NASA Appoints New Chief Scientist 66
SchrodingerZ writes "Planetary Geologist Ellen Stofan, expert in the terrains of Venus, Mars, and Titan, has recently been appointed the Chief Scientist for the space agency. Stofan will act as the top adviser for Charles Bolden, NASA's current administrator. Beginning August 25th, Stofan will be Bolden's head adviser for NASA's project planning and investments. She will replace former chief scientist Dr. Waleed Abdalati, who left his position to be the director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado. Stofan has both a masters and doctoral degree of geological sciences from Brown University, and is known for her involvement in the Applied Science Laboratory's project to put a boat on Saturn's moon Titan, as well as a member of the radar team for the Cassini spacecraft. Though she'll be joining in a time of large budget cuts, Bolden explains that '[Stofan's] breadth of experience and familiarity with the agency will allow her to hit the ground running. We're fortunate to have her on our team.'"
Re:In which direction? (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA is almost completely irrelevant in the modern world.
While I agree that they're becoming significantly less relevant for their 'traditional' activities (which are probably better left to the fledgling private industry) as a pure science organisation, I think they still have plenty left to offer.
There's bugger all that NASA has done with it's massive budgets.
The problem is that they don't have massive budgets. They've got tiny budgets for what we expect of them, and especially in the context of budgets that are thrown at far less valuable endeavours.
Re:In which direction? (Score:4, Informative)
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Only if it actually works. If it doesn't or it breaks down immediately its only value will be if it compells NASA to develop the manned or robotic capability to go fix it.
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Bolden explains that '[Stofan's] breadth of experience and familiarity with the agency will allow her to hit the ground running
I predict that this will be the first replacement in a long line of many replacements. NASA is almost completely irrelevant in the modern world. There's bugger all that NASA has done with it's massive budgets and people continue to look to them for progress. Anyone with hopes for the US space program is just reaching for desperate idealism in the face of the nearly complete failure of human kind to do any sort of space exploration.
NASA :- Not A Serious Agency
Okay wish guy, lets see you put rovers on Mars, or orbiters around the gas giants.
i guess Hubble's irrelevant too? Who the hell needed to know the universe is accelerating when we could be using our resources for more reality TV shows and night clubs.
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Rovers and orbiters are built by JPL. JPL is NASA in name only. It was created in1936, long before NASA.
After giving JPL well deserved tribute for their planetary missions, they also deserve tribute for surviving, staying relevent and doing great work in spite of NASA.
Hubble was OK after a disasterous start. NASA does deserve priase for it along with the other great observatories.
Those programs don't really explain away the fact that the centerpeice of the organization and the one that sucks up most of t
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What NASA has "done lately" with regard to 'marquee' programs is cope with Washington's repeated switcheroo - Ares, Constellation, ..., every year or two Washington seems to cancel one plan and embark on another. In the corporate world, this is a classic sign of a company in trouble and about to go down the tubes, but in politics it seems to be business as usual. Further, what NASA does (not just manned space and exploration - everything) is about what women in the US spend on lipstick and other makeup, a
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That is an extremely convenient cop out. NASA simply hasn't delivered on anything worth funding for a really long time. Success would breed support.
Ares was a deeply flawed in concept, design and construction and it cost a fortune to accomplish next to nothing. Why would anyone continue that farce when SpaceX and Falcon are developing far better launchers and capsules far faster and for much less money.
NASA simply can't do anything without squandering money. They sent a team to SpaceX to study how they w
Re:In which direction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
If all you care about is firing people on ballistic trajectories around other solar system bodies, then yes, NASA has failed. If what you want is great science, something like having a network of sophisticated planetary science missions [nasa.gov] operating on all of the major solar system bodies right now, then they're kicking ass, and Stofan is the right person for the job of continuing that mission.
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Oh, right. And it occurs to me that I'm not sure we still have one around Mercury.
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Re:In which direction? (Score:5, Insightful)
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NASA's budget is about equivalent to the money spent on cosmetics in the US each year. It's about 1/5 of the Food Stamp program, 1/10 of the interest on the national debt.
It's about 1/3 of what the people of the US spend on shoes, 1/20 what we spend on restaurants, 2/7 what we spend on tobacco products, and 1/2 what we spend getting our hair cut. Given the US median income of about $50,000, if the government were a family, it would be equivalent to what the average family spends of their income, on beer.
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I decided to Google his name and the closest I could find to him being a nut was a WUWT post, where the title criticises him, the article doesn't actually get around to explaining what Watts' problem with him is, and the update takes a NASA administrator to task for not knowing about Seinfeld. If this is the state of "climate sceptic" discourse I'd better get caught up on my '90s US TV shows. I'd hate for Anthony Watts to accuse me of not knowing about the third season of Friends or something.
Expert!? (Score:1)
How can one claim expertise in a subject one has never experienced?
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How can one claim expertise in a subject one has never experienced?
Through the process of studying it from afar. According to the summary she is apparently an "expert in the terrains of Venus, Mars, and Titan". She probably knows a LOT about geology, atmospheric physics, chemistry, and other fields related to planetary terrains; and then learned domain specific things about what we can infer from those bodies from what we've been able to see. Going there would probably help a great deal in cementing or altering some beliefs, but it's not necessary for being an expert on
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So the claimed "experts" have no idea if the meaning of the languages were changed with such subleties by gestures? You can't know a thing is so without having experienced the thing.
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So the claimed "experts" have no idea if the meaning of the languages were changed with such subleties by gestures? You can't know a thing is so without having experienced the thing.
You can't know anything at all, but you get in to the realm of pointless philosophical mental masturbation if you don't start accepting some things as being fundamentally true.
Also, as someone that has experienced psychedelic substances (quite a lot), it's also probably worth mentioning that just because your senses tell you something, that doesn't necessarily make it any more real than what reasoning can deduce.
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Didn't Asimov write a whole series about the Foundation of your thoughts? In many ways context is the key to understanding.
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More formally, your knowledge of certain aspects of the language is strictly bounded by the loss of this information. Historical linguistics as a field knows this and does research into it. I don't see that this undermines the expertise of a historical linguist any more than the uncertainty principle undermines the expertise of the theoretical physicist.
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It's really no different to someone being an "expert on historical linguistics" ...
Yes, but are you a cunning linguist?
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Yes, but are you a cunning linguist?
My wife seems to think so ;)
Having linguistics as a hobby tends to lend itself to using that joke rather often...
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I'm sure you do hear that a lot, but it's such a good joke, I couldn't resist.
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The same way that an expert ship navigator doesn't have to have gone out and personally charted every coastline?
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A ship navigator has real world experience to draw upon.
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What experience? They don't steer the ship and they don't create the charts.
Having a chief scientist is great! (Score:1)
So (Score:1)
Re:So (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, NASA has a habit of hiring *competent* scientists.
*snap*
Re:Affirmative action (Score:5, Insightful)
This must be a real dilemma for you, because she's a white woman replacing a non-white person. Which means more to you, your racism or your misogyny?
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I don't know what's funnier, that you basically invented an entire self-consistent philosophy to assign to me on the basis of my smartass one-liner, or that you practically shit yourself with hate raging against it.
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Its been a long time since NASA explored any frontiers with their manned space program. Shuttles carrying people in to LEO wasn't anything close to exploring a frontier.
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What a crock. The NASA manned space program has been squandering money to no good end since Apollo was cancelled. If all the money squandered on the shuttle and ISS, to no good end, had been spent wisely and efficiently we would be on Mars now.
Danger isn't the important thing. What matters is if you are accomplishing something worth the risk and the money. NASA simply hasn't accomplished anything in manned space flight for 40 years.
Do you even believe this stuff you are shoveling?
Re:politics, not science (Score:4)
Space exploration is the classic example of the kind of the kind of research that needs state funding: it's expensive, yet has hard-to-estimate returns that occur over an extremely long timescale.
There's a reason no private company has launched a planetary science mission, despite there being no competitive barriers to doing so.
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As a non-American, I'd just like to say that NASA is far more inspiring than any global hegemony conspiracy theory.
I'd like to be a part of a NASA initiative, despite their lack of any reasonable budget, and other blah blah blah.
There's a reason I'm not a part of NASA or other space agency...and that's because I'm not good enough! (At least until they ask for volunteers for high orbit radiation experiments! Where do I sign up? Can I get special exemption to pretend to be a baboon?)
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I'm glad you're inspired by NASA. But that's irrelevant, isn't it?
Again, the ends do not justify the means. That fact that NASA inspires you does not make it ok for some people to steal money from other people by force to fund NASA.
It doesn't matter what I do with the money after I rob you; I've still commited theft.
If a program like NASA is so important to so many people, surely those people can self-organize and find a creative method of funding a similar program on a voluntary basis.
And if they fail...
Idiotic anarchist drivel (Score:2)
You're not a libertarian. Those have some vestige of rationality and at least a vague grasp on certain aspects of the real world. You're an anarchist who finds it convenient to use the label "libertarian" because it sounds much better and some people can't tell them apart.
Pro-tip: the part that gave you away was the following line: "The state is not a scientific institution. It is the antithesis of science -- it is merely the organized used of force to dominate a population. The government in all its forms
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Slashdot... where pointing out evil gets you marked as a troll.
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I think flamebait is probably more appropriate, but nobody uses that mod much. Your posts are poorly thought out, logically inconsistent, and antagonistic. They also appear to be what you honestly personally believe, which says some very sad things about you. Nonetheless, they detract from, rather than adding to, the discussion at hand; consequently, they get modded down.
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That doesn't even make sense.
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...despite there being no competitive barriers to doing so.
You're joking, right? You've never heard of the FAA? No barriers? Are you for real?
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Competitive barriers. The legislative barriers are trivial or we wouldn't have almost entirely privatised satellite launches already.