Trump Offered NASA Unlimited Funding To Put People on Mars by 2020, Report Says (nymag.com) 600
From a report, based on a book by Cliff Sims, who worked as a communications official for Trump on his presidential campaign and in the West Wing: As the clock ticked down, Trump "suddenly turned toward the NASA administrator." He asked: "What's our plan for Mars?" Lightfoot explained to the president -- who, again, had recently signed a bill containing a plan for Mars -- that NASA planned to send a rover to Mars in 2020 and, by the 2030s, would attempt a manned spaceflight. "Trump bristled," according to Sims. He asked, "But is there any way we could do it by the end of my first term?"
Sims described the uncomfortable exchange that followed the question, with Lightfoot shifting and placing his hand on his chin, hesitating politely and attempting to let Trump down easily, emphasizing the logistical challenges involving "distance, fuel capacity, etc. Also the fact that we hadn't landed an American anywhere remotely close to Mars ever." Sims himself was "getting antsy" by this point. With a number of points left to go over with the president, "all I could think about was that we had to be on camera in three minutes .. And yet we're in here casually chatting about shaving a full decade off NASA's timetable for sending a manned flight to Mars. And seemingly out of nowhere."
Sims described the uncomfortable exchange that followed the question, with Lightfoot shifting and placing his hand on his chin, hesitating politely and attempting to let Trump down easily, emphasizing the logistical challenges involving "distance, fuel capacity, etc. Also the fact that we hadn't landed an American anywhere remotely close to Mars ever." Sims himself was "getting antsy" by this point. With a number of points left to go over with the president, "all I could think about was that we had to be on camera in three minutes .. And yet we're in here casually chatting about shaving a full decade off NASA's timetable for sending a manned flight to Mars. And seemingly out of nowhere."
He can't even get the money for his stupid wall (Score:3)
What makes you think this will be different?
Re:He can't even get the money for his stupid wall (Score:5, Funny)
Well he could try the same tactic: Explicitly lay out a plan on how the Martians will pay for it, and then act like he never did so [vox.com] and shut down the government until taxpayers pay for it (or more likely, until he gets bored, or people get so tired of his BS that they're ready for a political impeachment).
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Best comment today. As I keep saying, there's just no way the Democrats are going to win this contest of toddler petulance. Some Dems still have a little dignity, after all: they'll never beat Trump's perfectly-optimized build of 100% ego, 0% dignity.
Re:He can't even get the money for his stupid wall (Score:5, Funny)
If only he could get the stupid Mongorians to stop breaking down his shitty wall.
Just realised... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just realised... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just realised... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, he asked, didn't he? Isn't that what a leader is supposed to do? How is a real estate developer supposed to know the intricacies of space travel?
I mean, Obama didn't know jack about health care, so he went to the insurance lobby for help. And you guys LOVE that.
Re:Just realised... (Score:5, Interesting)
He's all of the "bad kids" in Wonka combined. He wants everything for himself (NOW) like Veruca, he watches TV like Mike, he eats like Augustus, and while he doesn't chew gum like Violet (that I know of), substitute Twitter and you have the final piece in place. Someone get Trump a "golden ticket" and a tour of Willy Wonka's factory.
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No, I think you nailed it: Trump's Twitter feed is imbued with an unmistakable, charismatic cud-like mass grass-roots mastication on a truly mastodonian scale.
Tremendously territorial animal. Terribly near-sighted. Engage cautiously. Walk tall, and carry a huge shovel.
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Bloody hell, you're right... except that he's already got his Golden Ticket thanks to gullible Americans and scheming Russians.
Now, if only Wonka would come along, lock him in a glass box and fire him through the roof...
All the way to mars. Hmm....
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It is called a boss (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like someone is not used to having a boss. Managers ask unknowingly ridiculous things all the time. It is called having a job.
J
Re:It is called a boss (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, Trump is famous for his wit. I would say that the factual reporting, er, I'm sorry "hit pieces", should probably keep coming until people stop defending the stupid shit he does.
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Bosses sometimes ask this to see what the bottleneck is. Sometimes you cite things they can control; like I would need about $1Mil to get the equipment for just testing that idea, or I would need at least a team of 12 people for a year to finalize the plan. Those are things a boss can effect if they see the project as worthwhile to them.
Now if you come back and say, if we launched today all the supplies and a person. To get them there by that date they would need to travel at a speed that wou
Re:It is called a boss (Score:5, Insightful)
You're bending over backward though to assign sane and skilled leadership skills to someone who does not have them. I will illustrate it with two different questions.
Can we get someone to Mars before the end of my first term with infinite money?
With infinite money, how soon could we get someone to mars?
They're subtly different but one question is an intelligent question that identifies bottlenecks. The other is a vanity request.
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Q1. "Can we get someone to Mars before the end of my first term with infinite money?"
Q2. "With infinite money, how soon could we get someone to mars?"
They're subtly different but one question is an intelligent question that identifies bottlenecks. The other is a vanity request.
I agree that they're subtly different. The first one has a concrete goal, one that's not achievable but also still admits reasoned answer as to why it's not achievable. Therefore it's more effective in identifying bottlenecks. The second one seems more likely to lead to answers that use more money than necessary. But I'm not understanding how Q2 would be a vanity request?
(I'm being obtuse. You of course meant to imply that Q1 is the worse request. I'm disagreeing with your assessment of the questions.)
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They're subtly different but one question is an intelligent question that identifies bottlenecks. The other is a vanity request.
Isn't that why we raced Russia to the moon and won? For vanity? To be first?
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All the companies I worked for where the bosses were that stupid are out of business now. Most of them didn't even make it 4 years.
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Yes well, Trump's exposure to the business world was through the Mom and Pop operation he was running. No board of directors, no public books. He could be as stupid as he liked because he was always able to shift financing to another group of marks. This shows up in The Grifter's 4-7 bankruptcies, depending upon how you count them.
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Yes, bosses do come up with schemes that only a non-engineer would think possible. But they shouldn't come up with schemes a competent manager would know is impossible. That's not to say bosses that bad don't exist, but usually their careers stall in middle management.
What we are looking at is something Europe grappled with in the 1840s: the incompetency of hereditary aristocrats. The only new wrinkle here is the use of electronic media to construct a more flattering public image.
What Trump's second response should have been (Score:5, Insightful)
When the NASA guy tried to patiently explain why it would be 2030 when NASA was there, Trump should have responded with:
"Well SpaceX says they'll be landing people there in 2025 [inverse.com], why is NASA so slow? Maybe I should just send more government money to SpaceX. Why do you think you deserve it instead?"
It's possible (Score:5, Funny)
But if you want them to be alive when they get there, it'll take a bit longer.
Wait, so can we send Trump (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wait, so can we send Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't forget to launch Pence too. I know it's easy to forget him (let's face it, he's the blandest VP since Quayle), but please, at least this one time, don't.
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We'd need a power supply to keep him animated the entire trip since he wouldn't have a wall socket to plug into.
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Actually, we could put live people on Mars by 2020 still. However the cost would be eye-watering. Good, cheap, fast. Pick any two.
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like ADHD (Score:2, Insightful)
This is how people with a very high IQ think and act. Almost like ADHD, except very focused.
This is just an observation, not an endorsement or denial of President Trump. I've worked w/people
like this. You look at their results, not the traveled path they took getting there 'cause chances
are you wouldn't understand it.
And you might see an easier way to their answer, but remember, you saw their answer and thus
were influenced by it.
CAP === 'ranked'
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I've seen Trump. Trust me. ADHD seems way more likely than high IQ.
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It's also a leadership methodology used by very experienced leaders. Of people involved in space programs, Korolev comes to mind. Get your engineering team, and then ask them to do the impossible. Offer them infinite support. Listen to them tell you it's impossible anyway. Ask for timetable with infinite resources.
You will very quickly see which engineers are good at their job, as they'll start thinking in ways they haven't thought when they were focused on getting budgetary acceptance. And that's how Korol
Re: like ADHD (Score:5, Insightful)
There's "impossible" that becomes possible when enough time and money is thrown at it and then there's impossible that is actually impossible. If you promise all the resources in the world to someone and they still say it's not possible, it doesn't mean they're bad at their job. It might just mean that it's actually impossible. If you promised me the entire world's resources devoted to sending a person back in time, I'd tell you it's impossible. Even if the entire world stopped what it was doing and devoted itself to this one task, we wouldn't be able to do it. I know that's an extreme example, but some things truly are impossible. Even if we gave NASA an unlimited budget, they couldn't safely send a man to Mars by 2020.
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First of all by 2020 implies by January 1, 2020.
No it doesn't. Trump will, in theory, be president for all of 2020. His term doesn't end in 2020, it ends in 2021. The election is in 2020. He was asking if it was possible to accomplish this during his first term, which is (again, in theory) through all of 2020 and into the next January.
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"Get me engineers who don't give a fuck" is how we got the Juicero.
Yeah. They got it done. Congratulations.
Businessman (Score:5, Funny)
Well, they can (Score:2)
That said, it's probably not a good idea if you value human life. And at any rate it's really just a distraction/vanity project. I'll believe Trump is concerned for our future when he makes good on his campaign promise of Universal Healthcare.
Worth asking... (Score:2, Insightful)
How is this different than any other business? A CTO with a million things on their plate may come to you and ask if you can speed up SAP deployment to a year.
It's a good question. If your constraint is funding or inter-company politics, a motivated CTO can fix that. There are limits to how fast you can speed up some projects, but what's the harm in asking?
Ditto for Mars. The President might have some interesting conversations if he made a phone call to Musk asking the same thing. Grant a contract or two
Re:Worth asking... (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this different than any other business? A CTO with a million things on their plate may come to you and ask if you can speed up SAP deployment to a year.
It's a good question.
It's not a good question if you're about to give a presentation about the current deployment plan in 3 minutes and the CTO is suddenly acting pissed off and now wants it done before his contract re-negotiation.
1) If the CTO cared that much they could have asked the question before the big presentation.
2) The SAP deployment is for the company, not to pad the CTO's resume
3) It's your big moment, giving the presentation on all your hard work. Now the CTO is pissed off at you for no good reason and you're thinking about their unreasonable request.
You know I once saw a brilliant person taste a paint chip because they were curious about the taste.
Therefore if Trump starts eating paint he must be brilliant also!!!
If he'd been really astute (Score:5, Informative)
..he would have said "No, Mr President we can't get it done for 2020 but we can get it done for the end of your second term if you start the funding right now.!
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But he would have got 8 years of unlimited funding for the "Mars" project, and if they'd been really clever they would also have claimed they needed fusion energy for a successful project. NASA would have taken a giant leap forward under those conditions.
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Citation needed.
NASA has a well earned reputation for low-balling costs to get a project approved and then having cost overruns. In fact, most government agencies have that reputation.
Not Really Wrong of Him to Try (Score:4, Insightful)
It'll happen eventually though.
Ferret
He asked the wrong guy (Score:5, Interesting)
If he asked the same question of Elon Musk, he would have had a yes. Of course, Elon has a long track record of missing deadlines, but if SpaceX didn't have to use profits from regular launches to fund their Starship program, they could probably move it forward faster.
Re:He asked the wrong guy (Score:5, Funny)
I commented publicly (here maybe) that Trump should pay Elon whatever he wants to start a moonbase during his first term. It was achievable then with Falcon Heavy but sadly for both they never read /.
Didn't the SLS boondoggle teach anything? (Score:2)
This would be little more than another pork trough for Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Of mice and men (Score:2)
Whatever happened to that plan for a private company to send two people on a flyby of Mars? It probably couldn't happen by the end of 2020, though.
I think the best Nasa might be able to do by 2020 would be to send a small mammal, like a mouse, on a flyby of Mars. I'd say its chances of survival would be 50/50 at best, but it would give us a good idea of the danger involved. Landing it on Mars might also be possible, but launching it back to Earth after that probably wouldn't be. Which would turn it into
How the mighty have fallen (Score:3, Insightful)
I want you to think about this. Really, truly, deeply think about this, and opportunity that was just lost. The space program has by and large been stalled. There is constant talk of going somewhere or doing something, sometime, which always seems to be 20 years away. Bureaucrats have been hired, who are more interested in job security than achieving. We have had a series of presidents, both republican and democrat, who have half assed the space program. We have lacked drive. We have lacked purpose. Now, an increasing number of people are losing interest that there is talk of far reducing funding or cancelling altogether. Why chase dreams when we can pay for more mundane practical stuff. It IS a good question.
So, along comes trump. You (likely) live in California, so you reflexively hate him, no matter what he says or does. So, when he asks if you want to chase your so called dreams, for real, you withered in the moment and said no. You disgust me. You should disgust yourself, and anyone else who loves epic science. The bell was rung, and you CHOSE to be tone deaf.
When Kennedy similarly rang the bell, better men than you rose and answered it. A whole host of knew technologies needed to be developed, but they new at its core, the moon shot was possible. Mars is the same. There are some issues to be solved, but they are not infinite. If Elon Musk offered a blank check for materials to have the best and brightest to work on this, you would faun over him, and maybe even be involved. But no, since you are small and petty, you mock and deride the effort because it was Trump.
You can say the timing was bad. You can claim it was unfair. But anyone who has ever chased a dream knows, you have to have your elevator speech ready. You never know who you bump into to make it happen. Instead of being snarky at Trump, you should save your Ire for the fucking NASA admin who was not prepared. He was asked, and he was not ready. Pathetic.
This was a moment in history lost. This was a moment for serious people with serious dreams. Instead, we got you. Instead of galvanizing expertise to figure out ways to meet the challenge, we will continue to support the nowhere scientists making nowhere plans for nobody. We will hand-wring and bitch that there is not money to test out solutions, since it is more fun to hand-wring and bitch than to actually tackle the problem. Again, you disgust me.
Re:How the mighty have fallen (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure you know all about it, I mean it's not exactly rocket science is it.
The response to someone making impossible demands isn't OKAY LET'S FUCKING DO IT. Less than 2 years absolutely is impossible, of course it is. Hell it takes about 7 months to travel there. It's not a case of not being ambitious enough, it's not a case of being scared, it's a case of the very clever person in the room who knows how hard things are knows that trying to do that would be folly, waste a lot of money, and people will die.
Fuck this macho bullshit. Hard things are hard, serious people respect that.
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" You (likely) live in California, so you reflexively hate him, no matter what he says or does"
I reflexively hate him BECAUSE of what he says & does.
And i live in Texas.
And fuck you.
Re:How the mighty have fallen (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had been in Lightfoots shoes I wouldnt have heard this as "Ill give you all the money you need to get to Mars." I would have heard a question that, if taken seriously, would cause all of NASAs priorities to be shifted around, lots of money spent on planning/replanning but when push comes to shove and the answer becomes "no, actualy we cant make that happen in in your term" and NASA becomes Trumps latest tweet storm, jobs are lost, there IS no additional money, everything we did comes out of the existing budget and we wasted a ton of money shifting priorities.
So "No sir, we cant" is the smartest answer there is when someone like Trump asks you to do something ridiculous.
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I don't live in California, but I do live in the real world.
In the real world, there is a limit to how fast you can speed up a project by dumping money on it. If you don't believe this that just means your experience with the real world is limited. Bad managers are quite generous when they're under time pressure, but a fat slug of money with a countdown clock attached doesn't make up for the lack of planning.
Going to the Moon in eight years was feasible but expensive. Kennedy already knew this when he mad
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I don't think the border wall is immoral. It's just stupid.
Should have taken the money (Score:3, Insightful)
And after Trump's term is up ... what's the worst that could have happened? The guy gets fired and nobody is on Mars. But there would have been a lot of progress made. Maybe it would have then been possible by the end of Trump's second term?
That is the problem with bureaucrats: they are too honest. Nobody expects politicians to tell the truth - the people they deal with should be self-serving for their causes, too.
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Maybe the NASA guy knows that Trump doesn't control NASA funding allocations?
Better waste of money than the Great Wall of Trump (Score:2)
And I know just the man to put in charge of this project...
The catch is everyone going are all Democrats (Score:2)
Starting with Nancy Pelosi and the Mueller team and their 13 angry democrats.
Fake News (Score:2)
Trump wants fame (Score:2)
Tell him its a revival of the TV series "Lost in space" and he is playing "Smith"
Aim the damn thing at the sun and tell him its a short cut as Mars is on the other side.
I'm not sure why this is a story... (Score:2)
Sometimes you can overcome logistical problems by simply throwing money at it.
Other times, you could throw every last cent, ruble, kopeck, yen, yuan, won, bot, pence, etc on the planet at it and it still won't make some problems go away.
If POTUS asks you about something like this, simply tell him that a manned Mars mission on a 1-2 year (since launching in December of 2020 would essentially be 2 years) timetable falls into the latter category.
Hey, unlike past presidents, this one actually ASKED NASA about i
I would have asked that question (Score:2)
It's an interesting question - "can you do it?"
My next question would have been - "What would it cost?"
And then I'd have started asking about priorities and what they presently had on the table, etc.
Folks sure are funny though, getting wrapped around the axle 'cause the man asked a question.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, constitutionally he doesn't have the rights to do this. This is why there is a government shutdown right now. He wants to pay for the wall, an other part of the government doesn't. The House of Representatives has the power of the purse strings, so they will not fund this wall. So the president will not approve any budget without such funding.
If he had the ability to unlimited fund NASA, why doesn't he have the ability to fund for his wall.
Also of note even with unlimited funding, putting a Man on Mars by 2020 is impossible. To perform such a project new technologies need to be made and the mythical man month is in play. There is only so much the everyone can do at once until they start stepping on each others feet.
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Also of note even with unlimited funding, putting a Man on Mars by 2020 is impossible. To perform such a project new technologies need to be made and the mythical man month is in play. There is only so much the everyone can do at once until they start stepping on each others feet.
Well, it's not totally impossible to put a man on mars by 2020. He may not be alive though.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about we send Trump himself?
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Graphene works as a shield and is very lightweight.
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The shielding needed for a deep space habitat will need to be a composite due to the different types of radiation and the weight limits that could be allocated to shielding. There is EM radiation such as x-rays, charged particles coming from the sun, and cosmic rays in high energy neutrons coming from deep space which are all blocked in different amounts by different materials. It's going to require different materials together to provide the lightest form of shielding. This will hopefully be able to includ
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
They have not yet solved the problem of humans surviving several months of radiation in space yet -- I'd call that a "new technology that needs to be made", although I suppose 100 tons of lead shielding would probably do the job...
Actually it's not that bad. Current estimates are that a Mars round trip will take about 60% of an astronaut's career limit and that below 16 feet of Martian soil radiation will be Earth level. With a reasonable surface budget you're straddling the career limits, but note that they mean +3% chance of dying from cancer, it's not like a lethal dose or anything. The biggest dynamic is solar flares which are fairly low power and also directional so possible to shield against. Most think there'll be an emergency shelter inside the water tank, because water is quite effective at those energy levels. There's also the galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) that you can't shield much against, but they aren't a blocker for an exploration mission. They'd make it really hard to make any kind of permanent settlement though.
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Where are you getting 438 days? Every proposal I've seen for sending humans to Mars has transit times in the range of a few months to a few weeks,depending on payload. Assuming we sent a SpaceX Starship carrying only a few people and only enough supplies to reach Mars (having sent the rest of the supplies ahead of time) you could cut the transit time way down.
And once you're on Mars (or the Moon), radiation pretty much stops being an issue unless you're stupid about it. A few meters of rock or twice that
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It's not quite that simple. To go fast you need greater delta-v; because of orbital mechanics, to go more than a little bit faster you need a LOT more delta-v. Because of the need to carry fuel, the rocket equation tells us that our maximum delta-v is related to the specific impulse of our engine. It's a bit counter intuitive, but chemical engines can only let you go so fast. Making the non-fuel payload lighter helps, but it very quickly becomes an insignificant factor compared to the fuel mass. As long as
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No new technologies need to be made. All you need is a ship, food and water, and someone willing to go. That's it.
They could easily use the space shuttle to fly there, I don't know why they haven't done it yet.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Woah now, slow down with that wild optimism. It's only been proven that we can launch a 2-seater Tesla into space.
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No new technologies need to be made.
They haven't yet figured out how to safely land several tons of humans and descent craft on Mars.
Machines? Yes, some, but not all, of the time.
But they don't know how to safely land people.
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The last President did claim that all he needed was a pen and a phone and the knowledge of how to use them.
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OK, but he could say "there is a caravan of people coming, which amounts to an army threatening invasion, and the easiest way to deal with it is a wall."
That would be within his purview and emergency powers, at least close enough that it would likely pass supreme court review (in the current court, of course).
Just because you don't want something to happen doesn't mean it won't.
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Or have we forgotten that Obama shut down the space program altogether?
https://www.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
Seems to be working for me?
Re:HURR DURR TRUMP DUM (Score:5, Informative)
And if any Democrat President had offered unlimited funding to get a human mars landing in 4 years we'd be applauding the progressive actions to move technology and human progress forward.
Or have we forgotten that Obama shut down the space program altogether?
Nice troll. [wikipedia.org]
TL/DR? Okay, here you go:
The Space Shuttle program was extended several times beyond its originally envisioned 15-year life span because of the delays in building the United States space station in low Earth orbit—a project which eventually evolved into the International Space Station. It was formally scheduled for mandatory retirement in 2010 in accord with the directives President George W. Bush issued on January 14, 2004 in his Vision for Space Exploration.[
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shuttle program != space program
The shuttle program is one aspect of the space program. You do not need to conflate things like that in order to disprove the AC.
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The point is that Obama did not "shut down the space program altogether". He did cancel the Constellation program because, in his words, it was "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation." He and other officials subsequently restored development of the Orion capsule, along with the Ares I lift stage and a Heavy Launch Vehicle stage to replace Ares V.
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See my reply to penandpaper above.
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Nah. We'd also call him desperate to pull a publicity stunt because he feels like his approval ratings are sliding.
To Mars in 4 years. From what is essentially standstill. Keep on dreaming.
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Nobody else, Republican or Democrat would ever suggest such a ridiculous and obviously ego catering idea.
Sure they would. They just wouldn't do it publicly.
With Trump, there is no filter. What he says in private is what he has in public. This is what his supporters love, and his detractors hate.
Re: HURR DURR TRUMP DUM (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: HURR DURR TRUMP DUM (Score:2)
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This isn't democrats vs republicans. It is that Trump is an Insane Idiot, not fit to be president.
Precisely.
My thoughts while reading TFS were "Unlimited funding sounds silly", then "Mars by 2020... that's ridiculously aggressive..." and I started thinking about the planetary motions involved, and current launch capabilities (for humanity, not just NASA), and started constructing a timetable in my head. They'd need to launch by early 2020, with supplies for a year, and we'd still need some way to get them home... it just isn't going to happen.
None of that has anything to do with who's in the White House
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Yep, just paste Trump's face over Matt Damon's with MS Paint-level graphics work and his supporters will insist that it's absolutely real, infinity times more real than the moon landing...
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He doesn't care about science, or exploration, or doing things the right way.
There is no scientific reason to send people to Mars. It is a political stunt. Every president is for it, but they all extend the schedule so the big spending will occur after they leave office.
Guess what? We aren't going to Mars by 2030. Here's the reason: National Debt Clock [usdebtclock.org].
Re:Trump is a fucking joke (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no scientific reason to send people to Mars. It is a political stunt.
I don't think any disagrees that it is a political stunt but so was the initial moon landing. There was no scientific reason to send people to the moon. Yet, that helped spur technological and scientific advancement. I think the same could happen with a manned mission to Mars. Is it worth it? I don't know.
Agree with the debt.
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If Kennedy hadn't been shot, there's a good chance the Moon landing wouldn't have happened. Kennedy became a martyr and the Moon shot became a monument to him.
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Yes, but at least with a halfway realistic time frame.
Flying to the moon is fairly easy. You're dealing with a body that has a fraction of the mass and thus gravity, and to return from it you basically fall back into Earth's gravity well after overcoming a fairly trivial one.
This is fundamentally different for a flight to another planet.
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Flying to the moon is fairly easy because the minimum energy transfer orbit is a few days, and windows come along every day, or a couple times an hour if you're in orbit.
Flying to Mars is harder because the transfer orbit is 8.5 months long and a window opens once every two years.
The amount of energy (depth of gravity wells, etc.) isn't really much different, and is dwarfed by the energy required to get into Earth orbit in the first place.
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I'm not sure when Kennedy told NASA to work on a moon landing, but he gave the speech in September 1962.and Apollo 11 launched in July 1969. If Trump gave a "we're going to Mars" speech today and expected the same turnaround, we'd launch in October 2026 - well after a theoretical second Trump term and MUCH later than his 2020 preference.
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> Now, as for NASA's part... I'd say take the money and RUN!
--That was my take on it as well (in fact I have that song in my head right now.)
--Unlimited funding for space? YES SIR, SIR
--By the time our long national nightmare is over, $NASA-admin should already have his exit strategy in place
Silly /.er (Score:2)
Re:By 2020? (Score:5, Insightful)
RTFA. The question was asked almost two years ago.
And if you get past your derangement, it's a reasonable way to prod a bureaucrat into thinking big.