Obama: 8 Billion For High-Speed Rail, 0 for NASA & JSC

Hmm... when did Bush plan to have Orion ready to fly to ISS to replace the Shuttle?

 

Well, your mom does, since I am a primary source of income.

Moving on.... Upkeep is not worth the cost. Heck, the entire venture has not been worth the cost. As I said earlier, the benefits from ISS are primarily in terms of operational knowledge gained - that is, knowledge related to station management, construction, and (unfortunately) periods of inactivity.

 

Yes, I do, since you evidently believe that a human being in low earth orbit is required to discover dark matter.

I have very high hopes for this science argument with you.

 

Sorry I wasn't exactly precise with my terms. You are right the Orion spacecraft wasn't going to fully replace the shuttle in its full function but it was going to replace the shuttle as a crew vehicle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_spacecraft

[rquoter]Subsequent flights will visit the International Space Station. If commercial orbital transportation services are unavailable, Orion will handle logistic flights to the Station.[/rquoter]

 

CaseyH, I'm sincerely interested. What is the ISS offering scientifically that can't be done elsewhere. I don't know that much about it, but reading what they put up as achievements was disappointing to me. And by that I mean a good proportion of it would probably not be funded by NSF, NIH, NIST, or DOE if it went out to competitive grant review. And I'm not finding many scientific publications coming out of it.

I hate being on this side of the argument -- I really do. It hurts me, but sometimes... love hurts. And truth almost always hurts.

 

Bzzt.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9728679

We were hitching rides with the Russians anyway. See, the Space Shuttle program was a colossal waste of money and by the end we didn't even have functional method to transport people to the ISS. Maybe you'd rather rely on Putin than Lockheed. I wouldn't.

 

Shuttle was scheduled to retire in 2010.
ISS was scheduled to retire in 2015.
Orion was scheduled to fly in 2015. (this date was/ is the most wishful)

Of course everything was/ is behind schedule, over budget.

Tell me if Bush had a plan!

 

Ya, maybe we'll all report to the transporter room and scottie will beam us down. You can't be serious with that response. I agree that you can always continue researching. But that has to go hand-in-hand with application. You basically are saying "meh we'll think of something". No entity would ever abandon their mainstay projects to go purely for research initiatives. That's like saying Apple will stop working on the I-Phone so it can focus on creating a phone that can be tranplanted into everyone's ear.

Again, too many people are competely ignoring "the gap". You just can't expect to pickup one day exactly where you left off. Space Exploration doesn't work like that. The greatest assets a space program has are the people behind it all. This is the same thing that happened between Apollo and Constellation. NASA lost all those human resources from Apollo days. Some people's skills weren't needed anymore due to the Shuttle being a glider, not a rocket. And now with Constellation being canceled, there will be likely very few left with the skills.

 

America's 1st Commercial Spaceport Blooms in the Desert

Y'all are dead on, private companies have no interest in flying into space. Gotta leave that up to the Feds.

 

I really don't think you can count Virgin Galactic or whatever Burt Rutan's company is called as "commercial space endeavors". They're just really high-flying airplanes.

SpaceX is finally getting somewhere, but the Falcon 1 is very small and has only one commerical success. The falcon 9 is a good idea, but 9 merlin engines on the first stage is probably not going to work - but we'll see.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/389388main_ISS Science Report_20090030907.pdf

See link. There are a lot of projects and experiments. Although some of them can be done here on Earth, most of they have been deemed necessary to be done in a zero-g environment.

 

I'm not sure what you are basing that on. Name one transportation vehicle that is able to carry complex experimental payload to deploy to the ISS? The Space Shuttle is the only such able to carry the MPLM payload which is the prime way of getting experiments onboard to the ISS. Please explain how the Space Shuttle program was a colossal waste?

See: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/alisse/03.AlisseInfoKit_Payloads.pdf

 

You aren't sure where I'm getting that "by the end we didn't even have functional method to transport people to the ISS?" Maybe cuz at the end we were hitching rides from other countries?

I think that we could just have easily developed a method of transporting cargo 30 years ago that was not such a waste of money. The shuttle program committed NASA to a dangerously bureaucratic system. We never should have gone with a reusable reentry shuttle in the first place. It's more expensive to retrieve, evaluate, repair, and upgrade the shuttle for every launch than it would have been to stick with Gemini. You're really going to argue the only way to get experiments into space was a shuttle? Egads, how did the Russkies get there exactly?

The Shuttle program was a departure from NASA's purpose at the time. The ISS is a waste of money today. What experiments are being conducted there that could not be done in a lab or via remote link?

 

This morning there was a press conference where the NASA Admin. introduced seven civillian contractors eager to develop a civillian low earth spacecraft. Anyway for getting to low Earth orbit why is it necessary that the US government be the one to do it? Its not like we rely solely on US government planes and ships for military or scientific deployments.

Which promise did Obama make? If I recall the last time this issue came up during the campaign was that Obama was stating on the campaign trail that some NASA programs might have to be cut to pay for other things.

I can't speak for other posters but my reaction would've been generally the same if some other poster had started this thread. The one difference might've been in regard to pointing out the hypocritical position of a poster who has frequently embraced a libertarian position and derided other posters for a provincial attitude now arguing for big government spending along in the favor of provincialism.

 

I didn't say it was a good plan but according to the information I've provided the Orion spacecraft was meant to among other things be a crew transport vehicle to the ISS.
Here's another link
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/index.html
[rquoter]
America will send a new generation of explorers to the moon aboard NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle. Making its first flights to the International Space Station early in the next decade,[/rquoter]

If you think it is a messed plan I will agree with you and it wouldn't be the first messed up plan from the last Admin..

 

What happens though if the Apple investors and management decide to pull the plug on funding? I mean when Apple pulled the plug on the Newton did that mean they couldn't do anything anymore?

The problem though is that we don't have unlimited resources so funding is never guarenteed for anything that doesn't mean that research stops. Anyway the funding environment can always change along with the political or other situations.

This is one of the reasons why we have such bloated budgets. You get programs that might not be that well thought out that keep on going because people cannot see other ways of doing things.

 

Let me ask you again. Were you for the bailout of GM?

If GM fails it takes its suppliers and vendors with it which means hundreds of thousands of jobs lost.

 

I haven't watched the video but I will agree Obama in this case made some statements in regard to NASA that he isn't living up to the spirit of those statements. That said he did leave himself some wiggle room.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5949605.html

[rquoter]
While Obama endorsed a "balanced program of space exploration and scientific discovery," his policy statement did not include any specific mention of the Constellation program. It did, however, discuss in great detail his support for expanding NASA's robotic and aeronautic programs. [/rquoter]