As for Park’s comment that lives could be lost, allow me to trot out a statement made by astronaut Gus Grissom (who was later killed in the Apollo 1 fire)
So at least as far as ground covered, humans beat robots (and the humans were operating in a far more inhospitable climate than the Mars rovers are). Although, to be fair, comparing the Apollo missions to the Mars rover missions isn’t really an even contest, since the Apollo guys were using older technology than the Mars rovers are.
I wouldn’t expect to. I’m skeptical about the reliability of any web site dedicated to advocating a particular political party, candidate, or postion, which is why I asked for a cite from a reputable news source.
You made the initial claim. You are the one with the responsibility to back it up, especially when the claims you make are in direct conflict with the published reports from a variety of news outlets. I have neither the time nor the inclination to search for evidence to support dubious claims made by a person whose reliability I have reason to doubt.
I note that you didn’t call me “Hector” in this post. Thanks! I shall stop calling you Samwise.
I didn’t mention it merely because I didn’t have it, silly. Besides, I think you are wrong about there being very little difference between 1996 and 2004 dollars, and, with all the respect you are due, I have learned to not take your assertions on their face value.
Um, Sam, you have pointed to a page that projects from 2004, and indicates that there would be a decline in funding from 2004 without this “new vision.” Bush has been president since 2000. This tends to support an argument of a downward trend in Bush’s NASA budgets to 2004, does it not? Perhaps you are not intentionally lying, after all…
??? Sam, your constant dollars number for 1993 is 15.077. You can’t make that into 16.5, can you? Apart from that, I am dubious about the “estimate” of 2001 constant dollars, and would like to see some actual constant dollars figure for NASA for 2001 before going into this specifically. But, can we at least agree that $15.077 billion != $16.5 billion?
I don’t have constant dollars for Bush II, I only have the estimates that you provided. Why aren’t they greater than Clinton’s, even after four years?
You twice asserted that Clinton’s failing of NASA was greater because it was less relative to his economy, didn’t you? Well, let’s see. Ah yes, here’s what you said…
So I ask you to apply the same logic to Bush II, by comparing NASA outlays/total outlays or NASA outlays/GDP, but for some reason you cry foul. Poor form, and evidence of mendacity, says I.
Run the numbers, my friend. Bring it on.
Clearly, I have acknowledged my mistake regarding Reagan’s overall NASA versus his R&D numbers, as anyone following the discussion will know. It is, I think, disingenuous to bring it up as if it were a standing assertion. Clearly, an effort to deceive.
Another lie! Not following along, Sam? I pointed out, using real dollars, that your story about the two Bush boys being standouts over the last 30 years for NASA, while Clinton was a source of erosion simply was not true.
Silliness. Absolute silliness.
It is difficult, when you keep spinning, dancing and moving the posts.
However, I think if we go back to, what was it, version 2.3 of your assertion, we can find agreement. To wit:
This here is largely supported by the data, as long as you qualify the amount of increase under Bush II (to this point) as slight. So, do you want to stick with your words of this point, the original statement, or any of the two iterations that followed?
Voting for Kerry because I agree with him on most things and I am very scared by Bush.
As a scientist, I see that Bush has trashed our governmental approach to policy based on science (environment, sex education, stem cells, the list goes on and on). Worse, Bush has made changes which could permanently erode the USA’s dominance in science and technology. His plan to restructure NASA is a good version of this – I agree with Bob Park and jshore’s post.
Let me expand a bit. Tonight, I had dinner with a friend who is an engineer on the life support team at JSC for the space station. We got into what he thought about manned spaceflight. I agree with his views, and they agree with a lot of punditry that I read after the Columbia disaster. From the end of Apollo, NASA has tried to sell manned spaceflight as being all about science. It has failed on this miserably. There is a near total absence of scientific literature produced through manned spaceflight while data from robotic probes and observatories fill the pages of top tier journals.
The Space Shuttle was seen as an integral stepping stone in pursuit of manned spaceflight with science as a goal. Unfortunately, it was designed to be one half of a pair, the other half being a permanent space station. The space station has yet to arrive, and the ability to do real science in orbit has been crippled.
Now, we are on the cusp of finally perhaps being able to go to a seven man crew in a few years and actually running some science up there. Bring it from the three man maintenance up to the level where it is supplied and on full systems and humming. The goal is in reach to integrate manned spaceflight into a scientifically very successful unmanned program. Stay the course and despite the tragic losses, political minefields, and budget overruns, we will be there. So what does Bush want? To refit the space station to be a launching point to Mars, with a relatively useless detour to the Moon. To scrap much of the successful unmanned programs and funnel money into a bulky, unfocused, partially credible Mars trip with dubious positive results. It is like what Bush has done on so many other fronts. Not only is he anti-science now, but he has actively sought changes that damage our ability to do science in the future – from peer review rules to non-scientific restrictions on stem cell research to political stacking of oversight committees to dubious long term plans in many oversight agencies.
In the end, I asked my friend what changes they have put into place with the new Bush vision. He answered that they had done none: they have seen no directive, there are no orders coming from overhead, and of course there has been no money yet. They are waiting, like the rest of us, for the elections. They all fear any sweeping changes now, as he (and his colleagues) suspect that this is simple electioneering. In the words of Dave Chapelle’s Black Bush “Mars, Bitches!!”
In all honesty, for those who want to get behind exploration, IMHO it will never work unless it is a race. That’s why there is all this interest in the X-Prize. If you want to go to Mars, the best thing you can hope for is an active, advanced Chinese space program. Bureaucracy becomes bloated and unfocused when there is no fire underneath its ass. Witness NASA since the end of Apollo.
You sure don’t make it easy to keep track of things. So the guy who claimed he’d knocked Kerry out - was he your uncle, your best friend’s uncle or someone else entirely ?
Of course, the robots are only going to get better over time…Humans will stay about the same.
But as edwino points out, the real measure of how scientifically-useful the missions are is not measured in distance travelled but in the amount of good publishable science it leads to. Here, I think the unmanned program beats the manned one hands down…And, that is probably even before factoring cost into things. (I never understand how people who seem to lie awake nights worrying about government being inefficient with our tax dollars when the social welfare programs are involved get all generous with the public pursestrings as long as the inefficiency involves manned space flight.)
Humans have roughly a 100,000 year head start on the robots, so I think that even the most optimistic proponent of robotics would state that it’ll be some time before robots are our equals.
As for the data gathered and papers published, it would be interesting to see how the numbers stack up, but in the end, I don’t think that you’ll find anything which provides a conclusive answer on that. Simply because so many of the manned and unmanned missions have had different objectives and results. Take comparing the current Mars rover missions to the Apollo landings. The Rovers have different gear, and more advanced gear than the Apollo astronauts had, but the Apollo missions that landed on the Moon, all returned samples of lunar materials, something that the Rovers cannot do. The Rovers have a published design life of 90 days, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t continue to return data for another 90 days. However, once they’re no longer functional (which could happen at any point in their mission), no more data can be extracted from them, unless you send another mission to Mars to repair the Rovers (assuming that could be done) or bring hunks of them back for analysis at additional cost simply for the mission to acquire the data. The Lunar material that the Apollo crews returned is still available for study, and supposedly portions of it have never been touched, awaiting better analysis tools to be developed.
NASA is working on a robotic sample and return mission for Mars, but in poking around on NASA’s website, I’ve yet to find anything which gives any kind of figures for the amount of material which they’re planning on bringing back.
Oh, I don’t think that you’ll find too many comments by me complaining about the social welfare programs of the government. (I’m probably the only person without kids, who doesn’t mind if his taxes are raised in order to fund education programs. See, the kids going through schools now are going to be the doctors and nurses taking care of me when I’m an old geezer, I want them to have a good education!)
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find hard numbers, but here is some testimony of Bob Park before Congress on the spacestation that contains some relevant remarks:
Except, of course, that by your own words, Parks is strongly in favor of robotic exploration. It’s quite easy to cherry pick among the various papers and find results which support your thesis. No matter what field of science one is in, a paper which disproves a theory is valid. Nor does the fact that a theory is well established mean that it is immune from periodic testing. NASA just launched the Gravity Probe-B mission to test features of Einstein’s theories. This is an unmanned mission 40 years in the making.
His commentary that humans experience “osteoporosis, muscle atrophy, immune suppression, sleep disorders, diarrhea and bouts of depression and anxiety” while in space is meaningless, really, as humans experience those things while on Earth. It’s all part of being human. And, yeah, it might cause problems with a manned mission, but those things might also cause problems with an airline flight, and considering that there’s more likely to be a greater loss of human life if an airline pilot get’s depressed and decides that he’s going to end it all, by crashing his plane into the ground, than if an astronaut on the way to the Moon or Mars goes nuts and decides to crash his spacecraft, and most of us don’t sweat that before we get on a plane, I say we shouldn’t worry about it in the case of astronauts. (After all, the astronauts are wired up to all kinds of health monitoring devices, and “can’t even take a piss without the whole world knowing about it” whereas airline pilots are only subjected to routine phyicals and periodic drug testing.)
There’s an implicit assumption in this discussion that needs to be challenged: That the only purpose of going into space is to do science. By defining the argument in those terms, you take away a lot of the things manned spaceflight proponents think are valuable.
For instance, manned spaceflight inspires children. Tons and tons of today’s scientists and engineers say that they were inspired to go into these fields because of Apollo and other manned programs. Robotic spaceflight just doesn’t inspire kids in the same way.
Frankly, I think that just the educational/inspirational aspects of manned spaceflight are worth the entire cost. The Dept. of Education spends what, 60 billion a year? Do we have any tangible results to show for that? NASA spends 1/4 of that amount for everything it does, and I’ll bet it has had a more positive effect on education than the Dept. of Ed.
Then there’s the fact that the only way you can learn to live on other worlds is to go live on other worlds. The only way to build a robust space capability is to start incrementally building new manned spacecraft. For example, future space telescopes like the terrestrial planet finder are designed to be flown in arrays in the Lagrange points. Don’t you think it would be useful to be able to fly people out there to service it?
There is also a philosophical argument. If you look at history, when societies stop expanding and looking outwards, they become soft and decadent. Humans need a frontier. We need something for our best and brightest to strive towards. We need outposts. It keeps us focused.
The whole notion that any space effort that does not directly benefit planetary or space scientist is wrong is small thinking. We need vision. Only manned spaceflight provides that. And I say this as a huge proponent of robotic exploration and space science. It’s just not enough.
Oh, jshore, what’s Park’s take on NASA’s decision to not upgrade the Hubble one last time? One of the reason’s they’re doing this, of course, is because they won’t have a “safe harbor” like the ISS to go to, if something happens. Personally, I think NASA’s being a bit foolish, since the odds of something going wrong are pretty slim (Hey, I’d be willing to take the chance.) and the amount of data which we have gained so far from the Hubble is pretty heafty, even if it has little or no practical application in our daily lives (other than to give us non-astronomers some pretty pictures to look at).
And all that is well and good, really, but that doesn’t mean that just because Bush pays a little lip service to NASA means that we will actually see tangible results. It is obvious to me that Bush was simply trying to take advantage of the public’s enthusiasm over the Rover mission success. Notice now that the public’s attention has reshifted back to Iraq, he’s not said one thing about NASA or Mars. The obvious reason is because it is not important to him anymore. He knew Congress would have a difficult time finding money for this committment and so he knew the monies necessary would never be allocated, but he didn’t have to worry about it because as long as he went on record supporting intensified space exploration, he could keep his points with the trekkies even if nothing ever happened.
Reminds me of the old election pledge from my student council days: “I promise, if elected, to mandate Sprite in all the water fountains.” It’s a promise easy to make, but difficult to keep. And politicians seize upon that.
Which is why Bush must win, IMHO. Because the folks gearing up for the 2008 election are going to be analyzing the hell out of this campaign, if Bush loses after mentioning the space program, they’ll interpret that as the “kiss of death” for any mention of expanding the space program. Then, if one of the unmanned missions craps out early, they’ll be more cries of “Why the hell are we spending all this money on space?” and some stupid SOB could go ahead and ax all space exploration, manned and unmanned. Anybody want that? I don’t.
This neglects the fact that Bush has already boosted NASA’s funding in his last two budgets. Also, there may be a very good reason for his remaining silent on this - one analysis I read said that in an election year with a congress as divided as it is, having Bush get involved in ‘selling’ the program would be the kiss of death and Democrats would just dig in their heels. Instead, he’s keeping his distance and is letting congress work it out on their own. So far, that appears to be working, because the added funding is still on the table. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Well, I acknowledged in one of my last posts that there are other more honest ways to justify the manned space program. I happen to think it is an extremely expensive education / PR program for science and technology, but surely it is worth discussion.
I think the reason that people like Park get so exercised on this issue is that, while these other issues get mentioned, the manned program is still sold largely as science…and often very deceptively as Park documents in terms of the space station.
Well, it is hard to summarize exactly what his take on it is, but here, here and here and here are a few of his recent comments on the issue:
So it’s still on the table. But it’s disingenuous to say that the Hubble was a victim of Bush’s new vision, and therefore indicative of a lack of interest in science. The loss of the last Hubble Repair Mission is the inevitable result of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s recommendations, which NASA had pledged to follow. Shuttle will not fly on any mission where A) its tiles cannot be inspected, and B) a feasible rescue or repair can be done in the case of damaged tiles. A Hubble mission would mean designing new methods for inspecting the tiles, which turns out to be very expensive, and in having a second shuttle on the pad ready to launch, which is a logistical nightmare. In addition, that mission itself would undergo the same risks because it couldn’t be saved if it too lost tiles.
For those reasons, the decision to only fly shuttle to ISS was pretty much inevitable, unless the decision was made to recertify the Shuttle (which the CAIB also mandated if the Shuttle is to fly past 2010).
Frankly, the ‘Save-the-hubble’ crowd just hasn’t been very realistic. Does Park want shuttle recertified? If the billions were spent on that, we’d be stuck with that turkey until 2025 or so, and in the meantime it would be sucking up 4-5 billion a year that could be spent on science. Recertifying it makes no sense, especially since there are only three orbiters left and the loss of another one would probably ground the remaining two.
So if you accept that Shuttle must stop flying in 2010, that puts a ton of constraints on the missions you have left to fly. I agree wholeheartedly that the ISS is a giant waste of money, but the fact is that the U.S. has made serious international commitments to completing it. The entire Russian space program relies on it surviving. Frankly, after spending this much money on it, it makes sense to finish it. Perhaps with an inflatable Transhab or two, and a new rescue vehicle (CEV may fill that role), we may still be able to put enough scientists on it to get something done, although I’d agree with you that the science potential of the station was grossly oversold.
But I’m a bit perplexed by Park’s position. He’s against the ISS and the Shuttle, and Bush’s new program calls for the cancellation of both. He should be celebrating that. What does he want, to competely end U.S. manned space capability? Because without Shuttle, the U.S. has nothing. He personally may benefit from flying nothing but robotic missions from here on out, but the hard reality is that if NASA doesn’t fly people into space, it’s going to see a constant budget erosion as it falls off the radar screen.
Then there are political considerations - Florida is a key state, as is Texas. Both of them employ huge numbers of people in the manned space program. Are you going to just turn them loose? Do you really want to lose the knowledge and capability to fly men into space that has been built up over decades?
Bush’s program makes sense. It gets rid of the two biggest budget black-holes in NASA, and replaces them with a modern, realistic, modular manned space capability. And despite the whining of some scientists whos pet projects are under risk, it actually increases the science budget. In the near term, there is one area of space science that gets cut, and that’s the “Mission Earth” stuff. Things like the James Webb telescope, the Jupiter Icy Moons orbiter, new Mars rovers like the 2009 roving laboratory, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and other very, very exciting science programs actually gain significant advantage from the new initiative. In the end, the bottom line is that 12 billion dollars tied up in Shuttle/ISS get moved into science and exploration. It’s a good thing.
Sam, as this article notes, there is considerable debate over whether safety concerns are really paramount in the decision to cancel the Hubble servicing mission. And, I don’t see anything there abut there being a hard limit on the number of missions and what is needed for the ISS that is constraining this.
Well, you can glean as much as I can about exactly what Park wants. My guess is he would want us to extricate ourselves from the ISS, phase out the shuttle but in a way that does allow for repair missions to the Hubble, and then, yes, basically get out of the manned space flight business and focus on unmanned flight and basic science. I honestly don’t know how much he believes it is worthwhile to continue some sort of research program in manned flight to maintain some basic competency there or whether he thinks this isn’t even worthwhile.
I don’t know what you mean when you keep implying that Park may personally benefit from robotic missions and has a vested interest in it. My impression of Park is that he is a physicist who worked in superconductivity before getting more involved in science policy / public affairs and is at this point even semi-retired. I don’t think he has a particular vested personal interest in anything regarding space science. He definitely has strong opinions but they don’t stem from any “vested interests” as I would understand the term.
As for the NASA budget eroding, well, I’d like to see the exact breakdown of money spent now, particularly for the manned space program vs. everything else…But, to be honest, perhaps NASA does need to have an overall leaner budget in these tight times. I think its budget in unmanned missions and science should be larger than it is today, but perhaps it will not be as large as the sum total of its entire budget today. I don’t know. You conservatives are always talking about how spending needs to be cut, and this is one area where I can see some logic in that. However, I certainly don’t want the spending to eat into good science. And, I understand the need to spend some money on promoting/advertising science through the space program. However, for the amount spent on the manned program, they could do a hell of a lot in promoting the unmanned. They could probably beam programs to every school showing the robotic missions and the heroic guys who are directing those robots. Maybe this isn’t quite as glorious as personally walking on the surface of Mars but at least it has the advantage of portraying science more honestly.
Well, you keep expressing this view. And, then there are the articles quoting scientists expressing a very different view, which you characterize as “some scientists whose pet projects are under risk.”
I must admit that I am no expert on the NASA budget, which clearly you have looked at more carefully than me, but to be honest I am going to tend to side with the views of the scientists. And, we have organizations like NAS whose purpose is to evaluate the science rather than letting political and other considerations rule the day. I’d prefer to have them calling the shots more than politicians.
