Donald Trump signs directive to send astronauts back to Moon
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is the real issue here. Trump can say all he wants, if the Congress doesn't allow more budget, nothing will happen.
Same thing here. The only way NASA is going anywhere outside LEO is with a commitment by congress to spend gobs and gobs of money every year over many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
Clearly we need one because North Korea or terrorists or sharks or whatever.
It's so expensive to put all that metal into space, they'll get interested in asteroid mining before long. And once there's a market for orbital-velocity asteroid metal... profit!
[clarifying: not a trump supporter - just a guy from the UK]
Otherwise, forget it, he hasn't done a single thing, good or bad, in almost a year.
There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. There's always something good to find.
With the right optics, maybe. I see white supremacist riots, inexcusable wealth concentration, income inequality, stagnating wages, and high labor drop-out. Overall, it's feeling a lot like the 1920s. The stock market? I hope you time it right, Black Tuesday is coming up.
Low border crossings reflect our underlying economic problem - illegals have been declining for over a decade due to automation, job exports, and declining middle-class jobs... rats abandoning a sinking ship.
Ironically enough, it's always the anti-government-spending Republicans who veto such efforts. Now that a Republican President is supporting this, they might finally get behind this as well. It's really a clever form of blackmail when you think about it. "Put our guy in the Oval Office, or we'll veto anything and everything in Congress."
It's more like appropriately enough, right?
I am unclear if President Trump's order calls for bringing back the program Obama cancelled or if it's more of a general statement of direction.
Isn't this the problem? Every President gives Nasa a new set of priorities, which they work on for a while until the next President comes along and changes things again. Back in 2004, George W Bush was also announcing a return to the Moon:
"Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond. Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods. "
Jan 14, 2004 - https://history.nasa.gov/Bush%20SEP.htm
> WASHINGTON, July 20— President Bush proposed today that the United States establish a base on the Moon, send an expedition to Mars and begin ''the permanent settlement of space.''
> In a speech celebrating the 20th anniversary of man's landing on the Moon, Mr. Bush made the first major commitment by a President to these ambitious goals and set the stage for the first full-scale debate in years on the nation's troubled space program.
> ... Mr. Bush pledged to commit the United States in the 1990's to the earth-orbiting space station as the ''critical next step in all our space endeavors.''
''And next, for the new century, back to the Moon, back to the future, and this time back to stay,'' Mr. Bush told the select audience, which included nearly half the American astronauts who flew in space. ''And then, a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars.''
There are the obvious things, like health insurance, immigration policy and the like. Whenever I cannot at all understand a certain action of the PotUS, like, for example, the scaling down (or closing) of two National Parks in Utah (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante), I'll do a little research and find: the action is undoing some former act of Barack Obama.
Each day I get more and more convinced, that Mr Trumps only motivation is the extinction of the traces of his predecessor. As cited: it is not about Moon or Mars, it is about "abandoning plans set by his predecessor Barack Obama, to send humans to an asteroid near earth". Therefore it is absolutely unimportant, if the program gets funded or executed. The directive has fulfilled its purpse by rescinding an Obama act.
I am into archaeology and history. Extinguishing the traces of the predecessor is a very common pattern in history, you know, like chiseling away the former pharao's name from the temple walls. Alarmingly archaic, primitive and despotic.
Even the most absurd actions of the US president become completely reasonable, when seen in this context.
one thing will lead to another and next thing you know The US (or whoever does it first) will be the biggest active population space community.
Maybe earth becomes a better place, when the people who think so, have all left for new unearthly frontiers! The sooner the better. I am all in for the new space program!
Nasa's yearly budget is less than $20bn. Compare this with the ~$600bn on the military, the ~$1.2tn on social secure, the ~$1tn on Medicare, etc. Space exploration is a drop in the ocean. Yet people troll that it's some huge, wasteful money sink, even when the US government is spending $1.5tn on the T35 fighter jet alone.
Moreover, Nasa's scientific work does help with tackling climate change and pollution. They are the ones launching satellites to monitor the Earth's biosphere, and doing work like National Climate Review[1], even as the current administration is removing all reference to climate change from the output of other Federal Agencies.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/us-government-climat...