no, fringe issues are fringe issues based on the overall impact on the elections. these candidates need to be talking two things, Iraq-Terror, Economy. Those are the issues that unite all voters.
No what represents NASA is its calling card - the manned spaceflight prorgam, which for the past 30 years has been two hugely expensive, way over budget, wasteful programs which have contributed nothing that could not have been achieved at a much lower cost: The Space Shuttle and the ISS. I could go on about what a disaster the Shuttle has been but there's no point. The patronage argument about the city of houston doesnt make sense from a national standpoint. It's the Alaskan bridge to nowhere argumeent - sure it creates jobs in Alaska, but ultiimately who cares? it's still a waste, which is exactly what the manned spaceflight program has become.
I must give Obama credit -- his team has found a rare dem wedge issue just in time for the primaries. As for Obama destroying manned spaceflight -- I think some are underestimating the power of the Nasa lobbyists. Good luck stopping the Orion Project -- it is a go, mock ups are already developed on time within budget.
Disclaimer: Up until about 4 months ago, I worked for the Constellation Program Office at NASA. Prior to that I worked with the shuttle for over 4 years. ===================== A couple of points: 1) Without a massive budget increase, NASA cannot afford to go back to the moon regardless. 2) It is highly likely that a 5 year delay would occur anyway, knowing the design and having quite a bit of familiarity with NASA beurocratic nonsense. 3) Constellation, much like the the shuttle, will forever be hampered by political and "marketing" interference in the design and engineering. Meowgi definitely nailed the "economy" thing, but it's more than just Houston, trust me. 4) NASA completely, utterly, totally, dropped the ball on selling the moon to America as a worthwhile endeavor. They have themselves to blame for that. 5) NASA culture is terrible for large engineering projects, and Cx is HUGE.
These arguments sound eerily familiar to people from Northern Minnesota talking about how we need more taconite subsidies, corn growers from Iowa about ethanol subsidies and dairy farmers from Wisconsin milk subsidies. Since government has grown so big anytime you make cuts its going to hurt someone but we have massive deficits as is while we still have lots of obligations to pay for. I'm not too hot about just dumping money into the department of Ed. but I will give Obama credit for looking for a way to pay for it rather than on credit or raise taxes.
I agree and while NASA is a good engine for driving those things its not the only one. Sattelites have a proven capital return and as private space flight develops there will be more interests in private money going into improving space flight. At the same time many other countries are advancing their own space programs. Obama's proposal doesn't mean the end of manned space flight. Lets bring back the COLD WAR! Do you want to be living under a Red Chinese Moon populated by Pokemen with socialized medicine? In your first paragraph you talk about your interest in space flight over your longterm concern for humanity. If its about more than just the US what's wrong with the Chinese, Japanese and Euros taking the lead in space exploration? In the end we're all humans. And while yes idealy we should pursue both education and a manned space program how are we going to pay for both? You either raise taxes, borrow more money or cut from somewhere else. Raising taxes for space isn't going to get someone elected, what good does it do us for national preeminence if we borrow money from the PRC to pay for our space program, so that leaves you with cutting somewhere else. As I said earlier due to the growth of the Fed cuts anywhere will cause pain to someone. We can't do these things for free and we need our priorities. I'm not fond of the Dept. of Education but who knows maybe putting that money into Ed will lead to some kids out there who get the early education to make them smart enough to figure out a cheap and safe way to colonize the Moon and Mars.
And this is the kind of nostalgia that has bought us the past 30 years of putting teachers in space at an extraordinarily massive cost, with no real return. Doing things to do them just to show we still can does not make sense anymore (and in rational terms, probably never did) especially if we have done them before. Why don't we just agree that "The Right Stuff" was a good book and move on?
Good idea! Lets move on to pursue money making ventures in space. Your problem here is that you wish to throw out the baby with the bathwater. There are problems with the way that NASA is run so lets scrap space.
Wow! Imagine throwing out all the government programs that are badly run...bureaucrats be gone! Seriously, SamFisher appears to have a tendency to forget the Tangs and Teflons etc. that have come directly out of the space program. Again, I do agree that robotic exploration is less expensive and safer, but manned exploration is a necessary ingredient of our space policy. Our economy benefits directly from the dollars we expend on space research.
They don't have to be money making ventures. Take the Mars Rover - that was a great program, which has produced a lot of scientific knowledge. . - it was not cheap (sevearl hundred million each) - but we are living in the age where a single shuttle launch - to study the effects of microgravity on various Saudi princes sent into orbit, costs 500 million per shot. But we can't talk about htat in the same breath as the right stuff, can we? cause it's just robots.
No offense but I have seen dust in HD and it ain't that exciting. Going to the moon and Mars for that matter is IMO stupid. There are better ways to spend our nation's money.
So you make fun of something that is exactly the opposite of what I am talking about in order (I assume) to put some sort of taint on what I'm saying by way of a counter. Big thumbs up there for honest discourse. Good for you Sam. Its always nice to find people who believe in what they are talking about enough that they have no problem presenting their side honestly and don't feel the need to make Strawmen to ridicule. Bravo. I guess you just missed any of the like 30 posts where I said that I thought the space shuttle and ISS were the biggest boondogles in history?
Jesus chrsit, what is going on Otto? Stop being such so freaking sensitive. You quoted my post (which specifically referred to the right stuff and manned spaceflight programs - that's why I made the post), that was not addressed to you. You said I wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater and that I only wanted "moneymaking" science missions (ironic because yesterday you were telling me about the trillions of dollars to be made out of your asteroid nickel mines.) That was not true. I don't just want "moneymaking missions", I don't want to "scrap space". These are direct quotes - that you made, while responding to me. As I said before - there's plenty of non-moneymaking missions that are helpful, and useful. So .... in other words - you attributed an argument to me ( baby/bathwater, only moneymaking missions) that I was not making, in a post not addressed to you - and you burned that motherf-n strawman down. Then I pointed it out, and you made another b****y whine post about how I'm being mean to you on the internet, by pointing out that you are arguing a point against me which is not a point I'm making. I didn't say "OTTO THINKS THE SHUTTLE PROGRAM IS A GREAT IDEA!" in my post. I know that you don't, you said it earlier about boondoggles etc. But NASA does think the Shuttle program was a great idea - and that's really the issue here. And that's the same people that are planning our next few manned space forays, and the same people who are planning a moonbase which is essentially, as far as I can tell, a bunch of guys in tincans on the moon just for the sake of being there - and they do it in part by exploiting "The Right Stuff" style nostalgia....as this very thread indicates. If you're offended by that on a personal level I'm sorry. Actually I'm not, I don't really care - I don't really understand why you would be though.
Apparently you misunderstood my post as ironic. It wasn't. We should be moving with a strong program with clear goals, like how to exploit space. Make money. Build. Grow. Expand. So I guess that when I read your response I assumed that you were responding as if you understood what I was saying but were intentionally misrepresenting it. So I misunderstood what you were saying. So I guess I apologize for that. But you also have a very lawyerly manipulative way of making points that causes me to not particularly trust you, even when we are on the same side of an issue. And you do want to throw out the baby with the bath water. The shuttle, which is one form of manned space flight, is expensive and has had no direction, therefore all manned spaceflight is bad and we shouldn't do any. That was your position yesterday - that we should scrap all manned space flight. As far as vehemence of my responses, perhaps this is just something that I care about a lot more than you. The strength of my responses will continue to be mediated by this.
We shouldnt' commit untold billions to manned spaceflight, the sacred cow of the space program and its jet jockey roots, unless there's a clear reason to do so - and I don't consider moonbase + your feasibility study to be one. So right now, the baby and bathwater look pretty indistinguishable. The same people who brought you the space station and the shuttle (NASA, it's congressional patronage backers, and big defense/aerospace firms) are the same people who are bringing you the moonbase that is on the table, which, as others have argued (http://www.slate.com/id/2155164/) looks a lot like something that is being done just for the sake of being done (even though it has basically already been done 40 years ago, just not for as long a time). Particulary ridiculous is the disingenuous argument that NASA is using to ptich it - it's groundwork for Mars. As cited in the article above and the one I posted before - to run a Mars mission through the moon would be ludicrous from a science standpoint and the fact that it's being sold as one is a pretty dead giveaway that NASA can't think of a real good reason to do a moonbase other than "we should do it just to do it so that you will continue to give us $$$." I mean why isn't your feasibilty study being cited by NASA in its press blitz? Probably because in 2007 the idea is really, really, really far away - even for NASA,who's got it's mind on a Mars mission golden goose - and sending people around to faraway places at tremendous costs, just to take pretty pictures and perform mundane science that could be performed at a fraction of the cost by an unmanned mission.
I think you are wrong. I think there are clear reasons to go into space. Further, I think your argument is circular and self-fulfilling. Plans for a moon base don't make sense because there is nothing to do there. But there will never be anything sizable to do there until people go and build the infrastructure. Once we build the infrastructure, we can start moving, but if we never take the first step, then yes space exploitation will always be a goal just over the horizon, as resources dwindle and space inches farther and further away. I think you have a very middle management viewpoint. I think you view NASA as something very remote, dusty, exclusively scientific, and ultimately of very little real economic importance. You are only interested in how you can manage it for short term profit (in the form of some nuggets of science). Why go to the New World when there's nothing but empty forests and savages? I think you are suffering from a severe lack of vision. I appreciate that you are not the only one.
Well then what is the ISS infrastructure for? The moonbase as currently envisioned is essentially the ISS, just a lot further away. But if my argument against the moonbase is circular, so is your argument against the ISS - You say ISS is a boondoggle. Well of course it is - but let's say I support the ISS - there's all sorts of wonderful things we can do in low earth orbit and we need a jumping off point for that which the ISS is. You know, giant solar wind power plants and space tethers and on and on and on (as indicated in the article above, the ISS was supposed to spawn a profitable microgravity business - whoops). So why don't we just keep pouring money and manpower into the ISS? If you say no I can say you lack vision. Anyway, what you're telling me that the moonbase now is essentially a multi-hundred billion $ construction shack for the Big Show which will be coming later. Nobody knows what the Big Show is, if it is even possible, or if there is any reason to do it, or if we are anywhere even close to being ready to do it. That's the same deal with the ISS, and it turns out we weren't. But suffice it to say you are talking in a long term picture. I am talking in a short to medium term one. Even if you are right, what difference does waiting 8-10 years or so and committing money in other places, be they NASA or outside of NASA, to delay spending money on a high risk project with no definable purpose other than as a placeholder for something better? Does it really matter if the Big Show moonbase (something acutal usable and useful) arrives in the year 2080 (at whic time I will probably be dead) or arrives in the year 2090, with us having taken some time out to pay down the national debt or save social security or work on alternative energy solutions or whatever back in the early 2000's rather than spending 500 billion + on a moonbase. Had we gotten to the moon in 1960 rater than 1969, would it have made an appreciable difference? What if NASA instead said they wanted to work on theoretical antimatter propulsion systems and scrapped the moonbase idea for the time being, in order to be able to build a better faster moonbase in the future - would you support this? I don't know how much NASA devotes to funding antimatter propulsion research presently, but I can guarantee you it is probably a fraction of the cost that a moonbase would run us. That runs us to another issue - sure lots of great discoveries came out of applied research like a moonbase - but the bulk of them came during basic research which is what antimatter propulsion is. Why not build antimatter propulsion first and then plan a moon base or a mars mission - rather than building a mars mission or a moon base and hopeing that something really cool like antimatter propulsion is a happy side effect? THat seems entirely illogical to me.
The ISS has to have everything ferried up from earth. There are resources present on the Moon, like water and oxygen which can be burned out of the rocks. The ISS has to have every single resource ferried to it. It will never, ever, ever achieve even the most marginal fraction of self sufficiency. Pulling stuff out of the well is expensive. On the moon, you can avoid some of that. It also has structural limitations which prevent its expansion beyond the half-assed compromise that it is now. It was essentially budgeted out of usefulness. Finally, the relatively light gravity on the moon is enough to mitigate the wasting effects of zero G so people could stay for extended periods without developing brittle bones and heart problems. Oh, you can also collect tritium on the moon which could jumpstart research on safe and inexpensive nuclear fusion reactors. Besides the fact that I will admit that I'm not even sure what a microgravity business is supposed to be, you are discussing things which were proposed for the ill fated Space Station Freedom, which was canceled. ISS never was built with that as a goal. Nothing about space tethers, etc. ISS was built because we had started to work on Freedom, and the other option was to do nothing – again a case of choosing funding or nothing. What do you expect them to have done? The mission as funded was essentially Skylab II. If you build a plan, cut the budget by a factor of 10, scale down the plans accordingly, and then compare the result to the original proposal, that doesn't seem to be particularly worthwhile unless you are looking for talking points instead of the truth. But in general, if you choose to build your view of the facts as presented to you by Mr. Gregg Easterbrook, a global warming denier and long time NASA hater with no science background, and a career writing Christian Philosophy books, that’s fine. As far as I can see his track record and qualifications make him a biased source. Maybe you can post a global warming article from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine next. But if you want to run down and parse the article from the beginning, we can do that. Just be prepared for a time consuming process. You certainly can, except for the fact that I have presented a very real vision, which would kind of contradict that hypothesis. But if you want to say it and you think you can defend that position, more power to you. We pretty much know what exists in the solar system. The scientific principals required to build an asteroid mining mission exist. It sounds like your plan is just 'wait until we have some breakthrough that gives us warp drive'. NASA has been spinning its wheels for 35 years with exactly that sort of directionless meandering. The way the most successful venture in the history of NASA worked, going to the moon, occurred by finding the destination and going to it. The one currently effective part of NASA, the planetary missions, has succeeded precisely because they had a goal and they engineered a solution, and they went. I don't even think you are looking more than 20 years down the line, which strikes me as short term, but I guess it really doesn't mater. You want to send out robotic probes, which will result in what exactly, besides making a few planetologists, geologists, and cosmologists very happy? Look at the history of NASA funding delays and how they tend to quickly become permanent, and we can talk. If you want to put aside the funds into a trust fund and wait 10 years, I'm cool with that. But the modus operandi for politicians to kill NASA programs is to 'delay' them, and chip off pieces and bits until we end up with a compromise boondoggle like the ISS. If you want to build ISS-Moon, then your preferred plan is the best one. Antimater? That is some real pie-in-the-sky technology. Considering we are incapable of producing antimatter in any quantity, I think that would be a much longer-term project than the moon base. You would probably have to sink in several tens if not hundreds of billions to build a series of colliders and magnetic traps, before you even begin to work on anything but getting the antimatter. Then, testing various ways to store it is a sincerely dangerous proposition since you could blow up half of Nevada (or wherever) if the containment on a medium sized supply gave out. Beter design it right the first time! But I guess maybe you could get funding and keep it so that the military can develop antimatter bombs – essentially nuclear bombs without the radiation so no stigma with their use.
Two examples of why it is sometimes damned near impossible to have an intelligent discussion here and not get personal. With Sishir, where did I mention the Cold War in a current context? If you would be happy to be reading the newspaper, or online, about China, Japan, and the EU going to the Moon and beyond with their own manned space flight program, while you sip your beverage of choice, good for you. I would prefer to maintain the lead we have in space technology. Not only in manned space flight, but in robotic research, as well. I don't see it as an "either-or" proposition. We should do both and we can afford it. As to the space shuttle, it was a bad idea. I would never say otherwise. What is being designed now is far more efficient and suitable for the near term. It will also be far less expensive in current dollars. Sam, where did I mention teachers in space? I thought it was absurd when it came up. You joke about The Right Stuff, but all those men were test pilots, superbly trained, highly experienced, and very aware that they could, and quite possibly would die during the program. That we didn't lose anyone except for the tragedy on the ground in the early days was a bloody miracle. It is not nostalgia. It is how we should be running the program, instead of fooling around with political stunts, which you can't blame on NASA. You can blame NASA for a lot, but remember that a great deal of NASA's problems are created in Washington. NASA is left to deal with it. We can have a sensible manned space flight program. I think we are finally on the right track. And compared to what we once budgeted for NASA, in real terms, the budget has been declining. Assaulting their budget is as much of a political stunt by Obama as putting teachers in space. You don't need to cut NASA's budget to fund education. That is just ludicrous. If anything, NASA should have its budget increased, while increasing funding for education. Just cut a few gold-plated Pentagon programs that are not needed, get the hell out of Iraq, and take back some of Bush's largess for the rich. NASA is a tiny portion of the Federal budget. Gezz... sometimes people around here blow me away. For me, this isn't a fringe issue. I don't give a damn how many times people say it is. I find it telling that not one person addressed the danger of our civilization being destroyed, or put in the crapper by a killer asteroid or comet, something we are way overdue for, based on the historical record. Just ignore the danger. That alone is reason enough to be in space. If we are presented with one coming towards us, I'd prefer to attack the danger with human beings. You know, the ones we don't want to be obliterated. Right now, we couldn't do a damned thing about it. D&D. Attempt Something. Impeach Bush for Creating Idiots.
