Subcommittee Stops Human Mars Mission Spending 343
An anonymous reader writes "Last week's House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science FY08 budget markup would prevent work on programs devoted to human missions to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue "development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." The Mars Society is already leading an effort to get the language removed."
If you don't want to d/l a PDF for TFA #1 (Score:3, Informative)
"The bill language also continues a moratorium prohibiting NASA from implementing a reduction in force and from funding any research, development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests."
Re:If you don't want to d/l a PDF for TFA #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
When Bush first announced this initiative, the director of Nasa was a Bush lackey and immediately moved to cut funding to other Nasa program likes Hubble to pay for it. (Eventhough presidents change every 4 to 8 years and with them their initiatives.) Congress pays for Nasa activities, and usually they have control. It just turned out that their was a Bush lackey in charge at Nasa and he started gutting other programs to pay for all this.
This was just a way to call the president out to have him pay for his initiative. You don't want to start a precedent where every time the president changes then existing programs are all gutted just because the president makes some random policy speech.
Re:If you don't want to d/l a PDF for TFA #1 (Score:4, Funny)
DSC-304s (Score:3, Funny)
Yeay! (Score:2, Insightful)
This unfunded mandate has been robbing our science for long enough.
Re:Yeay! (Score:4, Informative)
I like the idea of a manned trip to Mars (Score:2)
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Almost true.
I am tired of seeing this admin push a direction and congress not funding it adequately.
There! NOW it's true. Remember, congress controls the purse strings.
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1- First we need to find a better way - than the shuttle: it's not hard - to put people in orbit.
2- Then they must be able to stay alive long enough for a trip to Mars without any Progress cargo ship in sight.
3- Then NASA should focus on the vehicle that can really take them to Mars orbit
4- Then they should develop the vehicle that would land on Mars and be able to stay a couple months the
Clue time, kiddie (Score:3, Informative)
BTW,
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The titans started development in 56, with a maiden flight in 58. The Titan II had a maiden flight in 1962, and was designed for ICBM service. In fact, it was THE backbone of the airforce until 1982, with the last one decommisioned in 87. [wikipedia.org] One of the old silos complexes is 10 miles from where I currently live (just 2 miles from my old home).
THe saturn I started in the US army's [wikipedia.org]
Re:Yeay! (Score:5, Informative)
MO $987,000National Center for Soybean Technology (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Special Research Grants)
VT $750,000Environmentally safe products (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Special Research Grants)
CA $1,929,000Exotic pest diseases (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Special Research Grants)
I $2,500,000For the Great Lakes Basin Program for Soil and Erosion Control (Conservation Programs)
IA $1,775,000Iowa Biotechnology Consortium (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Special Research Grants)
MD $3,625,000Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (Agricultural Research Service, Buildings and Facilities)
NY $3,625,000Center for Grape Genetics (Agricultural Research Service, Buildings and Facilities)
TX $546,000Hispanic Leadership in Agriculture (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Federal Administration)
MS $1,433,000Mississippi Valley State University, Curriculum Development (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Federal Administration)
MI $1,350,000Pasteurization of shell eggs (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Federal Administration)
CA $3,625,000Grape Genomics Research Center (Agricultural Research Service, Buildings and Facilities)
WI $8,000,000Nutrient Management Laboratory (Agricultural Research Service, Buildings and Facilities)
$18,000,000Facilities in rural communities with extreme unemployment (Rural Community Advancement Program)
$18,250,000Technical assistance grants for rural water and waste systems (Rural Community Advancement Program)
AK $25,000,000Rural and native villages in Alaska (Rural Community Advancement Program)
MD $6,000,000Chesapeake Bay activities (Conservation Programs)
OH $1,145,000Center for Innovative Food Technology (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, Research and Education Activities - Federal Administration)
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Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:3, Insightful)
If NASA is that busy, then why not offload some of its activities to the private sector fer cryin' out loud?
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When the cost to get payload to the surface of Mars is on the order of several to many tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, and the cost to get it back all the higher, you're not looking at "the future of humanity". You're looking at a boondoggle that's ripping off actual science programs -- not to mention, money that could instead be put into research to reduce launch costs.
At this day in age, a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip". It has nothing at all to do with the
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if we had a million billion dollars and a pony, we could fly off to Candyland and have the faeries protect us!
At current launch costs, a "colony" (read: independent, unlike a base) is so far beyond the realm of possibility that it's laughable to even consider.
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you can simplify. If it would be optimal to make some bottle with polypropylene, you might, say, substitute HDPE for it. But that only goes so far. You're not going to, say, substitute HDPE for neoprene where you need a rubbery material or teflon where you need to contain fluorine. There's a fundamental level of compexity that we have to accept, and this gives an incredibly long tail of production needs.
Here on earth, we were able to bootstrap to industry because we didn't need it to survive. On another planet functioning independently, it simply has to be there -- everything from the mining equipment to the ore haulers to the ball mills to the refineries, and on and on. They all have consumables, even if it be just the need for replacement parts when things break. Most machinery has frequent consumables -- hydraulic fluids, lubricants, and the like. And to those who say, "worst case, we just have people out there digging with picks!" -- it doesn't work that way. You not only have to be *able to produce what you need*, but *able to produce what you need faster than you consume them*.
You can't even just put it all in one part of a planet, because all of the minerals you need won't be clustered in one location. You need huge refineries, pipelines, roads, seperate mining colonies, manufacturing centers, etc. You're looking at the equivalent of shipping, say, the industrial equivalent of Detroit to Mars.
It's just not at all realistic with as-far-as-can-be-forseen technology.
Re:One Book: (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Pick a finished piece of technology sitting somewhere around you.
2) Figure out what all of its components are.
3) Figure out what all of those components are made of.
4) Figure out the industrial processes needed to make those ingredients.
5) Figure out what raw inputs are needed for those processes (all of them, not just the primary ore).
6) For every input that needs to be manufactured, trace it back in the same way. Repeat.
7) For every part of the industrial infrastructure that might wear out or be consumed, trace back a complete route for its production.
8) For every truly "raw" input, figure out what sort of process it takes to mine it (factor in all equipment and consumables). Also figure out how much infrastructure it will take to move all of the "raw" inputs, once mined, to their destinations, given that deposits won't be next to each other.
9) For all new parts that you've just added, go back to step 2.
This doesn't even address the issue of actually *manufacturing* parts and products and all of the facilities needed to make the millions of accumulated parts of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and raw materials.
And this just looks at what's needed to get you that one piece of technology that you picked.
Modern technology suffers from very serious "long tail" problems when dealing with colonization.
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Insightful)
(why am I reminded of Google's directions from New York to London [google.com]?)
The proper first step to get from point A to point B is usually not to just walk. It's to figure out the fastest way to accomplish the trip. With your route, you might end up walking to point B, while a wiser person would get in their car and drive.
In this case, the proper course of action is not to send people on a money-wasting trip that accomplishes virtually nothing toward colonization. The proper course of action is to invest in lowering the costs associated with space exploration.
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to the moon taught us an awful lot about getting people into space, and supporting human life for a couple of weeks in space. It taught us a lot about landing on low-grav, no-atmosphere bodies, and lifting off from them again. We learned quite a bit about space exploration from that. Sadly most of it has been ignored for the space shuttle program, but if we don't try to branch out, we will not ever leave this planet. You don't just figure out the cheapest way to colonize a planet without sending humans there a few times first. How stupid would humanity be if we invested in everything needed for colonization, sent it all there, and then discovered that, since we'd never actually done the human trip to Mars beforehand, there was some hugely significant thing we missed about the planet or the trip? What if there actually is a significant difference in the impact on the body from a months-long trip to Mars compared with a months-long stay on a space station just outside our atmosphere?
The proper first step to getting humans to Mars is most likely developing a CHEAP way of getting humans to and from space. From there, developing useful, CHEAP space stations that can support launching missions deeper into space. Through all of this, a primary goal must be that these actions will be compatible with future exploration of space. We don't need another shuttle or ISS. This mandate from Congress would pretty much prevent taking steps towards Mars exploration.
I swear, if the government continues pissing me off with short-sighted crap like this and an inability to actually effect CHANGE, I'm going to wind up having to run for office in another decade. Cut the pork, stop throwing money at the rest of the world's problems and invest in something that will benefit all mankind for centuries to come.
Sigh. *forces blood pressure down*
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People actually worry about this?
As if humans are oh-so-important to the universe that we must ensure our survival by colonizing another planet.
Somehow I think the universe will get along just fine without us. Perhaps even a bit better.
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Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point Rei was making. A manned mission to Mars is not the first baby step towards having a full-fledged off-planet colony. It might seem like a rational progression from sending a few people for a short stay, to a few people for a long time, to many people for a long time, to a complete self-sustaining off-planet colony. But it isn't. The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that make a colony completely out of our league any time in the future.
We should be working on cheaper reusable vehicles to reduce launch costs. Any Mars colony is going to require a lot of material to get it started, and to sustain it until it can become self-sufficient.
We should be working on robotics and fully automated construction/industry. We will want to build as much infrastructure on Mars as possible before any people actually arrive.
We should be working on ecology and hydroponics because right now the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem we have is arguably between the size of a country and a planet, and we have never succeeded in boot-strapping an ecosystem from nothing. The whole point is that the colony can't depend on Earth, and we have no ability to do anything in space that doesn't depend 100% on Earth support.
By the time we actually solve these problems, the minor task of actually getting a human's feet to touch the ground on another planet will be considered trivial.
The Mars Mission is not the start of a Mars Colony. It's a boondoggle that was threatening to get in the way of the actual science that could, in time, lead to an actual off-planet population.
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How many humans do you think even a large meteor strike can kill off? Remember, a large percentage of mammals, reptiles, insects, and aquatic life survived the K-T extinction event, and they had ZERO access to technology.
IIRC, no land creature of over a couple of kilos managed it (though many oceanic creatures of that size did).
The estimated size of the K-T asteroid was roughly 10 km wide. That's considered 'still fairly small' as far as Near Earth Objects go.
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Interesting)
The estimated size of the K-T asteroid was roughly 10 km wide. That's considered 'still fairly small' as far as Near Earth Objects go.
It would be much easier and cheaper to set up a self-sustaining underground "space station" on earth, than to do the same thing on Mars or the Moon.
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The *future of humanity*?
When the cost to get payload to the surface of Mars is on the order of several to many tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, and the cost to get it back all the higher, you're not looking at "the future of humanity". You're looking at a boondoggle that's ripping off actual science programs -- not to mention, money that could instead be put into research to reduce launch costs.
Question - how much did it cost to fund Christopher Columbus' initial 1492 expedition? (Considering that it required royal patronage... I'm thinking it was nearly the same order of expense). In retrospect, that cost was paid back and then profited by history (consider the combined GDP's and natural resources found in Canada, the US, Mexico, Central and South America...)
At this day in age, a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip". It has nothing at all to do with the future of humanity.
In 1495, Spain felt pretty ripped off by the lack of all that promised gold, got no shorter commercial route to China, found only indig
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Insightful)
Question - how much did it cost to fund Christopher Columbus' initial 1492 expedition? (Considering that it required royal patronage... I'm thinking it was nearly the same order of expense). In retrospect, that cost was paid back and then profited by history (consider the combined GDP's and natural resources found in Canada, the US, Mexico, Central and South America...)
Colombus didn't go to colonize, and I don't have his numbers, so let's check out an early colony for comparison: Jamestown.
Check out this nice set of referenced calculations [wikipedia.org] for how much people paid to get to the New World. Depending on how much they were bringing, some people paid less than as ~$2k to get to Jamestown. The most expensive were ~20k. That is, for themselves *and* their gear. That much money wouldn't even pay for a single kilogram to go to Mars.
Oh, but it gets worse. On an unsettled part of Earth, modern technology is not needed to survive. The technology you need can be created in the wilderness. Not so on Mars. You need technology to survive, and modern technology suffers from "long tail" problems: each piece of technology has many components, each component many materials, each material taking an industrial process with many steps and often many raw materials, and so on. You simply can't go there and "bootstrap" like you can on Earth.
A more apt comparison would been if instead of going to Jamestown, the British colonists instead went to colonize the Marianas Trench.
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Columbus, Magellan, and the Mayflower voyage were very expensive trips as well. Today, not so much.
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel the same way, at least about the importance of the ultimate goal -- but I'm not sure that the Human Mars Initiative (or whatever they were calling it) is really the right way to go, and that canceling it is in any way bad or wrong.
Right now, we're so far away from having a self-sustaining (both physically and economically) off-Earth settlement, sending one guy or a few guys out to Mars and back really isn't going to get us that much closer. We have too much basic research yet to be done, in order to make it permanent. And really, non-permanent human exploration doesn't get us that much that we haven't already gotten.
Look at it this way. Imagine that we're some European nation in the 15th or 16th century, and we want to plant a colony on the New World. The Mars project that's on the drawing board now is like sponsoring a long-distance swimming contest. It seems like it's going in the right direction, but really it's not that helpful. It's the wrong set of skills to be developing. Instead, you need to be doing boring crap on shore, building shipyards and learning how to make ships that don't sink.
In terms of progressing towards the eventual goal of a permanent, sustainable, off-Earth human settlement, the money that we're spending pushing a few people to Mars, so they can dig around in the dirt and pose for a photo op, would be much better spent improving our materials science, producing a good reusable launch vehicle, or researching advanced robotics systems. None of those are as sexy as actually putting a person on the surface of Mars, but all of them will bring us closer to actually putting people in space, permanently, than a quick sightseeing trip would.
About the only reason to send a person to Mars and back without a sustainable presence there, is because it would be good PR for NASA and possibly result in a lot more funding for long-term projects. But I'm not sure it would be worth the cost and diverted resources, particularly since it would mean basically setting aside all other projects and priorities in order to work on it.
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I think it would be another moon shot. People would be excited at first, then bored and then "Mission complete. Let's spend money on something else."
(Unless of course we were to "find" some "possible alien artifacts". Then there would be some good Nasa funding.)
I agree with most everything else you said.
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It's been going on for years. The CAIB Report [nasa.gov] even has a side-bar that talks about ear-tags and their overall effect on NASA's budget.
"big picture" people with realistic priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself.
What are you smoking? Do you seriously believe that "humanity" has any hope of colonizing another planet to "save" itself?
It's been half a century since we first put people in space, and now we're still "just" putting a select elite few up into space to screw around with silly zero-g experiments with little commercial or scientific value.
The suggestion that we will have the resources, technical capability
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Yeah! They should rely on the private sector, not all of those government agencies like they currently do, such as the United States Department of Boeing, the Department of Lockheed, the Department of Orbital Sciences Corporation . . .
(Were you under the mistaken impression that NASA *doesn't* outsource most of its non-research work to the private sector?)
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I believe Bruce Sterling [boingboing.net] put best when he said:
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IMHO, the sooner we can practically disperse a bit and reduce our risk the better. Having said that, I agree that if we want manned missions to Mars, it should not be at the expense of real, exis
Re:Short-Sighted Bastards... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's silly. We're never going to solve those problems -- they're fundamental to our nature as individuals with different goals and desires, coupled with limited resources. What we can do, is try to spread out enough to keep a single major incident from ending us as a species.
In contrast to some other people in the thread, although I don't think that permanent, self-sustaining (or at least economically self-sustaining, e.g. "oil platform") settlements are right around the corner, that doesn't mean that it's a bad goal, or one we shouldn't be working towards. One of the most disappointing things about our society, to me anyway, is that even though we have organizations and entities that are capable of preserving themselves and executing very long-term projects, we seldom think of more than a few years out. (You would think that large corporations and governments, which by their nature don't grow old and die, would have long planning horizons -- instead they have even shorter ones than individuals.)
I'm not saying that working for peace, justice, harmony, etc. on Earth aren't noble endeavors or worthy of support. They certainly are. I'm just saying that if you make them a precondition for exploration, then you're dooming us just as effectively as if we don't try at all.
Bout time (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes I'm all for space exploration but I think Mars is a little far out there. There are a lot of other space programs that could really use the funding (launching a new hurricane observation satellites and global warming research satellites come to mind). Maybe we should think about a moon base first and once we get that up and running then a president can start talking about Mars.
-RZ
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Until the space program stops paying over and over again to orbit the same mass (space shuttle I'm looking at you), we're never going to get anywhere.
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According to the most recent road map, a Moon base is/was already the step prior to a manned Mars mission. If that Moon base is interpreted as "related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars," then we lose that, too.
But you can bet we'll have plenty of funding for peanut museums, bridges to nowhere, and other imporkant projects.
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I'd love to almost nothing given for manned space exploration until launch costs go down**. I'd rather see the money spent on A) robotic exploration, which almost everyone in the field acknowledges is far more cost effective; and especially spent on B) cost-reduction research.
To get off the surface: Nuclear thermal rockets. Scramjets. Rotavators. Advanced reusable rockets. Cost-optimized conventional rockets (say, SpaceX's Falcon series, or even some more esoteric concepts like OTRAG). A
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I can't disagree with a thing you said. However, a lunar base accomplishes one thing that the others on your list don't. It opens an avenue of research specifically into sustainable habitats, in situ resource usage (mining and processing technologies which might be used on asteroids in the future), and food production.
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It's pretty simple, really... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you would rather support explorers than crusaders, make sure the Presidential candidate you vote for in '08 agrees with your point of view, and hold him/her to it.
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And many of the latter have the intelligence of a tree stump, and the foresight of a drunk gerbil up Richard Gere's asshole. Doesn't mean we should listen to them.
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A) The solar system, outside of earth, is comprised of uninhabitable sterile rocks
B) The vastness of space and unlikeliness of life effectively means we're all alone.
In essence, we're stuck on this rock we call earth. So how about, instead of wasting all this money so a bunch of scifi dreamers can get their jollies, we spend our money and effort trying to make earth a better place i
The American taxpayer *isn't* paying (Score:3, Informative)
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It used to be that a war's home front consisted of a lot of sacrifice - not just sending the boys off to fight and die, but also making do with less, shortages and rationing, and, of course, higher taxes to pay for the military expenditure. Now we somehow think that we can fight a war without sacrifice. In the particular case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the President and Congress seemed to feel that we could not only afford a $750 billion [washingtonpost.com] open-ended wa
"Humans on Mars" is an unfunded mandate (Score:5, Insightful)
For any of you who aren't aware, the Bush administration is notorious for unfunded mandates [wikipedia.org]. If Bush thinks it's so good as to put it in the State of the Union address, he better damn well find a way to pay for it... otherwise it's just hot air as usual.
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2) Who is it who didn't even ask for said money in said budget?
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By which you mean "Vote for someone else in 2012"?
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How exactly do we hold them to it? Are you going to write strongly worded letters? Call the Congressman, or the Congressional or Whitehouse switchboards? Vote them out of office 4-6 years after they've been elected? Petition for a recall? Pray for an ethics scandal or criminal charges to be filed?
Of that list, tell me which ones are
Re:It's pretty simple, really... (Score:5, Interesting)
Compared to that, NASAs annual budget is around $17 billion.
So, yeah, rather than killing 100,000 Iraqi civilians, turning Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists, making the rest of the world hate us, and destroying the US constitution as an added bonus, we *could* have done a LOT more fun and worthwhile things. Or Bush could instead have just given $10,000 to each family in the US to spend how they please. Same cost.
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I should probably point out that if we divide the cost of the war in Iraq ($400 billion) by the population of Iraq (a bit over 26 million), we find
Is this bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Just after Mars (and before Jupiter) is the asteroid belt... and asteroid mining has a lot of potential (if you don't want to maintain scarcity of some minerals by watching the mines here on Earth tap out... or don't relish strip mining/whatnot). I wouldn't say that's infeasible to do via automation, but for that length of mission and with the variables involved, having a human (or a few) on the spot would likely make things easier.
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Maybe. But then again, the same can be said for a great many major technological advancements in human history. Airplanes come to mind. As do automobiles.
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Or rather, it only makes sense if Mars is "next" in the "places we haven't stuck American flags on and then left, never to return to" list.
We're not accomplishing anything by going there. Yes, it looks neat, and maybe it'll make space exploration 'cool' again for a while, but it hasn't brought us any closer to the goal of having a sustainable settlement off of Earth. The astronauts would go out there, stand around for a while, and then come back. And it would cost a lot of money and
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So duct tape and Velcro and thousands of other things which became part of all of our lives don't count for anything in the trip to the moon?
Seems like people forget that it's hard to get to some place far away and that the tools you develop to allow you to get there can and often do help out on Earth as well.
Perhaps more to the point it would be be something we do that we can actually succeed at unlike a lot of other things we've been doing lately which are miserable failures. I think this would pull a
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SOP (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, politics as usual.
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Re:SOP (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds to me more like a bit of basic rare common sense. If you want a mission to Mars, that mission will cost money, and money must be allocated for it. NASA does quite a lot of valuable things, and terminating all of those things to just barely have enough money to start thinking about a mission to Mars is not the right way to go about that.
I'm in favor of a mission to Mars quite a bit more than Bush is. (He just wanted to sound like a visionary without having to budget for it, whereas I actually see intrinsic economic, technological, and scientific value to such a pursuit.) But to do it, we need to dedicate the appropriate resources. It's not that we are unable to afford it, but until the money is properly allocated, we cannot really go to Mars.
My hard realization--NASA is over (Score:5, Interesting)
But that was 35 years ago. And the intervening time has been nothing more than a series of disappointments, vast amounts of wasted money, broken promises, contractor giveaways, and harsh realities. A shuttle that was supposed to be like a spaceship turned out to be more like a very expensive splashdown pod with wheels and a hefty refurbishing pricetag after each mission. A space station turned into little more than a low-orbit money sink. Promises of new ships and grand missions were promised--with little more to show for it in the end than some animation and a lot of wasted money.
The height of our achievement was putting a couple of glorified RC cars on Mars and putting a telescope in orbit. And both those missions were a pittance compared to the wasted billions of dollar spent on projects which went nowhere and accomplished nothing.
I've come to accept that man may one day land on Mars. But he won't be wearing a NASA logo on his suit.
Don't get too worked up about this (Score:2)
Also keep in mind that it says that manned Mars missions need to be explicitly funded, and not taken from general NASA funds. So if NASA ever gets to the point that they actually could consider a Mars mission (many years away), this
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Unfortunately it may end up being Chinese or Indian. But I shouldn't be sad. I dont care who get's their first as long as we get there.
Your pessimism is unfounded (Score:4, Interesting)
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Shame, because NASA has the biggest technological head start in this race.
I'm usually less technical and more emotional when I post about NASA, and you know what? This is an emotional issue.
Really, what got us to the moon? A clear vision from our young charismatic leader, which was followed up. We wanted to prove American technological might. We wanted to explore and push the boundaries of humans and their
Re:NASA has always been deluded. (Score:4, Insightful)
Replace some of your text to reference the Olympics games and you have another huge waste of money to give glory to a few and fuzzy feelings to the rest.
Is this really a bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I'd rather have NASA put up replacements for aging weather satellites before putting up manned missions to Mars.
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Huh? Do you mean "colonize the Moon first, then think about Mars..." ?
Simple Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't anyone learn from Wrong Way Corrigan [wikipedia.org]?
What spending? (Score:2)
Almost all of NASA's spaceflight planning for the next decade are focused on getting new flight hardware ready to replace the shuttle, and maybe then going to the moon.
Priorities (Score:5, Funny)
So now we become a second class space nation (Score:3, Insightful)
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Personally, I'd like to see NASA start putting people back on the moon before they start looking at putting people on Mars.
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Well, it's a nice dream, but it's going to take money. Just handing the order to NASA without giving them any extra money wasn't going to make it happen anyway, so it's good that this publicity stunt is scrapped.
If Bush really wants this, he can allocate money for it in the budget.
Priorities (Score:2)
This is the right choice... (Score:2)
The crash is coming, are you prepared? China is currently propping up the US dollar (buying it), and loaning the US billions of dolla
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Like what, exactly?
The deficit that's lower than it's been in years and shrinks every month? Our economy grows us out of deficit every time. If we'd just stop doing stupid things like the prescription drug program and bridges to nowhere, we'd be better off...
The economy always moves in cycles. WHEN (not if) it does go back down,
Space Exploration Side Efect. (Score:3, Insightful)
A Planet with a high percentage of Carbon Dioxide - What can we learn from that, maybe links to global warming?
Finding ways to store mass amounts of energy to shuttle astronots back and forth from earth to mars, in a small place, perhaps will help with out energy consumption problems?
Ligher Weight, easer to move, rugged space suits. This can help create far better materials for many applications.
Number of americans employed for such a project helping the economy.
Working with other nations of such a project, better tolerance for other cultures.
One project of this scale has many side efects that a lot of supid winy people just don't want to grasp their minds around to understand.
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However, the spin off technologies from Space exploration has returned many more times it's cost in tax dollars. Many, if not all, of those technologies ares till in use and still return taxes.
How much money does the government get in taxes from business that make smoke detector?
Just one of many spin off technologies.
Historically, Space exploration has been an investment. An investment that has paid off quite well.
That doesn't account
Post-MAD politics (Score:3, Insightful)
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Mars Sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
The asteroid belt is full of resources and the great thing about them is that they are already in space. We should start cataloging them and marking the ones that have necessary things like water, iron, gold, etc. Once we know what's out there, it won't be long before someone figures out how to get it and bring it back.
FFS. Privatise it already (Score:5, Insightful)
Stick a $1 billion prize into an investment fund and hand it over to anyone who can get people on to Mars and back alive. Do same for moon base. Close NASA down. Billions saved and lots of highly motivated businesses and individuals will do their damnest to earn that cash.
What This is All About (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't then an appropriate response to a fiscally unsound endeavor by a careful legislature. It's a gesture that the Congress will not support the President's Vision for Space Exploration in its entirety.
But, this language has the capability to significantly delay an eventual human mission to Mars if it's passed. It will force NASA to view the Moon as its ultimate objective, rather than as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond, as envisioned by the President.
Whether this is a good thing is up to debate, but I am inclined to believe that this empty gesture has great potential for unintended consequences further down the road.
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markup language? (Score:2)
since when does the government write using HTML or XML. :)
the committee has it right (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mars society should be ashamed for trying to have this language removed; apparently, they think that going to Mars is worth dismantling the rest of our space program.
Re:the committee has it right (Score:5, Insightful)
Better look again, they are already gone.
Precisely right (Score:2)
One should only consider sending humans to planets, after:
1) One has exhausted all possible exploration capabilities of robotic explorers.
2) One has "rad-hardened" (genetically enhanced) astronauts that don't require tons of shielding from radiation.
3) One has robust nanotechnology to make such ventures significantly less expensive.
Now, shortly after one has all of
Hurrah! More money for the moon instead! (Score:2)
You'd still need completely enclosed domes, caves or spaceports.
You'd still need full shielding from cosmic radiation and hard UV.
You'd still need imported air, water, food, medicines, equipment, etc.
However, you'd be a lot closer to home, reducing shipping costs and times, both ways. You can coast to the moon in three days, or accelerate there in 12 hours.
Reduced time in transit means reduced radiation exposure, which means reduced ship shieldi
Mark my words (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe not Mars, but you should give a shit about whoever gets control of the rim of Earth's gravity well. Whoever does that first, wins whatever the fuck they could ever want.