NASA's Bolden: No American-Led Return To the Moon 'In My Lifetime' 233
MarkWhittington writes "A clash over the future course of American space exploration flared up at a recent joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board. In one corner was Al Carnesale of UCLA, who headed the recent study issued by the National Research Council that found fault with the Obama administration's plan to send American astronauts to an asteroid. In the other corner was NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who has been charged with carrying out the policy condemned by the NRC report."
Hello, editors (Score:2)
Priorities (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's remember:
"Mr Bolden said: "When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Mr Obama] charged me with three things.
"One, he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.""
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Unless there are muslims to assuage on the Moon, we're not going back.
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Bizarre, you would have thought none of these things were in the remit of NASA. One is education and the other two are diplomacy.
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Um... that's not actually a shift.
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There is a general perception in the Muslim world that America is opposed to Islam and doesn't value Islamic culture or lives. This is backed up by things like drone strikes that kill innocent Muslims with barely an apology, all in the name of making Christians safer. Perhaps that is a distorted view, but it isn't an uncommon one.
I'm going to assume you don't want to be murdered by Islamic terrorists, and would prefer not to be fighting wars in Muslim countries. Therefore America needs to improve relations
Nothing's going to happen in any case (Score:2)
We're not going to an asteroid, we're not going to Mars, and we're probably never going to the Moon, either. NASA is a toy of the executive branch. Every prez comes up with a hot new "plan" and it never gets past the the planning stage. Bolden will be out on his ass looking for work in less than four years, maybe sooner, and NASA will be back to square one - again.
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Well, for last ten years NASA have been regularly on chopping block thanks to Republicans - but it is also institution about which general voting public don't care, and that's why it's first causality in austerity chill which like it or not will come anyway.
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Well, for last ten years NASA have been regularly on chopping block thanks to Republicans
And thanks to the Democrats as well. Keep in mind that current debt as a fraction of GDP jumped up by 25% during the Democrat dominated Congress of 2009-2011.
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Sorry, but check your facts first - current debt was built in by budget created by Bush Republicans.
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Sorry, but check your facts first
I did. Imagine that. Maybe you should actually look at the debt accumulated during the Obama administration than make empty claims.
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Just keep squeezing that stone, I'm sure you'll get blood from it someday.
I mean do you want to start with how the expenditure of Iraq and Afgahnistan was moved to being "on the books" for the Federal government under Obama (despite, you know, still being real money being blown away by Bush) or the GFC finally unfolding at the terminal stage of Bush's term and thus Obama (and said Democrat congress) inheriting the choice of "bail out the banks go bankrupt" or "let 90+% of Americans go bankrupt".
From your to
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was moved to being "on the books"
Which is completely irrelevant to debt growth. Off the book spending contribute as much as on the book spending.
From your tone I assume you think we should've just let the banks go under, which is an easy sentiment when you foolishly believe you wouldn't have lost money.
I take it you have no idea what "moral hazard" is.
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Challenging (Score:2)
NASA's manned spaceflight program is over (Score:5, Interesting)
What Bolden is simply acknowledging is that NASA's manned spaceflight program is over. Sure, they're still recruiting and training astronauts, but that's so they can keep the ISS manned until it is retired. The future of manned space flight, including space stations, Moon bases and interplanetary and interstellar travel will belong to private industry. NASA will focus on scientific missions. There's nothing wrong with that - it represents the evolution of the space industry. Billionaires like Elon Musk can build, launch, and return space capsules today. Fifty years ago, Musk's approach would have been highly unlikely, if not completely impossible. The US government will help fund and provide frameworks - think DARPA's development of the Internet and now the 100-year starship project and the humanoid robotics initiative. Along with its own research and development, private industry will take the frameworks and ideas DARPA is developing now and leverage and exploit them in unimagined ways, just as with the Internet.
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In the US perhaps, but China's manned space programme is moving forwards nicely. My money would be on them to get to the moon next. What will be interesting is the reaction of the US when China has a firm date and looks likely to do it.
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Last time that happened with a rocket in 1996, the Chinese abandoned almost all commercial launches.
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About the 100-year spaceship - if I recall a-rightly, the tasking involving DARPA was for one or more experiments to find out if humans were capable of conducting a concerted "long-range" effort at anything at all. The century spaceship effort is useful as it gathers interest, thought, and publicity - and who knows what it will bring in a hundred years? The real test is whether or not that project or any other can survive that long.
(sorry, I can't find the link I had to the original stuff; y'all with good
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Profits Uber Alles (Score:2)
Right, because there's some sort of profit motive here that we should be serving. Some guy's business is going to get ahold of this and that will make all of us (shareholders) rich, rich, rich!
Let's point out that there are slightly bigger barriers to entry in the space exploration market than in the internet market. And if there's one thing in the world that isn't going to get smaller and more efficient with time, it's a gravity well. At least until we develop a space elevator. So the market is guaranteed
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What's the big deal with H.H.? He had a couple of semi-successful (and that, by some, is a stretch).
HK-1 -> H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose" never came close to contract, and it's only flight (mostly ground effect) was two years after the war ended. It was a remarkable aircraft, to be sure, but hardly a success.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_H-4_Hercules [wikipedia.org]
Glomar Explorer - along with a slew of project names - was indeed quite an achievement, but pretty much failed (depending on whose account you read, ev
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If you want an example of someone who really did things in, for example, aviation, you might start with Igor Sikorsky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Sikorsky [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Russky_Vityaz [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Ilya_Muromets [wikipedia.org]
First four-engine aircraft -> first four-engine operational airliner, first four-engine operational bomber (a conversion from the airliner.) He did this in 1913, 1914.
Later, he designed and built the first successful, operational helicopter.
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I think the point here is that if private enterprise had been encouraged in the 60s (or at least NASA and the government had stayed out of the way back then) to set up space launch business, it would be a radically different world today. And Hughes Aircraft Company might well have been one of the businesses that could exploit any such openings back then.
Fine (Score:2)
If Mankind won't return to the moon in your lifetime, don't think this can't be fixed relatively quickly
It's clear what we must do. (Score:5, Funny)
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must be killed.
Then we can go back to the moon.
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I am unable to. This was told to me by someone else, and I accepted it as fact without merit or inquiry. To my credit though, there are some vague notions in that direction in our history texts about the value of the moon program.
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"Mankind" doesn't only encompass the United States of America. I am quite sure that the Chinese don't give a rats ass of the lifetime of Bolden so it might be that US won't be going back to the moon but that doesn't say that mankind wont. My guess is that China will do it within my lifetime if they progress on the current course.
Fuck the moon. Mars too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but there's nothing useful in either place AND they're both at the bottom of another god damned gravity well. Orbital stations for spaced based solar would at least be *useful*. Satellite based internet would be useful. Is there something wrong with useful? Why is it that when we talk about space exploration, it always descends into some dick-waving "me there first" macho-chimpanzee rant.
We know how to get into space. We know there are useful and profitable things to do there. Can we just get on with it please?
The moon is useless and if there's life on Mars, it's not going anywhere. We can wait.
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Sorry, but there's nothing useful in either place AND they're both at the bottom of another god damned gravity well.
The whole point is having two homes in case of an extinction level event happening (asteroid, nuclear war, plague, etc.).
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we can't build a hollow tin can big enough to serve that purpose in the next century; we can't travel to any such place either in the next century.
the only possible benefit to space exploration in the near term would be for resources, by automated system.
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The whole point is having two homes in case of an extinction level event happening (asteroid, nuclear war, plague, etc.).
The value of a "second home" isn't much if the second home can't sustain human life indefinitely. Why spend trillions of dollars just so that a few dozen humans can be miserable on some godforsaken rock for a few years until they die from lack of biosphere?
Even if the Earth was hit by an asteroid, a nuclear war, and a plague simultaneously, there would still be more chance for human survival on Earth than anywhere else.
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I hate to tell you this, but once you're dead, you won't give a shit about ANYTHING.
Well, damn, I guess I should go cancel my life insurance policy. Once I'm dead I won't care if my family has food and shelter.
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Not sure about that. Comets have water. Asteroids have metals and who knows what else? Whether either can be made profitable and useful is another question.
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Re:Fuck the moon. Mars too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there something wrong with putting solar panels in the desert, or using fiber optics? You have a nostalgic 1970s view of space and technology.
Yes, I also have a 1970s nostalgic view of physics, as in, land area is limited and the energy falling on it is limited and by multiplying the two, you get available power and THAT, as they say, is IT.
However, before you squeal with delight and tell me how *much* that is, please expect that you'll also need to calculate and exclude land and sea areas that are not currently supporting food crops or working ecologies, as well as areas without significant weather, or property rights problems. Oh, and do exclude land with other other instalment, theft or maintenance problems (e.g. Brooklyn, Antarctica). Oh, and don't forget those line losses for your little desert energy-topia.
If you ever want to get more solar energy than what's available on earth, it's lots of space, Mylar mirrors and microwaves.
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light pressure and solar wind effect on your large orbital solar panel
As the light panel orbits Earth away from the sun, you compensate for the solar wind with a space tether. The drag both slows down the sail and adds power to the system. You do have to extend it and retract it, which are admittedly non trivial problems.
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Well, OK. Let's say we want to replace say, the world's oil consumption per year, which is about 160 exajoules. We *can* do it here on earth, and I suspect that we'll be eventually be shoved into about 2500 (or more) thorium nuclear plants because in about 50 years, we're fuck out of affordable net-energy positive hydrocarbons (1.3 trillion barrels of conventional crude at 30 billion barrels a year gives us a tetch over 40 years. Natural gas extends this by about 11 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga [wikipedia.org]
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Am more than willing to admit this. We may indeed enter a phase change collapse of interdependent supply chains which require cheap transportation energy. It's also possible that we will not recover from this collapse in our lifetime and that a severe die-off will result. I suspect that this is the highest probability.
Doesn't make it desirable.
Moreover, if it happens that way, the problem is moot. If, as I suspect, we slow-collapse at different rates in different regions and manage to hobble along with uran
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Sort of. I don't believe that these are mutually exclusive scenarios. Depends on your time horizon.
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Mega-scale engineering like you propose will never happen, ever.
We've already developed many of the technologies that will make them happen. I find it interesting how people can in the face of what we've already done claim something, which just isn't that much harder, will never happen.
The point. (Score:2)
If you want to stay in space so you can say... maintain a power generation station, and NOT haul heavy (and therefore expensive) materials up from a gravity well, like Earth then redirecting some comets and mining asteroids are your best bet.
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There are actualy several fundimental reasons to return to the moon, not the least of which being the establishment of a launch platform there that could ease exploration of deeper space.
I actually waffle quite a bit
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There are actualy several fundimental reasons to return to the moon, not the least of which being the establishment of a launch platform there that could ease exploration of deeper space.
I think this is ultimately futile in the near term. The only thing we should be doing on the moon right now is figuring out how to get robots to semi-autonomously manufacture habitats and simple materials from local resources. We simply can't afford to bring all that stuff with us. We should be trying to figure out how to live off the land out there. Sending a bunch of robots to build our habitats in advance is the only practical way we put people in space until some cheaper way to get a lot of mass int
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Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
* No one will allow for cuts of any real substance.
* The richest in the nation and the corporations they own engage in concerted tax-evasion efforts.
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Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
The current approach being done to pay off 16 trillion dollars in debt is to devalue the dollar so you can pay it off with a 1945 penny (melted down and sold for scrap metal prices of copper). Either that or paid off with Zimbabwe Dollars instead because they will have a more favorable exchange rate.
It doesn't have to be this way, and I would hope that your "solution" was used instead.... by trying to seek a balanced trade market for American goods and having the federal government only stick within its re
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Harsh mistress (Score:5, Insightful)
In exchange, you get capabilities that aren't reflected in robots, such as on site decision making and complex on site study of surface characteristics and high maneuverability even in a bulky space suit. The Moon incidentally is the only place where such capabilities don't shine due to its closeness to Earth.
Ever wonder why even forty years after the end of Apollo, that no one from the US government dares go back to the Moon? Aside from the "Been there. Done that." attitude so common in space advocacy and the public, it's because you can't top the manned activities (all from only two man-weeks on the Moon!) with a few robots, even forty years later. Instead, it'll take an extensive though not necessarily manned effort to do better.
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A manned exploration for the purpose of establishing a settlement is one sound reason. There is yet much to learn about mankind's physical and psychological ability to exist outside of Mother Earth for extended periods,
We already know plenty about mankind's physical and psychological abilities in space/moon. There is little data to be gained having had MIR, ISS, and other long term confinement scenarios and experiments here on earth.
and a settlement on the lunar surface would help advance technology for a Martian adventure.
Then you have to ask why you want to send meatbags to Mars anyway when we can explore that dead planet with much cheaper robots (and future androids). Sadly, in the current climate if there is no immediate payoff for sending humans then there is little reason to pursue it (even though we all
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"it's because you can't top the manned activities (all from only two man-weeks on the Moon!) with a few robots"
Citation needed. Also, this argues for improving robots, which will be absolutely required for the conquest of space. That environment will be forever hostile to unprotected humans.
Why not spend a thousand years perfecting the machines we must have? We can send fleet after fleet of them to do our will, and they can be expendable. Humans are burdensome to support at our primitive level of technology
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Also, this argues for improving robots, which will be absolutely required for the conquest of space. That environment will be forever hostile to unprotected humans.
Or it argues to the need of protecting or improving humans. We currently have the technology to protect humans.
Why not spend a thousand years perfecting the machines we must have?
Because you wouldn't have done anything to improve the lot of people living in between now and then. Or expand the horizons of human civilization. And there's a good chance we hit a road bump between now and "perfect machines".
For example, who's going to allow the launch of von Neumann robots in the midst of widespread public hysteria about artificial intelligence? Wouldn't it be a bit of irony
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The Moon incidentally is the only place where such [human] capabilities don't shine due to its closeness to Earth.
We can build a lot of infrastructure and manufacturing capability on the Moon without a single person present. So why aren't we trying?
expensive mistress, high maintenance (Score:3)
Because even shipping just a screw back from there would make it a $100K screw?
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Because even shipping just a screw back from there would make it a $100K screw?
How about a million screws then? Economies of scale work, you know. An auto company doesn't build a factory just to make a single car. There's one common, highly demanded product for Earth orbit that currently costs about $5,000 to $10,000 per kg to launch into space - oxygen. The Moon has plenty of it. It can also provide several metals, aluminum, iron, titanium, to Earth orbit and elsewhere.
The presence of aluminum and oxygen even allows for metal-oxygen hybrid motors, a means for leaving the Moon from
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But what if China actually develops the infrastructure to reach the Moon, pretty much at will, and then decides missile bases would be a good idea? Far fetched. But, how would/could the rest of the world respond?
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Missile bases on a Moon? To bomb Earth? But will they have a giant LASER [blogspot.com]? Really, will they hire a bold weird Canadian guy to do the job for ONE. MILLION. DOLLARS?
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It's much more important for us to put missiles on geostationary satellites than on the moon.
Why would you travel 300,000km further than you have to.
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But what if China actually develops the infrastructure to reach the Moon, pretty much at will, and then decides missile bases would be a good idea?
EPIC FAIL BAD IDEA!
Distance ICBMs need to travel from China to strike the US: ~12,000 miles. Distance IPBMs need to travel from moon to strike the US: ~230,000 miles. Most optimistic estimate I have seen of the cost on lifting mass from Earth to the moon with new launcher systems: $2400 per kg. Weight of one US LGM-30 Minuteman missile: 35,000 kg (but let's assume a missile launched fro the moon would need to only weigh 15,000 kg.) Weight of the materials for a launchpad on the moon and the materials needed
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Helium 3 isn't really that common on the Moon, just more so then on Earth. According to wiki
The abundance of helium-3 is thought to be greater on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years),[1] though still low in quantity (28 ppm of lunar regolith is helium-4 and from one ppb to 50 ppb is helium-3)
and is also much harder to fuse then isotopes of Hydrogen or Lithium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_3 [wikipedia.org]
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The point of Helium-3 is that it is the one resource found on the Moon that can be extracted at a profit with current launch costs for shipping equipment to the Moon and sending fuel from the Earth to power the launch vehicles from the surface of the Moon to return back to the Earth. Extracting oxygen (and potentially hydrogen) from the surface of the Moon would be an added bonus... but the business case can be made without that added cost savings.
Unfortunately the global demand for Helium-3 is currently r
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It would probably be cheaper to mine it from the atmosphere of Saturn. Processing 150 million tons of lunar regolith (remembering it is only in the top layer) for a ton of He3 does not seem simple or cheap.
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Getting to Saturn is much harder than getting to the Moon, and nothing has ever gone to Saturn and returned back to the Earth (other than a few photons in the form of radio telemetry). Good luck with that. The technology might be developed to do just that if there was a demand though. Are you sure it would be cheaper and easier getting it from Saturn?
Helium-3 does have value and can be sold here on the Earth... so price is not a major problem. Trying to extract He-3 from sources here on the Earth (curre
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Actually getting to Saturn isn't much harder then getting to the Moon, at least if you don't mind spending a lot of time, getting back I'm not so sure of but probably not that much harder.. The time thing isn't too bad if you treat it like a pipeline, once the flow starts you keep it flowing. Either source in large amounts of tens of tons is going to be expensive and involve new engineering techniques which means lots of unknowns. Most people who talk about harvesting resources in space haven't put much tho
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We need a D. D. Harriman . (yeah, I know its a different future history but still RAH)
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I guess Kennedy's "Report from Iron Mountain" was a hoax after all...
that the space program was created to be a distraction and economic prop.
Re:Harsh mistress (Score:4, Insightful)
Defense is generally when you respond to protect yourself from an attacker.
Defense is not what the USA has done for many years.
More accurate words that describe what the USA taxpayer's 'defense' funding is used for are words like: Invade, attack, assail, assault, occupy, enforcement, pressure, coerce, compel, spy, dominate, afflict, oppress, encumber, harass, plague, torment, torture, trample
I'm all for the USA having the biggest, most sophisticated and competent army in the world, it comes in handy when the leaders of TPLAC's (or northern peninsula communist regimes) go off the rails - but if it were for "Defense", you would expect to see a lot more of it inside the states, and not so much of it in places that never posed a real threat to the states.
Places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia & Vietnam.
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Sorry to burst your Rep bubble, but private has been pouring insane amounts of money and they still can't get their launch right more than the NASA. Also while there's no real resources starvation on Earth initiative to go and explore for private money won't be enough - they will better rage costly war than trying to mine Moon. They never really plan in long term.
Only hope is that new initiative of mining asteroids. But it is also at least 20 years away, and probably will grab some gov grants along the way
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and they still can't get their launch right more than the NASA
NASA has no launch vehicle. And the few attempts to develop a replacement for the Space Shuttle have all failed hard.
Re:Half colonized double planet (Score:4, Insightful)
A mission failure in the lunar capture plan could lead to a global disaster.
The Moon has already been captured so no reason to capture it again.
Oh, you mean the global disaster that would be caused by the somewhat bright light and perhaps even slight noise (we must steel ourselves to consider worst case here) that would come from a tiny asteroid dissipating way up in Earth's atmosphere?
The greatest burden to humanity would be the possibility of an unmanageable swarm of 911 (or equivalent) calls, thousands even. This will probably completely overwhelm our delicate emergency infrastructure. It might even be a worse disaster than the average Manchester football game.
Would obtaining an asteroid be worth that terrible, fearsome risk? I... I... just don't know.
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HALF(?) colonized (Score:2)
You need to take a second look at Earth if you think our "double-planet" is half-colonized. We can relatively trivially colonize the interior of the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans, for an insignificant fraction of the cost of colonizing Luna.
To me, by suggesting the most expensive option, you seem to be talking about economic waste.
If you're going to advocate such waste, and that it be done compulsorily (i.e. funded through government) then I'd like to be persuaded that we're already in a post-scarcity
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Sadly there was no real alternative to electing Obama.
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Sadly there was no real alternative to electing Obama.
I'd like to see the Modern Whigs [modernwhig.org] gain support, if for no other reason, because one of their goals is to reform the electoral process to reduce the ill effects of our plurality voting system.
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Re:That's what you get... (Score:5, Interesting)
I will repeat, the head of NASA should see his primary missions as being involved with Aeronautics and Space, not foreign relations or education (although both of those may be secondary or tertiary objectives).
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... for electing Obama.
Check out what Obama want's Bolden to do. Direct quote from Bolden:
"When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things," Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
Their "foremost" task is to make Muslims feel good. He literally said that. Yet he still heads NASA
Thanks, jackasses, for electing Obama.
That is no direct quote from Bolden at all - that is a myth [nasawatch.com].
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... for electing Obama.
Check out what Obama want's Bolden to do. Direct quote from Bolden:
"When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things," Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
Their "foremost" task is to make Muslims feel good. He literally said that. Yet he still heads NASA
Thanks, jackasses, for electing Obama.
That is no direct quote from Bolden at all - that is a myth [nasawatch.com].
Actually it is a direct quote in an interview with Al Jazeera (at the 1:20 ish mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e857ZcuIfnI [youtube.com]
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1) The Saudi prince flight was about a deployment of a satellite, and the prince was a trained representative of the Arab Satellite Communications Organization. He gained that role politically, of course, but are you judging the Arab world in who they decide is or is not an astronaut? I would say it's just a different culture; the blame you place on the Reagan Administration is unfounded.
2) There's a difference between Arabs and Muslims. As I said, Saudi prince officially represented Arabs. He is also M
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Nobody is saying they shouldn't do those things, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's foremost task should be to expand United State's scientific and technological knowledge in the fields of space and aeronautics. The fact that all three of his primary tasks are essentially PR outreach programs with three different groups is telling; it seems to point that President Obama sees NASA as more of a good PR machine than the top-tier place for science and engineering that it once was.
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The long-term strategic interests of the United States are most cost-effectively served by building goodwill to the US throughout the world. If that means we use NASA as one such vehicle to deliver outreach and some long-term interest in people moving to and supporting the US, why not? Money not spent bombing the Middle East is money that can go to NASA and other pure science programs which don't necessarily have immediate practical applications (but are frequently of the most value long term).
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Nope, he's a retired army man.
General Charles Bolden is a Marine, not a soldier. There is a huge difference.
If you are going to be critical of the guy because of his military service (including his service after he left NASA as an astronaut and went back to the USMC earning his stars), at least get the branch of service he served in correct. While General Bolden would likely be polite to you if you got the two confused, don't try that at any bar full of Marines. You might not survive to see the morning.
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One of NASA's major roles has always been public relations and/or propaganda. Why do you think the US went to the moon in the first place? It was to inspire Americans and scare Soviets.
Maybe it's just another political fundraiser? (Score:2)
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What Obama did by making such a ludicrous statement was the equivelent of saying that The Department of Education's primary mission is to advance nutritional standards, or that the IRS' primary mission is to s
Here's the actual video for non-morons (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e857ZcuIfnI [youtube.com]
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Is the end of manned space flight really a bad thing?
How are people going to get into space, if they stop going into space? The idea driving our exploration of space is that we will eventually be there. Get rid of that and there really isn't much reason to do anything aside from some commercial and military-based Earth-facing activities. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge just isn't that valuable.
Sure, we could explore a dozen new worlds that would never matter to us rather than extensive manned expeditions. But what would be the point?
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I also notice you conveniently brush aside my numbers.
The presence of numbers can't defend a massive non sequitur. For example, why speak of going to Alpha Centauri when there are many places in the Solar System that can be reached in less time than it takes light to reach Alpha Centauri? Mars can be reached in about six months; the Moon in three days; I think Venus is about four to five months; and Earth crossing asteroids in weeks.
Similarly, it's pretty irrelevant that there is a lot of volume in space. We're not trying to use every bit of volume in space
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A robot with a meat or just connected to a meatbrain remotely is a good approach.
The former can be just an augmented human. The latter has little advantage over the current approach once the robot gets too far away from the meatbrain.