NASA Safety Panel Finds Concerns With the Journey To Mars (examiner.com) 155
MarkWhittington writes: NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel issued its annual report on various space agency programs. The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding. It suggested that NASA's plan to launch the first crewed mission on the Orion, which would use the heavy lift Space Launch System to go around the moon, in 2021 was unrealistic given current, anticipated funding. The panel also suggested that lack of a clear plan for the Mars program is compromising its viability. It also suggested that the decision not to return to the moon should be revisited in view of the desire of international partners to do so and the need of low gravity surface experience in advance of going to Mars
Elon Musk will beat them there (Score:2)
we've BEEN going to Mars! (Score:1, Informative)
We first went to Mars in 1964 [wikipedia.org], and we've never [wikipedia.org] stopped [wikipedia.org]. We've done all [wikipedia.org] kinds [wikipedia.org] of amazing [wikipedia.org] science [wikipedia.org] there, on an ongoing [wikipedia.org] basis [wikipedia.org], and we continue [wikipedia.org] to do so. [wikipedia.org].
Seriously, sending humans is silly. Humans are frail, highly expensive to maintain due to all the extra mass that must be taken along to keep them going, and increase the price of missions by two orders of magnitude. Let's get the most science for the dollar, which is not done by "flags and footprints". It's done by continuing to push the envelope of robot
Re:we've BEEN going to Mars! (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, but humans relate to the experience of another human far better than what can be done remotely via camera and sensor.
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, which was hardly one of the most peaceful years on record, the whole world stopped and watched. An entire generation of aerospace engineers was energized and motivated. It was a seminal moment in a turbulent era that defined what humans are capable of when we try.
The Apollo program was worth 10x what we paid for it, and as a highly taxed citizen of the US, I'd happily pay to see my generation's moment when we step onto another planet for the first time in our species existence.
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Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, ...
Perhaps not as much science for the money spent, but perhaps more flexible science. With robotics, you have to decide *all* the science up front and bundle it with the machine. Humans can do all that and improvise and adapt. We can go places, see and do things robots cannot. Of course the reverse is true for really human-hostile places - for example, I do not want to be the first man to land on the Sun.
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Really? Humans can improvise and adapt? So the human is supposed to build a mass spectrometer out of duct tape and discarded food pouches?
Modern science isn't conducted by rubbing two sticks together and seeing what happens, it requires complicated equipment. Whatever we send, that's going to be the equipment that does the science, whether it's a rover or a human behind it.
Humans can "go places and doing things" by means of us sending them and a huge amount of mass to support them, mass that could have m
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Really? Humans can improvise and adapt? So the human is supposed to build a mass spectrometer out of duct tape and discarded food pouches?
Don't be obtuse and/or an ass. If you send people, you'd probably *also* send the same/similar equipment you'd send for a robotic mission. By "improvise and adapt" I meant things like people could select samples that might outside the operational parameters for a robot - too big, out of reach, etc... Humans can explore places a robot isn't designed to go.
The rest of your argument is, of course valid, but it ignores my statement that agrees sending humans would provide: "Perhaps not as much science for t
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Modern science isn't conducted by rubbing two sticks together and seeing what happens, it requires complicated equipment.
Sometimes it's not much more complicated than rubbing two sticks together [independent.co.uk], no complicated equipment required.
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You should see the setup they use to produce the graphene before separating out the layers with tape.
Also, may I add: it's a stupid assumption that robot operators can't innovate either. Because they do this sort of stuff all the time, inventing new techniques - using the hardware they sent - to do things that weren't expected at the time. From rovers dragging wheels to expose buried sediments while they roam, to New Horizons' doubling its planned data throughput by the realization that they could run bot
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Really? Humans can improvise and adapt? So the human is supposed to build a mass spectrometer out of duct tape and discarded food pouches?
It like you've never seen a SciFi movie, or something.
Humans just simply cannot compare, gram for gram.
Depends on the goal. You were responding to a post about "the science", and in that context, sure, that's clear. But I've never seen that as the point of the space program - science is a happy byproduct.
The point is to inspire. To inspire people to care about science and engineering. To inspire people to think beyond their neighborhood or nation. To inspire people to want to become scientists. It takes humans on grand adventures to do this.
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You're robot isn't going to get much science done when MY astronaut kicks it over the nearest cliff.
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Of course your astronaut isn't going to do much after breaking his foot trying to kick a 1000kg robot
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Perhaps you don't get as much science by sending a human, but humans relate to the experience of another human far better than what can be done remotely via camera and sensor.
I don't know -- maybe we just need to make a movie about sending a human, make that human act like he's having an emotional experience, and everyone will just think the story is true [slashdot.org]?
When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969, which was hardly one of the most peaceful years on record, the whole world stopped and watched. An entire generation of aerospace engineers was energized and motivated. It was a seminal moment in a turbulent era that defined what humans are capable of when we try.
It also was a different era. Although concern about things like Vietnam and culture wars with college students was heating up, there still was less cynicism than today.
For average people, you'd probably get much more "bang for your buck" by making movies like The Martian ("Based on a 'true' story") in terms of inspiring the
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Let's get the most science for the dollar, which is not done by "flags and footprints". It's done by continuing to push the envelope of robotic exploration.
That is an interesting assumption. Do probes actually give us more "science" for the dollar?
Did we learn more about the Moon from the Apollo missions than the Soviet Union learned from all of their Luna missions? I'd argue that we learned more than they did. But it cost us more money. Unfortunately, there isn't really a good way to know the actual cost of the Luna missions (socialist governments and all) so it's tough to compare the cost/knowledge.
In reality, sending human beings is the best option. Hu
Funding (Score:4, Insightful)
"The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding."
Then the panel is considering the wrong things. The areas of concern regarding a journey to Mars are many, all much greater than any funding consideration. Basically, sending people to Mars with current technology is a stupid idea. The moon is _right next door_. Let's figure out how to live there first.
Nano straw to Earth (Score:1)
If you had a "nano" straw to Earth from the moon, could you sip air from it?
Re:Nano straw to Earth (Score:4, Informative)
no, and sticking nano on the front of it doesn't make much difference.
You know how barometric pressure used to be given in inches of mercury? well that was the number of inches you could suck a pool of mercury up a straw (don't do that!) before you end up with a vacuum at the top of your straw and you are sucking away and nothing is rising any further because the pressure of the atmosphere won't push it up any more. Turns out you can't suck it up that far before it would rather not go any further. If you use other fluids the same kind of thing happens, but more so, because mercury is heavy. For water I think it is about 13 meters For the atmosphere itself the distance you can suck it up a straw is exactly the height of the atmosphere!
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Maybe you could blow the air instead? Granted, it'd have to be a pretty magic straw since the earth-moon distance changes by 26,000 miles through it's orbit. Not to mention that the pumping station would have to be mobile unless you want the straw to wrap around the Earth.
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I nanodisagree with you.
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Careful, you might be committing a nanoaggression with that statement.
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If you had a "nano" straw to Earth from the moon, could you sip air from it?
No, that takes MEGA MAID and the combination to Druidia's atmosphere.... Be sure to get the switch in the right position...
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These comments have gone from suck to blow!
Congress power of purse (Score:1)
I think more important things need to be done on Earth then a sending people to Mars. So far, all the unmanned vehicles have not provided any real reason to send a human to Mars. We dream to go there because our technology does not provide any other manageable travel to anything else. We go to the Moon again, or Mars.
It's like not being able to go to Hawaii so let's go to Disney World again. We go go to Mars many times for the price of one human trip. Why would we do that?
To plant yet another flag?
Invest in our future (Score:2)
I think more important things need to be done on Earth then a sending people to Mars. So far, all the unmanned vehicles have not provided any real reason to send a human to Mars.
Sure they have. It's another freakin' planet. Or haven't you seen the photographs? You think another planet wouldn't be awfully interesting to explore in person?
It's like not being able to go to Hawaii so let's go to Disney World again. We go go to Mars many times for the price of one human trip. Why would we do that? To plant yet another flag?
Because we would hugely advance human knowledge by going. On trip involving humans would require advances in medicine, life support, shielding, power, communications, propulsion, ground transport, and even possibly agriculture just to start with. More technology would have to be developed than you will see from 100 years of robotic probes. You
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Do you think preventing the next asteroid impact on Earth might be more important than colonizing Mars? Sentinel is also short of funding.
Oh? What were they thinking before? (Score:1)
That it would be a easy trip to California [youtube.com]?
La cucaracha, la cucaracha...
Can I be the first to say "Duh"? (Score:4, Insightful)
The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding.
They needed a panel to figure this out? Shit, I have nothing at all to do with NASA and I thought that was bleeding obvious from the cheap seats where I sit. The Apollo program required funding about 4X [wikipedia.org] what we see today as a percent of federal budget. I don't really see us getting back to the moon within my lifetime (much less mars) without a very substantial budget increase. It's been 40 years since we landed on the moon and we haven't been out of low orbit since. I see nothing in the current plans that will change that.
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Showing NASA's budget as a percentage of the entire Federal budget isn't a very good comparison, as the Federal budget has ballooned into an unmanageable pork buffet with each and every member of Congress swilling at the trough, as well as each and every corporation that can find space to dip their own snouts.
Our elected officials are not nearly the stewards of the country's treasure as they once were.
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A better comparison from the same page is Cost of the Apollo Program [wikipedia.org] which estimates that the total Apollo cost was around $136B in 2007 dollars. Yet Mars One says it will only cost $6B to put the first 4 people on Mars and $4B per 4 people after that. That's a hell of a difference compared to the cost per person of putting people on the Moon (about $11B per person all up).
We're spending less is the point (Score:2)
Showing NASA's budget as a percentage of the entire Federal budget isn't a very good comparison
There are plenty of others if you prefer. Pick any one of them. My point stands. We are spending less on the space program by whatever inflation adjusted measure you care to use. Thinking we are going to get to Mars which is MUCH harder than getting to the moon while spending less is pretty naive I think.
Private companies aren't taking us to Mars (Score:3)
Any given thing should be cheaper now (in real terms) then in the 1960s. And it is...if you look at SpaceX.
SpaceX is doing things that have already been done. They aren't breaking major new technical ground. They are breaking new economic ground by improving already existing technology. Don't get me wrong, that's SUPER important but SpaceX isn't going to send us to Mars. They aren't working on that problem in any meaningful way because they can't. No private company can make a credible business case for going to Mars. The economic and physical risks are large and mostly unquantified, the cost is enormous,
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Any given thing should be cheaper now (in real terms) then in the 1960s. And it is...if you look at SpaceX.
They might contract SpaceX to do something but the only realistic route to the first boots on Mars is through NASA or some other nation's equivalent agency.
That is the point. NASA needs companies like SpaceX who are about developing the technology to drastically reduce costs to make the program/mission efficient enough. NASA enables companies to develop the cost-efficient technology, and then those companies' technologies enable NASA do the expensive missions within a lower budget.
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SpaceX is doing things that have already been done. They aren't breaking major new technical ground. They are breaking new economic ground by improving already existing technology. Don't get me wrong, that's SUPER important but SpaceX isn't going to send us to Mars
Well, TFA insists that the main obstacle to going to Mars is cost (which is another way of spelling funding). SpaceX is focused only on a part of that, launch costs, but dropping the price-to-orbit of 1 kg by an order of magnitude would make a huge difference in space exploration, whether human or robot. It may be a necessary part of going to Mars, given the funding environment.
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I think that's an unfair characterisation of what SpaceX has done/is doing.
Landing an intact first stage after it was travelling 6,000mph the other direction is pretty groundbreaking. Propulsive landing of a space capsule for re-use is pretty major too. That one's only partially demonstrated, but it's not the blocker in Dragon 2 progress and the work on Falcon 9 re-use feeds into it as well.
Then there's the Raptor engine, most of the way through the development with some components already tested to a high
Ground already covered (Score:2)
I think that's an unfair characterisation of what SpaceX has done/is doing.
SpaceX is doing some great work in lowering cost to orbit and improving rockets in a variety of ways. The importance of that cannot be overstated. But they are most decidedly NOT at the frontier of human exploration. Rockets to orbit is a solved problem. So is landing rockets on land. We can get better at it and do it cheaper (which is what they are doing) but we've done it before. They are incrementally improving work that has already been done in other projects. They're making the technology better
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SpaceX is doing things that have already been done. They aren't breaking major new technical ground.
Well said. NASA's job is to break new ground and push the boundaries of what we know. Once they do that to some level it's up to others to take what NASA has done and commercialize it.
Re: Private companies aren't taking us to Mars (Score:2)
Can't prove ROI = private companies don't do it (Score:2)
Except for Apple, what with their $205 billion dollars in cash on hand...
Apple has cash (not enough for a Mars mission) but if they said they were going to Mars their stock would plummet faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". Companies cannot do things which have unknown ROI, distant if any payback, huge costs and unquantified risks. Doesn't matter how big the bank account is, they can't do it because they can't show how they'd make a profit doing it.
A realistic Mars mission is probably going to cost north of a trillion dollars and I'm not even counting all of the R
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The panel found a number of areas of concern surrounding the Journey to Mars program, virtually all of them stemming from inadequate funding.
They needed a panel to figure this out?
They probably needed a panel to officially tell the public this. If any particular official would happen to call bullshit on the government's claims of wanting to send people to Mars, they'd probably find themselves alone and in hot water. Form a p[anel, collect the facts, dot their i's and cross their t's and announce what everybody knows and see if anybody cares now that official notice has been given.
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I don't really see us getting back to the moon within my lifetime (much less mars) without a very substantial budget increase.
Then the problem is easy to solve. with Nasa's recent announcement [slashdot.org]:
Can we stop this ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's stop pretending humans can survive in deep space or or Mars.
It doesn't take a week of reading articles @ JPL to realize we're not built for longterm weightlessness or different gravities.
Let's send remote devices that can do our bidding now.
Maybe one day when we start either manipulating our DNA or build ships with artificial gravity....but landfall is going to be unhealthy
and not in anyone's lifetime that can even see this page. It's all a con.
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To me, the problem isn't so much gravity or technology but radiation.
Space is a NASTY place to try and stay alive in. If you can survive the weightlessness and vacuum with the right technology but the radiation is going to kill you. Providing shielding is theoretically possible, it's just not practical. Some kinds of radiation don't respond to magnetic or electric fields so they cannot be deflected, only blocked by using mass, lots of mass. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why having lots
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Some kinds of radiation don't respond to magnetic or electric fields so they cannot be deflected [...]
In that case, wouldn't those of us on Earth have the same problem?
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No, we live on this thing called Earth which has a really deep and dense atmosphere which shields us from the really bad stuff that makes it though the magnetic shielding which naturally exists...
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NASA Ames had an interesting concept for that, which is not only to use the large amount of water a long-duration mission would need as shielding, but to use the "waste products" of the astronauts to replace that shielding as the water was lost (extremely hard to avoid small losses even with really good recycling tech).
Getting the mass off Earth is expensive but not difficult per se. Re-usable launchers will change that game, because the amount of mass per launch is flexible, unlike launching a giant space
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"Artificial gravity" is actually a well understood technology - centripetal/centrifugal force. We still need prototype testing though before we try it out, particularly if we want to do it with tethers rather than rigid structures (our experience with tethers in space has been less than stellar). It also imposes minimum size constraints on the diameter of the craft, as you don't want people exposed to too much tidal forces between their head and their feet.
Regardless, while living in space isn't "good for
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Stop peddling your fictitious forces! We're not buying it!
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Come now, do you really expect me to do coordinate substitution in my head while strapped to a centrifuge?
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Just so. It's all about the cost-to-orbit IMO. And to go beyond high orbit, it's mostly about the cost to get fuel into orbit. I do think mankind will be traveling the Solar System one day, and not just sending robots, but we're not going to get very far without near-free fuel available in orbit. And that of course requires making it there from asteroids.
Robotics has moved so far in the past 20 years that this no longer seems like a fantasy. Turning a CHON asteroid into a fuel depot opens up the Solar
Re: Can we stop this ? (Score:1)
It depends on how its done, the timing is the most important thing. Getting there and retaining enough muscle and bone mass for Mars 1/2 gravity is doable if its timed right and if the crew sticks to a vigorous workout program.
It's the return that is the killer. By the time they got back the astronauts bones would be too brittle to handle earth's gravity and muscle atrophy would be even further advanced.
This is really the best case argument for going to the moon first, so we can build a small rehabilitation
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This is the usual "oh, look at all the insurmountable problems/medical disaster" Chicken Little stuff. Since day one, there has been one scare story after another about how people aren't designed to be in space and that some unresolved disaster is waiting just a bit beyond current experience. Virtually ALL of it has proven to be nonsense or a pretty-easily-resolved problem. Same people were around when the steam engine was invented, they/you were wrong then, and you are wrong now.
There's absolutely nothing
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I see your Collier's magazine reference from 50 years ago and raise you a recent peer-reviewed article:
"Why the NASA Approach Will Likely Fail to Send Humans to Mars for Many Decades to Come"
http://link.springer.com/chapt... [springer.com]
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Let's go back to the moon and stay in high orbit.
Trouble is, the people not paying for a Mars trip don't have any interest in paying for a moon trip either.
I was right, I was right!! (Score:2)
I've been saying for ages that this push to skip the Moon and go straight to Mars with manned missions was a bad idea.
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Great! (Score:2)
Who needs to be on Mars when the own planet is in peril. Just a mind-distraction from currently unsolved issues.
Seems to be some firmware bug in human brains. Fixing that one, maybe a collective reboot is needed....
Good luck!
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Fixing that one, maybe a collective reboot is needed....
Advocating for another mass extinction event eh? Yea, that's the ticket. Let's wipe civilization off the face of the earth....
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Fixing that one, maybe a collective reboot is needed....
Advocating for another mass extinction event eh? Yea, that's the ticket. Let's wipe civilization off the face of the earth....
Nope - will first go into another mode and maybe comes to it's senses, like firmware/kernel update on a running system. If you look at the dysfunction of political systems across the board, appearance of pseudo authorities killing everyone not following their programming - IS comes to mind - then terrorizing more democratic systems, Europe for example, those systems going bonkers in reaction.
Interesting times. Ah - I forgot Trump becoming president, where did he get his money from and how many underlings w
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"Who needs to explore the New World when we have plenty of unsolved issues right here in Europe"
The Natives here would have been happy I guess, but this line of thinking isn't how to make technological progress.
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It's what makes us human. We need to explore.
Says who? - "need" ???
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The idea that you can (or should) do only one thing at a time is sheer foolishness. In real life a leader needs to manage multiple tasks at a time, giving each one the proportionate amount of attention that it needs. If you (as a person or a nation) are only capable of one thing at a time, you should step aside and let someone with more chops run things.
"One thing" - where do you get "one thing" on this planet?
Radiation.. weighlessness.. random space debris.. (Score:1)
Rocket scientists (Score:3)
Do Practical Research (Score:1)
Mars dreams give targets, but shouldn't dictate policy or actual project goals. Sci-Fi is fiction, and there's a reason it is often paired with fantasy - super colony ship is just as much a fantasy as Puff the magic dragon. Create practical technology and an actual "in-space" industrial base by continuing efforts in LEO and work on handling the risks we face now. Those are primarily the recovery of sattelites for repair, control of waste/wreckage, and maintaining the agreements against space-based weaponry.
Needs more potato. (Score:2)
You're Doing It Wrong (Score:2)
First you build a shipyard in orbit, then you build a long-term interplanetary research vessel, deploy, rinse and repeat. Do that and Mars will naturally follow.
The present mode of expensive one-off mission after another is horribly flawed.
Re:Paper rockets (Score:5, Informative)
Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
Re:Paper rockets (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Paper rockets (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
Tax money is always political (Score:3)
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized.
When you are spending taxpayer money it is ALWAYS political. This was true back during the Apollo era too. We just ignored it because of the Cold War.
The real problem is that to fund something like a space program you either need to be doing it for national security (see Cold War) or there needs to be economic opportunity. The economic opportunity is actually there but unfortunately the benefits are indirect and long term which makes it a hard sell to politicians who only care about the next election cyc
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somehow, become politicized.
There has never been a time in history when it wasn't politicized. NASA was never all that popular, even in the heyday of Apollo. I think the highest it has ever been was during Apollo 11.
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NASA is actually quite popular.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac... [pewresearch.org]
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Then you just undercut your own argument, since more money was spent at the height of the Apollo program. But whatever, nobody every admits being wrong on the internet. I get it.
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NASA matters to me. When I sold, I looked into it, and made a rather large donation to NASA. I'd wanted to earmark it for Educational Programs but, it turns out, they told me that it was not allowed. I donated a lot, a 7 digit sum, as I was doing everything I could think of to lower my tax burden or at least not give it to the general fund for bombing little brown people. It was still a very, very large tax bill. But, at least I can say I donated to NASA.
I didn't realize you could but it turns out that you
Space Bonds? [Re:Paper rockets] (Score:1)
Space has always been politicized. We need to find a way to make funding and planning more stable.
Perhaps the money should be committed up-front to specific plans and not subject to fiddling by the next shift in DC. I'm not sure how to legislate something with a "lock box" built into it. Space bonds?
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"So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature"
Well then, you are in luck!
Obama wanted to cancel manned space exploration and shift support of the existing ISS to a commercial, contracted manned taxi service. Instead a bipartisan, manned space exploration program, beginning with development of the SLS was mandated by Congress. Obama got some money for commercial manned space taxis
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I don't know - the Moon versus Mars thing is a tough call. The Moon would admittedly avoid the time and radiation danger of interplanetary travel, while laying the seeds for an eventual useful moon base (assuming we can figure out something useful to do there - asteroid mining may steal its thunder).
However, a moon base is also much more challenging than Mars in many ways. The extreme temperature fluctuations from a 709 hour day. The razor-sharp dust that is going to wreak havoc on air seals and moving p
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You could indeed do a lot of practicing on Earth, the problem is we've already done much of it and are well into the realm of diminishing returns. Biosphere 2 showed that we can engineer a self-contained ecosystem, there were a couple of major unforseen problems, but they managed to adapt and future projects would compensate. Current projects tend to focus more on the low hanging fruit like meal variety and other morale issues. It's really just the low gravity, vacuum, and unknown complications that rem
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The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized.
A central question within the political debate is: "why send people on long-term missions at all?" Astronauts and companies building capsules for people don't want us thinking too hard about that question.
If we want to explore outer worlds to learn more about them, the logical and financially viable answer is to send out autonomous robots engineered for outer space. People are simply not designed to be outside of the Earth's atmosphere or in zero G, or away from an incredibly complex biosphere that giv
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Funding consistancy (Score:1)
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
This is actually a problem throughout government. It's impossible to plan long-term missions well when you have to argue for funding every year, rather than being able to get a five-year spending plan approved. This bugs the hell out of the CIA, for example.
Nope (Score:2)
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Not really the people that lost interest, it is the elite that would be footing the bill for it and they themselves are not for anything more than the theatrics of a space program and only for entertainment value, if there were one that stayed to it's focus the elite would lose control of the people. The real problem with NASA is not within NASA, it is because the US has been run by a non domestic imperialist bus load of retards through mafia occupation for over a century now. There will be no advancement
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President puts forward the budget and congress approves.
If you support the President you blame congress.
If you do not like the President you blame him.
Truth is that President Obama did have the killing of the constellation program as a plank in his platform. Frankly none of the HHLV that have been proposed over the last decade or so seem like great ideas. They mostly seem like recycling old programs.
Duh! (Score:2)
President puts forward the budget and congress approves.
Yep, and this has been an issue way before Obama. I stopped listening to State of the Union addresses under Bush the Younger because while he would usually bring up going to Mars and other hopeful NASA missions, when I checked, NASAs budget would not even been keeping up with inflation. Presidents and even Congress have been talking about Mars missions for years, but they have just been talking, not actually doing anything. It's all just sound bites for the public and this safety panel is probably just NASA
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President proposes a budget, Congress does whatever the fuck they want with it before passing it on to the Senate. NASA funding is heavily affected by pork considerations. And this year it seems they forgot to under-fund commercial crew.
Constellation deserved to die, its only official mission was to be an ISS ferry, and it required killing ISS to fund it. Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions. (And yes, I know they'
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Falcon Heavy will probably be launching manned missions before the Senate Launch System ever launches humans in non-test missions.
This is an interesting issue in regards to NASA--what should they be doing about rockets?
One the one hand, NASA does research and they should be looking at rocket technology as a benefit to the space community. Look at the Shuttle Engines: they are beasts. They burn hydrogen, not some hydrocarbon. The SLS will use 6 engines to lift a little more than the same amount of cargo as the Falcon Heavy's 18 engines. And NASA is looking at ways to improve that further. This sort of research is a good thing. A
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It's not like SLS will necessarily do something that Falcon/Falcon Heavy can't, at least in regards to lifting payloads into whatever orbit you might want.
But it does do one thing that Falcon/FH can't, it's a great way to pass the pork around! The primary mission of SLS is not to launch a rocket, it is to keep Shuttle-era jobs and spending going.
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"President puts forward the budget and congress approves."
The president presents a budget proposal. But the actual spending legislation is put together by the House of Representatives which can add funding for other things and is under no obligation to follow any of the president's recommendations. Indeed, before the 1920s, the president wasn't even legally required to submit a budget proposal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Paper rockets for a has-been nation. Obama killed NASA heavy launch and gave us fake, unfunded programs. Go talk to China or India if you want progress.
Are you sure this was Obamas's doing? I thought these sort of funding decisions was down to congress?
The president can have great visions, but in the end depends on congress to allow them to happen.
The president's study on the future of human space flight suggested a manned mission to an asteroid as a next step because it would be a more doable milestone, we could pick the easiest asteroid to get to and back from and it would give us experience in deep space without having to also get us back off the surface of Mars which essentially doubles all the mission cost and risk.
An asteroid mission was a practical milestone (despite my own initially poor reaction) but not very sexy, so they went back to the '
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We just need to wait for the Chinese to start seriously pushing for a manned Mars mission, then you'll get all those right wingers on board with their dollars. Nothing gets a conservative to spend money like the fear of non-white people doing something before they do it.
It's the exact same thing that happened with Mercury/Apollo.
Well... (Score:1)
Well ... the start of budget negotiations is the President's Budget Request. The surprise in the mars program being overfunded is BECAUSE it was not in PB16. Such gives rarely happen except as pork in the military budget to buy a certain already designed thing from a certain representative's district. Very rarely does it happen with RDT&E money.
Not entirely accurate. (Score:2)
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