Mo’ money for trips to the moon/Mars, 1.5 billion for marriage counseling — methinks Bush is employing some serious diversionary tactics here. What about those two little words we haven’t heard in a while … Bin Laden?
I understand the arguments regarding tele-robotics. Robots can do a lot of what people can do and will do ever more as AI and robotics improves. That said, I think the best reason to send people to space is to send people to space! By that I mean that we are safer as a species if we are based in many places all around the solar system. That way one catastrophe (nuclear war, asteroid strike, etc…) can’t wipe us all out. I don’t see space exploration as enormously expensive compared to the federal budget as a whole and if we can get other countries involved we can split the cost even more. This might even be a good way to rebuild some of the political capital we’ve burned through with our allies in the recent war. Finally
Moon base
This is actually a good idea (it would have been a better idea 30 years ago when we should have done it. But that’s all done now). If the moon can be industrialized and spacecraft can be constructed using minerals mined locally you can build quite large and heavy craft and lift them off the surface with great ease in the lower gravity. Such things would be much more expensive and energy intensive to build here on earth and would then have to be shipped up in pieces and assembled in orbit.
Then again a space elevator here on earth would solve a lot of these problems too (though not the assembly one). Perhaps we should focus on that instead.
Robotics? Sure, I’m all for it.
Space Exploration, now that’s something different. Terraforming Mars seems like a so-so idea when and if we have the technology, but it seems to me that the US has been spending way too much money on absolutely useless “Space Tours”. I was shocked when the (us) Europeans decided to join the bandwagon and throw money away with this ludicrous Mars expedition. I just can’t see the point, as far as I’m concerned we have more pressing issues to attend to here on Earth before we start thinking about what’s outside.
I would suggest that Bush is trying to be the first to be able to use outer space for his WarMachine, but I fear my admiration for Alde is clouding my judgement…
Space tours are a bad idea. Sending a bunch of guys up to play golf on the moon was not a great use of the capabilities we had. If Mars is just an expensive golf expedition then I agree. But the plans I’ve seen for Mars seem to emphasize going and staying and not frivolous cold war style dick swinging.
I think there will always be something here on earth we could focus on instead but space is worth it for the “insurance policy” reasons I cited above. A large international project like this could also reduce tensions and perhaps even help avert wars. Or it could lead to people fighting over chunks of turf on other planets 
But I think the cooperation needed to pull off the projects themselves will prevent that.
Not to hijack, but…
If you chose a nation of, say, 25M people (or just 25M needy people), that budget would allow $1.64/day. I argue that that’s enough to feed someone. Not that I know anything about relief work, but that $15B would probably be better put towards irrigation/water, hospitals, and development of sustainable agriculture.
Why are you feeding the First World in your argument, anyway? It’s a shameless straw man. You (probably) know damn well that $15B/year could make a huge difference to a lot of people in the world. Now if only the military budget could be pared down just a little… nah, impossible.
Cuts from NASA haven’t gone to feed people and I doubt they would now.
You can use my above mentioned $7.00 Bush tax cut to feed kids school lunch in Mississippi, I’ll come up with some more for NASA.
I agree. Now actually if only 10% of the Health and Human Services budget could go to needy people in 3rd world coditions that $50.2 billion could do some good. :rolleyes:
Health and Human Services annual budget 2004 $502.0 Billion
I have to admit, I’m starting to have have mixed feelings now that the Hubble service mission is confirmed to be one of the sacrifices for the new initiative:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/157010_hubble17.html
Also Sam Stone’s link appears to show a decrease in science and aeronautics funding for the next 3 years. Interplanetary missions may fall under “Exploration” but this does not look too good for astronomy. Though I suppose it could have been worse, and the infrastructure built for the new exploration program may benefit astronomers in the long run. I want a lunar observatory!*
*I think the Moon is a nice place for astronomy. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to stabilize an orbital telescope to 0.1 arcsec accuracy, much less 0.01 arcsec (diffraction limit for a 10-meter telescope).
The Shuttle Servicing Mission wasn’t cancelled because of the new initiative. The funding for that was left in place. It was cancelled because O’Keefe felt that it was too dangerous for the benefits it provided. It has been decided that all future Shuttle missions must go to the ISS, so that the tile system can be inspected (and the shuttle astronauts have a place to hang out if their ship is busted).
Under the new plan, the aeronautics and ‘other science’ funding goes down very slightly for three years, but then increases again and winds up larger than it is now. But as far as I know, this budget does not include things like Hubble. It’s more things like Earth sciences, research into new General Aviation engines, etc. I believe the telescope missions are part of the ‘exploration’ budget, which gets massive funding increases from here on out.
Granted, we don’t know how that budget breaks out, but I have confidence that you’re going to see all of the planetary and telescope missions remain intact, or even get bigger funding. All of those programs fit very well with the new initiative. The media has characterized this new plan as “A moon mission, followed by a Mars trip”. But that’s really not it. If you listen to Bush’s speech, or read the documents I linked, the true nature of this is much clearer - NASA’s new job is to explore space. All of its money tied up in quasi-commercial activities in LEO are to be diverted to exploration. Part of that is a Crew Exploration Vehicle, which can go pretty much anywhere in the solar system. Other than that, exactly how the exploration budget gets broken up is still unclear. Bush it’s been said repeatedly that ‘exploration’ includes both robotic missions and telescopes.
This is from the jerk who was supposed to change things after Challenger and didn’t listen to people. Who laughed the week after Columbia at the jokes of Congressmen sucking up to keep his job. Oh, and a President that killed the lifeboat for the space station. That’s why there are just two guys there now.
It might take a while to get there, depending upon where anywhere is. 
I should think you would need different kinds of ships to do different things; trips of three days to the Moon, land and return vs. months to Mars land in a much greater gravity well and return.
It might also be difficult to design the CEV when the design of engines and power sources are part of the program. I hope NASA doesn’t get stuck with a bad idea that eats up the budget.
Uh, no. That would be Dan Goldin.
Okay, one of the jerks.
Here is an interesting article:
I am, unashamedly, a space junkie. As such, I have been following the current mission(s), and this discussion thread among others, with much interest.
Really, for me, the need to continue exploration and expansion can be boiled down to a very simple statement of philosophical principle. In short: A major human presence in space is inevitable. Eventually it will be economically and sociopolitically sustainable, represented by permanent habitats on the Moon and Mars plus asteroid retrieval and so on. This will require a hundred years of effort, regardless of when we start. So as far as I’m concerned, we might as well start now.
On this, I’m a big-picture guy. And I say we need to get rolling. The more we do it, the better we’ll get at it. If we stand around and argue until the stars miraculously align and we have a rare shot at something meaningful, our lack of experience will translate to excessive caution and cost and it’ll turn into a boondoggle, and then we’ll all sit back down and do nothing for several more decades. Metaphorically, we’re all standing at the edge of a hundred-square-mile plot of land, trying to decide what kind of city we’re going to build, but doing basically no work until we’ve finalized our plan. And we’re thinking that once we all manage to agree on a plan, we’ll be able to build a massive metropolis inside a week. It just doesn’t work that way.
No, we won’t be perfect at first. Yes, we’ll lose some personnel to accidents and it’ll cost a lot of money to get the infrastructure established. But long-term success demands sustained effort over the long haul.
So, like I said: We might as well get started now.
Carnivorousplant:
O’Keefe has been a fine administrator so far. What specific criticisms of him do you have?
As for your link, the one thing it should do is put to bed that this is just election-year politics. Both because this plan has been in the works for a long time, and also because according to the article Karl Rove was not particularly supportive of the whole thing, but Bush went ahead and agreed to it anyway.
I saw a satellite feed of his laughing with a bunch of Congressmen after Columbia. I thought that was in bad taste.
I am dissapointed that he didn’t change things so that someone listened to the engineers about Columbia.
But what do you make of this quote (from Space.com):
Scr4: Sure, the ultimate deciding factor was that the Shuttle was being retired. Once that decision was made, cancelling HSM-4 was a foregone conclusion. Because NASA only had two options - kill the Shuttle in 2010, or recertify it. So yes, if Bush had issued a Presidential directive that NASA continue flying the Shuttle until 2020 or 2030, then maybe that would have left room for HSM-4. That, by the way, would have been a horrible decision. The Shuttle needed to be retired.
But even if the decision had been made to recertify the Shuttle, that doesn’t mean that HSM-4 would have flown. The decision had been made that further Shuttle flights will all go to the ISS, so that the Shuttle can be inspected, and if necessary the Astronauts could hang out there until a rescue shuttle could be prepped to go up and get them. For the Shuttle to fly to Hubble, they would have had to develop some way of inspecting the thermal protection system, AND they would have had to have another Shuttle waiting in standby in case there was damage.
Originally, there was hope that the icing problem could be solved with some kind of shroud to prevent ice from the main tank hitting the orbiter. Those plans became unworkable, and the shuttle was looking less and les viable over time, and I’m pretty confident that the decisionw would have been made to scrap it anyway.
So I don’t think the Hubble servicing mission would have flown regardless of what the Bush administration had planned. Other comments I’ve heard from people inside NASA suggest the same thing.
Back to my original claim: The servicing mission wasn’t scrapped because funds were moved to Bush’s new program. It was scrapped for safety reasons, and because the three remaining shuttles are critical to the task of finishing ISS. A cost-benefit analysis showed that it was just too risky to service Hubble to give it a couple more years of life. Notice what Grunsfeld says: IF the Bush proposal hadn’t come along, and IF the decision had been made to recertify the shuttle, THEN the mission MIGHT have been flown AS LONG AS a rescue scenario could have been developed. And all that would have had to happen very soon, before Hubble failed. Long odds indeed.
It looks like my fears were not unfounded. According to the latest Space.com article:
[quote]
The five-year plan outlined in Bush’s 2005 budget request details exactly where that money would come from:
[ul]
[li]$5.9 billion by phasing out or transferring to the new effort funding previously set aside for existing launch programs such as the Orbital Space Plane and the Next Generation Launch Technology program, an effort to develop reusable launch vehicle technology;[/li][li]$1.5 billion from the shuttle program;[/li][li]$1.2 billion by eliminating research aboard the international space station that is not tied to the president?s new exploration vision;[/li][li]$2.7 billion by deferring the start of several planned new missions, including the Global Precipitation Measuring Mission, solar terrestrial probes and Beyond Einstein, a group of planned astronomy missions designed to investigate the origin and nature of phenomena like dark matter and black holes. In addition, spending on several Earth Science missions and Sun-Earth Connection missions will be held flat through 2009; and[/li][li]$300 million from reducing space technology development and deferring institutional activities such as the construction of new facilities at NASA field centers.[/ul][/li]So the very popular Astronomical Search for Origins initiative (includes the James Webb Telescope) is unaffected, but the other astronomical and environmental science missions are all affected to some extent. The Beyond Einstein initiative includes high-energy astronomy missions (successors to the Chandra X-ray Observatory), and Sun-Earth Connections includes environmental science satellites and astronomy (solar physics) missions. This whole initiative is bad news for the world’s science community, IMO.
[QUOTE=scr4]
It looks like my fears were not unfounded. According to the latest Space.com article:
I agree. But it is hardly surprising that Bush would sacrifice long-term gain for short-term glory. We can only hope that his cronies will be too senile to name the actual rocket after him, 20 years from now.
If the Project Constellation CEV is really a worthy replacement for the other Reusable launch initiatives, the money may be well-spent. The shuttle and non-human exploration ISS money will not be missed, as I believe the real goal of the ISS is to examine long-term human existence in space anyway.
But to scrap real science missions in the name of a long-term, risky exploration whose real budget will be anything but predictable (especially given this president’s inability to put out accurate budget numbers, exemplified by yesterday’s announcement of the Medicare package), is exemplary of Bush’s shallow grasp of scientific endeavor.
My understanding is that the CEV will be an unpowered capsule launched on top of an expendable rocket. You can see the proposals for its previous incarnation (the Orbital Space Plane) here. You’ll notice that one of the proposals looks like a plain old Apollo-style capsule.
I don’t see any indication that reusable launcher development will continue. The more I look at this proposal, the more short-sighted it seems…