9 ms·

Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

88 points by grannyg00se 15y ago

bradleyland 15y ago
I know this has to be incredibly difficult for anyone who grew up during the space race, but there comes a point at which you must force yourself to let go of the old in the act of grasping at the future. Compared to the advance of technology within government organizations like NASA, the progress seen in private programs chasing the X PRIZE has been astounding. So long as the government keeps their 70s era technology in service, the role remains filled, and the young upstarts have less motivation to shoot for the stars.
- nate_meurer 15y ago
  Bingo. Armstrong and many of the other old Apollo-era astronauts are emotionally invested in manned space-flight. I think he romanticizes it to the point of being immune to arguments of cost-effectiveness.
  - diogenescynic 15y ago
    It's not just about emotions. It's the next frontier. Don't you want us to get there first? It's also a great investment, it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.
    - eru 15y ago
      > it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. That's a testable statement. Though the more interesting statement would be: It creates more jobs than other things we could do with the many, and develops more beneficial technology. (My guess is that those stronger version aren't true.)
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
    - alexqgb 15y ago
      Wow, vintage rhetoric. I'm guessing 1954.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    What is space exploration? Is it sending robots to take pictures? Or is it sending people who can radio back a message saying how it feels to look at the Earth from afar? The information gathered through space probes is awesome, but what's the point of knowing something if we are never going to experience it? It's like comparing writing a travel guide from second-hand knowledge with making the journey yourself. You know NASA's budget is tiny compared to the military. I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century.
    - bradleyland 15y ago
      To answer your first set of questions: it's both. I'm not sure how Nate got the feeling that I'm against maned space flight? There are plenty of private entities out there with the stated goal of manned space flight, so that's a bit of a straw-man. "I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century." Boy do we ever agree here. Reminds me of the ending of Watchmen. A world united in the effort to save us all from randomly-appearing psychic squid. Gaaaaaaah! Here's the rub though. I think that private enterprise has a greater chance of leading the charge here. Governments are hamstrung by their constituencies. There's nothing stopping entrepreneurs from reaching out across political boundaries, except for pesky laws in some cases, but that just serves to reinforce my point. The face that the laws like that even exist shows that the government seeks to prevent what some individual may be prone to try. In this context, reaching out in unity with "forbidden" foreign nationals.
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        private enterprise is about competition. It's about getting somewhere first. It may inspire a generation of entrepreneurs, but, alone, it doesn't have the power to unite people like a huge project the scope of Apollo had. At that moment, it wasn't an American walking on the Moon - it was a human being and that made all the difference for the rest of mankind. That was a precious moment when the message "we can set aside our differences and work together" would be heard. Still, private enterprise does not exclude projects like those - quite the contrary - most of Apollo was built by private enterprises. It doesn't make them less extraordinary.
sixtofour 15y ago
Space? You can't get there from here.
FrojoS 15y ago
>>[...] Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only taxis for the world's astronauts heading to low-Earth orbit, and each ticket to the ISS costs global space agencies between 50 and 60 million dollars each.<< I thought, the last shuttle starts we're costing over 1 billion. So with 7 crew members, thats more than twice the price paid to the Russians. Sure, they could raise that price in theory. But the Russians can't afford to run the ISS on their own.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  The ISS is great and all, but the real value of the shuttle was that we could park next to Hubble or one of our spy satellites and do maintenance in place, so milking a lot of value out of orbiting platforms that would otherwise have to be shut down. I don't see what we have that replaces that right now.
  - krschultz 15y ago
    Satellites are not designed for that - the Hubble sure wasn't. It is not a capability that needs to be replaced.
    - droithomme 15y ago
      KRSchultz is basically correct, please don't downvote him. The last Hubble repair mission went way beyond the Hubble's expected service capabilities, which was an amazing accomplishment. However, it's vastly more economically sound and safer to bring an aging device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do space walks for a repair and upgrade mission. The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit, and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.
pnathan 15y ago
It is terribly embarrassing. But the solution is not to keep the Shuttle program creaking along, but to work on a new program. At some point, legacy must be removed and a new platform created.
- lhnn 15y ago
  Like I've said repeatedly, what is embarrassing is our dependence on forign nations to get to a space station largely funded and built by us. Russia is not our friend. Russia is a business partner with whom we're not at war. We should have gotten our asses up and had something new by now, so we could retire the shuttle.
nhebb 15y ago
The title is completely misleading. Armstrong did not tell NASA "you're embarrassing". He told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the demise of NASA is embarrassing. And it is. Regardless of the other crap our government spends money on, NASA is a fantastic investment, and has always provided a positive return to our economy.
- SamReidHughes 15y ago
  I'm sorry, but you have no way of knowing this. What would happen if you took a bunch of would-be rocket scientists and hadn't given them jobs at NASA?
  - nhebb 15y ago
    No, I don't have absolute certainty, but there have been studies on its economic impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Economic_impact_of_NASA_funding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Economic_impact_of_...
  - ap22213 15y ago
    That's an interesting perspective, assuming you're alluding to private vs. government funding. However, can anyone provide evidence that private funding can accomplish anything near the scale of what NASA accomplished? I'm asking that as an honest question. I don't love government spending or bureaucracy, by any means. Who would, except perhaps government workers? However, I fail to see any major advancements that have happened without the scale of funding that only governments can provide. I really want to believe that the private sector can do it. I just don't see a lot of historical evidence that it can.
    - astine 15y ago
      It's hard to make an apple-to-apples comparison here as private companies in the past decades have been forbidden to do what NASA has done. Not to mention, NASA's most memorable achievements were fueled largely through patriotic furor. I suspect that it's possible. Much of NASA's flouted benefit are the technological discoveries it has made while solving the problems of Space exploration. Assuming that those discoveries have benefited our society economically more than NASA has cost it (an argument I've read before) then it seems like their would have been at least one sufficient financial incentive for private industry to pursue space if given the chance. Not to mention R&D that can only be performed in a zero gravity environment. A patent system could make all this profitable. But there are still so many other concerns, such as national defense that crop up in talk of private space exploration that it's really hard to make any real comparison.
martythemaniak 15y ago
Great, now try to tell people they should pay more taxes to support a bigger space program - be it carried out by NASA or private companies.
- cryptoz 15y ago
  The people don't need to pay more taxes. An adjustment of current budget allocation is all that's needed. For example, you could double NASA's budget by shrinking the war budget from ~$698,000,000,000 to $678,000,000,000 / year. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    And you should not underestimate the propaganda value. Generations were inspired by the Apollo program. The shuttle is a beautiful machine, but it really doesn't go anywhere interesting.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      Is the Moon that interesting?
      - rbanffy 15y ago
        It's a real place. The ISS is not a "place" - it's something we put up there. It's the difference between going to the woods and camping on your mother's lawn. Besides that, if we can manufacture spacecraft parts on the Moon, launching them is much easier than launching from Earth. You can even use a maglev rail to launch stuff from there - no reaction mass involved.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
The shuttle was never flown the thousands of times it needed to have all the bugs worked out, NASA is an agency lost in middle-management hell, and you can't trust exploration to the politicians. That being said, Armstrong has a point: none of what I've just said is new or is satisfactory as an excuse. The failure to manage these facts and manage our access to space -- perhaps by a privatization push a decade earlier -- is an embarrassment.
- nickolai 15y ago
  >you can't trust exploration to the politicians. I've seen that " you cant trust X to polititians" waaay too often. What's left around that one can supposedly trust them with ? Or even better, is there something we don't trust politicians with that is faring particularily better? the corporate world doesnt seem to show any kind of outstanding performance, and is in fact just as pervaded with politics, with the execs playing the politicians' roles. Any organization big enough to pull off the kind of stunt needed to push our exploration even further is inevitably big enough to be paralyzed by political strife. Small startups are pretty much out of the game because no one found a way of making space exploration profitable. I can see how the situation is broken, but how can it be fixed?
  - DanielBMarkham 15y ago
    I tried to be brief, but your point is taken, if a bit over the top. Of course you can trust politicians for stuff, just like you can trust your corner grocer not to put poison in your potatoes. The problem, whether the private sector or the government sector, is where there are mixed incentives and no feedback loop. So, for instance, it's a big deal to come out with some vast new NASA goal every time a president gets elected -- but these goals always take decades to make happen, which is long after the current guy is gone. Presidents get mileage out of making the speech and formulating the policy, not making it happen. Likewise, unless you are a congressman from a district with lots of space spending, it's very easy to make speeches with phrases like "why should we go to the moon when we can't even fix our problems down here?" without anybody digging any deeper. So politicians do that. They act rationally. There are no voters in space. There are no orphans to appear on TV with, and there are no space aliens to defend ourselves against. There's just not a lot up there to emotionally move the electorate, sadly. In these cases, where the incentives are mixed and there's no reward, you can't trust them because of the role they play in the system as it is currently implemented. And no, I don't mean "can't trust them" as in somehow they are purposefully deceiving anybody or crooked or any of that. Most of them are really smart, dedicated people who want the best for their country. I'm very proud of the politicians and the people who work at NASA. But by acting the most logical way possible, exploration can't prosper. There are no bad guys and no hatred of government here. Space exploration just doesn't work the way it was set up. Sure, as a last great dream of an assassinated president, with a completely new agency, we could hold it together for a decade or so, but those days are long gone. What has been needed for the last 20 years or more is a bit more brave and pointed honesty at NASA. That's maybe too much to ask, but I think guys like Armstrong deserve it.
raldi 15y ago
Asking how we can shut down the shuttle program "in the middle of its prime" reminds me of the line from Star Wars about the bad guys surrendering "Now? In our moment of triumph?"
johrn 15y ago
Isn't SpaceX scheduled to make a resupply flight to the ISS this November? I'm not sure how we get from that to "We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future". Is it just because the SpaceX flights are only cargo and not personnel? I can't tell from the SpaceX launch manifest(http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php) what the launch is going to be carrying, but the Dragon is at least capable of carrying crew.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  It's not looking good: http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed-to-dock-to-iss-on-next-flight/ http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed...
nirvana 15y ago
This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen!) This should resonate really well with anyone building a startup. A startup is a money engine. You find something that is profitable, and you invest in it and grow it. You can go out and spend a lot of money doing things the manual way, but if everything pretty much stops when you stop spending money, you're not really investing in a sustainable business. This is the case with NASA and a lot of government programs. We were spending a lot of money, but we were not building a space industry... in fact, because government bureaucrats saw space as a competitive advantage (NASA, for instance, long enjoyed easy funding from Congress) they worked to stymie private interests that might show them up. It is great that things are changing now. We have SpaceX building launch vehicles. Virgin Galactic will start their business any day now (hopefully, though remember how congress wanted to shut it down because it might not be "safe"?) Jeff Bezos is doing something off in the desert of west texas, and even John Carmack has a small space business. But we cannot ignore the legacy of hundreds of billion sunk into NASA on unsustainable programs, and quirky launch vehicles designed to meet bureaucratic needs, such as to at least have one component of it built in each of the 50 states. So, the news that NASA is in an "embarrassing" state to me, is good news. I say this, because I would very much like to see Humans have ready access to space.
- TechNewb 15y ago
  "First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA? -Neil deGrasse Tyson" http://wp.me/p1bnM2-qW http://wp.me/p1bnM2-qW
  - dimitar 15y ago
    Eventually the US government will sell back the banks and make some income, so its hardly comparable. Sweden in the early nineties did this and they recovered more than half their money. The bailouts were a necessary step to prevent severe economic crisis - they amounted to just 6% percent of GDP. Clearly worth it, when considering what is at stake here.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
droithomme 15y ago
I agree with Armstrong. It is indeed very embarrassing the US has no human launch capability left at all, especially given our enormous lead. Hopefully that will be rectified with the work SpaceX is doing.
diogenescynic 15y ago
America has stopped dreaming. Remember all those futuristic visions of tomorrow and the optimism America had? That all stopped once we stopped going to the moon. We just need to make this a priority over say, two wars and a military presence in hundreds of countries.
mkramlich 15y ago
I have massive respect for Armstrong and Cernan but disagree with their positions. I think they're both wrong on this issue, they're distorting the actual state of things, and at a deeper level they're romanticizing the shuttle so much and looking so much through the lens and context of the 60's US-Soviet space race that their prescription is nearly the opposite of what we should be doing. I and a lot of techies I know are way more happy with the state of US space affairs now than say 20 years ago precisely because there's so much private enterprise innovation now, while, at the same time, NASA is still doing new missions and research. NASA ain't perfect, govt ain't perfect, market ain't perfect, but there are lots of things going right at the moment. And I think they're overlooking it.
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
canned primates are not the future of space. I wish every dollar spent on it was spent on brain research. i want to explore space in an appropriate body, not this laughably fragile meat one.

88 points by grannyg00se 15y ago

I know this has to be incredibly difficult for anyone who grew up during the space race, but there comes a point at which you must force yourself to let go of the old in the act of grasping at the future. Compared to the advance of technology within government organizations like NASA, the progress seen in private programs chasing the X PRIZE has been astounding. So long as the government keeps their 70s era technology in service, the role remains filled, and the young upstarts have less motivation to shoot for the stars.

nate_meurer 15y ago
Bingo. Armstrong and many of the other old Apollo-era astronauts are emotionally invested in manned space-flight. I think he romanticizes it to the point of being immune to arguments of cost-effectiveness.
- diogenescynic 15y ago
  It's not just about emotions. It's the next frontier. Don't you want us to get there first? It's also a great investment, it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.
  - eru 15y ago
    > it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. That's a testable statement. Though the more interesting statement would be: It creates more jobs than other things we could do with the many, and develops more beneficial technology. (My guess is that those stronger version aren't true.)
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - alexqgb 15y ago
    Wow, vintage rhetoric. I'm guessing 1954.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 15y ago
  What is space exploration? Is it sending robots to take pictures? Or is it sending people who can radio back a message saying how it feels to look at the Earth from afar? The information gathered through space probes is awesome, but what's the point of knowing something if we are never going to experience it? It's like comparing writing a travel guide from second-hand knowledge with making the journey yourself. You know NASA's budget is tiny compared to the military. I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century.
  - bradleyland 15y ago
    To answer your first set of questions: it's both. I'm not sure how Nate got the feeling that I'm against maned space flight? There are plenty of private entities out there with the stated goal of manned space flight, so that's a bit of a straw-man. "I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century." Boy do we ever agree here. Reminds me of the ending of Watchmen. A world united in the effort to save us all from randomly-appearing psychic squid. Gaaaaaaah! Here's the rub though. I think that private enterprise has a greater chance of leading the charge here. Governments are hamstrung by their constituencies. There's nothing stopping entrepreneurs from reaching out across political boundaries, except for pesky laws in some cases, but that just serves to reinforce my point. The face that the laws like that even exist shows that the government seeks to prevent what some individual may be prone to try. In this context, reaching out in unity with "forbidden" foreign nationals.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      private enterprise is about competition. It's about getting somewhere first. It may inspire a generation of entrepreneurs, but, alone, it doesn't have the power to unite people like a huge project the scope of Apollo had. At that moment, it wasn't an American walking on the Moon - it was a human being and that made all the difference for the rest of mankind. That was a precious moment when the message "we can set aside our differences and work together" would be heard. Still, private enterprise does not exclude projects like those - quite the contrary - most of Apollo was built by private enterprises. It doesn't make them less extraordinary.

sixtofour 15y ago

Space? You can't get there from here.

FrojoS 15y ago

>>[...] Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only taxis for the world's astronauts heading to low-Earth orbit, and each ticket to the ISS costs global space agencies between 50 and 60 million dollars each.<< I thought, the last shuttle starts we're costing over 1 billion. So with 7 crew members, thats more than twice the price paid to the Russians. Sure, they could raise that price in theory. But the Russians can't afford to run the ISS on their own.

anigbrowl 15y ago
The ISS is great and all, but the real value of the shuttle was that we could park next to Hubble or one of our spy satellites and do maintenance in place, so milking a lot of value out of orbiting platforms that would otherwise have to be shut down. I don't see what we have that replaces that right now.
- krschultz 15y ago
  Satellites are not designed for that - the Hubble sure wasn't. It is not a capability that needs to be replaced.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    KRSchultz is basically correct, please don't downvote him. The last Hubble repair mission went way beyond the Hubble's expected service capabilities, which was an amazing accomplishment. However, it's vastly more economically sound and safer to bring an aging device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do space walks for a repair and upgrade mission. The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit, and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.

pnathan 15y ago

It is terribly embarrassing. But the solution is not to keep the Shuttle program creaking along, but to work on a new program. At some point, legacy must be removed and a new platform created.

lhnn 15y ago
Like I've said repeatedly, what is embarrassing is our dependence on forign nations to get to a space station largely funded and built by us. Russia is not our friend. Russia is a business partner with whom we're not at war. We should have gotten our asses up and had something new by now, so we could retire the shuttle.

nhebb 15y ago

The title is completely misleading. Armstrong did not tell NASA "you're embarrassing". He told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the demise of NASA is embarrassing. And it is. Regardless of the other crap our government spends money on, NASA is a fantastic investment, and has always provided a positive return to our economy.

SamReidHughes 15y ago
I'm sorry, but you have no way of knowing this. What would happen if you took a bunch of would-be rocket scientists and hadn't given them jobs at NASA?
- nhebb 15y ago
  No, I don't have absolute certainty, but there have been studies on its economic impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Economic_impact_of_NASA_funding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Economic_impact_of_...
- ap22213 15y ago
  That's an interesting perspective, assuming you're alluding to private vs. government funding. However, can anyone provide evidence that private funding can accomplish anything near the scale of what NASA accomplished? I'm asking that as an honest question. I don't love government spending or bureaucracy, by any means. Who would, except perhaps government workers? However, I fail to see any major advancements that have happened without the scale of funding that only governments can provide. I really want to believe that the private sector can do it. I just don't see a lot of historical evidence that it can.
  - astine 15y ago
    It's hard to make an apple-to-apples comparison here as private companies in the past decades have been forbidden to do what NASA has done. Not to mention, NASA's most memorable achievements were fueled largely through patriotic furor. I suspect that it's possible. Much of NASA's flouted benefit are the technological discoveries it has made while solving the problems of Space exploration. Assuming that those discoveries have benefited our society economically more than NASA has cost it (an argument I've read before) then it seems like their would have been at least one sufficient financial incentive for private industry to pursue space if given the chance. Not to mention R&D that can only be performed in a zero gravity environment. A patent system could make all this profitable. But there are still so many other concerns, such as national defense that crop up in talk of private space exploration that it's really hard to make any real comparison.

martythemaniak 15y ago

Great, now try to tell people they should pay more taxes to support a bigger space program - be it carried out by NASA or private companies.

cryptoz 15y ago
The people don't need to pay more taxes. An adjustment of current budget allocation is all that's needed. For example, you could double NASA's budget by shrinking the war budget from ~$698,000,000,000 to $678,000,000,000 / year. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  And you should not underestimate the propaganda value. Generations were inspired by the Apollo program. The shuttle is a beautiful machine, but it really doesn't go anywhere interesting.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Is the Moon that interesting?
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      It's a real place. The ISS is not a "place" - it's something we put up there. It's the difference between going to the woods and camping on your mother's lawn. Besides that, if we can manufacture spacecraft parts on the Moon, launching them is much easier than launching from Earth. You can even use a maglev rail to launch stuff from there - no reaction mass involved.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

The shuttle was never flown the thousands of times it needed to have all the bugs worked out, NASA is an agency lost in middle-management hell, and you can't trust exploration to the politicians. That being said, Armstrong has a point: none of what I've just said is new or is satisfactory as an excuse. The failure to manage these facts and manage our access to space -- perhaps by a privatization push a decade earlier -- is an embarrassment.

nickolai 15y ago
>you can't trust exploration to the politicians. I've seen that " you cant trust X to polititians" waaay too often. What's left around that one can supposedly trust them with ? Or even better, is there something we don't trust politicians with that is faring particularily better? the corporate world doesnt seem to show any kind of outstanding performance, and is in fact just as pervaded with politics, with the execs playing the politicians' roles. Any organization big enough to pull off the kind of stunt needed to push our exploration even further is inevitably big enough to be paralyzed by political strife. Small startups are pretty much out of the game because no one found a way of making space exploration profitable. I can see how the situation is broken, but how can it be fixed?
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  I tried to be brief, but your point is taken, if a bit over the top. Of course you can trust politicians for stuff, just like you can trust your corner grocer not to put poison in your potatoes. The problem, whether the private sector or the government sector, is where there are mixed incentives and no feedback loop. So, for instance, it's a big deal to come out with some vast new NASA goal every time a president gets elected -- but these goals always take decades to make happen, which is long after the current guy is gone. Presidents get mileage out of making the speech and formulating the policy, not making it happen. Likewise, unless you are a congressman from a district with lots of space spending, it's very easy to make speeches with phrases like "why should we go to the moon when we can't even fix our problems down here?" without anybody digging any deeper. So politicians do that. They act rationally. There are no voters in space. There are no orphans to appear on TV with, and there are no space aliens to defend ourselves against. There's just not a lot up there to emotionally move the electorate, sadly. In these cases, where the incentives are mixed and there's no reward, you can't trust them because of the role they play in the system as it is currently implemented. And no, I don't mean "can't trust them" as in somehow they are purposefully deceiving anybody or crooked or any of that. Most of them are really smart, dedicated people who want the best for their country. I'm very proud of the politicians and the people who work at NASA. But by acting the most logical way possible, exploration can't prosper. There are no bad guys and no hatred of government here. Space exploration just doesn't work the way it was set up. Sure, as a last great dream of an assassinated president, with a completely new agency, we could hold it together for a decade or so, but those days are long gone. What has been needed for the last 20 years or more is a bit more brave and pointed honesty at NASA. That's maybe too much to ask, but I think guys like Armstrong deserve it.

raldi 15y ago

Asking how we can shut down the shuttle program "in the middle of its prime" reminds me of the line from Star Wars about the bad guys surrendering "Now? In our moment of triumph?"

johrn 15y ago

Isn't SpaceX scheduled to make a resupply flight to the ISS this November? I'm not sure how we get from that to "We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future". Is it just because the SpaceX flights are only cargo and not personnel? I can't tell from the SpaceX launch manifest(http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php) what the launch is going to be carrying, but the Dragon is at least capable of carrying crew.

jessriedel 15y ago
It's not looking good: http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed-to-dock-to-iss-on-next-flight/ http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed...

nirvana 15y ago

This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen!) This should resonate really well with anyone building a startup. A startup is a money engine. You find something that is profitable, and you invest in it and grow it. You can go out and spend a lot of money doing things the manual way, but if everything pretty much stops when you stop spending money, you're not really investing in a sustainable business. This is the case with NASA and a lot of government programs. We were spending a lot of money, but we were not building a space industry... in fact, because government bureaucrats saw space as a competitive advantage (NASA, for instance, long enjoyed easy funding from Congress) they worked to stymie private interests that might show them up. It is great that things are changing now. We have SpaceX building launch vehicles. Virgin Galactic will start their business any day now (hopefully, though remember how congress wanted to shut it down because it might not be "safe"?) Jeff Bezos is doing something off in the desert of west texas, and even John Carmack has a small space business. But we cannot ignore the legacy of hundreds of billion sunk into NASA on unsustainable programs, and quirky launch vehicles designed to meet bureaucratic needs, such as to at least have one component of it built in each of the 50 states. So, the news that NASA is in an "embarrassing" state to me, is good news. I say this, because I would very much like to see Humans have ready access to space.

TechNewb 15y ago
"First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA? -Neil deGrasse Tyson" http://wp.me/p1bnM2-qW http://wp.me/p1bnM2-qW
- dimitar 15y ago
  Eventually the US government will sell back the banks and make some income, so its hardly comparable. Sweden in the early nineties did this and they recovered more than half their money. The bailouts were a necessary step to prevent severe economic crisis - they amounted to just 6% percent of GDP. Clearly worth it, when considering what is at stake here.

deleted 15y ago

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droithomme 15y ago

I agree with Armstrong. It is indeed very embarrassing the US has no human launch capability left at all, especially given our enormous lead. Hopefully that will be rectified with the work SpaceX is doing.

diogenescynic 15y ago

America has stopped dreaming. Remember all those futuristic visions of tomorrow and the optimism America had? That all stopped once we stopped going to the moon. We just need to make this a priority over say, two wars and a military presence in hundreds of countries.

mkramlich 15y ago

I have massive respect for Armstrong and Cernan but disagree with their positions. I think they're both wrong on this issue, they're distorting the actual state of things, and at a deeper level they're romanticizing the shuttle so much and looking so much through the lens and context of the 60's US-Soviet space race that their prescription is nearly the opposite of what we should be doing. I and a lot of techies I know are way more happy with the state of US space affairs now than say 20 years ago precisely because there's so much private enterprise innovation now, while, at the same time, NASA is still doing new missions and research. NASA ain't perfect, govt ain't perfect, market ain't perfect, but there are lots of things going right at the moment. And I think they're overlooking it.

nazgulnarsil 15y ago

canned primates are not the future of space. I wish every dollar spent on it was spent on brain research. i want to explore space in an appropriate body, not this laughably fragile meat one.