NASA Vets & Administration Clash Over Moon Plans 158
mattnyc99 writes "There's a serious feud brewing this week over the Bush administration's plan for a manned mission to the Moon as an eventual stepping stone to Mars. The Planetary Society, a top group of former mission managers, space-based scientists and NASA astronauts argues, is set to rebuke the Moon plan at a conference next month in favor of hopskotching an asteroid on the way to the Red Planet. Agency chief Michael Griffin issued an abnormally strong response to the society, calling it an overly political criticism of Bush for a plan that he says was 'the best legislative guidance NASA has ever had.' Either way, it's clear that the stars are aligning for the whole space race to be reconsidered as a new administration steps into the White House. So far Clinton and Obama (who just added his) are the only contenders with space proposals."
With an appropriate call for proposals (Score:5, Funny)
Re:With an appropriate call for proposals Yeh... (Score:3, Funny)
But, when I re-read the tag, I saw:
NASA, Vets & Administration Clash Over Moon Plans
I guess monkeys or apes will go on the mock runs... They'll return (after 5,125 years of suspended animalization), and find... Cornelius? Or, maybe a Charlton Heston statue half-buried in older New York...
Or, they'll find the Land of the Lost, with millions of sexually-incompatible Sleetaks groveling all over the Earth.
I think the NASA part will be: Continuous audio p
In before... (Score:3, Funny)
Of course its not generating enthusiasm (Score:4, Interesting)
I am very convinced that if some of the leading candidates get in with all their promises of health care and expanded benefits there won't be any money for NASA to do something big. It will simply fall by the way side because it simply doesn't get Congressmen or Presidents votes.
The best thing has already been done, the hard choice has already been made, axing the shuttle. Hopefully that expense relief won't be taken from NASA but I fear it will. Without the costly expenditures needed the money will probably go elsewhere.
If the main opposition is truly because "BUSH" wanted it then it speaks volumes for just how juvenile the opponents have become. We need a direction, it has to come from the Administration, as Congress no longer attempts to lead anywhere but schemes to keep themselves perpetually in office. NASA has been wandering, stuck with two spruce gooses. The shuttle and ISS. The ISS could flourish without the shuttle and we can hope it will. Yet I am very sure that with all the promises being made by candidates that NASA is the least of their concerns. We are seeing the greatest promised expansion of Federal power over our lives and people are cheering it on as if it were the latest American Idol contest. That is not an avenue for great science to occur
Re:Of course its not generating enthusiasm (Score:5, Informative)
The main opposition is because Bush wanted it, and then didn't fund it. He wants a positive legacy (since his *ahem* other legacy isn't looking so hot), but he didn't want to spend any of the political capital necessary to actually do it. It's like his suddenly trying to jump start the Middle East Peace Plan he'd been ignoring for 7 years, only here it's even easier to just "mandate" that it be done without doing anything substantive to accomplish it. He gets to seem like a visionary in the present, and if it somehow ever happens he can claim credit, and if not, nobody will remember that niggling detail of his Presidency anyway.
Bush's "Mars, Bitches!" plan, and resulting budget problems since now NASA had a huge new project to worry about and no additional money to do it with, was one of the factors that directly contributed to the scrapping of any Hubble repair mission.
You want to talk about generating enthusiasm? The continued operation of Hubble would generate ten times more interest than a moon/mars plan that in the most optimistic thinking of a hypothetical plan by a guy who had no intention of being around to see any of it turned into reality isn't going to do anything for a decade.
Re:Of course its not generating enthusiasm (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, your concept of the middle east peace process seems to mimic a headline news blurb. Bush and his administration has been working for middle east peace since the start of his first term. It wasn't until recently that he actually took a trip there outside of US military bases and war zones.
You can argue not enough or soon enough, or a combination of both and be correct. But claiming he didn't care or didn't find is a little disingenuous. It may seem like that to you if your mostly paying attention to headline news and the sorts (some call it the drive by media) so I can understand the position.You mean the arguments about being risky and so on were a bunch of lies? Tell me, what costs has NASA created that has zapped up close to 12 billion dollars in less then 3 years without producing a vehicle yet? Last I head NASA wasn't in the habit of waisting money or am I wrong about that? Oh yea, I remember now, NASA has been ignoring the budget redirections and Congress has been earmarking portions of the funding and spending the money on anything they damn well pleased which caused the hubbub about Bush re-redirecting funds about a year or so ago. Hardly a problem because of lack of funding, Maybe lack of oversight of congress pilfering for their contributers and rogue NASA officials.
I'm actually surprised that your even blaming this on Bush too. It seems that the democrats are the ones wanting to cut NASA's budget. They wanted to pull 500 million so they could 1.3 billion to the global AIDS fund. Instead, they ended up placing the 2007 funding at 2006 levels. I think they are just as hard if not harder on NASA then any republican congress. It all depends on who's contractors are donating money and who is in power at the time I guess. This seems hardly a one sided issue though.Isn't there a repair mission already scheduled for the Hubble? I think it is slated for 2008 and will replace the batteries, gyroscopes, a spectrograph, and the main camera which should put it back in operation until at least 2013.
Re:Of course its not generating enthusiasm (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, so that's why he started a war there.
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(Actually, for the US, Afghanistan was relatively "nice," as wars go. If we'd kept our focus there, Bush's legacy could potentially look different now.)
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It's doing more damage to America than any Democrat or Republican ever could. Both sides need to bite the bullet and accept the actions of the people they elected, rather than blaming it on the political parties (both of which happen to be unabashedly corrupt at the moment).
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I was really hoping the tone of my reply was more spread out then an "us verses them" attitude but I will admit that the reason I replied in the first place was because all this stuff was incorrectly being blamed on one person. I'm not sure I have more of a fondness for Bush or the republicans then I do with accurately placing the blame on the right people. There is enough to blame on them,
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The original intent was for us to elect the members of the college on merit of for THEM to elect the president. The concept of direct vote was specifically being avoided. This is designed to prevent some brief hot-button issue.
We need to RESTORE the electoral college by getting rid of the state laws the force the members of the college to pick whomeve
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Actually one of the first things Griffin did was to cancel a near complete robotic program to repair Hubble. He only allowed a shuttle repair after the huge backlash from both the public and scientific community. If he hadn't cancelled the program, Hubble would have been repair
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Yes, exactly, he wanted them to skim from existing projects, projects that were themselves hoping for a budget increase, because his budget increase was not close to sufficient to fund the mars project.
Second, your concept of the middle east peace process seems to mimic a headline news blurb. Bush and his administration has bee
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It doesn't need to be funded all at once. None of the work is going to be done all at once. Some of the projects would have ended anyways so the redirection was simply stopping it from being used for something else completely.
You do realize that the mars mission is decades away right? More money can be fou
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It's only decades away if it begins now, and there isn't enough money to get it started unless NASA scraps a lot of their other, more useful, programs.
If there's not enough money to start it now, meaning it will not make any significant progress, what makes you think there's going to be money in the future? If the one who actually wants to turn this mission into their legacy can't get the money to fu
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Yep, he sure did. He cut it by 51.3 million in 2000 and another 10.8 million in 2004. Of course I'm thinking Clinton should have still been in office for the fiscal year o
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Which is why some of us are talking about a base there instead of yet another touch-and-go mission. If we can build a moon base and make it self-supporting, doing it on Mars where there's an atmosphere of sorts should be easier.
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Yeah if you were either a psychopath or a moron at the time.
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Let's look closer to home, first (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Let's look closer to home, first (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's look closer to home, first (Score:5, Funny)
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Yup. Sounds like Washington to me.
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While this seems to be the popular view, you do realize that not only has Bush raised taxes but he's driven the debt to record levels (this is both Bush Sr and Bush Jr). The last real tax cut was by Clinton.
Re:Let's look closer to home, first (Score:5, Insightful)
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something tells me that isn't the least bit likely. The temptation to spend the ten billion a year NASA uses on something entirely useless to science and the world as a whole is too strong. Meanwhile, we'll still be in Iraq for some idiot reason spending money 100x the rate the space program has and doing nothing but killing and seriously p---ing of
Leave the Ocean unexplored, or bad things (Score:2)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ow-PxJhDBuA [youtube.com]
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Well we know a heck of a lot more about space now than we did in the 1930s too. Does that mean we've learned all there is to know about space and there's no reason to expore it further?
I'd say for both space and our own planet we've barely hit the tip of the iceberg on the kno
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Objecting to space programs on that basis is ignorant, not insightful.
Russia can do it (Score:2)
For less than the cost of one stadium [wikipedia.org].
How soft have we become? Where space travel was born [bayqongyr.com] they don't even have cars yet. But we need them to get to the space station? Come on, America! Let's go!
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'the best legislative guidance NASA has ever had. (Score:2)
I understand the desire to get to the moon because it has better public awareness the asteroid.
Is this really a valued "guidance"? (Score:2)
I somehow feel the scientists are more well introduced in what is the most cost efficient use of their budget, at the same time as I doubt landing on the moon will make a bang in the world like it did in 1969.
Sure, there'll be a lot of YouTube vids, funny amateur remixes, and so on, but really, it has already been done. So I think the PR part of the whole thing can safely be skipped here, and the US should rather strive to get to
A definite objective (Score:2)
The Vision for Space Exploration set a direction for developing a replacement for the shuttle, something that needed to happ
Objections (Score:5, Informative)
1) There is very little technical overlap in designs between a lunar and martian based program. The Moon has no atmosphere. That means no atmospheric braking. A lander landing on the Moon is radically different than one landing on Mars since the lunar one has to use only rockets to slow its descent. The Martian one can use rockets and parachutes as well as glide. Also, the lack of an atmosphere means that the Moon can not as easily provide oxygen or fuel as Mars, where those products can be pulled directly from the atmosphere. The Moon requires regolith mining to obtain any materials.
2) The transfer vehicle to the Moon is going to be able to complete the trip within 120 hours, or 240 hours if you have to do a return. That is easily within the range of not needing to recycle. You can just load up with consumables and then replenish at either end of the trip. The Martian vehicle will have to have some pretty hefty recycling technology.
3) The day/night cycle on the Moon is vastly longer than that of Mars. Mars is pretty close to that of Earth. Solar power is not even remotely practical on the Moon. (Except in the polar regions where it s theorized that would be possible to find spots where you have continual daylight). If you want to go somewhere other than the poles on the Moon for any duration, you are looking at needing a new generation of nuclear power. Which would also be useful on Mars, but there is a tradeoff there in terms of mass and other factors.)
4) I am back to "There is no atmosphere on the Moon" because it keeps impacting multiple areas. One of the problems that needs to be solved is HVAC type issues. Keeping things warm or cold. The Moon has no atmosphere, hence no convective heat transfer. All heat transfer is radiative or conductive. That necessitates a completely different thermodynamic paradigm than would be possible on Mars.
5) In terms of Human factors, the Moon is 1/6th gravity and Mars is 1/3th. That means items on Mars weighs twice as much as that on the Moon. The lunar space suits can not be worn on Mars as they are too heavy. New ones need to be designed. (We're also back to "The Moon has no atmosphere". Space suits need to be able to maintain a steady temperature inside. Since a lunar space suit is essentially a thermos when you consider it is in vacuum, all you have to worry about it shedding excess heat. On Mars, you are essentially enveloped by a fluid - the atmosphere - which has a temperature and can carry away excess heat.)
Actually, the reason for the asteroid mission instead of the lunar one is simple. It will require essentially the same type of spaceship that is required to get to Mars. The lunar base only has about 20% overlap with Mars technologies and - honestly - for those 20%, Earth is as good an analog as the Moon. When you develop a technology to go to the Moon, that is what you are developing. You are not developing one for Mars.
Essentially, you get the Moon and Mars for only twice the amount as getting the Moon or Mars.
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Re:Objections (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, you've listed all the non-advantages for a moon program. Now how about some advantages?
1) by developing technologies for hard vacuum, you are in a sense prepping for one of the hardest parts of the Mars mission, that is, a months/years long transit time. You have a nearly perfect platform for testing technologies outside of the Van Allen belt(s), exposing them for long durations to solar heating and occluded cooling. Note: developing the tech for an asteroid mission is essentially saying that 'we can already do this part' - can we? Reliably to put a crew's lives at risk over extended periods of time?
2) long-term value: geopolitical, military, commercial, geographic - as you dismissively point out, there are theoretically (only!) 2 places where solar power access is continual. Possibly more importantly these two places (the poles) are also the only places where the sun, the earth, in fact the entire ecliptic (north or south) is in clear line of sight. How much are those two spots worth today? How much will they be worth in a century? Want to surveil deep space while having a straight line-of-sight link to earth? Want to have a launch point for a flinger that could theoretically put lunar materials anywhere in the earth-moon system with the simplest ballistic solution? I'd argue that being the first with a permanent base there has an INCALCULABLE value over longer timespans. And if you have the first base on one pole, it's not a giant stretch to put a second one on the other pole and monopolize both. The lunar poles - for near-earth space - are practically 21st Century Suez or Panama canals in their strategic value.
3) raw materials: again, a lunar base in the longer term answers one of the bigger questions to space exploitation. Tossing something up to an orbiting factory or processor module is trivial from the moon, and the effectively limitless raw material (including rather important oxides) doesn't hurt. Going to an asteroid lets you explore, but bringing that back where it could be usefully exploited is an ENTIRELY larger project with propulsive technologies we aren't even CLOSE to having.
Personally, if I were looking at it as a game of Civ or something, I'd say the asteroid is probably the cheaper, higher payoff short range program. The lunar base is the more expensive, slower-to-develop programs that ends up being the incontestable game-winning economic- and military-power multiplier in the endgame.
Needless to say, I don't see nearly the value you do in an asteroid mission. I see THAT as the 'flash in the pan' while the idea of a lunar base is the investment-growth option, for Mars certainly, but also for decades if not centuries further on.
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2) long-term value: geopolitical, military, commercial, geographic - as you dismissively point out, there are theoretically (only!) 2 places where solar power access is continual. Possibly more importantly these two places (the poles) are also the only places where the sun, the earth, in fact the entire ecliptic (north or south) is in clear line of sight. How much are those two spots worth today? How much will they be worth in a century? Want to surveil deep space while having a straight line-of-sight link to earth? Want to have a launch point for a flinger that could theoretically put lunar materials anywhere in the earth-moon system with the simplest ballistic solution? I'd argue that being the first with a permanent base there has an INCALCULABLE value over longer timespans. And if you have the first base on one pole, it's not a giant stretch to put a second one on the other pole and monopolize both. The lunar poles - for near-earth space - are practically 21st Century Suez or Panama canals in their strategic value.
Jeez, if monopolizing lunar (or martian) resources is what is to motivate our space programs, we may as well forget the whole thing. We should just cut to the chase and focus our resources on killing each other here on earth rather than wasting them extending our greed and petty bickering into space.
Re:Objections (Score:4, Informative)
What else, pray tell, did you think was going to be our motivation? Altruism? The beautiful view?
Organisms, including those that fly spaceships and use computers, compete with other organisms for resources. It's a zero-sum game. Those who compete best win, and are able to then pass some advantage to their children to give them a leg up in their own competition. Securing any advantage is good, securing that advantage while denying it to your competitors is logically BETTER.
Either program - lunar or asteroidal - is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, those dollars could be spent on many other things that are beneficial to our people or yes, our country. When deciding where to spend those dollars, I bloody well HOPE that someone is doing some sort of cost-benefit-time analysis. And if those dollars can be spent giving us something that is an advantage to us in terms of commercial, scientific or even - shudder to think of it! - military, doesn't it stand to reason that's worth pursuing?
Unless of course you're one of those starry-eyed Utopians who believe that somehow we're gong to evolve into a future where people don't compete? Then you're simply irrelevant to the conversation, because if that's the case, there's no reason to spend the resources on space exploration in the first place when there are so many other pressing immediate human needs here on earth.
Counterobjections (Score:3, Interesting)
With the moon as near to the sun as earth, but lacking clouds and atmosphere, it receives much more sunlight than corresponding spots on earth, and is therefore that much more suitable for solar energy. The 330 hour lunar night can be handled just like the 12 hour martian night, using battery technology.
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Also.. that little bit of atmosphere turns out to be a huge difference. Look at any of the in-situ experiments done on creating fuel from the atmosphere and you have tons of fuel being cranked out with essentially very little required power. You have a medium to fly through (dirigibles and blimps will work using hydrogen gas on Mars). You have completely different heating issues.
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Capacitors still have less energy density th
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Umm, there are problems and tech to solve
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6 months? Shoot.. they do that now at the South Pole. You can test *any* 6 month duration anywhere just by not going there for 6 months. And still be 20 minutes away in case of a real emergency. They have already built and started testing the analogs for Martian bases here. Pretty basic stuff. Build out a hab module. Put some people in it. Let them live there for gradually longer periods of time. Take the lessons learned, incorporate t
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6 months on Earth's South Pole is about the same as 6 months on the Moon's South Pole when you are looking at going to Mars.
If the stated goal is *Mars* exploration, then sidetracked very expensive development should be discouraged. If the goal is the Moon, go there. If it is Mars, develop in that direction. They do not overlap that much in terms of technology and all the other technological developm
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BUT only the moon/leo/geo/asteroid scenarios have the added educational value of dealing with the problems like heat transfer, micro-gravity, micro-meteorites, etc that w
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The Martian one can use rockets and parachutes as well as glide.
It turns out that we don't actually know how to land a big craft on Mars. The atmosphere is thin for aerobraking and parachutes, but the gravity is high enough that a powered descent takes considerable fuel. So more mass is required for the descent stage than previously thought. This cascades back into a much larger launch vehicle.
Too late to be of value (Score:5, Insightful)
Sputnik put USA on the back foot. With the whole Communism vs capitalist theme going at the time, the space program was wrapped up tightly with the US national identity (gotta show those Russians who's boss). Space was patriotic. Space was exciting. The USA were the people doing the space thing. Space was completely intertwined in the national identity as well as the identity of a generation (the kids who grew up in the space era).
The whole national obsession with the space program drove the interest in science which bootstrapped a generation of scientists and engineers. It was not space per se that did this, but the obsession that saw Apollo models hanging from the ceiling in every second kid's bedroom. That obsession was linked not only to science, but to selling cars, pens, breakfast cerial etc.
Just rolling out another space program will do nothing to help education and science unless it is accompanied by the passion. What are the defining obsessions of today?
Asteroid mining (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because it is hard (Score:2)
John F. Kennedy, 9/12/1962 [virginia.edu]
I'm getting a lot of miles out of that speech. Going to Mars is hard. Going to the asteroids
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In a depression, we would need something like a war to motivate the populace. A war of the major powers doesn't make much sense because they all have nukes. A space race on the other hand - a last ditch effort to give the earth a backup plan where resources are running out, etc... can make a lot of sense.
Given the mountain of d
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Makes a lot more sense (Score:4, Insightful)
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And also, but this isn't mentioned very often, in order to get and keep funding in a democracy, you need to frequently prove that you're making progress. On top of that you have to prove it to people who actually have no idea what you're really doing and what it is good for. They can't spend
Ok WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the peanut gallery over at the Planetary Society start jerking the Government's chain over settled NASA policy they're going to get stuff defunded. Most of our leading presidential candidates will take any excuse they can find to snatch away the funding and use it to buy votes some other way.
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NASA will become the FAA of Space (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:NASA will become the FAA of Space (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA is an investment.
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Virtually all of the New World explorers were funded by business interests, even if it was a sovereign state doing the funding. All we need is a half-decent idea where the money is out there, and we'll be all over it, both nation-states and corporations.
Personally, I think the Moon and Mars are both dead-ends if fast-paced exploration is the goal. Once someone figures out how to prospect in the asteroid belt, Mars will have a million people on it within 50 years, servicing the mining industry out there.
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I believe that the private realm of business will become dominant over NASA in the coming years.
You are entitled to your beliefs.
Your beliefs might even turn out to be true.
As of now, however, the only entities who have ever put a person into LEO have been (in order of appearance):
The only entity that has ever put a person past LEO has been
As of right now private enterprise
It seems to me that the Nasa Vets are off-topic (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't imagine trying to do something like that on an asteroid or going straight to mars until we have figured out how to get to the moon, and stay there for a while!
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Getting there and landing on Mars will be like doing the same on Earth (with a marked difference in the surface area needed for aerobraking, etc.) But, the
Put the $$ in fusion research (Score:2, Interesting)
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In this year's budget, the democrats cancelled all funding for ITER (the big fusion experiment), along with a lot of funding in fundamental particle physics. Coupled with the cancellation of the SSC in the 90's, it seems quite clear to me that the US government is fundamentally incapable of performing any long-term science project. They review the funding every year, and sooner or later before it is finished, it will be the tragic victim of partisan bickering (as ITER and particle physics this year), or s
The basic problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you're going to do is a one-shot mission to the moon, mars or an asteroid, then it doesn't matter which one they do.
They'll go to the moon/mars/asteroid, come home and pat themselves for a job well done and if we want to go back we have to do the whole damn thing over again.
Heinlein said "Get to low-Earth orbit and you're halfway to anywhere". We need a truck stop in LEO. If we have someplace in LEO where we can stockpile fuel, food and water, it becomes much easier to start a mission from there than to carry everything in one go from the ground (and no, the ISS isn't even close).
the best legislative guidance NASA has ever had (Score:3, Funny)
This "guidance" is nothing more than the best idea a stupid chimp could come up with at the time to try to ride Kennedy's coattails.
As with just about anything Bush, going to the moon again is pretty stupid. What's the purpose? Hell, all we would need to do is just build a few new Saturn V's, a new LEM or two, and another couple of Lunar Rovers. We have all the plans and we know they work.
Wasting the time and money on doing something we did almost 40 years ago is typical for our diminutive presidenter.
Someone put him back on a Segway and hand him a pretzel.
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Old news in the space development community: (Score:3, Informative)
Planetary Society has been pushing Mars rather than return to the moon since at least the late 80s.
At least part of that position was stated to be that a manned Mars mission could be a cooperative effort between the US and the Soviet Union. i.e. A political goal. That's an aspect that doesn't apply quite so much now.
Also, at that time, the Planetary Society was a lot less keen on manned missions than robotic ones. Friedman, Murry and Sagan (the notable founders) were all veterans of the highly successful unmanned planetary probe missions. They tended to view the manned program as a very expensive method that tended to take money away from the robotic probes.
Others disagreed with this viewpoint. The National Space Society, for example, (also populated with former astronauts and space scientists though no one as much of a household name as Sagan) tended to take a more pro manned space viewpoint.
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No. It's a practical goal. Russia has the launcher and long mission duration technology and the USA has/had the cash and a lot of the other technology that Russia does not have even today. It is likely to be barely relevant if economic and foreign policy own goals continue to be deliberately kicked for the benefit of none but a corrupt few. NASA may well have to follow the Russian model and make ends meet with space
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There's nothing new or surprising about many of the motivations behind space exploration, manned or unmanned, being politically driven. JFK's push for the moon was based in international and internal politics rather than just science and engineering motivations.
In the 80s, the USSR had the Energia heavy launch vehicle that might have been u
Space Initiative is nothing but vaporware (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't believe how many space enthusiasts took this obvious bait.
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The problem is that Bush is so unpopular that having him publicly support it would damage the effort, if anything. Also, the whole point isn't to do it with an increased budget, but rather pursue it using the funds diverted from retiring the space shuttle.
That said, even though I think the initial idea was good, Mi
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Time to put the VSE in the closet (Score:2)
Griffin was like John McCain. Act first, then talk. My way or the highway. Maybe he'd be better off running China's moon program.
Target Moon, build lunar base (Score:2)
Why vets? (Score:2, Funny)
Then it dawned upon me. This is a US site. A vet is something entirely different there.
"abnormally strong response " (Score:2, Insightful)
One can only imagine Michael Griffin gurning, blood vessels popping, perhaps some sort of fit...has someone got the utube clip?
Why not build a big carrier space ship? (Score:2)
This ship would be built in space, since it would be big and lifting it would be impossible.
Gravity would be simulated by rotating decks.
The ship could employ a variety of energy schemes, but nuclear energy seems the miscellaneous form of energy for this ship.
The ship would be big and comfortable,
Re:PARSE ERROR (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh please. NASA has very little to do with the development of missiles or fighter jets. All that stuff is done by the Air Force under separate contracts. Vir
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That may be true these days; I don't know. Under its original NACA name (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, I believe), they did a lot of important aerodynamics research that did indeed have military applications.
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Yes. In theory that's half of NASA's charter. And, to be fair, they do still have the odd high-speed wind tunnel project. Scramjets, too, which you could argue may benefit the military someday. Maybe.
But the shuttle is the Monster that Ate the Budget. Most of the aeronautic work has been defunded, and important scientific work like interplanetary probes and high altitude astronomy is hanging on a thread. This will only get worse. CEV's configuration was, in large part, chosen to ensure nobody who wo
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You appear to be under the illusion that NASA receives more than a fraction of a percent of the US budget.
NASA receives about $16BN a year.
The argument that "that's a tiny fraction of the budget" is bullshit- the federal budget is divided into MANY slices, so yeah, individual departments don't amount to much.
It's still SIXTEEN BILLION DOLLARS, and one of the reasons the federal budget is so fucking massive is because everyone thinks adding in another billion here or there won't hurt.
News flash (Score:2)
Like any good investment, it made a hell of a lot of money.
Every bought a smoke detector? that industry exists because of development for NASA
There are hundreds of technologies that needed to be developed to get us to the moon.
"a looming social security crisis"
No, we do not. That is just republican fear mongering, and it's not new. The people that actu
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Re: (Score:2)
While I think the idea of nuclear vehicles has a lot of merit this is unfortunately the typical nuclear advocate outright lie. "Nuclear could be the best we could have so let us try something out and see if it works" is not an outright lie and would have been better.
The other bit of exaggeration:
is a little bit of manipulation that should have been grown out of in the schoolyard
On the nature of reality and early speculation (Score:2)