Obama ends NASA space race with slow road to Mars
timesonline.co.uk
timesonline.co.uk
Yeah, gravity sucks, but I find a trip to Mars far more interesting than one to an asteroid, E.g. the geology, water resources, valles marineris, the potential for life, colonization. Why not be obsessed?
Robots can tell a lot, but not everything. Exploring is not only knowing what's there, but actually experiencing it in human terms. The richness of the reports from astronauts on the Moon cannot be approached by what a robot can tell you. Also, a robot can only answer the questions it was designed to answer and, thus, it embodies, in its own construction, a series of assumptions about its target environment that may be completely off.
Humans are an extremely valuable resource.
And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spectacular, but if we want to get to mars and stay on Mars, rather than what Apollo did by getting to the Moon and then saying ta-ta for 40 years, then building an incremental and sustainable interplanetary presence is far more important.
I'm not sure what the RoI on the moonshot has been factoring in all the stuff like tech industry stimulus and so on, but I imagine that the RoI on an asteroid settlement and mining plan would be way higher than RoI on a Mars-shot. Probably to the point where the asteroid program could fund the Mars-shot by itself.
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that the most expensive part of our current program is just getting shit into orbit.
Clearly, they were just photoshopped in.
This is a great plan. It's a Good Thing for the aerospace economy in the long run even if there's going to be some displacement in the meantime.
It also opens the door for entrepreneurial companies - building rockets, engines, payload integrators, whatever - to make money in a way previously not possible. It's impossible to make money when the government is competing with you. This is a great thing for entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, and people everywhere. There's a better chance your kid will be struck by lightning than be a NASA astronaut, but now the door has opened and we'll see private astronaut corps pop up from a few different sources.
Get behind this plan, folks. It's a Good Thing and great for other entrepreneurs, even if we're not building web software. :)
As far as science goes, the better-faster-cheaper ethos NASA had with the Mars Rovers should be revived. Robots are a terrific way to get actual science done. That said, the lessons learned from building and working on the ISS would be a good starting point for creating a vehicle to take people to Mars - a place we can eventually make habitable (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm).
Those aren't jobs - they're welfare checks, taken from working Americans in return for very very very little of value.
I hope that the folks on the Space Coast are right. They can all go get real jobs (even if it's at Target), and the free market space industry can deliver for several orders of magnitude less.
Also, if the free market space industry does pan out in our lifetimes, I think they would love to have these aerospace guys working for them even if they have such "little of value."
I live in Michigan, half my family works for car companies one way or another, and I was and am still against the auto bailouts. Locally healthy for me, perhaps, but in my opinion still bad policy for the country. (My point not being that I want to debate that point, but that location does not have to dictate opinion.)
Obama's plan seems to say "Your newborns might have the space program to be excited about ... when they're 18 years old."
Armadillo Aerospace
XCOR Aerospace
Masten Space Systems
Unreasonable Rocket
Scaled Composites
SpaceX
Blue Origin
If you want to talk to rocketeers who are actually building hardware, today, check out the arocket mailing list.
We don't need another space race to a destination. We need to build space infrastructure.
It's the difference between trying to get from the east coast of the US to the west with one wagon train, versus building railways and towns. That first wagon might just make it, but it doesn't help the next wagon.
I wouldn't worry about space spending, or space infrastructure when our AF is spending oodles to put weapons and craft into space.
There are too many people in the space industry who can write a nice paper showing what they could do if only you gave them a billion dollars.
Obviously private space (beyond GEO) is going to be huge at some point. The problem is bootstrapping.
When you have a chicken and egg problem, the solution is to build some small cheap thing that works to demonstrate your competence and attract larger opportunities.
John Carmack's started his own space program on about $5M of his own money and 10 years of effort. How many people in the US buy homes for more than $5M? How many shitty web apps get more funding than that?
He has a device that can lift off the ground, move a couple hundred meters to the side, and land.
That's a long way from a space program.
There are a lot of subtleties in liquid-fuel rocket engines.
Simply getting them to ignite reliably and to re-start were seen as a Big Deal, only a few years ago.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people call President Bush 'King George' or other epithets, even if I do disagree with his policies.
Seriously, as a foreigner I reckon that the office of the President of the United States needs to be taken down a few notches. I mean, I accept that the dude needs a private jet, but does it really have to be a 747 and called Air Force One? I accept that the dude needs a limo instead of driving himself around, but does it really need to be a custom-built limo? I accept that the guy can have a nice executive mansion, but does he really need his own seal, his own theme tune and a standing ovation every time he shows up to talk to Congress?
"Someone will do something at some point" is just more typical dithering from this lame-duck president. In office but not in power, we say in England.
Your second sentence shows the depths of your ignorance of American politics. "this lame duck president" just passed a bill that liberals have been trying to pass for 30 years. Not exactly "in office but not in power". If you want to see what that looks like, see 2006-2008 of the Bush administration and their inability to pass ANYTHING.