Obama Nasa plans 'catastrophic' say Moon astronauts
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1. Massive budget increases to fund missions to the moon and Mars.
2. Realign its goals to match the budget they have now.
The Bush-era plan to return to the moon without actually paying for it was the worst of all worlds. Obama's plans may not be inspiring to those who want to relive '69, but I respect that he's willing to tackle problem realistically.
We've also got to face the fact that human spaceflight is a prestige project with no scientific value. It's time to force NASA to focus on science. If people want to fart around in free fall, then that's something for private industry to concern itself with.
What about the scientific value and long-term species survival value of trying to make it so humans can survive in space long term? Learning how to colonize the moon and other planets?
Getting anything sizeable past low Earth orbit is still something that takes an amount of investment well outside the abilities of all but the largest companies. Governments make up a very large percentage of the few entities that have the capital and long-term vision to get us over the first hurdles.
If you consider the amount of support the early American colonists required from Europe, despite how primitive their society was in comparison to ours, colonization of space would require an immense amount of infrastructure that simply doesn't exist beyond the earth's surface. Materials that we take for granted, like hydrocarbons and plastics, are unobtainable off-earth. More seriously, the moon and Mars have almost no native sources of energy. Everything would need to be shipped from earth at tremendous expense.
Obviously, it would be possible to put men on the moon or Mars and support them with an endless train of supplies from earth, but in the event of some catastrophe on earth that interrupted the flow of materiel, those colonies would become deathtraps rather than refuges.
>More seriously, the moon and Mars have almost no native sources of energy. Solar cells work well in space for small needs, and fission provides great fuel energy density for larger needs. Both of these work fine in an environment bereft of oxygen.
There's no reason they couldn't be self-sustaining long-term.
Exploration leads to discovery. Medical discoveries of the effects of radiation and low gravity on the crew, previously unobserved properties of things great and small, things that men may notice that instruments are not designed to notice, and unknown unknowns that we can't yet imagine.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Men in space necessitate certain things: filtration systems, radiation protection, extracting water from Mars and the Moon economically, advanced materials, robotics. Terraforming Mars is one of the end-goals of human space exploration. Humans in space are an incentive to do so. Earth has finite resources, and an expanding population. This is science that we ought to contribute to.
Manned space exploration also causes people to be interested in space, to pursue degrees in science, and to contribute to research here on Earth.
That being said, you must surely admit that contributions to science can be indirect as well as direct, and that manned exploration of space provides both.
I am not in any way an expert on space exploration, but there are a great number of highly knowledgeable people who would love to elucidate the situation for you. ##astronomy on freenode has a bunch of bright people in it. Talk to them, or maybe #space, or take a trip to your local planetarium, museum, or university; get an opinion from someone who has some specific knowledge so that you can engage in debate from an informed perspective, rather than, say, rigidly adhering to things you thought up on the toilet while listening to political talk radio.
But if you choose the actual task to be one that is useful, you also get the results of the task.
So yes, throwing money at space exploration will get you some advances as by-products. But so would throwing money at, say, fusion research, or extremely high speed ground transport, or nanotech, or, heck, I dunno, synthetic (biological) life... and you'd have the chance of getting something useful as a direct product.
I worked in astronomy, which is also pretty pointless from a practical point of view (and also has close links with space research). A lot of effort is put into making things look pretty and exciting exactly because people believing - for no sound logical reason - that it's a wonderful thing is what keeps the money rolling in.
How long do you think it will take for a space program to pay off for your commitment? How long will it take for it to start reducing American debt? What scientific breakthroughs have manned missions brought? And I mean examples, when more advanced robotic technology couldn't do the same? What do you learn about propulsion by sending a human into space?
The scientific gain is marginally limited to the effects of radiation and low gravity on the crew. Your prospects like "unobserved properties of things great and small, things that men may notice that instruments are not designed to notice" I believe are 'thought up' by definition. And what I mean is all that can be done by robotics.
There are only a few areas where human perception can be a reference instrument. That might be in fields of interaction with otherworldly life. But we haven't encountered it yet. So I think that by talking about space exploration, you actually refer to space tourism.
And this is not a matter of science, this is a job for the commercial industry.
There's a surplus of people with advanced degrees in science. Take it from me and every other former postdoc.
Like the Moon landing itself, the shortage of trained scientists is a problem from 1958 which has long since been solved.
What there's a shortage of is research funding that would put our existing pool of trained scientists to work in science. To fix that -- if, indeed, fixing that is a high priority -- we need money for science, not nostalgia trips or cargo cults.
I went to school with astronomers. They did their work with the usual tools: Telescopes, computers, pencils, paper, and coffee. Commuter trips to low-Earth orbit, let alone the Moon, were not required. Even the planetary scientists are very successful as telecommuters: Robot probes worked pretty well in the Voyager missions of the 1970s and they work even better now.
And I'm always entertained by the claims that manned missions to the Moon or Mars are some sort of important step toward "terraforming Mars" or "mining the asteroids for their precious, precious metal" or, god help us, "the stars". If going somewhere were a meaningful step toward terraforming it, I'd buy a ticket to Antarctica and plant some pineapples. And to say that Mars (0.00024 light years away, on average) is meaningfully closer to the stars (4 light years away or more) is literally like saying that one side of my house in Massachusetts is meaningfully closer to London, England than the other.
If you want to carry out a plan to, say, terraform Mars, shouldn't you work on that? Maybe you could start with a cheap but useful theoretical model of terraforming? Then convince someone with money that the model is practical? Then build a pilot system that can, say, grow palm trees in Siberia without a greenhouse? [1] And only then bother to spend billions of dollars to actually take such a system to Mars?
In the same vein, even if human travel to the stars were possible [2], the secret to interstellar travel isn't going to be discovered in space. It's going to be discovered by someone doodling on a napkin in Pasadena or Oxford or Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then it's going to be prototyped on Earth, and then it's going to be tested with robots.
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[1] Not that this isn't several orders of magnitude easier to do.
[2] Which it is not, for any reasonable definition of "human" and "travel": http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
Remember two things. First, the Bush administration was all about privatization. It was practically a mantra for them. Second President Bush announced the plan right after the Columbia disaster. When you put things in that context you realize the Bush administration was actually using the moon mission as marketing for other private space endeavors. It's primary purpose was to inspire the public not necessarily to send people to the moon.
If successful the end result of the program should be to create a whole new industry of space entrepreneurs spending all kinds of private capital to service the space fascination that the moon mission inspired.
Also keep in mind NASA was spending $4 billion on manned space flight. That's $4 billion out of $3.55 trillion in expenditures or around 1/6th of 1% of the U.S. budget. It's still a lot of money but not that much in the scheme of things and I can think of things that I'd cut first (http://www.cagw.org/newsroom/releases/2009/earmarks-rise-to-...).
I was no fan of President Bush but on this he did the right thing.
Also, I hold to my opinion that manned spaceflight has produced nothing of scientific value. I'm sure you could come up with the odd technology here or there, but after fifty years it's hard to point to any significant technologies that came out of human spaceflight, much less advances in science. All human spaceflight teaches us is how to put men in space. I'm not suggesting that NASA's budget should be cut, but they should be spending that money on missions that produce real results, like the Mars rovers.
In particular, the VSE was not about using upstart private launch companies (such as SpaceX). It was about JSC, KSC, and the large prime contractors (USA aka United Space Alliance, and ULA = United Launch Alliance, both Boeing/LockMart joint ventures) that are associated with them and that together employ over 10K people. I believe SpaceX employs substantially less than 1000, even today.
In typical Bush fashion, the VSE was all slogans and no substance. The officials involved believed in what they were doing, but there was not a coherent plan (actually there have been at least two phases of the VSE, with distinct strategies). And of course, as others above have noted, not enough money. The slogan for that approach was "go as you pay". (I.e., we will do the best we can with what you give us.) Sounds cute, but does not get you into orbit.
And military spending is about a lot of silly things too. But it drives development in the technological field, and we have reaped huge benefits because of all the funding the US poured into arms and space
There's not just one way. Commercialization brings prices for the same goods down, but innovation and progress brings prices down too. The government is useful for a situation where something is still vastly unprofitable; they continue to attack the problem, and somewhere down the line it gets close enough to having business potential that companies start getting involved.
'putting a man on the moon' may not be the best goal, but that's a different discussion imho. (Although I already know planning for a Hubble 2 is something I could really get behind)
Commercializing rocketry should mean that ground crew size and turnaround times can be minimized, since there is a direct financial incentive to control costs.
In order to do anything serious in space, it needs to become MUCH CHEAPER to put things into orbit. That is what a space elevator could accomplish. Not to say that we're ready technologically... we need to become a whole lot better at producing long carbon nanotubes.
I'm not sure that this is really news in the genuine sense of the word. News is Obama announcing the change.
I kept re-reading this and saying, what? He thought going on the moon was disappointing?? Ooooooh, "it" == "Obama's decision". :)
Is Obama's plan for increased commercialization anything more than moving around the pieces that are already there? Most of the parts for the space vehicles are already made by subcontractors, aren't they just changing how the oversight is done?
Even with those rules changed NASA is still going to be responsible for the astronauts. It'll take years and billions of dollars to man-rate vehicles that we wouldn't have thought twice about using back in the 70s as long as they didn't explode on the first couple of test flights.
Maybe money flowing out of the Space Shuttle program will get us there sooner, but with the US rebooting its space program every time time a new president takes office I'm starting to think the Chinese are our best hope for getting to the stars.
The rest goes to other Military-Industrial "Usual Suspects," like Grumman and Raytheon.[1]
These organizations are principally interested in maintaining their cushy position and soaking up tax money. They are not particularly driven to push the envelope.
Obama's plan is a "shifting" around of the contracts, yes, but it's shifting away from organizations like Lockheed Martin to organizations like Scaled Composites. Away from fat lazy organizations to ones with some hunger and drive.
That's also the reason why it's probably DOA in Congress.
[1] http://www.govexec.com/features/0808-15/0808-15s13s1.htm
Many people fail to separate two things: a) the process of evolving technology and exploring space; b) the process of putting people to orbit. Why do you think the space station will be trashed so soon? It has little to none value, but sucks the resources FROM the technology.
So if we want to 'harvest' H_3 from the Moon surface, why do we need people up there? The fact is that we actually don't. Even modern robotics as simple as it is, may do most of the resource gathering job cheaply. While human presence and life-support will increase the cost and move this perspective even further into the future.
All eyes are turned where there is a prospect of financial gain. Right now, the gain is negative because of the lacking technology that needs investment. That is exactly why we have 3-5 people in space and not a large colony of workers. We use more money on supporting those three, than on making ground for some larger operations.
Where am I wrong?
Even though the "United States gives up on space" narrative is temptingly simple, it's also (in my opinion) simply wrong, and substance-free commentary like this is disappointing. (If you base your opinions on the unsupported statements of old astronauts, you can look at Buzz Aldrin's comments for a different perspective, but I'd recommend doing your own research instead.)
Much of the gloomy commentary on this announcement is uninformed. Canceling the Constellation program is a forward step and an essential step---it makes possible the very dream, bold human spaceflight, that this article mourns. At the very least, read the Augustine Commission's summary report; it's only 12 pages. Note their statement of the goal of space exploration: "human expansion into the solar system". That's cause for excitement, not mourning.
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/434022main_bolden_WSBR_20100316.pdf
Note also the $6B increase in NASA's budget.
What does exploring space or landing on the moon have to do with "moral leadership"?