I hope not. 
I believe you started it, Sam:
Although I discounted it; I realize that your makeup doesn’t allow discussing any topic without a token Clinton-bash.
Not true, it’s just a little difficult for some of the boards more partisan members to realize that there comes a time when their interests are better served by putting down their swords, and working towards a mutually agreeable goal. That doesn’t mean that they can’t do it. It’s just hard.
Well, I see the State of the Union came and went, and we have:
- No Nuclear Thermal Rocket funding.
- No space verbage of any sort in the speech.
- Jack.
- Shit.
Science talk was limited to funding hybrid cars. Which is cool, altough details were sparce. But nononono space push.
Grumble. Thanks f’nuttin, Sam.
Hang on there, sonny. I got yer details, right here.
And I did say a couple of days ago that I figured his ‘Prometheus’ speech would be moved from the SotU speech to the budget speech. It just seemed like there was too much stuff on the agenda.
Heck with that. Lets start the million geek march.
Where do I sign up?
I wonder if something like this would actually work, getting a Million Geek march together.
Of course, if that happens, the Million Jock Marchers would beat us all up and take our lunch money…
Ah, but we would have counterfeit lunch money and they would all get busted. Then we can date the cheerleaders.
Hmmm, $3 billion over 5 years of funding for a Jupiter mission? What happened to the Big Space Push from the Bushies? What happened to ‘swinging for the fences’ ? Gah.
Hang on… That’s just the price tag for the Jupiter mission. That does not include the ‘greatly enhanced’ funding for Prometheus, nor does it include funding for the space plane initiative.
We’ll have to wait for the next NASA budget to see exactly how this all shakes out, but I’m guessing that Prometheus will go from 1 billion over five years to more like a billion or two a year. I have no idea how much funding the space plane initiative will get.
Sam, I have to think that if there were serious plans to send people to Mars Bush would have mentioned it in the SotU. In the alternative, maybe something like that is worth its own speech.
I’m up for the march. Haven’t visited DC in a while. If anyone would care to organize it - I’m more of an idea guy.
I think that was misreported. The original article I linked made the claim about a human mission to Mars, but other sources said somethign more along these lines: “The Bush administration is set to announce a major increase in funding for Prometheus, a project to develop a nuclear rocket and new nuclear RTG’s for space missions. The ambitious timetable includes a major mission using the new technology before 2010.”
Since this was all discussed in terms of how much quicker you can get to Mars with a nuclear rocket, the assumption the first article made was that a ‘major new mission’ would mean a manned Mars mission.
But now it looks like that major mission will be a very ambitious Jupiter probe using nuclear RTG’s and a nuclear rocket to avoid the time-wasting gravitational slingshots that made Cassini take years to get to Saturn.
If you think about it, this makes sense. You don’t want to send humans on an interplanetary mission with a nuclear rocket without trying it out on an unmanned mission first. And Jupiter is a great target - there’s probably more science to be learned there than at Mars. Europa alone could keep a probe busy for a decade.
And this sounds like a BIG mission. Three billion dollars? That’s what Cassini cost, and it was the largest interplanetary mission ever. Given the nuclear rocket and much cheaper propulsion it implies, and the increases in technology since Cassini was designed, this is going to be a VERY powerful mission.
But we’re going to have to wait until NASA releases its FY2004 budget, and for Bush’s budget speech to see just how ambitious they are going to be.
I’m a little more pessimistic after seeing the SOTU speech. Bush is going to come under fire for a growing deficit and out of control domestic spending. That’s going to make it harder to seriously increase NASA’s budget. But we’ll know soon enough.
Hydrogen cars were important enough to be mentioned by the ANWR-drilling, SUV-supporting, Kyoto-killing oil kid, even before that messy war stuff, but not any space exploration material of any kind. So much for that brilliant, foresighted Bush leadership you were citing so many pages ago, Sam. We know his priorities.
Keep dreaming if you like, folks, but building a political constituency for it will probably work better.
I think we witnessed some hype on this story. The way our “manned” space program is going I will be very surprised if we land a human team on Mars before 2020. The robotic explorers seem to have the upper hand. I hope I’m wrong.
Would you give it a rest already? You’re getting awful tiresome. This isn’t the thread for knee-jerk Bush bashing, okay?
And besides, even if we don’t get a manned mission to Mars funded right now, I think anyone other than a hard-core Bush hater would have to admit that he is doing alright by NASA. Nuclear Rockets, new nuclear RTG’s, and a new space plane initiative all in one budget. It seems to me that space is a pretty big priority, even without a Mars mission.
Well he did kill the X-33, or whatever the damned thing was called, before inaugurating a proper replacement, and has been working to defund the Pluto-Kuiper express, so it’s still a little early to say he’s done alright by NASA. He needs, at a minimum, to make a real monetary commitment to nuclear propulsion first.
Well, I’m not sure it’s fair to say that Bush killed the X-33. The program was killed two months after Bush took office, and by all accounts it was heavily into the weeds long before Bush won the election.
As for Pluto-Kuiper, my understanding is that the mission was a rather cheap-but-quick mission to get into space quickly before Pluto’s atmosphere freezes in 2020. There were many compromises in the mission to meet that goal.
Now, if you had a nuclear rocket, your launch window grows by a number of years, and the cost of the mission goes down or the mission gains lots of functionality. That may be the reason Pluto-Kuiper was axed.
NASA said that the cancellation of the X-33 was an internal decision, not a White House order. That program had numerous problems. Even before it started, I remember hearing a lot of skepticism about the enormous composite tank. Also it’s not quite correct to say that there was no replacement for the X-33. The funding for the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) was already in place, IIRC.
The nuclear-powered Jupiter Tour sounds like a sensible decision to me. You can’t use that kind of technology on a manned mission before you test it on an unmanned mission. In fact you usually don’t use it on an unmanned science mission until you try it on a “technology demonstration” mission, so the Jupiter Tour would make a nice testbed for nuclear propulsion.
Who killed the X 38 lifeboat for the space station?
Overall funding if I remember right. Soyuz craft are cheaper and already work.