
With all due respect (Score:2)
Really, I have a ton of respect for all astronauts and consider them true heros, but please don't resort to making sensationalist statements like (FTFA):
"A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain,"
That doesn't even make sense, how is it nearly impossible to regain a "lead"? The only reason he said that was to scare people. Remember at one point the Soviet Union was winning the space race, but the US eventually overtook them by landing on the moon. Now he is claiming that we are at risk of losing our leading position in space to the Russians. It seems
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Yup - crank up the engines. We're talking about multi-billion-dollar investments the same way we'd talk about maybe taking the car in the garage to the shop for a $1000 tune-up.
The shuttles are a distraction. They're a dead end. We already know we can do it. Let's do something we haven't already done.
Doing something you can already do is fine if there is some kind of demand for it. We know how to make apples, but people still want to buy them so people still do it. On the other hand, people aren't wil
The basic problem with NASA (Score:2)
In a word, NASA's problem is: Congress.
Congress's attitude towards NASA alternates between using it as pork spending, and seeing it as a horrendous waste of money. The major points of the space program from Congress's point of view was never to promote science or human exploration of space - it was to learn how to launch spy satellites, and prove to the world how much smarter the US was than those dirty Commies. Since the real motivations are gone, you're left with an agency that has a lot of smart engineer
Not the "gap" crap again (Score:2)
"manned spaceflight gap"
Not the "gap" crap again. Look up Kennedy's "missle gap" or "bomber gap" sometime to see how our overwhelming superiority in each area was successfully used to convince Congress to overspend on the same things even more.
(I wouldn't be surprised if we start hearing about a "carrier gap" soon now that China is poised to launch a group of their own.)
Risk Averse (Score:2)
Get off my lawn (Score:2)
Coldwar (Score:2)
What you can do (Score:2)
There really is a lock of money out there right now and manned space flight is expensive.
The government is in a hole right now because taxes ( via the Bush tax cuts ) are the lowest on wealthy Americans since the 1950s. Add to that two wars paid for with loans ( mostly benefiting the wealthy through defense spending and securing resources like oil ) and a bailout of the financial sector ( also paid out to the wealthiest Americans, no convictions ).
If you want manned space flight back, stop supporting going
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If you believe that Democrats want to spend for NASA instead of any of their other pet constituencies, but the eeevil Republicans keep cutting taxes, you are mistaken. After all Whitey's on the Moon.
really (Score:2)
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Agreed. For the price of the SLS, NASA can buy 300 Falcon 9 rockets (or a mix of F9 and F9 Heavy for an average price of $100M).
NASA vs. Military A/C (Score:2)
This is not surprising given that the U.S. military spends more annually on air-conditioning than the entirety of NASA's budget [gizmodo.com].
When talking trillions of $ in government spending, it's thoroughly and completely embarrassing that an accomplished org like NASA has to scrap for a few billion
Let me guess (Score:2)
THANK YOU NEIL! (Score:2, Interesting)
response to Eugene Cernan (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Mr. Cernan,
While I respect your contribution to the space program, you're wrong. Specifically, with respect to the Space Shuttle, it is too late. They've been pulled out of service, stripped of flight hardware, and decomissioned. Contracts have been cancelled. Staff has been layed off. Necessary support infrastructure and hardware has been mothballed. It's done.
In addition, required airframe inspections were postponed in order to complete the final missions by the deadline. So, even if we were to renew all the contracts, re-hire all the staff, and pull the ground support harddware out of mothballs, a recertification of all three airframes would be required. This takes time; and, for the duration of the recertification process we would have no launch vehicles. Given that we did not have facilities to do more than one full tear down and inspection at a time, (or have not had the capability for a considerable period of time), the recertification would be drawn out until at least two airframes were inspected, sequentially -- flight rules require a second shuttle be available on standby in the event of an on-orbit accident.
No, Mr. Cernan. As embarrassing as it is to have no capability, returning the Shuttle to flight, now, is not the option. Our best option for NASA designed hardware is a return to flight leveraging proven components and technology, in the form of the SLS (or whatever you choose to call it) If you want it sooner, get it funded faster. And although your past arguments make it clear you find commercial options distastefully, I feel you should review your decision. One option is the ULA Atlas V+ Boeing CST-100. Another option is to use the Lockheed Orion on either ULA vehicles (Atlas or Delta) As these contractors are the people who built and maintained the Shuttle, they're already intimately familiar with the manned space flight requirements. Frankly, they're likely to be ready before SLS.
Finally, You should not be so quick to dismiss alternatives such as SpaceX. Yes, it is rocket science. Yes, these are the "new kids on the block", upstarts some may call them. Consider that SpaceX is hiring many experienced people from both NASA contractors and NASA itself. Consider that the work being done by SpaceX is under contract to NASA and the Air Force, and is under constant review by NASA and Air Force personnel. Consider that their designs, while new, are based on existing works. They may be the "new kid on the block" but they are clearly leveraging the industries 5 decades of experience.
CONGRESS is the problem. (Score:3)
If Congress had let rocket scientists design the shuttle, instead of lobbyists, not only would NASA have achieved the design goals, but it would have been a safer system, and we would have been able to afford to invest on new technology and follow-on systems.
ATK(Morton-Thiokol)/Lockheed/Boeing, and their congressional Pork-Piggie enablers killed the goose that laid the golden egg. And as a result, yes, NASA looks embarrassing. But they can hardly help the design constraints that were forced upon them by IGNORANT LEGISLATIVE FIAT. And Neil Armstrong should know better, for fuck's sake~!
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decay comes after living beyond one's means.
nasa is a reflection of the government.
the government is a reflection of the people.
and it's 20 years, not 10.
america, and a large part of the world will know what it means to live beneath one's means for decades to come.
Re:I Love you Neil (Score:5, Insightful)
No, try again. As the poster above you points out: the Bush Bailout cost more in one year - nay, in ONE LUMP SUM PROGRAM - than NASA's entire budget for the entirety of its existence.
And what did the Bush Bailout get us? Pretty much nothing except a bunch of Republican fat-cats lining their pockets after claiming their businesses were "too big to fail."
NASA is not a reflection of "government." NASA is a reflection of what happens when you give an agency - ANY agency, whether public or private - an order to do grand things on a shoestring budget and then start hacking away at the budget even further.
The final three planned moon missions were all canceled by Nixon and the Republicans, who had their hate on for the space program because it had been put in place by JFK (Nixon had an especially heavy hate on for any remnants of that administration, as he had lost to JFK previously). This behavior has continued more or less apace every time the Republicans held either the Presidency or at least one house of Congress.
As has once been said: NASA is an agency with an undeniable problem. The problem is not the will to do what they are assigned to do. It is not the capacity and intellect to get the job done. No, the problem is that it is an agency assigned to tasks that require a 10-15 year program to set up and accomplish, while being overseen and funded by a bunch of assholes who are generally replaced on a 2-year cycle and who are perpetually looking to be seen as "cutting government waste" and wanting instant gratification. For god's sake, we build in a 10% overage "just in case" fund for every construction project, but Congress won't do the same for NASA's programs!
You want to see NASA do well? Give them a task, assign realistic funding (and a percentage for overruns when they happen, because something unexpected always happens) for the task, lock the funding in place so that future Congresses can't touch it, and GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.
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Hate to be the devil's advocate here, but the bailouts also saved pension and mutual funds. Even though most mutual funds say they are diversified, most of them were/are heavy on financial and bank stocks. Oh, they took a major hit in 2008, mostly because the superstar fund managers didn't see it coming, but seeing mass bankruptcies without a chance to recover would have devastated boomer's retirement funds.
Of course it was made worse for the mutual funds because they have stupid rules like they cannot shor
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The best definition of "bad policy" I've ever heard is this: one that leads to a position where you have no good options.
Baling out Wall Street was a bad option. Letting the economy collapse because liquidity dried up would be a bad option too. Judge which is the worst. The sensible thing looking back on these no-win situations is not to criticize the choice taken, but the path that led up to that choice.
The same goes for NASA's retirement of the shuttle without a successor. The path to that decision is lit
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The real issue is and remains the endemic corruption in the entire affair. After all that money and all those laid off workers (for circumstances basically entirely outside of their control) and foreclosures and what not, nothing has really been changed. New regulation is being opposed and hounded down - visibly by the Republicans but you'd be joking if you thought that wasn't happening because the Democrats are mysteriously gunshy about pushing it.
There are no changes to executive salaries, top-tier tax ra
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The question is what would have happened if the government did nothing and let the free market take its course. It's quite possible that these guys were too big to fail and could have taken down the whole system with them.
Am I happy with how the crisis and bailout was handled? No. Does that mean some kind of hugely expensive bailout wasn't necessary? No.
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Yes, that is what I meant by "completely devalued." Thank you for confirming your reading comprehension to be of the average level for the republican redneck retard fringe.
You, my friend, are a bigot. Re-read your post and replace "republican redneck" with any other slur and maybe then you will understand. You are quick to defend the target a racial slur, but you are too stupid to even recognize that you do the exact same thing. You speak of the "fringe" without realizing that you are on the fringe yourself, so much so that anyone even close to the middle of America is viewed as the "fringe" by you.
Reading your posts and realizing the willful ignorance and raw hatred that
Re:I Love you Neil (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they should be run like CERN.
Basically have a big bank account that the government(s) dump money into each year and then leave it up to NASA to decide how to spend it.
That way if some wingnut gets in and decides to defund it, they'll just loose funding for that year or two and can live off the savings during that time.
People always think it was the Republicans (Score:4, Informative)
The Democrats seriously have a lot of people brainwashed to think they're for the little guy.
The bailout was bipartisan and not targeted to Republican supporters.
Citigroup, the largest recipient, in fact donated much more to Democrats than to Republicans.
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Yes, after Bush basically pulled the panic switch and by the way he would do it again [cnbc.com].
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The bailout was bipartisan.
You want to do the blame game? (Score:3)
Bush tried to enact stricter controls long before the crisis, but was continually rebuffed by the likes of Chris Dodd (the guy who got the favorable CountryWide loan) and Barney Frank. The latter is the guy who in response to a 2003 Bush proposal for tighter accounting of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac said they "are not facing any kind of financial crisis" and wanted to "roll the dice a little bit more" in relation to such institutions.
There's enough blame for all sides, corrupt Republican and Democrat politici
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American space exploration has been in a state of decay for four decades now.
FTFY
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Hmm... Perhaps after there are some brown people living on the Moon or Mars...
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Hmm... Perhaps after there are some brown people living on the Moon or Mars...
Everyone knows that Martians are green ... sheesh
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No, they both suck, just on different levels and in different ways.
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No, they both suck, just on different levels and in different ways.
They do both suck, but Bush funded NASA more than Clinton and Obama combined. For all the fucking up Bush did, hurting NASA isn't part of it.
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No, this is slashdot. Democrats are as pure as the driven snow, Republicans are responsible for all the world's problems.
Re:I Love you Neil (Score:5, Insightful)
but the real blame goes to the american people. exactly such as yourself, or people like you.
to think that one half of america is an innocent bystander while the other half is a lying, self deceiving bunch ....it's indicative that you have your head so far up your ass, the taste of old copper pennies fills your mouth.
The reason I disagree with this is that the American people are lied to and propagandized to such a degree that they have no basis on which to make informed decisions about government. They are taken advantage of at every turn by self-interested politicians and media outlets. Where can they get good, honest information about what various government agencies are up to, and what policy outcomes are? TV ain't gonna tell 'em! Local news is just that, and the national stuff is high level overview, and mostly just what the government wants us to hear anyway. And the politicians are too concerned with funding their next campaign and getting elected to be bothered with any kind of honest assesment.
So people are left to their own devices. Some will go out of their way to find out what's going on (even then it can be tough). But many people are too busy with taking care of the kids and keeping a job to really understand what is going on and how to respond. And even if they do, how do they affect change? It's hard to get anything done in Washington without an army of lobbyists. It's hard for the average citizen to challenge the military/industrial complex, or Wall Street, or Big Oil. So you can blame the American people if you want. And I might agree with you if we had a real, functioning republic with real, adversarial media. But we don't.
Re:I Love you Neil (Score:5, Insightful)
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The other side is better funded.
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Re:I Love you Neil (Score:5, Insightful)
The hell he did. He inherited a BOOMING economy with a MASSIVE surplus. I'm so fucking sick of this bullshit false equivalence. What you have said isn't just a lie. It's mendacious to the extreme.
Stock market peaked in March, 2000. The dotcom burst was well under way by election day. As you might recall, half of the valuation for all publicly traded companies went away by late 2001. That in turn dropped tax revenue considerably, since so much (around 20% of the 2000-2001 fiscal year) was dependent on capital gains. So no massive revenue surplus in fiscal year 2001-2002.
The original poster is correct.
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Basically America committed suicide [wikipedia.org].
So the root problem is due to ethnic diversification?
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Maybe not shelved, but cut? Money is an input to the development process. What you come up with will be different if you have $X versus 10 * $X, but you can still come up with stuff. One obvious thing that inflates NASA's manned space mission costs is safety. The thing is -- how safe does it really need to be? Would there still be plenty of volunteers if the risk of a mission was higher, but much cheaper? As long as they're open and honest about the risks it doesn't seem like a big deal.
It's not that simple (Score:2)
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escape velocity (Score:2)
(in general) escape velocity exists as a concept when you will run out of fuel before you reach your location and so are coasting along against gravity.
The kinetic energy of the escape velocity must equal or exceed the change in potential energy (due to gravity) required to raise you to the required height.
escape velocity applies absolutely to a catapult, not at all to a flying saucer with limitless zero-point fuel (which could ascend as slowly as the pilot liked), and somewhere in between for a rocket that
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I'm hoping that you didn't miss the point, which is that as long as you have enough fuel to do it, you can ascend as slowly as you like.
It's only when you run out of fuel before you reach the desired height that escape velocity applies in order to convert remaining velocity into height.
The catapult also cannot fire a stone into space because the elastic is needs to be vulcanised with unobtanium too...
Finally, tacking against the wind does not violate the laws of physics, and I don't see why tacking against
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I'm sure thats what they told Columbus (Score:2)
No doubt you'd have been down there on the dock pointing and laughing at him,
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Without manned spaceflight, mankind is doomed.
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I'm sure they'll be really good at stopping the sun from swallowing us when it goes red giant on us.
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Suppose it's 1995. The Hubble space telescope is broken. How do you fix it?
Now's it's 2015. The James Webb space telescope is broken. How do you fix it?
Maybe the US in all its financial glory has abandoned human space flight as "cost ineffective". I only hope other societies such as China see things differently and at least try to advance humanity beyond a race of ineffectual bean-counters.
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James Webb will be unfixable since no manned platform (including the Shuttle) can reach its orbit.
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Well sadly the answer is "we do nothing" in 2015.
But that is a whole level of stupid. It's 2015 - we should be able to easily manage a manned trip to a La Grange point (or a telepresence trip with a suitable robot to a La Grange - frankly the payload requirements would be similar for both).
We should be able to slingshot, if not bother landing, on the moon easily. The benefits of having that capability in terms of orbital instrumentation would be immense.
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I do have to agree...
We've made great advances as a result of manned space flight, but it doesn't seem so functional now.
There needs to be at least some kind of practical reason to send a man up into space now. If we could develop the means to slowly terraform Mars for example, sure send a man up. But right now I don't see a compelling reason to reinvest in manned missions when probes are doing a decent job. (Maybe not as good as a man, but there is a Cost to Benefit relationship here too)
Just Finish It (Score:2)
If they would just fucking pick something and COMPLETE it, stay with the basic design and develop a wide base of manufacturing for it, manned flight would be cheaper and more reliable. The Shuttle was an expensive sports cars with too many moving parts and too few suppliers.
I think they were on the right track with the Orion, but once again it was killed half way through development. You can't keep killing development programs half way through and then wonder why NASA wants more money.
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Later today we'll also get the 5th story about how Buzz Aldrin is pissed too.
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The shuttle was more than just a truck to deliver large loads to space or a commuter vehicle to get astronauts up there. It was also large enough to perform as an orbiting lab for science experiments that could only be performed in zero G. (Perhaps now that we have the ISS that function isn't as important). The shuttle was also the only way to bring cargo back to earth from orbit, and there were several such experiments placed in orbit to study exposure to space environments.
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Their different thinking is more easily explained by the fact that they left this planet and viewed it from a distance, than because they feel themselves political tools.