I am 47 and grew up with the space program. I lived about 5 miles from Johnson Space Center, (Mission Control) which is in Clear Lake, about 25 miles south of downtown Houston. Can’t remember offhand what it was before they named it JSC, but we just called it NASA. In fact, for a time I lived off of Nasa Road 1, as it was named.
My dad was a contractor for the old AT&T, and worked at NASA for years during the moon shots, and it was a big thing. I remember mom and dad taking us kids on drives through Nassau Bay, to see where the Astronauts lived.
Back in school, I must have took 30 field trips to JSC during elementary through HS.
I grew up across a highway from a small airport, and started taking flying lessons when I was 17. Everybody wanted to be an astronaut.
I remember the whole extended family at the house when Neil and then Buzz dropped down the ladder in '69. In short, I am a major supporter of NASA.
But dammit, it’s time to retire the fucking shuttles. Move on. move up! I know Nasa probably has some contractual obligations to deal with from the private sector, but stop fucking looking backwards, the platform is obselete and has been for many years. They apparently plan to fly the shuttles until 2010. :rolleyes:
Apparently they don’t understand that right now NASA=Need Another Seven Astronauts.
I know there is a lot of financial pressure, but the whole NASA budget is a drop in the bucket.
Fuck this foam on the tank bullshit, we have better tech now.
Move on to the next generation of manned vehicles, keep with the unmanned probes, and give the fucking private sector more support. They have the money and motivation.
The way I see it, the primary purpose of NASA is not science, nor is it “space exploration.” The primary purpose of NASA is spacecraft design. Period. Build a spacecraft, test it to see if it works, then build a better one. Don’t waste your time with science - leave that to the kids at MIT. Your job is in engineering.
If you keep on making better and better spaceships, sooner or later you’ll build one that is both practical and cost-effective; but that won’t happen if you don’t FUCKING GET TO WORK.
The problem isn’t Shuttle - it’s ISS. The International Space Station isn’t finsihed yet, and the components that have to be installed can only be flown on the Shuttle. So the Shuttle needs to fly until that is done, and then will be retired. That’s supposed to happen in 2010.
ISS has turned into a giant white elephant and a huge money sink. Unfortunately, it has a million political strings attached to it, and since it’s a multinational project, the U.S. has an obligation to do its part in finishing it, and that involves the Shuttle.
New spacecraft are being developed right now. The CEV is the next-generation spacecraft, and it’s well under development. Unfortunately, Shuttle and ISS consume a huge chunk of NASA’s budget, leaving few resources to work on other things.
Got bad news for you. The shuttle’s replacement, the CLV, is a huge concession to simpler platforms and less ambitions space exploration.
NASA claims that the Apollo era look and feel to the ongoing program is because it’s simply the best design. Says a lot about 20 years of shuttle missions.
I say go beyond dropping the shuttle and drop NASA. We should give 2/3 of the budget to either the Chinese or Russians and let universities set up science experiments for them to run. If we had done this years ago instead of wasiting time and money on the shuttle program, there would ptobably be a moonbase by no and possible a mission to Mars. When an accident happens and people die, the shuttle program shuts down for years.
Screw giving the money to the Chinese and Russians - use the funds to set up ‘X-Prize’ like competitions in the U.S. Fix the goals so the success is measurable, and provide enough money to create a proper incentive.
“200 million to the first company than can orbit a spacecraft containing three people for at least three orbits, land, and go up with the same craft again within one month.”
“1 billion to the first company that can launch 10,000 pounds into earth orbit for a demonstrated per-flight cost of less than $1000 per pound”
“2 billion to the first company to land five people on the moon, keep them there for two weeks, and return them safely.”
“5 billion to the first company that can keep 10 people on the moon for five months.”
“1 billion to the first company that can find or otherwise create 500 gallons of potable water on the moon.”
There are already lots of these prizes running, and they are having a fantastic success rate. The X-prize is the most famous, but the DARPA challenge for autonomous vehicles had several winners this year when none were expected, and NASA itself has numerous ‘millenium challenges’ going. The problem is that all these challenges are for smallish amounts, and therefore seeking modest solutions. I say go for broke, and put the big money out there. What have we got to lose? If the challenge is too difficult, no one will win, and it costs nothing. If they’re successful, you get a space program for a fraction of what it would have cost the government.
And challenges like this excite people and create innovation. I can imagine companies going after the big prizes to seek to finance development in lots of innovative ways, from reality TV to using the R&D to kick off their own private space ventures. In fact, most of that is happening already. Gigantic prizes would just hasten the process.
That ain’t necessarily a good thing. I got the chance to talk to Gene Kranz about the Apollo program (and the programs that preceded and followed it), and he talked about how they were seconds and inches away from total disaster on every single mission, many times more than once. Not just the ill-fated Apollo 1 and Apollo 13.
First of all, NASA does not and never has designed or built spacecraft. All of the detail and most of the systems engineering/integration work is done by aerospace contractors working to NASA-developed requirements. Boeing-McDonall Dougles, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Orbital Space Corporation, Alliant Technologies/Thinokol, and the former Rockwell/Rocketdyne companies served as prime or system-level contractors who were responsible for concept, detail design, and in many cases, assmebly and pre-flight operations.
Second, blaming NASA in particular for the Space Transportation System (STS, of which the Shuttle Orbiter is a part) is, while not incorrect, a mistatement of the ultimate responsiblity. NASA has pegged its operations on the STS and the ISS because this is what Congress decided that NASA’s job would be. There’s a great book on the development of the STS called Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System which details the development and early operational history of the Shuttle. Jenkins doesn’t shy from presenting both the early idealism of a truely reusable SSTO (single stage to orbit) or flyback booster system to the ultimate technical and political compromises that resulted in the STS which failed to meet performance expectations by a rough order of magnitude. Development of alternative and more capable transportation systems has been hampered by inconsistent funding, a risk-adverse philospohy that avoids pushing the technical envelope, and political posturing about the utility of the Shuttle despite its manifest problems, hence the desire to complete the ISS regardless of cost and problems.
Third, what NASA really does best is science missions; JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s unmanned exploration center, managed out of CalTech) has a rate of sucesses and failure abatement that can rival any technical program in the world. They’ve done some astonishing planetology, climatology, astronomy, and heliotropic missions that have provided invaluable data for both practical applications and abstract science. NASA should be better throught of and operated as a clearinghouse and mission oversight agency rather than a design bureau or system integrator. This would be more cost-effective, but it would result in upheavals (i.e. layoffs, center closures, et cetera) that are politically unacceptible to many.
The CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle) is still in proposal stage, although requirements have been pretty well set. Part of the problem is, again, the risk-adverse attitude that (to quote Gene Kranz) “Failure is not an option.” It’s fine to have that attitude as a morale driver in a crisis, but in reality, things are going to get ufcked up occasaionly; in fact, that’s when you usually learn the most from what you’re doing. Calling CEV a “next generation” is something of a misnomer; far from advancing the state-of-the-art, it seeks to use all existing technology and largely off-the-shelf components to ensure reliablity. This isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing–right now we could use some risk abatement–but it does harken back to Apollo rather than forward to spaceplanes or SSTO boosters. CEV should properly be considered an interim program, a stop-gap while the failures that have hobbled the STS are addressed and the technology for reusable personnel spacecraft is improved. (Heavy boost capability should probably be relgated to non-reusable SRB-type rockets for the indefinite future as the cheapest way to get payload to orbit.)
Well, yeah. That’s what happens when you push the technical envelope and try to accomplish an impossible goal in a short timespan. There’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you’re honest. The Apollo astronauts were all test pilots and fighter jocks who had as good an understanding of anyone the risks they were taking.
The Big Lie about the STS and the Shuttle is that it was a “space truck” that would turn around in two weeks and deliver personnel and massive payloads to orbit with a reliability of a 747. The truth is that it was a development testbed that was grown into a fleet of operational vehicles despite the early and well-known problems and cost-overruns. The problem is that there was, quite deliberately, no replacement planned for it. The tooling for Apollo (which was just coming into an economies-of-scale reducting in launch costs) was deliberately destroyed and future development programs were underfunded, as if the Shuttle was going to last indefinitely.
After the Challenger debacle, when it was made clear that the real problem wasn’t the technical failures of the SRB design but also management problems within the organization itself, NASA could/should have started a program of developing the next generation of systems and re-evaluted their approach to risk management. Instead, they dug in their heels, assured everyone that the Shuttle wasn’t fundimentally flawed, and continued on with sinking money into more Orbiters, even though the cost of five or six launches could go a long way to developing a much better replacement. Fundamentally, NASA is guilty of wanting so hard to please its Congressional masters that it deluded itself and everyone else into believing that the STS was a good long-term solution. To admit anything else would be to acknowledge that the STS was a “waste” (it wasn’t; the technical lessons learned are invaluable if applied to a subsequent design) and that NASA was failing at their primary mission…which is to be perfect and pretty, rather than to accomplish far-reaching goals and manage long-term space exploration.
mmm :dubious: , I think he is not quite right, IIRC in the UN all members (even the US) declared the Moon as an area not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty since the 70’s.
While it is ok to get there for research and profit reasons, others will have the freedom to go to the same area Diamandis and buddies would “claim”. They may attempt to keep others away, but unfortunately they will have to come back sooner or later to the waiting arms of the earth governments.
Can anyone explain WHY we should go to into space? It seems like a big dick contest to me. YES we know you have a big dick but will your big dick help anyone anywhere?
NO your big dick just wants to keep showing it is bigger! So man went to the moon, YAYYYY. Go Man! GO USA!
What the fuck use was it? We may now know how to get a man to space or keep man alive in space. GOSH that is useful! How does that help ANYONE???
Who the fuck cares? Seriously! Most of the world gives not a shit and those who care are scientists and politicians.
And you can lay that white elephant problem directly at the feet of Congress, especially that asshole Proxmire. They kept screwing with the budget for ISS and every time they did, NASA had to redesign. If they had just left it alone instead of raiding it for pork, we’d have a functional space station right now, and it would be three times better than what we’re going to get.
Because at some point in time, maybe 10 years, maybe 10,000 years, we WILL need to leave this planet. Maybe it’ll be a man-made problem, like global warming or overpopulation. Maybe it’ll be some natural phenomenon, like an asteroid. But there is zero doubt in my mind that the need will arise to move humans off the Earth, either en masse or as groups of emmigrants. And Stephen Hawking agrees with me.
At some point, we have to begin the process of learning how to do that. Now’s as good as time as any; not to do so is extremely short-sighted.
However, it’s arguably a lot more short-sighted to divert NASA funding away from climate science research toward space exploration, as we seem to be currently doing:
Yes, we may need to leave this planet at some point, assuming we can find anywhere else to live and can figure out how to transfer billions of people over interplanetary or interstellar distances. But what we need to do now is to pay attention to our current planet’s environment and to figuring out how to keep it reasonably stable under the impact of human activities.
Space travel is very geewhizzical and exciting and all, but in practical terms, it’ll be a long while before we have feasible extraterrestrial solutions to our terrestrial problems. So we shouldn’t skimp on the more mundane earth-based approaches in order to pursue dreams of starflight.