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Moonset: Something is Afoot Down at NASA

• stcredzero 17y ago
  Prediction: China will go to the moon or perform some other feat of manned space exploration as a way of claiming the mantle of leadership for the 21st century.
  • ErrantX 17y ago
    I have a feeling a commercial company will make it first (but I dont really know what the state of the Chinese spaceflight program is)
    • thaumaturgy 17y ago
      As much as I would like to believe this, commercial -- especially publicly held or funded -- companies need some kind of serious profit incentive to justify the massive outlay of resources that space exploration requires. This is supposed to be exactly the kind of thing that we have governments for.
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  • RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    They will secretly build their ship in full view in orbit, surprising everyone when they attach boosters at the last minute and rocket out toward Jupiter. They will name their ship after Chinese rocket scientist Qian Xuesen, and it will run into trouble in the vicinity of Europa.
    • kordless 17y ago
      Well, you can kiss Jupiter goodbye if that happens.
    • stcredzero 17y ago
      If they accept a 10% or so cancer risk per crewmember, they can launch a chemical rocket mission as 4 pieces using a variation on Mars Direct. But to do this, they would need in-situ fuel production in place a year earlier.
  • fnid2 17y ago
    Contrary to popular opinion in the U.S., America is not a Space leader. Japan landed a probe on an asteroid. Russia beat the U.S. to space, to manned space flight, and to venus. Most of the U.S.'s belief in its universal superiority is fluff. I don't doubt at all that china and india will overtake the U.S. in space exploration in the coming decades. If commercial endeavors are going to go to space, why would they waste their money over paying washed up NASA scientists to do it when they could go to china or india just like they do for Nikes and cars and everything else pretty much. The entire supply chain is in asia, what does the U.S. have left? Guns. That's about it. Guns. No room for butter -- move aside.
• DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  What's worse than having a mission you can't accomplish? No mission at all. What's worse than no mission at all? A changing mission every 4 or 8 years as a new administration takes office. I'm finding it really hard not to say something political -- pretty angry right now. I'll simply note that for whatever reasons manned spaceflight at NASA has lost its luster with large hunks of the American public. And like every other political spending program, if there is not a large group of people pushing for it, it's going to get cut.
  • TetOn 17y ago
    People tend to think it's a lot more of the federal budget than it is: "For example, in 1997 the average estimate of NASA's share of the federal budget by those polled was 20 percent." From http://bit.ly/aAg7I3 http://bit.ly/aAg7I3 Er, try 0.58%. But this misconception is a real problem: if people think there's just tons of money in there, cuts don't seem like a big deal; in fact, they seem entirely reasonable. Add to that the unwillingness of our political class (both parties) to do anything about spending and cost growth on defense, medicare, and medicaid and you've severely limited "what you can cut" to NASA and a handful of other programs, even though cuts to those are a fractional percent of the budget and barely enough to even register over a 10-year window. Leadership takes hard decisions. Our "leaders" have shown no interest in same.
    • apowell 17y ago
      That's a really fascinating poll. I'd really like to see similar data on the perceived cost vs. actual cost of other federal programs -- do you know if anyone has conducted such a study? It would be interesting to see how people respond when asked only about one or two pieces of the budget, vs. being asked to "complete the pie" by estimating the federal budget when looking at it as a dozen (or so) components totaling 100%.
    • yardie 17y ago
      Not to mention that out of the 50 states only 3 really benefit from the NASA budget. Aerospace tends to be highly concentrated around Alabama, California, Florida, and DC (obviously). Without the support of the 47 other states NASA becomes an obviously easy target.
• bediger 17y ago
  Really. What do we expect after gutting the aerospace industry in 1970, and approximately every 8 years after that. Sure, it keeps profits high for (more-or-less hourly) engineering work, as you have beginners doing it, at beginner's rates. But between the Iron Hand of the FAA, the oddities of the Black Space Program and politics, nobody can have a career in aerospace, so it doesn't attract decent people, much less imaginative innovators.
  • yardie 17y ago
    As a former aerospace major I have to agree. When I entered the program, Boeing was scaling back their programs and lots of engineers were heading back to school. The consensus I got from former engineers and some professors was it would have been wiser to go into mechanical. Then, if the aerospace jobs fall out you can coast by designing pumps or something. I remember some joke about aerospace engineers and working in fastfood.
    • waterlesscloud 17y ago
      I remember graduating with my CS degree and having multiple job offers, and my electrical and mechanical engineering friends having the same. And the lone aerospace guy in our circle with no job prospects at all. And he'd probably worked the hardest of all of us. Sad.
• deleted 17y ago
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• briansmith 17y ago
  The death rate for manned space missions is absurdly high. At the same time, robotics, AI, and remote control technology have all made incredible progress. Unmanned missions are much cheaper. So, an unmanned program is a greater bang for the buck, and a greater bang per death. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_accidents_and_incidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_accidents_and_incidents. Let's say China sent people to Mars tomorrow. What could they learn about Mars that we couldn't learn by sending our robots there, similarly equipped? Manned space missions are now almost purely about bragging rights; the first person to do X in space was from nation Y. Who cares? It's just propaganda.
  • mquander 17y ago
    Well, I care about propaganda; manned space missions are really cool, and they get people excited about science and technology. We throw most of our budget away anyway on defense, which is certainly not doing anyone any good; if we can't politically agree on anything useful to do with it, it would be nice to at least spend it on something cool, instead.
  • radu_floricica 17y ago
    Unmanned missions are not only safer, but a lot cheaper. It's sending human habitats to the moon and back compared to sending a package one-way. I'd be very exited to see the moon as a testbed for robotic technologies. With little effort we could make a moon base before anybody even goes there. Or useful stuff, like a telescope. You have cheap energy, lots of space, some building materials and time. Could be a lot worse.
  • stcredzero 17y ago
    Mars has a compellingly high potential for colonization. It's the only place in the solar System one can cheaply grow food, other than Earth. Its lower gravity well gives it an insurmountable advantage in access to off-planet resources, and it has water-driven geologic processes that have probably created exploitable ore deposits. Mars will be to the 21st and 22nd centuries what N. America was to the last four. The short-sighted will ask why we'd ever want to go there. It will take some form of "irrationality" to overcome the short-tern economic myopia. If it's Chinese national pride that opens the door, so be it. They're no worse than the Pilgrims.
• karzeem 17y ago
  It makes sense; there's no real reason for the government to own and operate a spaceflight company. The exciting stuff in aerospace is happening in private companies, and especially in smaller ones. Manned spaceflight doesn't have many good arguments in its favor, and in any case, if the government wants to get involved, why not buy the tech from a contractor? That's how pretty much all military technology works, and as wasteful and inefficient as it is, it's probably a step up from direct government ownership.
  • nradov 17y ago
    NASA has always purchased most of the technology for manned spaceflight systems from contractors.
    • karzeem 17y ago
      Ah, I didn't know that.
  • TrevorJ 17y ago
    On one hand, you may be right. On the other hand, our constitution was written in deference to an understanding of basic human needs and human nature. Exploration is certainly one trait of human nature so it doesn't seem so out of line in that regard although from a purely intellectual standpoint there is not much justification.
• TrevorJ 17y ago
  Are there any history buffs out there who can shed some light on this for me? Is there any link between a civilizations' predilection for exploration and its' longevity?
  • thaumaturgy 17y ago
    Yes and no. (As it happens, my current book du jour is "The Collected What If".) The Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Frankish empires all became huge due to the need for exploration and conquest, usually from a relatively small number of people. Their massive growth led to greater wealth and cultural exchanges, which enriched the empires, sometimes at the cost of conquered territories and peoples. That, in turn, usually led to stability. The great exception to this is of course the Mongol Empire. They were the largest empire in history, led by just a few people, and they were incredibly destructive. They had a certain distaste for cities and everything that they represented (education, culture, liberalism), so they became an unstoppable destructive force. The "What If" book claims that some regions of the world are still feeling of the effects of this. But, the empire only lasted for around a hundred years. I'd say that a civilization's thirst for exploration and adventure is one of the traits which would tend to lead to longevity, but others include a respect for education, intellectualism, and liberalism.
• another 17y ago
  Much of the gloomy commentary on this announcement, Cringely's included, is uninformed. (And statements like "NASA has had zero success in relying on outsourced systems" are just bizarre.) Canceling the Constellation program is a positive step, and an essential one---it makes possible the very dream, bold human spaceflight, that Cringely seems to be mourning. 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.
• gamble 17y ago
  Good? NASA has spent decades pouring money into scientifically-useless programs like the shuttle and space station, while starving out the robotic missions that actually produce results. Spirit and Opportunity were such a slam dunk, it's hard to believe we're still having this discussion. The Constellation program has been a particularly sad example of NASA's refusal to face reality. It was conceived as a cynical political stunt by the Bush administration, and essentially abandoned the day after it was announced. NASA should have faced the fact years ago that Constellation never had and never would have the budget or popular and political support required to get back to the moon.
• jsz0 17y ago
  The moon is incredibly boring when Europa & Titan are within the reach of our unmanned probes. I know it's not quite as exciting to the average person but it's just a more realistic approach to space exploration at this point.