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Space

Goldin to Retire from NASA 429

Posted by michael from the gone-fishing dept.
nervesmiffs writes: "Lots of people hated him. I believe he has been one of the truly great leaders of our time. He has completely turned NASA around during his 10 year tenure. Here's the retirement story." So if you were NASA's next director, what would you do with the agency? Men on Mars? Probes on Europa? Trans-warp drives?
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Goldin to Retire from NASA More

Goldin to Retire from NASA

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  • Question... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So if you were NASA's next director, what would you do with the agency?

    Why, would they hire me?

  • what to do (Score:2, Funny)

    by donabal ( 116308 )
    lets fix all our social problems with the moon.

    perhaps we can give israel half of the moon, and the palestinians the other half.

    then no more land disputes.

    plus, if they wanted to terrorize the earth, we'd seem them coming from over 100,000 miles away.

    heh

    --donabal
  • Great... next thing you know, NASA will be losing vehicles in the Gamma Quadrant, and then who knows what'll happen to their funding.
  • Were I offered the job, the overriding priority would be manned missions to Mars, starting with exploration, and ending with colonization.

    No question about it.

    DG

  • if we don't do it on the moon first... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gonar ( 78767 ) <sparkalicious@ve ... minus herbivore> on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:38PM (#2442766) Homepage
    well never do it on mars..

    i've said it before but...

    [RANT]

    we need a moon base. in the words of hienlein (I think), "once you are on the moon, you are halfway to anywhere"

    I was born in 1967, by the time I was in kindergarten, we had been to the moon several times. by the time I was 10, we had driven dune buggies on the moon. now, 23 years later, we have sat around with our thumbs you know where, and we think Skylab++ is an amazing achievement, while we underfund or dont even try to fund the cool stuff which could lead to a truly spacefaring humanity.

    look at the launchers that have been cancelled or delayed just in the last 5 years:

    delta clipper (dc-x) (cancelled)
    x-33 (delayed)
    rotary rocket (died for lack of funding)
    kistler k-1 (delayed - please don't kill it)
    Beal BA-2 (killed by a concerted effort by 2 governments and enviro-weenies)
    blackhorse (rocketplane) (lack of funding)
    kellyspace (lack of funding)

    most of these programs required no more than $100M to survive, but couldn't get even that, at a time when our gov't spends that much every day dropping bombs on empty "terrorist training camps".

    are you pissed yet? you should be living on the moon by now.

    [/RANT]

    • are you pissed yet? you should be living on the moon by now.

      What's there for me to want to live on the moon? I mean, besides all of the cheese and moon pies I can eat.

    • I tend to agree: Moon first, then on to Mars. Mars is more important, but:

      • We have to make absolutely certain there is no life on Mars now before we start messing around there. If there IS (and I hope so), then we have to study the hell out of it before we decide it's cool to send living organisms there.
      • We have a lot to learn about space travel, and the Moon is a much easier, lower risk target.
      • We can get resources from the Moon we can actually use.

      The Space Station will probably die with the Goldin admin. This will be bad and sad, but it's a long term good thing, since the beast is poorly conceived, massively expensive, and doesn't do enough to forward long-term goals.

      Overall, I liked Dan Goldin. He was in love with new technology, and has been vigorously pushing innovation. The Space Station albatross could have dragged anyone down.

      • The Space Station will probably die with the Goldin admin. This will be bad and sad, but it's a long term good thing, since the beast is poorly conceived, massively expensive, and doesn't do enough to forward long-term goals.

        I work at NASA Goddard in Maryland, and the ISS is alive and kicking. There are tons and tons of resources working on the project, and it would be a huge reversal for the ISS to die. It's a massive undertaking, and it's projects like the ISS that will begin to enable further things, like ISS-originating spaceflight which would eliminate the need for costly and difficult ground launches to get space vehicles in the air. The focus here at NASA IS to get things like Moon bases and Mars landings...but we need decent tools to do it first.
    • Agreed.

      I won't miss DG. He has become a government kissass in the last few years and that is not what NASA needed. NASA needs strong leadership with vision and balls to stand firm on the vision. It is a complete disgrace that at this point in time and entire generation has become 'Adult's' since the last time we landed a human on the moon.

      A lunar launch base is absolutly essential to making a Mars program work yet we have nothing to show for progress other than the ISS... which isn't exactly progress at this point; under budgeted and now forever crippled by being understaffed.

      Dan:: so long and thanks for the fish. I would loved to have seen you resign with the meter/feet incident. In the big picture that should never have happened; you guys are supposed to be rocket scientists.

    • "If we don't do it on the moon first, we'll never do it on mars."

      Didn't they say that in Flesh Gordon, or one of those other cheesy spaceporn movies?
    • I agree 100%. I'm very much against high taxes and big government, but I would be proud to pay more taxes if I knew they were being spent for actual scientific research and space exploration.

      About the most I can do now is join the mars society [marssociety.org]. They have lofty goals, but as the previous poster said, we need to go to the moon again and build a base there.

    • My favorite quote about this... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by devphil ( 51341 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @03:07PM (#2442967) Homepage


      ...is one from Jerry Pournelle (who IIRC is/was the president of the citizen's space advisory council -- for a while they actually had people in Washington listening to them):

      I always knew I would live to see the first man on the moon. I never dreamed I would see the last.
    • we need a moon base. in the words of hienlein (I think), "once you are on the moon, you are halfway to anywhere"
      Besides being an incorrect quote this is in fact not true. A moon base is not better than an orbiting station as a launching pad to Mars, indeed it is much WORSE. Why? Because you have to break free of the moon's gravity in order to begin the mission. THIS FORCES YOU TO BURN MORE FUEL THAN THE REST OF THE ENTIRE MISSION. The moon is a gravity well. It's like saying lets start an Everest expedition from the dead sea, it makes no sense.

      • Re:if we don't do it on the moon first... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gonar ( 78767 ) <sparkalicious@ve ... minus herbivore> on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @03:24PM (#2443065) Homepage
        um no.

        I am not suggesting originating missions on earth, stopping for lunch on the moon then hopping off to mars.

        I am suggesting that missions start from scratch from the moon using things like linear accelerators ( fuel stays behind, you only have to launch the payload, no aerodynamic drag and 1/6th earths gravity well )

        sure it will take time and money to set up a true moon colony (not a hotel for astronauts but a true living facility, complete with hydroponics, solar power generation and manufacturing facilities)

        but if we had gone on straight to that after Apollo 16 instead of 30 years of thumb sitting, we would be there by now.

        besides, if we cant put together a base on the moon, what could possibly make anyone think we could do it on mars?

      • The gravity well on the earth is 22 times stronger than that on the moon. It's much easier to get to space from the moon than from the Earth. Of course it is easiest of all if you are starting out at a space station, but it's much easier to build large facillities if you have some gravity (like on the moon) than it is in free space.

        Besides if we are going all the way to Mars, we might as well test out some of the tech by going to the Moon.
    • most of these programs required no more than $100M to survive, but couldn't get even that, at a time when our gov't spends that much every day dropping bombs on empty "terrorist training camps".

      Let's make the world a safe place before we go off wrecking other planets/moons, etc. Imagine what those nutbags could to with commercial trips to/from the moon and airtight moon colonies?? It would make 9/11 look like a cherry bomb in comparison.
    • "are you pissed yet? you should be living on the moon by now."

      Hold on there cowboy, I just got broadband in my neighborhood. Listening to those static-filled conversations that astronauts have with Houston Control even a 3Com modem couldn't hold THAT signal.

    • The moon is just as far, from a resource and expenses standpoint, as Mars is.

      If we can go to the moon, we can just as easily go to Mars - and during certain times of the year, it's even *easier* to get to Mars than it is to the moon, because of the timing of things.

      Also, getting there is only half the problem. Stopping and landing is a big deal - and guess what: it's easier to stop on Mars (aerobraking) than it is on the Moon (retro rockets, burning precious fuel).

      There's nothing on the moon worth the effort. Mars has *lots* to offer. We should go there first...
      • The moon is just as far, from a resource and expenses standpoint, as Mars is.

        Sure, the fuel consumption is about the same. The distance, time and kilometer wise, is very different. First, it takes a long time to get there, and you have to worry about the effects on radiation, boredom, etc. on passengers. Communication is much tougher, because of the long delays it takes for a signal to get to Earth and back. You also need a lot more fuel on the return trip because Mars' gravity is much larger and Moon's.

        There's nothing on the moon worth the effort. Mars has *lots* to offer. We should go there first...

        What does it have to offer?

    • Why do we need to first build a base on the Moon? There's no resources there, no way to make fuel, no building materials. It's just a gravity well that we'd be better off avoiding. If you use Mars' atmosphere as a brake, it actually costs less [colorado.edu] delta-v (and therefore fuel) to land on Mars than on the Moon.

      Altough its unconventional, Zubrin's Mars Direct [sciam.com] plan makes a lot of sense. I suggest everyone interested in space exploration pick up a copy of his book.

      Still, we need to lessen the cost of Earth low orbit. That should be the administration's first goal. Sadly, this goal isn't compatible with NASA's current corporate welfare programs (ISS and Shuttle) that please the constituents.
  • I would study and apply to concept of a space elevator on Mars. It would facilitate landing / take off to our sister planet and no fanatic would be able to blow it up.

    Then, once we have mastered the technology over there and removed the terrorist over here, we can build anotehr one on Earth.

  • Start with the moon (Score:2, Interesting)

    by .sig ( 180877 )
    We've been there already, why not go back. We send people out in space stations all the time (relatively), so why not start building a station on the moon. At least we wouldn't have to worry about keeping it in orbit. Maybe sometime in the near future it oculd be liviable, and we could start making plans to actually develop the moon for habitation.

  • On the topic of NASA in general. (Score:3, Informative)

    by trilucid ( 515316 ) <pparadis@havensystems.net> on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:41PM (#2442791) Homepage Journal

    If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of NASA, you may want to check out the pseudo-fictional (historical fiction, real events, mostly real people, some author elaboration) book Space [amazon.com] by James A. Meichner. It's a long read, but well worth it.

    The article asks where the space program in the States should go next... perhaps a good way to start is to look at the past. Where have we gone seriously wrong, and what have we done right? What can we do better in this century is the real question, I suppose.

    To the naysayers, I'm (1) not plugging this book for profit, (2) not associated with Amazon.com, (3) a definite literature geek. You may not like it, but at least give it a shot :).

  • Take Stephen Hawking's Advice (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hether ( 101201 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:42PM (#2442797)
    I would take Stephen Hawking's advice and work on a Star Trek style "warp drive" so that we can colonize space before the human race is wiped out.

    http://news.excite.com/news/r/011016/09/odd-hawkin g-dc [excite.com]

  • Radio Telescope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quizme2000 ( 323961 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:43PM (#2442800) Homepage Journal
    Build a hugh radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, its the only place in the galaxy where you wouldn't pick up noise from us earthlings. Not very sexy, but probably 100x more useful than sending little R\C toys to mars IMHO.

    • Re:Radio Telescope (Score:2, Insightful)

      by magarity ( 164372 )
      "only place in the galaxy where you wouldn't pick up noise from us earthlings"

      Since the 1936 Berlin Olympics were the first high-powered television broadcast, This should read: "the only place within 65 light years where you wouldn't pick up noise from us earthlings."

    • Would you have to build a railway track all the way around the moon so that the telescope could move around always stay on the dark side?

      ;)

      Ohh, the FAR side of the moon. Or perhaps dark in the radio spectrum...
    • Speaking as someone who wrote a thesis using radio astronomy data, we'd rather have 500 huge radio telescopes on earth, and let you keep the change.
    • Build a hugh radio telescope on the dark side of the moon, its the only place in the galaxy where you wouldn't pick up noise from us earthlings.
      To quote the very end of the relevant Pink Floyd album, "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." The moon rotates once every 28 days, during which period it also completes one trip around the Earth (relative to an inertial frame of reference). So there is no "dark side"; the moon has a day-night cycle just like Earth's, only slower. (There may be permanently shadowed areas inside polar craters, but this hardly counts as a "side".) The "it's all dark" addendum is surprisingly good astronomy, too; the moon's surface is one of the darkest in the solar system, roughly comparable to rough asphalt in color and albedo (reflectivity).

      What the moon does have is a far side. Because it is tidally locked to Earth, its periods of rotation and revolution are the same, so that it keeps one hemisphere permanently turned earthward, and the other permanently turned away. (Actually, there is a small amount of "rocking" (libation) which means we see a little more than half the moon as the edges rock into view, but this is a small (less than 10%) effect.)

      And yes, the lunar farside would be a reasonable place to put some kinds of astronomical gear, but in general, deep space is better. Modern beam-forming is good enough to exclude most off-beam signals, and you can build arbitrarily large and delicate structures in microgravity. Building these at e.g. L4/5 or in an L1 halo orbit makes a lot of sense. The moon could still play a major role in such an effort, as a source of raw materials. A mining operation with a Heinlein-style electromagnetic mass driver could sling payloads of e.g. aluminum and oxygen up to a construction team building a large antenna elsewhere in Earth's neighborhood.

  • I'm not sure if I should say "Yah" or "Holy crap" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:43PM (#2442801) Homepage
    I'm not sure what I should think.

    On one hand, Goldin has done some good things. And he did some difficult things that needed to be done.

    On the other hand, he's done some crappy things. He cut down NASA expendatures too much.

    The problem is, nobody wants to be the NASA administrator. He would have been replaced now, but nobody wants his job. I know that Jerry Pournelle, deizen of Byte Magazine, famed Science Fiction writer, and often advisor to congress, turned the possibility of that position down (rumors were flying he was in the running).

    The problem is that NASA, while it enjoys bipartisan support, is always on the chopping block. Most of the expendatures have to go to the different NASA centers that have to remain there for NASA to get congressional support. The infrastructure for the shuttle MUST get funding, and enough of it, or else safety will slip, we'll loose another shuttle, and heads will roll. It's also the only available craft for returning cargo to the earth, construction tasks in orbit, lifting space station parts, etc. It does too many things to have an easy replacement.

    Whoever takes his role will have more hard decisions, trouble because of Sept 11-related extra funding, etc.

    If I don't live to see men on Mars in my lifetime, I'm going to be pissed. If I'm alive to see a time when space isn't inhabited by humans, I'm going to be pissed.
  • would implement my datailed plan ona logical and safe(as it can be) way to get mankind on mars.
    I would also ensure that the next generation of space telescope gets into space.
    My goal for these items is too fold:
    1. Find a planet that can support human life
    2. Send people there.
    I would work my PR machine so hard, that after 10 years, there would be too much momentum to stop.
    I would first sent the taliban. After a couple of years I would start a project on how to get people there and get them back...

  • I would send people back to the moon... but this time, to set up a permanent base using technology developed for the long mars trip. Instead of research being the primary goal, they would be focused on the practical arts, so that unlike most every other mission they could pay, at least in part, for the expense of being there. They would be manufacturing heavy items - structural members, fuel, etc. - so that we don't have to ship them up from earth at high cost. They would develop new technologies for living and travelling in space. They would manufacture items that could only be fashioned in low/zero-g, and shoot them to earth. They would become a base for lunar/asteroid mining for rare elements.

    Why put all that money and risk on a mission to mars first? Why not try it out in our own backyard, where we can support them if need be?

  • I'd love for the next NASA administrator to press for a man on Mars, probes to the outer planets, interstellar probes, ... the list goes on. Let's be realistic though; with recent events NASA's spending priority will be falling. (Too bad the Afghans aren't trying to beat us to the Moon.)

    The next NASA administrator should invest heavily in high-risk engineering projects that could lower launch costs. This is the role of NASA as a research center; commercial launch companies are already efficiently launching satellites, while the Shuttle and ISS projects are already well in hand. If the Venture Star (or some related SSTO vehicle) could actually work, it would cut launch costs by an order of magnitude, thus reducing the cost of a manned Mars mission from $100 billion to $10 billion. That way, a mission to Mars would no longer require the complete dedication of a nation's technology infrastructure, which is hard to justify for any goal short of war.

    • The problem is that spending on breakthrough, high-risk stuff has gotten NASA nowhere. It killed the X-33 program.

      What we need is a reliable and efficent SSTO. Right now, we can build it. It will have 1/4 the cargo capacity of the shuttle, and a marked improvement in costs. It wouldn't be the wonder vehicle that the shuttle was supposed to be. It won't replace the shuttle. It would be run like a cargo airliner. Go from the airport to a point in orbit, drop off cargo, go back. Rinse and repeat, once a week.

      The problem is that NASA can't afford the shuttle AND something else. This wouldn't be a problem if we had the infrastructure to make it work. Jerry Pournelle think we need zero-prebreathe suits, so that going outside the space station is as simple as going out of an arctic research station. I personally think an inflatable construction shack in orbit would work well, too. We need a second space station, so we don't disrupt the science experiments with all of that hammering. We need an orbital transfer vehicle to take cargo from one part of orbit to another. And we need construction worker astronauts, not just engineer astronauts.

      What do we have already? Well, we have one space station that we might be able to get some engineering effort out of to build the second one. But NASA would probably end up redesigning everything because that's the way they work. We'd need new spacesuits -- NASA keeps cutting the funding on new space suit research. We don't have an orbital transfer vehicle. NASA cut the transhab, which would have provided us with the engineering knowlege to make large inflatable structures in space.

      And, the new orbital transport would result in a LOT of NASA engineers at KSC being laid off, which is not a pleasant thought, either.
      And furthermore, every 4 years, you run the risk of a change in administration. Which means that 4 years down the road, all of your sponsors could dissapear. The NASA administrator could get replaced by someone with a different vision. Congressional priorities could change. The president may be different. All of this will destroy the carefully planned more-than-4-year-plan for the eventual US dominance of space.

      Our only hope for a cool NASA is a space race with China.

  • ALICE speaks out about NASA (Score:4, Funny)

    by btellier ( 126120 ) <btellier@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:46PM (#2442823)
    me> Alot of people dislike Goldin.
    alice> What do you like?

    me> What's your take on him?
    alice> Objective case of He, used as a predicate complement with a linking verb. Also standing for Imperial Majesty.

    me> Fascinating.
    alice>Yes Mr. Spock?

    me> What do you see as the future of NASA?
    alice> I don't eat that.

    me> Excuse me, ALICE
    alice> You're excused.

    me> what is the future of nasa
    alice>You are talking to her.

    me> have you been drinking this afternoon?
    alice>No I don't think I have been drinking this afternoon. Have you?

    me> i'm drinking right now
    alice>At this moment It's good to meet someone who is drinking.

    me> Are you coming on to me?
    alice>Do I act like it? I don't mean to come across that way.

    me> What's your sign, baby?
    alice>Don't call me "baby". Saggitarius

    me> let's go back to your place.
    alice>That sounds good to me.
  • The original note notes "Lots of people hated him. I believe he has been one of the truly great leaders of our time. He has completely turned NASA around during his 10 year tenure."

    Ten years ago it was coming off the Challenger disaster and attempting to get funding for the space station. Morale sucked, and all the good science projects kept getting canned.

    Today NASA has largely forgotten the Challenger disaster, to the point where it cut the space lifeboat. They continue to attempt to get funding for the hole-in-space station, but now they can't even justify why. Morale sucks, and all the good science projects keep getting canned.

    Some change, indeed.

    I don't know if Goldin is a good or bad guy, I don't think that's the point. The point is that he is definitely the WRONG guy. I don't know, making money at TRW during Star Wars doesn't really strike me as credentials for running NASA.
    He did no good for NASA's image, and his hissy fit over Tito make him look like an ass. Congress doesn't seem to like him either. And he just can't seem to say no.

    What NASA needs is Steve Jobs. A completely crazy git who will cancel a whole bunch of really great things and freak the crap out of everyone, but in the end leave a core with a vision and the bottom line to do it. You might not like the vision and be pissed off that he killed the Comet Smasher Express, but it would have died anyway, death of a thousand cuts.

    Maury
    • Jobs in charge of NASA.....

      That sounds incredibly cool. I think it would work really well. Of course, I could also see NASA switching to Macs after he becomes appointed. :-)

  • To Do List (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:48PM (#2442843)
    1) Faster propulsion, and if that means nuclear powered engines, so be it.
    1a) Develop heavy lift capability.
    2) Develop tech necessary for colonization, and use the moon as a testbed.
    3) Do thorough study of the moon, manned study if necessary (probably is), in particular to find all water and mineable metals that may be there. Not to bring back to Earth, but so we won't need to transport them from Earth.
    4) Especially if #3 allows for the construction of spacecraft hulls, when 1-3 are done, head to Mars. Use tech from #1a to transport the machinery to equip the craft.
    • I would also add artificial gravity to that list. Zero-g environments are huge problem.

      A lot of first-time space travelors have to indure about a week of illness just to adjust to zero-g. You have extreme disorientation because there is no definite up/down/left/right. Plus the long term effects can be extremely hazardous to your health (returning to a positive-g environment can be very hard on your heart. Your bones get mis-aligned etc).

      Until space ships are equiped with artificial gravity then space travel as a tourist option is out of the question.

      --
      Garett

    • 0) Reduce cost of launch to Earth orbit.
      0.1) Reduce cost of launch to Earth orbit.
      0.2) Reduce cost of launch to Earth orbit.
      ...

      You do stuff with money. Almost anything NASA does involves launch to Earth orbit (sometimes with further destinations beyond, sometimes not). Therefore, reduce this one single cost and you immediately increase your ability to do stuff. Granted, this cost can be broken down into parts: more automated preflight/launch/operation/landing/postflight procedures (especially the first and last of those), redesigning equipment so it can be maintained easier, speeding up said maintenance (for instance, doing some minor fixes on the pad if it's already there instead of requiring the shuttle to be hauled back to the hangar just to see if a wire's loose), and so forth - but those all boil down to a number of ways you can reduce cost of launch to Earth orbit.

      Eyes on the prize...
    • Develop tech necessary for colonization, and use the moon as a testbed.

      How about we use Earth as a test bed. Much cheaper and safer. There are certianly plenty of very hostile environments. Still not cheap either.
  • I'm tired of the $2 billion/year ego project that the ISS is. I'd go back to really good 100 million buck science projects, and fund 20 of em a year, or 5 bigger and 12 smaller ones. I suspect a few scientists would agree.

    People forget that it takes foundational science to do sexy science, and there are TONS of really worthy and interesting projects that get sidelined by sex appeal.

    Even the dreamers should realize that ISS does much less to get folks on mars for example than real good focused R&D here on earth.

    Man on mars (one way trip to start) is definatly cool, but let's take a pause to do some real science for a while, say 5 years, then see where we are.

  • Perfect Idea (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 )
    Rotate the Hubble Telescope towards Afghanistan so we can see WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON down there.

    For real.

  • Goldin not so great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by crayz ( 1056 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @02:58PM (#2442917) Homepage
    I highly recommend the NASA Watch [nasawatch.com] website, which has a highly informed (and often highly critical) view of NASA and especially Goldin.

    He wrote an editorial [nasawatch.com] a couple weeks ago saying that he didn't think Goldin would be replaced any time soon. Well obviously that prediction turned out to be wrong, but I am eagerly awaiting his comments on Goldin's departure.

    I think Goldin was seen by a lot of people as a bureaucrat, as someone who was holding NASA back, not advocating for them strongly enough in Congress, and not setting his sights high. The ISS has become a monstrosity that has gobbled up dozens of other scientific missions, and now it looks like barely any science will be possible due to massive cost-overruns and then the slashing of key portions of the station.

    My personal hope, at this point almost prayer, is that the new director has the vision and balls to put humans on Mars within the next 20 years. Right now it seems almost impossible that that could happen, but it should have happened already, and I for one am sick of waiting.

    • Goldin's biggest flaw is that he's been a staunch supporter of George Abbey. Anybody who's followed NASA politics knows that George Abbey runs the manned spaceflight crew rosters with a mixture of cronyism and voodoo. People get dropped from missions without explanation and put into permanent perpetual hold until they figure out what they did to piss Abbey off and either resign or correct their mistakes.

      Manned spaceflight has no room for such nonsense. Abbey grew close to Goldin and NASA has suffered for his presence.

      Yes, the ISS needs more money to avoid becoming the kind of white elephant the Space Shuttle turned out to be. Yes, the cost overruns on the ISS have eaten the NASA budget alive and killed unmanned missions that could have had high value. But there's only so much a NASA administrator can do without the support of the American public. Right now, it's going to be hard to push for more money for space exploration when people are worried about contracting fatal diseases from opening their mail. You need to recognize what the winnable battles are, and right now, one fast way to improve NASA is to fire George Abbey and put somebody with integrity in charge of manned spaceflight.

    • First thing I checked after I saw the story on slashdot was nasa watch.. ;)

      I suspect that the ISS has potential to get better. Think about it this way. It costs a crapload of money to build the station well enough so it's barely usable. The problem right now was getting that all together. So the cost of doing ANYTHING interesting with perminant space habitation was a crapload of money.

      Now, 4 years down the road, what's the cost of doing something else interesting with perminant space habitation? One shuttle mission, some astronaut time, and the construction of one module. 1/20-1/100 of the cost of the space station. You can run that project on the same timeline as an average successful probe project. 2 years of hardcore work, then you watch as the probe does its stuff. These things slide into the budget with much greater ease than the repeated chunks of NASA budget that the ISS has been taking over the past 20 years, with the deliverables finally in place.

      The next administrator for NASA, I hope, is somebody with both practical knowlege and vision. They need to have the vision to discover the realm of possibility. They need to have the practical knowlege to know that the best way is to make small steps, tiny projects, things that can be done easily, that advance the larger goal of humanity leaving the planet. Of creating projects that produce delivarables in a 2-3 year timeframe so that the next guy to administer NASA can't cancel them before they produce deliverables, so that the work isn't lost.
  • Get us their permanently, with O'Neill colonies [nasa.gov] in the L4 and L5 points. Beam collected solar energy to collectors on Earth, and solve the energy problem. Move from internal combustion to fuel cells with the collected energy. Clean up the sky.

    Then start thinking space elevator. Once we've done that, we can start thinking about getting off this rock.

    Then the future is here.


  • So if you were NASA's next director, what would you do with the agency?

    I'd find another scam to keep the money rolling in as the "Life on Mars" story is wearing a bit thin.


    "Warp drives are just around the corner" would be a good one - especially if you can convince the defence guys that phasers photon torpedoes would come out of the same research.


    Maybe NASA could go religious. Maybe they could start publishing stories about how they can find evidence of God in the stars. Maybe his name is etched on a planet somewhere if only they could launch a big enough telescope to see it. Or some weird anomaly in the distribution of planets that would make it easy for Jesus to travel from one to the next saving alien souls. That would guarantee lots of money from those gullible Americans. He he...maybe they could launch a mission to demonstrate that the universe is in fact only 5732 years, 3 months and 21 days old. Divert a bit of money from those wacky Creationists.


    But please, please, please. Drop the "Life on Mars" stories!

  • (I'll leave my thoughts on Goldin out of this, except to say I was not one of his bigger fans.)


    First, NASA needs to have clearly-set goals, with a clearly-defined timetable. Sure, you can argue all you like about the politics of getting man on the moon, but the fact is this: NASA -did- achieve the goal, inside the time specified.


    What those goals would be are not altogether clear, though they WOULD include pushing the hard science and the frontiers of what's possible, especially in space.


    (We already know you can do research in space. Spacelab proved that. Mir proved that. If it doesn't lead to growth, it risks leading to stagnation.)


    I believe oxygen-breathing rockets and laser-propulsion need resources. I believe that NASA's goal should not so much be a man on Mars by the end of the century, but rather a permanent supply station in Mars orbit and the first steps to a Biosphere II on a Jovian moon, by 2005.


    (Why Jupiter? Because that way, you have a secure point, each side of the asteroid belt, from which you can do anything from mining work to deep space research, with increasing independence on shipping materials over. Only securing one side or the other just increases the costs - and the risks - of moving through, and doesn't provide as good a platform from which to catapult further missions.)


    Isn't the time-frame a little... optimistic? Not really. Virtually all the hard parts (figuring out what's needed in a biosphere, figuring out how to build a self-navigating vehicle, constructing spacestation modules) have already been solved. The only real time needed is to get the stuff to where it's wanted.


    Mars, you should be able to reach in a year. Jupiter, maybe two or three. That gives you a year to build some skeletal components, and launch them. That's not a huge amount of time, but it's certainly doable. There's nothing impossible about building combined habitat module / DS-1 in that kind of timeframe.


    Why not go to the moon? The answer is simple. Why bother? We know that simple economics and social inertia make it unlikely that you could try for a second major space endeavor, which means that you really truly don't want dead-end destinations. At least, not right now.


    By getting a platform in space which corporations can use for their own profits, you're not providing the same kind of dead-ends. The paths are open, the incentives are there, and there's just a chance that somebody will want to see where we can go from there.

  • Since NASA headquarters moved into the "rough" part of DC, there have, of course, been stray bullets in the area. One actually made it through someone's window, leaving a nice sized bullet-hole through the middle. The next day there was a sign beside the hole saying, "Goldin's office is on the third floor" or words to that effect...

    Overheard by a colleague at a conference.
  • Whatever happened to those hoverboards from "Back to the Future"? Didn't some company claim they worked?

    I also remember an article in Omni I think (probably 5 years ago) about somebody that created a spinning top that defied gravity, but it was unstable because they said that gravity is not constant.

    Personally, I'd just like to have a SkyCar for now. But maybe a personal shuttle would be kinda fun. They need to get artificial gravity working though, I don't want hook a vacuum to my privates.
    • The hover boards did work.

      IIRC, they required a large setup to put the EM field in the areas you want to ride the hoverboard.

      So, yes, they worked. No, they weren't practical.

  • I'm wondering where might the replacement come from? somone already in NASA or someone from outside NASA?

    I have to vote for somone outside NASA that just grew up in love with star trek and can't get enough of this new fangled farscape thing. All I want is a space geek from outside NASA.

    I think anyone inside NASA may be to beholden to the past and has already given up on Mars in his or her lifetime. someone from outside might not yet have their spirit broken and will wonder "well why haven't we" all the time. Then go about making it happen.
    • There is one that I know of.

      Jerry Pournelle is a SF writer who plays well with the political circles. He's pragmatic and realistic. His name has been bandied about with respect to NASA administrator once or twice.
      He also won't touch the position with a 10 foot pole. Why? Probably because he'd have to make too many extremely hard decisions with consequences. He'd cut things that the rest NASA wouldn't want to cut. And he wouldn't want to deal with all of the existing NASA crap.
  • someone needs to make some real money from space exploration to keep it viable. Produce giant tomatoes, or perfectly round ball bearings, or somthing with a viable financial future to boost NASA :)
  • Faster: The party will only last for 45 minutes.

    Cheaper: Keeping with NASA policy, it will only cost 12 million dollars.

    Smaller: It will take place in a closet in DC.

    Ironic: The party will start off looking very good, but before anything truly cool can happen, it will mysteriously stop.
  • Dan Goldin saw NASA through the end of female boomer fertility without any revolutionary acts in the private sector -- despite the dangers presented by large transfers of wealth into high tech IPOs. The generation raised to believe theirs was to be the "space age" generation is no longer a threat to the civilization as we know it.

    Good work, Dan -- you saved the planet the most horrifying fate of allowing the pioneering culture that founded the United States of America to escape being turned into a feminized consumer culture.

    Now we can all look forward to a more stable, terrestrial-bound future -- if the oil producing coutries continue exporting, the anthrax vaccines don't have too many side-effects, no one engineers any Y-chromosome specific retroviruses and ...

    ...uh...

    ...um...

    ...Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to domesticate that pioneering culture...

    Are there any of those kind left in places like the Alaska now that we've gotten most of the best women born there to come to the lower 48 and be fuck-dolls? If we can find any we could put them on a reservation somewhere in the Yukon or maybe even, oh, I don't know, Kodiak Island(?), and let them try to do something ...

  • Infrastructure! No more one-shot deals. (Score:3, Informative)

    by GPS Pilot ( 3683 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @03:32PM (#2443135)
    The overriding philosophy that must be adopted is to start building an infrastructure for human outposts that can "live off the land."

    The failing of the Apollo program was that each mission was self-contained. The missions should have left behind pieces of infrastructure that could be re-used in future missions; instead, junk and toys like single-use moon buggies are strewn all over the lunar surface.

    I'm talking about power units (solar or nuclear); units that extract oxygen or turn the lunar soil into cement, metal, or glass building materials; and with the discovery of polar ice, water-extraction units. These are the things that will make largely self-sufficient outposts possible.

    Not everything needs to be made off-planet. Microprocessors are light and easy to ship; it wouldn't make sense for Intel to build a fab on the moon anytime soon. But at $10,000 per pound to low earth orbit, we'll never get anywhere until the high-mass needs of our astronauts are met with resources that don't have to be lifted out of the earth's massive gravity well.

    This is why de-orbiting Mir frustrated me so greatly. Everyone though of it as an either/or situation: either burn it in, or find money to maintain it and keep it manned. No one seemed to consider the third and best option: boost it into a non-decaying orbit, and leave it there unmanned as a resource to exploit in the future. Because, you see, it contained hundreds of tons of aerospace-grade steel, titanium, and aluminum. Someday (10 years from now? 80? it doesn't matter!) we'll have foundries in orbit which could have melted it down into components for future space structures. Structures which will now be vastly more expensive because we have to re-boost all that mass at $10,000 per pound, instead of using a resource that had already been put in orbit.

    Another example: the original Reagan-era plans for the Space Station included a large hangar where interplanetary vehicles could be assembled. That's forward-thinking INFRASTRUCTURE, folks! Oh, and the Station was projected to cost only $6 billion at that time. Now, after innumerable Congressionally-mandated redesigns to "save money," all the cool features like the hangar have been eliminated.

    By the way, asteroids have an even shallower gravity well than the moon. We need to be prospecting those puppies yesterday. Especially given Steven Hawking's warning about space colonies being necessary for mankind's survival.
  • Work on better propulsion. Trans-warp drives or whatever you want to call them, we should get better vehicles before we worry about doing anything else in space. Once we have such means of transportation, all of our missions will be much easier, faster, and we will be able to to so much more.

  • Thank God (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Dev ( 19322 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @03:39PM (#2443190)
    Good riddance Dan. Remember when NASA had successful planetary missions? Remember when NASA did great things? Today NASA does great things in spite of you, not because of you.

    You stood by for 7 of 8 years while NASA's budget was reduced. You spend countless hours and money on your insane quest to eliminate the venerable NASA "worm logo". Your "faster better cheaper" was none of the above and cost billions in failed missions and years of setbacks in the evolution of space exploration.

    One has to wonder if it was just incompetence or if the above was actually your intended goal. Perhaps you were instructed to keep NASA from exploring too fast or discovering too much at this critical time in our cultural evolution.

    NASA has a wonderful opportunity now to turn itself around and once again lead the evolution
    of the human civilization by exploring and colonizing space, and all the new technology that derives from that quest.

  • Comments on Goldin (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jpgrimes ( 15330 )
    I am of 2 minds on this
    1) I've heard Goldin talk at AAS (American Astronomical Society) meetings and was very disturbed by him. The best part was his comments on how genetic algorthimns should be used to do everything and that all of our current computational methodology was useless. Being someone who does use genetic algorithmns occasionally I couldn't believe how obvious it was that he had no idea idea of what he spoke. And he continued on several topics just spewing ignorance. Even worse was his reply to a questioner that tried to be reasonable. So he, as a person I really dislike

    2) Nasa before Goldin was a mess, it still has a long way to go but its has improved. Most engineers don't go to Nasa anymore, a lot fo money and beauractic waste still occurs. But it has gotten better under him. As much as I don't agree with much of his vision he does have far more long term goals then previous adminstrators-and that is good. Also, faster, better, cheaper is mostly a good idea.

    SO although I don't like him, his methods, or his goals I do think Nasa is better than it was when he started.

  • I'd bring it all back in house... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @03:43PM (#2443218) Journal
    If you want NASA to be special - make it special. Don't make it a civil service career choice where you never get fired and you plod along, engineering paper, while the contractors do all the hands-on work. Fire all the contractors. If you don't want something to be in house, it's not important enough to keep at all - just sell it off.

    Make NASA the place that every top engineering and science Brainiac want's to go. Yeah, it might be a training ground for industry - but make people want to stay. Make every project important. Some science areas are like this. It's amazing when you see the fire in the eyes of a scientist in Goddard SFCs earth sciences area working twelve hour days because they absolutly love it. It's also depressing to see engineers - good, creative engineers - reduced to pushing papers so that engineers at a contractor (be it large or small) can do the hands on work.

    I'd eliminate the contract system for engineering and science services. If you want it done, do it in house.
  • Simple answer! Trans-warp.

    "And in recent news, the science and technology necessary for Trans-warp travel have suddenly become available. Most credit the recent takeover of NASA by Mr. PimpinMonk."
  • I already bought the prime real estate [moonshop.com]. All your base are belong to me.
  • All these worlds are yours, except Europa...
    Attempt no landings there.
    Dave Bowman, via HAL

    Don't forget what happened to the Chinese!

    ;-)

  • Public Relations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pz ( 113803 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2001 @04:43PM (#2443528) Journal
    Funny thing about NASA. There are thousands upon millions of people, kids, teens, adults, who love Space, who love the idea of space travel. People who look at old footage of Apollo launches and get this tingling in their spine like nothing else. These people are *hungry* for what NASA can provide. These people are the astronauts and engineers of tomorrow, people who want to go forth and explore, as is evidenced by the tenor of many of the postings here.

    But, NASA offers them nothing.

    Sure, you can go to Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and spend hours and hours waiting in line for exhibits that are insulting to morons. If you find your self at KSC, don't bother asking any hard questions, as the staffers don't know an Atlas booster from a bottle rocket. Don't expect to see anything other than a watered down Disney version of Space; in Boston, we have a better exhibit (albeit smaller) at the local Science Museum.

    Sure, you can watch NOVA. Or listen to the occasional astronaut interviews on NPR. Or join local interest groups. Or wait in line at book signings to have 15 seconds near an aged astronaut. This is not enough.

    NASA is, and has been historically though the Goldin era, dropping the ball in such a fundamentally stupid way it makes me spit. When they face budgetary cutbacks, crises like the Challenger disaster, competition from ESA, Japan, India, and the like, their best friends would be a supportive public. And yet, they do not recruit the thousands and thousands of space enthusiasts.

    A close friend of mine has been applying to become an astronaut for years (and made it to the interview level last cycle). She was an Aero/Astro major at MIT, and works for a company that supports space missions through contracts with NASA. She travels a good deal as part of her job, and tells me time and time again, people she meets are fascinated by the idea of space travel, but there are no resources she can direct them to. Why isn't NASA using this waiting, eager resource to their benefit?

    NASA needs the public's help and support. If I were the next administrator, I'd made it a priority (after firing Boeing's incompetent ISS staff) to build positive public sentiment. The "amazing benefits to humanity" horse has been flogged to death. Why not NASA-sponsored rocketry competitions? Why not recruit college students into NASA fellowships? Why not a whole lot more visits to elementary schools? I'd eschew the encroaching commercialization, and re-present the NASA of my childhood (one where corners weren't cut, missions captured the public imagination, and astronauts were heros) to the public. Then, the pro-NASA advocation, at the grass-roots, could start.

    -- pz.

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