NASA Unveils Sweeping New Programs For Next 5 Years 278
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that after terminating the Constellation program, which was to develop rockets to return humans to the moon, NASA has announced that instead it will focus on developing commercial flights of crew and cargo to the ISS and long-range technology to allow sustained exploration beyond Earth's orbit, including exploration by humans. 'We're talking about technologies that the field has long wished we had but for which we did not have the resources,' says NASA administrator, Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. 'These are things that don't exist today but we'll make real in the coming years. This budget enables us to plan for a real future in exploration with capabilities that will make amazing things not only possible, but affordable and sustainable.'"
"Among the new programs is an effort known as Flagship Technology Demonstrations, intended to test things like orbital fuel depots and using planetary atmospheres instead of braking rockets to land safely, a program that will cost $6 billion over the next five years and will be run by the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kennedy Space Center in Florida is to get $5.8 billion over five years to develop a commercial program for carrying cargo and astronauts to the space station. These new programs will be 'extending the frontiers of exploration beyond the wildest dreams of the early space pioneers,' added Bolden."
Sweeping (Score:3, Insightful)
R & D (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA does a hell of a lot more than just launch people into space. This new budget will give NASA a leg up on real cutting edge R & D in new technologies. All the billions of dollars going towards getting men to the Moon will be spent on next generation rocket tech and many other exciting fields.
Re:R & D (Score:5, Insightful)
Human Spaceflight is no longer NASAs job (Score:5, Insightful)
There's BILLIONS of dollars in potential earnings from manned space flight in the private sector. First it will be ventures like Space Ship Two that send people up for a couple hundred grand a pop. In a few years there will be the first private orbital manned private spaceflight. There's ideas for hotels, private moon missions and much, much more.
NASA has successfully pulled this load for 50 years (of course Apollo more than Shuttle). NASAs turn at the forefront is over. Its time for the private sector to start doing the manned flight inspiring.
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"There's ideas for hotels, private moon missions and much, much more."
this will never happen until their is a radical change in how people get to space.
It simply costs too much money. And yes, even the very wealthy will bald at spending million a night in a hotel with no pool and a risk of death a foot away.
Human Spaceflight is still one of NASA specialties. There just not going to act a s a bus anymore.
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Its time for the private sector to start doing the manned flight inspiring
When is the last time the private sector did anything "inspiring"? The private sector is best known for greed, self-interest, and only doing what will get them a buck this quarter - long-term be damned. Not exactly "inspiring".
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Take a look at how the automobile has developed since the 60's and tell me that the private sector doesn't do anything "inspiring". (As long as there is some regulatory oversight for safety)
Re:Human Spaceflight is no longer NASAs job (Score:4, Informative)
Take a look at how the automobile has developed since the 60's and tell me that the private sector doesn't do anything "inspiring". (As long as there is some regulatory oversight for safety)
So to say it correctly, "Thank you Mr. Government". They, US companies anyways, did nothing which was not forced on them by oversight, regulation, and new laws. Most of the cool new technology didn't even come from US companies. It actually came from foreign auto makers who actually invest in long term R&D.
You need to keep in mind, something like fuel injection existed during the 50s and 60s but wasn't widely introduced into vehicles until the government mandated better economy.
So realistically, at the end of the day, you can thank government and foreign companies which are not completely fucked up like American companies are. American companies don't understand the word, "long term". And if they use those words, its an absolute fact they are lying. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but not with US car companies.
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There's BILLIONS of dollars in potential earnings from manned space flight in the private sector. First it will be ventures like Space Ship Two that send people up for a couple hundred grand a pop. In a few years there will be the first private orbital manned private spaceflight. There's ideas for hotels, private moon missions and much, much more.
We've been telling ourselves that since the 60's
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but nixing manned spaceflight entirely is worse.
Good thing we're not doing that, then.
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If you say so. But we weren't doing any manned spaceflight anyway then. Oh yeah we had a plan to one day do the same thing we've already done, at the cost of most other interesting things NASA is doing, like developing a way to go beyond what we did 40 years ago.
If having an underfunded a underambitious boondoggle like Constellation on the books that will, at best, recreate the past in another 15 years assuming it doesn't keep slipping, is all you want, that's fine. But if that program's hypothetical fut
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Never thought I'd say this, but it's time to move on. The last truly monumental thing done by NASA was almost half a century ago now. The money dumped in to NASA over the decades since then could
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Re:R & D (Score:5, Insightful)
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With Soyuz, Russians are using the Unix philosophy: do 1 thing, but do it well. NASA's better at the R&D and robotic exploratory missions and more money for that is a good thing.
Interesting how times change. During Apollo, the US was king of manned flight and the Russians were the pioneers in robotic exploration with the Lunokhod program [wikipedia.org]. BTW, a very interesting story on how they designed and all the struggles the team overcame. You'll also see plenty of "inspiration" in the current NASA rovers from the Luna robotic moon explorers.
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That was more true in the 60s, but now putting people in space is hardly NASA's core competence now. They do much more unmanned stuff. They run over 100 scientific satellites and a bunch of interplanetary probes, along with the rovers on Mars.
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html [nasa.gov].
This is a Good Sign (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA is at its best when it's researching and developing new technologies to achieve the previously unachievable. Obama's nixing of the Constellation program was a good move as it was a program based entirely off of existing technology. NASA's budget overall has increased, and their renewed focus on future tech will inspire budding students to take up engineering, computer programmers, physicists, mathematicians, and other difficult fields. This will certainly reap rewards long into the future.
Meh (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, look.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone thought of a way to drive our economy, create new jobs, set up new business opportunities, and create a whole sector of global wealth, all without raiding some shithole country in Farthest Outer Asia. I'm floored.
Smell that? That's sarcasm.
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They know that, and have been trying to get more jobs. When comparing are current financial crisis to others, we are actually coming out of it pretty quick. no quick doesn't mean 1 year, it means faster then 10 years. The normal time it takes.
The real issue is people will buy cheap over buying something the supports American jobs.
Re:Oh, look.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm just glad someone noticed that creating jobs was good for the economy.
Creating jobs is great for the economy. The *government* creating jobs - not so good.
Let's make this simple. Say you have a country with 20 people. 10 of them are working and making 100,000 a year, which is about the minimum need to get by comfortable. Tax is 10%. Let's further say we had a smart government, and they saved all that tax revenue for the first 10 years of the country's existence, giving a bankroll of 1 million.
At the start of year 11, the government decides that 50% unemployment is unacceptable, and it must create jobs for its other 10 citizens at the same rate of 100k. It does this by giving 1million dollars annually to Company Y, a major employer who will use it to hire the remaining 10 people.
At the end of year 11, the government has a bankroll of (+1m balance + 200k taxes - 1m to Company Y) = 200k
At the end of year 12, the government is in debt for (200k + 200k - 1m) = 600k.
At the end of year 13, the government is in debt for (-600k + 200k - 1m) = 1.4m
At the end of year 14, the government is in debt for (-1.4m + 200k - 1m) = 2.2m
Yes, it's over-simplified, but that's kind of the point. It seems utterly ridiculous doesn't it? This is obviously a model that's not sustainable. Yet when you make that a country of a few hundred million, bump the dollar amounts into the billions -- and the debt into the trillions, and make the expenditure just a fraction of total government spending, it somehow looks like a good idea?
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Now run those numbers with an employment rate that is sane.
The government does not pay for half of the population, nor do we have 50% unemployment -- it's about 9.7%, which is higher than usual. And most of the other 90% still pay taxes.
beyond the wildest dreams? (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA underestimates dreams
FAIL (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm seeing a lot of talk about figuring out how to do things that we might want to do, maybe, at some point.
You know why Apollo worked? We set goals and a date, and the figuring out took care of itself.
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Here I was thinking that it worked because there was national prestige at stake and the hearts and minds of the world. The Soviets were basically saying "haha! we're better than you" and the US needed to prove that they weren't. The same is not true now. No matter how much time and effort you put into making the airfield look legit and pretend to talk into radios, the planes will not come flying out of the sky with food and supplies. Give up on the Apollo cargo cult, people have been trying to rekindle
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Actually, it's a little of both. There was a national prestige thing going on- AND they set goals, a series of planned dates, and then just did it.
Cargo Cult? Only to those that don't have any of the history at their disposal- and access to some of the people that were there while they were growing up (My Father and Grandfather...and I've got verifiable proof of some of the stuff I've been told over the years in their shop notes, etc...). And there is something to the complaints from that "cargo cult".
NA
Re:FAIL (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect it worked because the government considered it important enough to pay for.
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I just wish they'd consider it worth spending on... We've gotten quite a bit of return on the Apollo investments- and we'll see NOTHING from the bank bailouts.
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You know why Apollo worked? We set goals and a date, and the figuring out took care of itself.
Is that how you think it works? The figuring takes care of itself? I'd say you have a bright future in middle management, but you forgot to mention budget.
Here's what setting a goal and a date got us: A program that was, at best, a rehash of Apollo which involved zero "figuring out" of the real problems facing space exploration today. Oh, but because the ones who created this program were also terrible managers
One of the best apologies I have ever read (Score:5, Insightful)
damn if they aren't doing a good job apologizing for putting NASA on the back burner. Effectively ending US leadership in space is about the sum of it, with all the required "forward looking" related buzzwords. Yet for every politico speak buzzword fest there is the followup of "no long range plan"
In other words, there ain't money for rocket science. Really, until some other nation lays claim to the moon or really starts being pushy in space our space program is going to be full of double talk and expectations. So, uh, yeah, they have the resources now to develop x,y, and z. Well duh, your not doing any expensive launches your bound to have money for other things. The problem is, research is not exciting to the public. It does not capture the imagination. So NASA will fall further from the public's eye which will make it easier to keep marginalizing it.
It does not generate sufficient votes in an entitlement first generation. Why spend money to go to the moon when we can use the money to provide entitlements which generate votes which keeps us safely in office.
Hell, NASA's budget ain't larger than a rounding error in the overall scheme of things. To tell the American public with a straight face there ain't money to do that is astounding. Whats worse are all the people running to defend it. We just spent more money shoring up some major banks than we spent in the last ten years on the space program! The stimulus package had more pork than NASA has budget.
What those articles do is nothing more than spew a well rehearsed apology for going nowhere.
Re:One of the best apologies I have ever read (Score:5, Insightful)
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". All they've been doing for the last 40 years on that front is delivering animations of ships and missions that never pan out and holding press conferences about how *one day* we're going to the moon and/or Mars (promises which get pushed back every few years). The cancellation of Constellation was just a tacit admission of what anyone with eyes, ears, and any memory at all has known for a long time."
It is called surrender.
We did have Skylab which was big leap in Space station. Did you know we have a seco
Re:One of the best apologies I have ever read (Score:5, Interesting)
We just spent more money shoring up some major banks than we spent in the last ten years on the space program!
OK, enough of this bullshit that I keep hearing mindlessly repeated. The TARP funds that went to banks were structured as investments, which haven't done too bad considering the circumstances.
A big chunk of that has been paid back (at an annual rate of return around 8.5% [snl.com]). Yes there will be some write-offs that will ultimately lower that rate and in the end, it may end up being a wash. That means little or no net loss. Pretty good for a government program.
Stop spewing this ridiculous meme that the bank bailouts were some huge money sink. It is not true.
Now, if you want to complain about how things went with our money and AIG (an insurance company) and the automakers, fine. But on the balance, the bank bailout wasn't too bad...
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A big chunk of that has been paid back (at an annual rate of return around 8.5%).
And "reinvested" in shit business. The TARP program is some sort of twisted version of the Gambler's Ruin problem [wikipedia.org]. Any positive return is put back in.
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I'm not arguing that the TARP program overall isn't a questionable idea.
I'm just trying to inject a little TRUTH into the discussion. The OP (and so many others, both here and elsewhere) are screaming about how the bank bailouts are the cause of all of our problems.
It turned out that the bank bailouts were a pretty good investment, or at least pretty much a wash.
If people want to rant about real problems/mistakes, fine. But I'm getting sick of some of the untrue memes that people mindlessly repeat over an
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Don't forget the opportunity costs of not bailing out GM or AIG. Although I found the behavior of the two companies reprehensible, the failure of a mammoth company like AIG would have been devastating to the economy.
We may never know the true extent of what the damage could have been -- it's certainly possible that a GM liquidation could have spurred the creation of several new companies out of the former parent's assets, although for the time being, it looks like it was the right thing to do, even though
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1. Government took over risky stuff off their balance sheet so they were not in such dire straits any more.
2. Government pumped ENORMOUS amount of liquidity into the system so that borrowing is free. It is easy to make money when you borrow for nothing and lend it out for 5%.
All these have long term costs for the government and we will all start feeling it real soon while the bankers will be giving themsel
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Really, until some other nation lays claim to the moon or really starts being pushy in space our space program is going to be full of double talk and expectations.
That's already happening [slashdot.org] ...sort of.
Better space stations going a bit farther (Score:2)
IMHO, at this technological point all efforts should go towards establishing a fully inhabitable and equipped space station.
Not a web of tiny corridors, but a large building, sith actual rooms, artificial gravity, etc.
First step? Reduce a hundredfold the price of pushing stuff into orbit.
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sith?
isn't a freudian slip when you say one thing and mean your mother? :-)
Wrong tense in summary (Score:5, Informative)
Members of the U.S. House panel with direct oversight of NASA vowed Wednesday to oppose White House plans to cancel the Constellation moon rocket program, calling the proposal a “deficient” idea that could jeopardize U.S. leadership in space exploration.
The criticism, from both Republicans and Democrats, underscores the difficulty that President Barack Obama faces in convincing Congress of his plan, which would terminate Constellation and instead rely on commercial rockets to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
I predict that the usual political sausage factory will preserve some part of Constellation. Look how long the F-22 lived on life support.
stop sending bags of meat into space (Score:5, Insightful)
for every astronaut we send up into LEO, we can probably send 40 cutrate probes all over the solar system. hell, as the predator drones in afghanistan show, not even the military needs pilots anymore
the point is: the days of needing pilots and astronauts is over. everything can be done remotely for orders of magnitude of less cash outlay, for much greater amounts of quality science
instead, send probes, hundreds of them. send 20 to saturn. send 40 to jupiter. lose a few. who cares? get them up there fast and keep cranking them out. fire and forget. FOR FAR LESS MONEY, ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, THAN A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM TO THE MOON. do quality science remotely. do it on a giant scale
to hell with sending men to the moon, to hell with sending women to mars, enough of that pointless cold war chest thumping. let india and china play that idiotic nationalist game of who has the bigger penis now. sending human beings into space, for the foreseeable future, is a vanity, a conceit, a waste of money and time, like a rich guy buying a ridiculously expensive car just because he can
lets give up the puerile boyhood scifi fantasies, and start doing real interplanetary on a massive scale... for far less money!
Lets Send Bags of Meat To The Moon... (Score:4, Interesting)
NASA paved the way with huge, expensive spacecraft. It's time now for the USA to put private sector ingenuity and efficiency to the Space sector. The US government should put some nice Tax incentives in place for space companies to keep them in the USA, thus keeping incentives for engineers and scientists to stay here.
It isn't a waste of money if it pays for itself in Private hands!
agreed (Score:2)
i welcome all the budding dr. nos out there. if you have a lot of cash to blow, go ahead and do it on a space fantasy. what the hell do i care?
however, my comment has to do with what nasa does with our public money, and a national program of unmanned space probes certainly makes the most sense, for many reasons, not least of which is that it can be really cheap: lots of science bang for very little buck
there's no reason to give that up because some rich dude has a space fetish
Re:stop sending bags of meat into space (Score:4, Interesting)
for every astronaut we send up into LEO, we can probably send 40 cutrate probes all over the solar system.
It's more the other way around. Current seat price on the Shuttle (which is already pretty darn expensive) is something like $100 million, perhaps a bit more. The Discovery class probes are around half a billion dollars. This is as close to "cut rate" as NASA gets. That's five astronauts in space. You're off by a factor of 200.
Now, if we really did cut rate probes, then we could as well do cut rate manned missions as well. I still don't see the price advantage that probes are supposed to have over people. It remains, for example, that a few geologists on Mars for a few years, would do a lot more scientific work than a few dozen space probes, perhaps even a few hundred space probes over a few decades of exploration (there's some hideous inefficiencies here, since in the unmanned exploration scenario an unanswered question requires a new unmanned mission, which typically takes a decade or more to develop and deploy currently). They wouldn't have the geographical coverage, of course, but most of the problems with space probes is that they simply are too limited to do much science at a time.
we can get far more cutrate (Score:3, Interesting)
when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
i want to see RPI managing 5 probes on venus, i want to see lehigh managing 10 probes on the moon, i want to see northwestern managing 15 probes on titan. i want to see carnegie mellon and case western arguing over which of their probes gets to prospect the interesting block of ice on ganymede, because they both spotted it at the same time. i wa
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when you don't have to deal with something that eats, drinks, breathes, shits, and pisses, you can get a hell of lot more bang for your buck. surely you can see this
That "something" also is lightyears ahead in capability of any unmanned probe we can currently field. The stuff you mention is just overhead.
that is pure fucking bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
a probe is merely an extension of a human's senses
if you send a probe, a human being is still evaluating, deciding, and learning, just as if he were standing on an alien surface
yes, with a time delay for radio signals. as if whatever a meatbag is learning, deciding, and evaluating on an alien surface isn't also time delayed when being relayed back to earth! and how much more does it cost to send the guy instead?
think of the military guys sitting in a cubicle farm in nevada killing al qaeda assholes remotely from predator drones. why do you need those actual guys sitting in the actual drones? YOU DON'T! what are you gaining by doing it remotely? what are you losing by doing it remotely? THINK! drones are the model for space exploration in our lifetime: more bang for the buck, very little is lost, plain and simple
and what of the massive price reduction? sending 1 meat bag to mars=sending 100 probes around the solar system. why don't you see that the tradeoffs between meatbags and probes obviously and overwhelmingly balance out in favor of unmanned probes?
think of sending probes as the same as sending astronauts, but the astronaut is sitting in a room in cape canaveral using a probe to see, hear, feel, and touch FOR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE LESS MONEY
why don't people see this? because of fan boy sci fi fantasies, that's why. everyone wants to be an astronaut. 5 out of the 5 million who want to be astronauts will actually get the chance. but with drones, 5,000 out of 5 million who want to be astronauts get to do real space science... remotely instead. so think of what your boyhood fantasies and your mental deathgrip on the "need" to send meatbags into space is costing you in terms of your real chances, in your lifetime, to do real space science
the fan boys have inculcated star wars and star trek as the only cognitive model that makes sense to them. you adhere to the idea of astronauts out of passion, not logic and reason. SOMEDAY, we'll go into space. and our probes will have, in the meantime:
1. decided the best place to go
2. made massive strides in science and technology
3. even set up the infrastructure and facilities waiting for our arrival
compare that with the emotional but expensive and impractical and limited idea of actually going there in person first. its poor strategic thinking
face facts: we only have extremely primitive spacefaring technologies. work with what you got, and resign yourself to the fact that firefly is centuries from now, and will never occur in your lifetime
you get probes instead. work with what you got. if you instead waste your resources on investing in the idea of meatbags in space instead, you will satisfy some sort of atavistic fantasy life, but you will also see far less discovery and far less science in your lifetime, because the simple truth is that your financial and technological resources are limited
it really is a no brainer: no more astronauts. stop wasting your time and money on that conceit, please
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And there you go... In the end, we need both things, really.
Part of the main reason things aren't getting done in the same manner that they were in the Apollo days of NASA is that they roughly have half the proportionate budget in dollars than they had in the 60's right now, coupled with a bureaucracy like any other ossified government agency.
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instead, send probes, hundreds of them. send 20 to saturn. send 40 to jupiter. lose a few. who cares? get them up there fast and keep cranking them out. fire and forget. FOR FAR LESS MONEY, ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, THAN A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM TO THE MOON. do quality science remotely. do it on a giant scale
OTOH, this here is a very sexy unmanned approach. I wouldn't mind scrapping a hobby-level manned program for a couple decades, if it meant some sort of serious, methodical unmanned approach like this. It's worth noting that the Apollo program had 21 unmanned probes as part of the deal for a cost (in 1994 dollars [asi.org]) of less than $5 billion dollars. The Russians had some success in their series of probes to Mars and Venus in the 70s when they did a similar approach. As far as I'm concerned, the approach has bee
thank you (Score:2)
for coming around to the superior approach
spread the word, evangelize with me
we need to wake the fan boys out of their star trek fantasies and the false need for putting bodies into space and get to work instead on inexpensive, rapidly deployed, unmanned probes. lots of them, quick, cheap, easy. fire and forget, lose a few who cares, crank them out by the dozens
there's lots of science to be done, a lot more cheaply and a lot more easily and faster than one pissing and breathing meatbag on mars which only ac
Re:stop sending bags of meat into space (Score:4, Insightful)
the point is: the days of needing pilots and astronauts is over. everything can be done remotely for orders of magnitude of less cash outlay, for much greater amounts of quality science
One of the STS-125 astronauts (I forget which) was asked this question at an event I attended.
He told an anecdotal story about having asked a geologist about the science being done on Mars by the rovers, and how long it would take a geologist to do the same science if he were on the surface of Mars.
The geologist did some back of the envelope calculations, and replied back "About 15 minutes."
The point was that there is absolutely a place for both manned space exploration as well as unmanned exploration. Yes, human space flight technology is still primitive. It will need to improve for us to do more practical manned exploration. But that doesn't mean we sit on our butts and expect the technology to magically appear.
Did Balboa or Columbus wait for diesel-powered cargo ships to do their dangerous trips? Did Lewis and Clark wait for a transcontinental railroad to magically appear?
completely false (Score:2)
we do what we can afford. and if we can send out 100 probes, or 1 meatbag to mars, for the same price, its a no brainer to send out the probes, and to hell with the meatbag
and those probes can do the science and find where to go and set up the facilities that will be needed to support humans when we finally DO get humans out there
"But that doesn't mean we sit on our butts and expect the technology to magically appear."
what the hell is that supposed to mean? sending out astronauts is the only way to advance
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and if we can send out 100 probes, or 1 meatbag to mars, for the same price
We can't.
stupidity makes me angry (Score:3, Interesting)
and it is obviously fucking stupid to send a meatbag into space instead of 100 probes for less money
i'm angry because i am seeing less scientific discovery in my life time because some macho posers have boyhood astronaut fantasies
i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
YOU are seeing less space science in your lifetime for the sake of a chest thumping conceited vanity, so get angry if you care about
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i think my anger is justified: are you passionate about space exploration? then why aren't YOU angry at this stupid obsession with meatbags in space?
I am passionate, which is why I work in the field and study the design issues at hand before ranting like some lunatic religious idiot trying to sell Jesus or Mohammed or whatever. Because well thought out, rational, developed thinking is what is required to do any amount of space exploration. Not batshit insane preaching on the internet like a fucking used car salesman.
As for why I am not angry about manned space exploration, because so far nobody has every demonstrated that manned exploration is, inde
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"not even the military needs pilots anymore"
Watchu talking bout son. For every Predator in the air there are two pilots someplace in Arizona manning it remotely.
And sending 20 probes to Saturn is stupid compared to making on more expensive mission to send a drone blimp or a drone boat to Titan. Besides for every probe you have large teams of all kinds of people behind, and then you have years of study on the returned data by planetologists and such. So if you've got money to blow on probes you might as
it IS an awesome idea (Score:2)
because when the day comes to send actual people into space, we will know WHERE TO FUCKING GO and everything WILL BE REMOTELY SET UP ALREADY
what do we lose? a little science about how our bones degrade? ok, i can deal with that loss of science... because we did 10,000x that amount of science in other fields for 100x less money instead!
fuck the idea of astronauts for the foreseeable future. 100% serious
i agree 100% (Score:2)
and i look forward to the day when we can sustain ourselves offworld
until such a day when we have the infrastructure and cash outlay to afford that, unmanned probes will establish the science and probably build the actual facilities that will help us realize that goal
then we can worry about the next adage we need to fulfill: "keeping all your breeding pairs in one star system is a retarded way to run a species"
obligatory quote (Score:2, Insightful)
from "The Right Stuff"
No Bucks, No Buck Rogers" or in this case "No Buck Rogers, No Bucks"
Phone home? (Score:2)
was to develop rockets to return humans to the moon
I'm confused. How did they get here in the first place?
Just because they don't like it here, does not mean that we have to send 'em back on NASA's dime, dammit.
I mean, what have the Lunar humans ever done for us?
A funding proposal (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA cannot do anything long term because they have no long term funding - every year their funding is up for the chop in the name of political expediency. Since almost ANYTHING NASA can do is long term, this means they really cannot do anything.
So, here's my proposal as to how to fix this. This would require Congress passing a law, but once the law is passed, Congress is out of the loop.
1) Create a class of bonds - NASA bonds.
2) The money from selling these bond SHALL BY LAW only go to funding NASA.
3) Any technological spin-offs from NASA developments funded by these bonds SHALL be owned by NASA, SHALL be licensed to industry under reasonable and non-discriminatory rates, and those license fees SHALL be used to repay the bonds.
4) Interest rates on the bonds SHALL be based upon the license fees above - no fees, no payments. In this sense the "bonds" aren't "bonds" in that they can fail.
5) IF NASA can convince the market the bonds will be profitable, THEN the bonds will sell well and NASA will have a steady source of funds. If NASA cannot convince the market, then the bonds won't sell to the market.
6) However, if you are truly a star-struck geek, you can still buy the bonds, even if you don't think they will pay off, if you feel that the work is worth the risk of losing your money.
7) Since the funding is now voluntary, nobody can reasonably complain about "their money being wasted" (not that will stop them).
8) If NASA starts doing things that people don't want to fund, the bonds will dry up, and NASA will (hopefully) get the message.
9) For those who will claim this is just "NASA, Inc." - not quite. A company MUST make a profit, and failing to do so can be actionable by the shareholders. This setup purposefully allows NASA to NOT make a profit.
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Alternately: accept the reality that large scale missions can't be achieved over presidential transitions and plan missions that are short enough in duration for the current President to take the credit when they are successfully completed.
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Unfortunately, most of the sort of missions that can be accomplished are larger, longer term than that- NASA won't get to do much of anything if they take that and will dwindle even further down the hill.
another direction (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean NASA is seriously fucked up at this point in time. Every time they try and do something the rug is pulled out from under them. I know it's cynical but when I was growing up watching all this I really thought space would be accessible to a greater portion of the population than you can count in less than a minute.
It's seriously fucking disappointing and I just can't even read this stuff from NASA anymore cause it's more of the same 'were gonna do this we're gonna do that' blah blah blah.
NASA has gone from being a 'can do' organisation to a 'gonna do' organisation.
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I mean NASA is seriously fucked up at this point in time. Every time they try and do something the rug is pulled out from under them.
To be fair, the constellation project wasn't going well when it got pulled. Private industry aren't immune to budget cuts themselves, and it was probably a good idea to scrap it instead of having it turn into another Shuttle-like debacle, in which the final product was an order of magnitude over budget, and failed to achieve any of its original design goals.
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Is it just me (Score:4, Insightful)
or "To send a robot where no robot has gone before" doesn't exactly sound quite as exciting as the original phrase.
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I think you mean:
"To boldly send a robot where no robot has gone before."
Less thinking, more doing. (Score:2)
Research is great, and I think NASA should do it, and I hope they continue to do it.
But not at the expense of actually doing things.
The way I'm reading the spin is we basically canceled our space program so that we can think about having another one some day.
That's fucking depressing.
A 5 year mission ... (Score:2, Funny)
... To explore strange new worlds; To seek out new life, and new civilizations; To boldly go where no man has gone before.
Developing new technolgies is all good and well... (Score:2)
Inspiration (Score:5, Interesting)
How many of us grew up wanting to be scientists an engineers because we thought NASA was the coolest thing since the Super Nintendo?
We have a terrible shortage of scientists in the US and a culture that ill-supports our nerdy kids. NASA serves an an inspiration not only to them, but to children all over the planet to get into the sciences and excel. The trickle-down technologies that come from NASA research are just a bonus.
Re:Inspiration (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no shortage, only a culture that is unwilling to pay scientists and engineers the same wages that are available in medicine, law, and finance.
If you want scientists, give kids an incentive to become scientists. You can only trick them with dog and pony shows like manned space "exploration" for so long.
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Money is important. I live in a country where there is so much shortage of engineers that we can just laugh and choose from whatever job we want. We are paid quite well. On the other hand, the country is full of lawyers, economists, and humanities students that just cannot get a job.
Now, suddenly, the whole society started to respect engineers, and now the girls all know that we have good salaries, and presto! -- we can have girlfriends, finally! :)
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My mixed metaphor sensor just took the head-staggers.
Re:Inspiration (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, don't forget that part of it is our own damn fault.
I find it incredibly hard to blame a 20-30 year old for deciding not to go into the sciences, simply because of the horrible conditions that graduate students are forced to endure. Graduate students are paid poverty-level wages, and do the vast majority of the work for which their mentors take credit. The actual "studying" is usually done within the first two or three years, while PhD students usually work for 7-8 years on their degree.
After the PhD's done? A modest wage increase, and the even further humiliation of being a PostDoc.
Re:Inspiration (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah because people who like money and aren't interested in science will make great scientists. Marketing people and bank managers? Total wasted talent. Each one is a potential Einstein just languishing in the wrong profession.
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The reality is that the closer you are to the money, the more you'll make. It doesn't make sense
Sure, it does. You have more visibility, more negotiating power, and being "closer to the money" means it takes less effort to redirect some of that money in your direction.
Money and Sales (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is that the closer you are to the money, the more you'll make. It doesn't make sense
Sure, it does. You have more visibility, more negotiating power, and being "closer to the money" means it takes less effort to redirect some of that money in your direction.
No, it doesn't even work that way. The sales guys don't even have to expend effort to redirect money in their direction: they get obscene commissions on the sales they make, sometimes on top of high salaries.
The engineers (or whatever job it is) who make it all possible are seen by management—which is usually made up of former salesmen, or people in the same social circles as the salesmen—as interchangeable cogs, who can simply be swapped out if they start to get too uppity about pay. Because it's not them who will have to work three times as hard to both pick up the slack of the work not getting done because they let go someone who had been there for 10 years, and train that person's replacement, while still getting all your own work done...
Dan Aris
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No, it doesn't even work that way. The sales guys don't even have to expend effort to redirect money in their direction: they get obscene commissions on the sales they make, sometimes on top of high salaries.
More negotiating power and less effort to redirect money.
The engineers (or whatever job it is) who make it all possible are seen by management--which is usually made up of former salesmen, or people in the same social circles as the salesmen--as interchangeable cogs, who can simply be swapped out if they start to get too uppity about pay. Because it's not them who will have to work three times as hard to both pick up the slack of the work not getting done because they let go someone who had been there for 10 years, and train that person's replacement, while still getting all your own work done...
Visibility.
I just explained how your examples demonstrate my argument.
Re:Money and Sales (Score:4, Interesting)
The sales guys don't even have to expend effort to redirect money in their direction: they get obscene commissions on the sales they make, sometimes on top of high salaries.
More accurately, it comes down to skill sets - sales people are good at convincing other people to do what they want. This is a good skill to have when negotiating salaries and benefits.
Engineers and scientists work in factual reality, which is a disadvantage in these situations. (Particularly if you're negotiating with sales-types.)
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". The sales guy couldn't be an engineer, but the engineer could do the sales guy's job." spoken by an engineer, I'll bet. Sales is hard. Sure, the sales guy couldn't do my engineering job. But I can't do his job either. And lets have no cant about "well, you could learn to do the sales job"... maybe.. and the sales guy could learn to do my job. But for good sales people, it comes naturally. Just like engineering stuff comes naturally for me.
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I'm a 80s kid, yet the imagery of the grainy black/white video still has an impact on me. I do love the old scifi series and movies, all in that generation seemed to be geared to push those boundaries, the SciFi was gorgious. In this day and age scifi looks like "oh, that's sortof.. yeah not mindboggling" while we twitter that instantly on a smartphone which sends a signal TO SPACE and back and then AROUND t
Former Rocket Scientist View (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work as a contractor at NASA writing real-time GN&C software for space vehicles. I was very young, but I do recall watching TV when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. It didn't really mean that much to me, but it was one of my earliest childhood memories. July 20th is an important date for me, personally.
Years later, I did very well in math and science classes, so my engineer/pilot father pushed me towards engineering as a profession. I planned to be an EE, but fate and transferring between Universities forced me into Aerospace Engineering. When I was eligible to transfer into the EE program, I chose to stay put and concentrate on aircraft design, fluids and viscous boundary layer CFD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics [wikipedia.org]. At graduation, none of the aircraft producing companies were interested in me due to lower grades (I worked 25+ hrs/wk and paid my way through school with ZERO loans). I was offered a job at a NASA contractor writing GN&C software. Non-CS graduates were better in that role - we weren't interested in doing every trick the compiler or hardware allowed. We wrote highly maintainable, solid, boring code that worked. Our error rate was/is the lowest in the world, at a price in productivity. In 5 yrs of that job, I introduced 1 error. I probably wrote a total of 8,000 LOCs. That counts 4,000 initial values for a big new failure mode module. I was highly specialized and knew my marketability was very limited in coding. I was an expert at software development processes with very low error rates, however.
Took a few C/C++, OO, and other classes during that time and found a position writing cross platform code in the mission control center rebuild for the space station and shuttle updates. That taught me *NIX operating systems and cross platform GUI programming. Highly marketable skills at the time. I was the Windows and OS/2 porting expert on the team and responsible for bringing the software into the new MCC's world-wide, Canada, Russia, France, etc. As the new development for the project was completing, the NASA sponsor added me to a list of critical skills required to continue the project. Basically, it was a job for the life of the project. I worked for the "development" contractor, not the "run/maintenance" contractor company, so by doing that, he was taking huge political risk for him and me. He was very politically powerful and anywhere I worked within NASA (we had team members at JPL, AMES, Huntsville, and Goddard in addition to ESA folks), I'd be pulled back at least part time to work on the project. He never asked if I were interested in the position either. I left and have been working in the private sector since mid-1996. I pay more in taxes now than I earned at NASA.
NASA is a highly political entity, both externally with congress/funding and internally with the different teams getting the best resources.
NASA provides welfare for engineers and a way to get political favors for congress. Nothing really new has come from the manned space program in years. All the new propulsion crap being rehashed now was ground tested in the 1950s. Until they take 5+ experiments into space and let them be proven in around moon flybys, I won't be convinced we aren't wasting money. NASA is too afraid of failure to risk anything now. Failure appears to congress like throwing money away, regardless of how much knowledge is gained as part of the failure. OTOH, going into space is hard. People will die. Expect it. Commercial space science can take the risks that NASA can't. The people who go into space and don't survive should be certain to have iron clad life insurance policies. The only people getting rich off space technologies today are the spies selling secrets to foreign governments.
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Eventually getting us off this slowly dying rock? Doy? Extinction WILL eventually happen if we stay here...the sooner we get out into the stars, the greater the chance our species has for surviving.
Of course, the counter to that argument is that we've fucked up Earth so badly, is it really a good idea to inflict ourselves on the rest of the planets out there...
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Getting off this slowly dying rock, global warming and other man-made disasters aside, is not going to be a matter of survival for many thousands of years to come. During which we will hopefully acquire the technology to _actually_ pull it off, compared to the current situation in which, simply, we have nowhere near the skills to do such a thing.
so, in short:
1) We can't establish a permanent self sufficient extraterrestrial colony anywhere at the moment, and even an Apollo or Manhattan size project won't make this possible for quite a while. We really can't go anywhere at the moment, not even within the solar system, not even on the Moon.
2) We *will* eventually have the technology to do that in a not-so-near future. This Flagship Technology Demonstrations thing is a step in that direction.
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Agreed that this isn't anything that will need to happen soon...but we have to start developing the technology and methods that will eventually lead to it at some point, so why not now?
If we took half the money we spend killing people and instead used it to research space flight, we would be MUCH further along at this point.
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If we took half the money we spend killing people and instead used it to research space flight, we would be MUCH further along at this point.
If we took half the money we put into entitlement programs and put it into getting better education, we would be much better off. Instead, we shunt money to people who WON'T do anything with their lives but suck on the gov't teat and spit out kids to get MORE money. Then THEIR kids do the same thing. Welfare reform is a joke. People just move to places when the money dries up. And yes, I KNOW people like this.
While off-point: Defense v. Entitlement (Score:3, Insightful)
The actual #'s are instructive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget [wikipedia.org]
The "killing people" sector of the U.S. budget dwarfs the "suck on the teat" portion, many times over in real dollars, and the more so when you consider the current military expenses for open-ended wars that aren't being paid for with current funds, the hidden costs in "non-military" parts of the budget related to veterans etc., and that programs like Social Security are directly funded (for now) by specific taxes. Th
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Did you even spend 1 second at that wikipedia link?
Look at the pie graph of spending. Entitlement programs, i.e. welfare - that is, social security, medicare, and other mandatory spending - make up well over 50% of the total. Defense clocks in at around 25%. Given our current deficit, *completely eliminating* defense spending would not even *balance* the budget. Why? Because all the BIG spending is on entitlements.
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Of course, the counter to that argument is that we've fucked up Earth so badly
Oh, we haven't harmed the earth, it will do just fine without an ecology, or even without any life at all. It is we, ourselves, that we are fucking.
We wouldn't be the first to "ruin" the earth, either. The very first life here poisoned its atmosphere, filling it with the poisonous oxygen. Guess what? They're dead, Jim. The oxygen that they themselves created killed them.
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Ask the Russians, they're the only ones who have been doing any heavy lift rocket engine research in the last 40 years. The biggest rocket in the US arsenal, the Atlas V, uses Russian engines.
Ya know how everyone is moaning that the shuttle is going to be retired and NASA will lose the expertise of that workforce? Well that's what happened after Apollo. The expertise of the F1 was lost and now the only way to get back that capability is to do the research all over again (hopefully better with modern amen
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Only really usable for interplanetary distances. You need some lift tech that'll work well for atmospheric operation that won't irradiate the countryside or have issues with lifting the reactor powerful enough to move the reaction mass for that operation.
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Heh... I did. Remember it pretty well, actually. Got plunked down to see it because Dad designed part of the ground support launch systems.
And there's still Major Matt Mason toys in my toy collection (parents took 'em from me for safe keeping when I started trashing my toys...)- and a legacy of two Apollo 8 medallions (flown metal minted for the people that worked on the project...) in the family heirlooms.