Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax 185
astroengine writes "NASA's baseline budget for the year beginning Oct. 1 pulls the plug on the 10-year-old Mars rover Opportunity, newly released details of the agency's fiscal 2015 spending plan show. The plan, which requires Congressional approval, also anticipates ending the orbiting Mars Odyssey mission on Sept. 30, 2016. 'There are pressures all over the place,' NASA's planetary science division director Jim Green said during an advisory council committee teleconference call on Wednesday."
90 day budget (Score:3, Insightful)
It really overran the original 90 day budget.
Re:90 day budget (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:90 day budget (Score:5, Funny)
You had me until "buy French Raphaels"
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I think GP mistook the Rafale [wikipedia.org] for an Italian painter who lived in the sewers of NYC with a giant talking rat.
ITYM but some Eurofighter/Typhoons (Score:3)
Thats the nearest equivalent jet in capability to the F-35 - and its actually in production and flying today. The Rafale looks nice buts its a bit long in the tooth now and not at the top of its game.
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There is one real reason why these alternatives will never be considered an option by the US military (and therefore by a couple of other NATO countries). All these planes lack the capability to deliver a US designed nuclear warhead, and the US industrial/military complex is not likely to give away their USP in selling overpriced jets by licencing the technology to non-US manufacturers.
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really? [wikipedia.org]
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The Rafale and the Eurofighter are the same age (they actually date from the same initial development program, from which the Eurofighter countries left because they didn't want a carrier capable variant), it just looks like the Eurofighter is newer because it spent longer in development hell.
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And you forgot the fact that the A-10 is a better combat platform than the F-35 will ever be. Will the F-35 be able to fly home with most of it's wings and tail section missing? I doubt it. the A-10 does it all the time.
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Uhm, no one said that the bulk of the US future airplanes must take off and land like helicopters - there are three variants of the F-35, and only the F-35B (which will be bought by the US Marine Corp, as well as the UK) has VTOL capability. The bulk of the F-35 order (around 1,600 planes at last count) will consist of the F-35A, which is completely conventional. The third variant is the F-35C, for the US Navy.
It helps your argument if you actually sound like you know wtf you are bitching about.
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F-35 being both Vaporware and an abortion ...
I remember back in 20th century when F-35 was CALF, Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter, as many planners saw F22 becoming so expensive that not even the Pentagon could afford no more that 100 or so.
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No they aren't actually, the F-35A and C have no compromises caused by having to accomodate the B variant, as its the B variant which compromises for its own capability (it has smaller weapons bays, a lower fuel capacity, shorter range etc etc).
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Typical government run program. It's work was supposed to be completed in 90 days, but after ten years the rover's work is STILL not done.
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Re: 90 day budget (Score:2)
There is not much commercial imperative to do some interesting science though.
Getting to close to (Score:2)
debunking that life only excists on Earth?
Give control to the internet (Score:5, Interesting)
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How common? On the other hand, perhaps there is a profitable niche there, sort of like how space tourist lies somewhere in between commoner and astronaut. There's a bunch of money involved and a lot of it covers training.
Sure (Score:2)
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Or draw gripper drawings in the Mars dust.
Or drive around and leave tracks that spell out a message in cursive...
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You'd probably just end up with a lot of this: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/ho... [thesun.co.uk]
open source it (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the whole "budget crisis on infinite earth's" is all fiscal voodoo...however if this has to happen, we should turn it over "to the community"
NASA should open the project to screened volunteers who maintain the basic mission functions.
NASA could set up an API & a simple prototyping program & let people download it for free. Best ideas get kicked up the ladder...eventually to NASA staff who could approve it.
This should be happening now...it would cost virtually nothing (on NASA $ scales) and get thousands interested & involved in space.
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They would probably be better off giving operational control over to a university with an existing research program. Preferably one that could field its own operations center (under the assumption that their budget problem is facilities and staff). The university could then create an outreach program for interested community members (maybe team up with the Udacity guys and do something online).
Re:open source it (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize it probably sounds like a good idea, but screening and training volunteers is likely to be even more expensive than keeping the minimal crew they have operating the rover now.
Ditto on the API and "simple prototyping program," although I'm not even sure what that second thing even it supposed to be. Just writing the software would be expensive, not to mention you now have to have NASA people reviewing what comes in.
Driving rovers probably sounds a lot easier than it is. Commands are strung together in sequences. Sequences have to be checked to make sure they don't have conflicting commands. Instruments have to be taken into account; it's not just driving around that is being done.
And then there is the intense analysis and investigation that has to be done if something goes wrong. Reports have to be written explaining everything down to the bit level.
On top of that there is planning to be done to even decide where to drive, which involves a whole lot of people.
There is not only no money to be saved by handing operations over to "the community," there is also the probability that if you did the rover would be ruined within a few days.
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I know code just doesn't write itself but on NASA budgetary scales this would be a pittance.
When I say "simple prototyping program" I mean they learn the interface + mission capabilities...then they devise a mission...then they **test** the mission via the API & prototyping program.
Basically it's a simple simulation program that anyone in "the community" could download and test their ideas for what the rover should do.
They record their simulation & make a proposal that is discussed on forums...event
Re:open source it (Score:4, Informative)
You say that as though it is supposed to bolster your argument. NASA's budget is somewhere around $15bn/year, or about 0.5% of the total federal spending. That covers everything from advanced research to planetary exploration to human space flight. The line item for the Mars Exploration Rover program (i.e., Opportunity) is $13 million. I suspect a lot of that goes to personnel costs, some of which might be reduced through volunteer efforts. It also costs a lot to maintain the control center and the program infrastructure, which cannot be replicated through an "API and 'simple prototyping program' ". The costs associated with people coding instructions for the rover is really a small part of the program budget. The cost to create and administer some sort of volunteer program might be small compared to $15bn, but it would be quite expensive relative to costs it is trying to replace.
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typical space idea obstructionist (Score:2)
Yes...I did!
Because it *does*
$13 million per year...that has to be cut
You exhibit your lack of management experience by your framing of this idea. It's people like you that have made NASA suck for anyone trying to do real space exploration. Every idea is an opportunity for you to exercise your pedantic asperberger proclivities to bolster your ego.
**MY IDEA
Re:open source it (Score:4, Insightful)
And it accomplishes virtually nothing to boot! Seriously, there's a hell of a lot more to running the rover than just steering and driving. There's also a whole hell of a lot of engineering support. Then there's the whole science team, who also are on the NASA payroll...
this is how they learn "engineering support" (Score:2)
right...i know what you mean. this would be more in the "PR" realm, but educational "PR"...they learn the stuff you're saying they need to know! Realistically speaking it's highly unlikely that a workable idea for use would get "kicked up the ladder" from the community would be anything that wouldn't have been pre-planned anyway.
but don't discount "PR"...it's not just "P
There's more to it than you think. (Score:2)
Generally, it's considered bad form t
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**slaps you across your bitch mouth**
Can it run another 2.5 years? (Score:2)
September 2016 is two and a half years from now. If NASA's lucky it'll wear out and stop functioning by then. If not then probably a big hue and cry will arise and funding will be found to keep it going.
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As well it should, compared to designing, building, testing, and launching a new probe manning the ground station has to be downright cheap so as long as they are getting useful scientific information out of it it seems shortsighted to cut the funding.
Take a lesson from youtube (Score:2)
If they give it a face, preferably with puppy or kitty eyes, finding continued funding for it should be no problem.
If NASA can't afford to explore with robots... (Score:2, Insightful)
If NASA can't afford to explore space with robots, then what's the point of funding NASA at all? That's certainly what some probably want, but I think it's utterly ridiculous that NASA can't afford to continue to use resources they've already developed and launched.
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If NASA can't afford to explore space with robots, then what's the point of funding NASA at all?
One word: pork. It's to maintain those Shuttle-era jobs in the districts that already have them!
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This is not the only attempt to say that NASA can't afford to continue to use resources they've already developed and launched.
If you look at the SOFIA Project, [usra.edu] you will find that the aircraft recently reached a fully operational status. This is a platform that should run for about 20 years collecting data and expanding our scientific understanding. They were scheduling and assigning people time slots for years on out before this budget release.
The budget proposal shows other priorities. NASA has been
That's what killed skylab (Score:5, Informative)
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Skylab did it's mission, HAve you been in Skylab II? I have, it's sitting there at space camp in Huntsville, AL. I was able to get past the glass and walk around. it was incredibly small and not much science could get done in it. mostly it was to make sure that humans did not get space madness after extended stays in low gravity.
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Skylab was pretty much done; future mission plans involved refurbishment. Just prolonging its existence would not have been productive.
Surely you are joking (Score:2)
Skylab was a lot of effort for work carried out very briefly and with care it had potential to last like Mir. Bullshit about the mission being done is just revisionism to justify abandoning the project just after it started.
If you look up in the sky long enough you'll s
Why does it need money? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the expense of this thing at this point?
Everything being used is likely fixed and in use on or orbiting mars. The only things beyond that would be the transmitter/receiver on/above earth, the control room, and whatever you're paying the engineers to run it.
So of that, the only thing that should really cost money is the engineer's time... and I would think at this point you could get volunteers to do it.
Sorry, NASA's budget has no room for fat. These little projects add up to being a significant portion of a budget. I think the project should be maintained. But all the fat needs to be trimmed. Additionally, solicit donations and consider relocating the control room somewhere cheaper. Possibly a university somewhere would be happy to have graduate students control it and would pay most of the costs associated with maintaining it. After all, all the expensive stuff was already completed.
Farm it out to someone with room in their budget.
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The big-ticket item is probably communications They need one of the DSN antennas: huge dishes that there are never enough of. Ending the Curiosity mission makes room for a new mission without having to build a new 34-meter dish antenna.
Re:Why does it need money? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The universities don't have a problem with export control. They used export controlled technology all the time.
Give the program to another institution that wants it and is willing to pay for the upkeep on it. The budget will be less then 13 million a year. But it should be enough to keep it going. The grad students would likely be very grateful to get access to the program if only for the experience.
NASA should be done with this thing. 13 million is money they can spend doing something else.
Typical government stupidity (Score:2)
This rover has been running ten years and has been used to do great science, far more than anyone ever anticipated. All the rovers have far exceeded their intended lifetimes. In other words, they're cheap. X number of dollars was spent to delivery Y amount of science and they got far more than they bargained for. Continuing the funding for the the rover means that this science gets even cheaper.
What Congress really ought to do is give NASA $10 billion, tell them to build and launch more rovers of this t
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Re:Typical government stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't forget subsidizing corn way, way beyond reasonable!
if there were only terrorists on mars (Score:2)
this would be an easy funding battle
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and we should give them 20 billion, then 24, 28,32,36....
Science is far more important than killing people.... yet we give 80% of our taxes to the department of killing things.
Re:Typical government stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
I admit a lot of kids see this and dream of becoming a sports star or rock star. Is this a productive use of a human lifetime? Some say it is, some say it isn't, and I am not qualified to state. All I know is advancement of science is a dream to me. As far as I am concerned, Space Exploration is to science like programming games is to computer science. Its the stepping stone, the common basis of knowledge, from which we spring off whatever comes up.
NASA has always been an icon for me - an entity who is actually doing something that has never been done before. Will I benefit from a romp on the moon? Probably not. Would I benefit from stronger alloys, higher energy density batteries, more sophisticated CAD systems, and legions of kids which were motivated by the Scientists at NASA. I believe I will.
Our society seems to be quickly succumbing to what the economists refer to as "tragedy of the commons", where everybody is in it for themselves regardless of the cost to others. Our government is passing all sorts of laws encouraging "rent seeking" ( ownership benefits ) at the expense of production ( job creation ), leading us into a welfare state. I see big social problems ahead with this leadership model, as the ownership faction will run amok, leading to enormous wealth disparities between those who labor and those who own. We are setting ourselves up for a civil war between the worker and the politician/banker classes.
We seem to have no problem funding enormous salaries for someone to hit a ball with a stick. Here we have fostered an intelligence great enough to have placed a part of ourselves on another planet, and we bicker over whether we can even fund manning the operation? I am quite sad over this whole affair. It seems the only idols we are given is all this bread and circus crap. No more Spock, Scotty, or Steve Squyres.
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Re:Typical government stupidity (Score:4, Insightful)
then they can pay for their own fricking stadiums.
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Thank you, you beat me to it. It's disgraceful how much taxpayer money gets spent on those things.
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NASA projects involve basic science.
The ROI on basic science is so enormous it's difficult to quantify because it's hard to know where to stop. How do you even try to attach a dollar value to the entire Internet and everything it has created and touch in order to answer "What was the ROI of the DoD's investment in ARPANET?" With the corporate sector having, in the last 50 years, become utterly blind to everything more than 3 months out, it's up to the government and associated entities (national labs, unive
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I keep seeing the argument of what we get for a dollar funded to NASA. I ask what we get for a dollar funded to professional sports. I get to see some grown man chase all over some field trying to snare a ball.
You have to consider this from return on investment. For buying an overpriced ticket, you get to see grown men chasing a pigskin. That's huge value compared to typical NASA projects, which while they do somewhat more, also cost a bunch of orders of magnitude more.
Watching it on TV is even better from the ROI point of view.
Our society seems to be quickly succumbing to what the economists refer to as "tragedy of the commons", where everybody is in it for themselves regardless of the cost to others. Our government is passing all sorts of laws encouraging "rent seeking" ( ownership benefits ) at the expense of production ( job creation ), leading us into a welfare state. I see big social problems ahead with this leadership model, as the ownership faction will run amok, leading to enormous wealth disparities between those who labor and those who own. We are setting ourselves up for a civil war between the worker and the politician/banker classes.
I view NASA's activities as contributing to this state of affairs. It's not all their fault. I doubt they would have spread the work of a project over a bunch of congressional districts
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Mars? launch a very large rover for the moon and another to Venus. why the hell are we only looking at one planet?
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The moon's close enough that we shouldn't bother with rovers, unless they're left behind by acutal astronauts..
another to Venus
Venus isn't all that interesting since there's no chance for humans visiting it in the forseeable future. And a rover would only survive hours at most. However, placing an airship or balloon probe in Venus' atmosphere (where it could survive for quite a while at the right altitude) might be interesting.
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The moon's close enough that we shouldn't bother with rovers, unless they're left behind by acutal astronauts..
If I go to the airport now I can get to Japan by tomorrow, but it still makes more sense for me to FedEx something there than to take it there personally.
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Time for you to watch "Dark Star"
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Congressional Idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
less than 1% of the Defense budget can run NASA at higher levels. WTF is wrong with the complete MORONS that were elected to be in Congress?
They want to save money, call all the troops home and end the frigging police actions.
Of course (Score:2)
It makes sense the NASA budget is tight, they don't have a lot of jobs that can just be handed to anyone's nephew, and its hard to dupe a bunch of engineers into buying expensive equipment they don't need that may or may not even work as intended.
This makes NASA a piss poor government program from the POV of politicians. What is the point if they can't make some kickbacks or repay a large campaign donation with favors? Duh. This isn't rocket science.
I bet if they found a reason to buy full body scanners and
Re: Of course (Score:2)
What Mras couldn't kill (Score:3)
politicians will
lol (Score:5, Insightful)
For those that are not aware how this works... Every time there is a new budget proposal, NASA first suggests axing its most popular projects... usually Hubble, but sometimes other things... and they send that up to the hill... Congress panics "They can't shut down Hubble! It's the only sciencey thing we do anymore!!!" and they give NASA a bit more money. It's all part of the game. BTW, you're supposed to write into your congressman angry about how NASA doesn't get enough money right about now. I'm not saying you shouldn't... they really don't get enough money... but you should at least know the game that's getting played.
Reall? (Score:2)
The Admin tried to cut 300 million (Score:2)
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"If you like your NASA, you can keep your NASA..." (Score:2)
Re:Thanks, Obama. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you got the wrong president's name, but you do have a point.
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BAD MOD: Not everyone will agree with this, but that doesn't mean it's flamebait.
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BAD MOD: Not everyone will agree with this, but that doesn't mean it's flamebait.
Anyone who needed to have that explained to them is demonstrably resistant to facts and so-called "common sense" and is therefore a lost cause. Mass numbers of non-individuals agreeing with you bandwagon-style is the only thing they would find persuasive.
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Even though I have no love for Obama, this is one case where he doesn't deserve the blame. He's actually big on funding NASA. The blame is squarely on Congress, who insist on funding the SLS (aka Senate Launch System), for no other reason than to keep Shuttle-era pork jobs in their states, and have actually been cutting NASA's non-SLS budget. They've also been cutting the budget for private companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada to develop human crew launch vehicles. This delayed the contracts for private
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to republican leaders? science has zero value.
Pork bellies is where it's at!
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So what, no Republicans voted to fund NASA or the NSF and Democrats don't vote for pork? This isn't MoJo, around here someone will call you on it when you engage in mindless political cheerleading.
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You're so cuuuuute, I could just pinch your cheeks! I'm gonna slap a big [CITATION NEEDED] on that. How exactly can anybody with the TP, who can barely get the time of day in Congress, where Republicans actually have a majority, have any ability to affect NASA's budget?
Hint: try looking at the very incumbent pork-barrel politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle who are cutting NASA's budget for everything but the prime pork of SLS.
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Has nothing to do with the F-35. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the payouts we give to individuals in this country. It's at a record high of 70%, and those programs (unlike military spending) will never be cut, ever, because it'll be political suicide for anyone who tries. Massive expansion of social programs is what kills science spending.
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Actually no one gives a monkeys about the planetary science program, its deeply unpopular because it uses genetic medicine and genetically modifies organisms to survive drought and it supports evolution and it ends the war on drugs - it is fundamental Science.
NASA should spend more money on that Russian space station, because we get live moving pictures back which make the news. Air time gets funding.
Actually America is just about done now and the rest of us are just waiting for the Chinese to take over the
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I thought the same thing...seriously. NASA usually delivers good bang for the buck, and this is the best way to fund efforts for the common good in our cyberpunk dystopia.
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Yeah.
Let's donate millions of dollars of multi-purpose infrastructure, tied into secure NASA systems, operating over radio communications towers costing millions of dollars to operate, relaying over satellites around both Earth and Mars and sucking up the most expensive bandwidth in the solar system, that we could use for something else, so that kiddies can drive a remote control car on Mars.
If just anyone had the power to talk to the Mars Rover, we wouldn't need all these expensive relay satellites and hug
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Re:Sounds like the rover needs a Kick Starter (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, people are lining up to pay $150k for five minutes in "space" on Virgin Galactic...
New idea: Get rich idiots to pay Nasa $150k for one hour of "driving" Opportunity, complete with "I drove on Mars last week-end" NASA-certified bumper sticker.