You can’t mean to imply that the money spent on NASA is as useful as it is on these other things, can you? Call me insane, but I’d say that the money spent on health and human services is a hell of a lot more than four times as valuable and important than we put into the black hole known as NASA…
Personally, I’d be very happy if we dismantled NASA and used its budget to fund education. Our state, which is admittedly #50 in funding spends 100 million dollars a year and kids manage to have a decent education - undoubtably more money would help improve things in this and every other state (but particularly states like Lousiana and Mississippi). Dividing up the NASA money and putting it towards education youth would probably have a big impact. Better education translates into being better candidates for gainful employment and all that jazz.
So no, I don’t think we should have a federally funded attempt to return to the moon by 2018. 100 Billion dollars is an awful lot to convince skeptical baby boomers that “Yeah huh, we can so go to the moon! See? We did it just now too!”
Fair enough, it is your money and the demands on seem to be endless at the moment. Crying poverty due to $8 billion a year on a revenue stream of $1800 billion rings a little hollow to me though. But put that down to me being a space nut.
Normally I’d be right there with you in blasting MORE government spending…especially with mad Bush at the helm, hell bent seemingly on being the next guns and butter Johnson. He spends money like a drunken liberal with the keys to the national treasury.
I have to say though that $104 billion over 15 years is a pretty paltry sum when we are talking about the US budget…and, assuming it actually gets funded and we actually get folks on the moon in 2018 (two assumptions I’m a bit dubious about to be honest), it would be worth it. It would be worth it from a prestige standpoint, a morale standpoint…a great achievement from a great country. There is still a lot of engineering to learn, and even good science that can be done by humans on the moon (we could answer Sam’s question about ice crystals at the poles and in the deeper shadows in the craters for instance, do mineral surveys to see if there is any economic potential there, etc)…and even if there weren’t any it would be worth it for the US to do this.
My question is, 2018? What the hell? Kennedy said in 1961 we’d be there “before the decade is out.” And we were. Even while developing a program from scratch. Including design and construction of the VAB? So, 44 years later, in a period with the most explosive advancement of technology ever seen, it’s gonna take us 13 years to get there? Shit. Plan oughtta be scrapped on that basis alone.
We’ve LONG past the point where taxes should have been raised to pay for Bush’s extravagance.
I’m all for a return to the moon. My personal pet scheme would be a lunar-based observatory. A lunar observatory could be built to surpass the Hubbell without worry of it falling out of orbit. You wouldn’t need people there once it was built, just use solar or nuclear power and transmit the data back to earth. I’d put it just past the near edge of the far side so that the earth wouldn’t obscure the field of vision.
It looks like a good plan to me. Remember, NASA is going to get that money anyway. This is better use of their budget than to continue flying the Shuttle. Plus, American companies are spending less of R&D, so this will be a shot in the arm to the science and engineering communities, and that’s what produces spinoff technologies.
If you’re worried about the deficit–and I am very worried about it–you should call for the immediate withdrawl from Iraq. Next to the Iraq war, this is pocket change. in fact, the Iraq war taught me a valuable lesson: there’s ALWAYS money for anything a government wants to do. It just has to want to do it bad enough.
So what? Nobody expects the economy as a whole to make money off this. The point is to spend the money we have on something worthwhile.
This particular project is not about the science, except to the extent of developing better abilities to send people into space.
National pride can lead to a lot of bad things. Why not channel it toward something good?
Not at all. If China, or any other country, puts a man on the moon, it will gain immediate and substantial prestige as a worldwide economic power. People will observe that others are now doing what the U.S. can no longer afford to do.
I also disagree with your characterization of Apollo as a “stunt”. On the contrary, in 500 years, the Iraq war, terrorism, Katrina, Vietnam, Watergate, etc. will be mere footnotes, of interest only to historians. But everyone will know that 1969 was the year people walked on the moon and that 202x was the year people walked on Mars, just like they know Columbus landed in the New World in 1492.
I am sorry to say that many people probably share your views. Unfortunately, the national character seems to be turning from optimism to naysaying and cynicism.
I would submit that the current generation has nothing to prove to the baby boomers, who were in high school during Apollo and who, I predict, will come to be known as the generation that spent the Medicare trust fund on Viagra and facelifts.
The Hell? I paruse the JPL web sites on Cassini-Huygens and the Mars rovers every day. My screen saver is the best of the Hubble. I voraciously read about the CMB, GRBs, quasars, magnetars, cosmic rays and black holes. I ponder questions about the origins of life and if it arose on other planets. I’m deeply curious about the earliest moments of creation and the fact that we don’t quite know what about 95% of the universe is made of.
I think the cancellation of the SSC project was a national disgrace, and our support of the ISS a gargantuan folly. Gravity probes and a mission to Pluto potentially face the axe. The Hubble may be scuttled, and the best HEP and applied nuclear reasearch is now or soon will be going on in other countries. Science gets short shrift as it is, and suddenly Bush wants to take what’s left of that narrow slice of pie and put people on the Moon to do little but walk around. The Apollo Moonshots were a stunt, plain and simple, no matter what esteem people put in them, and I completely disagree that national tragedies like Vietnam, which cost tens of thousands of American lives, while vanish from our collective memory while we bask in the glow of technological grandiosity. What you call cynicism is simply an entirely different set of priorities and a desire to explore bigger questions in my lifetime than “Can we get this meatware to Mars and back alive?”.
The money is planned to be redirected from the currrent shuttle/ISS programs, not NSF or the space science portion of NASA’s budget.
Maybe it would make sense to peel the space science portion of NASA off, and place it into the NSF’s budget. Of course then NSF’s would grow from $5 to $10 billion a year, and open up that money to every sort of basic science request. Not just those associated with space.
I don’t debate the accuracy of your reporting, but I do seriously question the sanity of those who claim we can rebuild our manned space program on the cheap after the monstrous cost overruns of the Shuttle and ISS programs.
Thats nice and all. But I ponder the questions of engineering and technology that will allow humans to expand into space. Not for science, the science will come when we go there IMHO, but because there are vast resources out there, unlimited possibilities for the human race to expand into…for the betterment of all humans. Even if we are limited by physics and logistics to just this one solar system the shear amount of resources out there are staggering. Yeah, I know that we can’t get to them now…we have to take baby steps, to push our limits, to learn more than we did before about how to support the ‘meatware’ in that environment. If we sit on our ass and merely send probes out we will never get there at all…because there will be no push in new technology, no engineering problems solved and knowledge gained. There will always be something more pressing internally to spend our money on.
Apollo moonshots were an achievement, no matter how the naysayers try and revise history to fit into their own world view. There were technological feats unrivaled in human history…and you wish to relagate them to ‘stunts’. Going back to the moon now would also be an achievement, there is still good science there that can be done, and we will learn more than we know now from an engineering perspective.
Long after Vietnam and the 60’s are forgotten the achievement of the US in putting a man on the moon will still be remembered (just like the country that sends ‘meatware’ to Mars will be remembered)…just as Spain and Portugal are remembered for the exploration of the new world. Only historians rememeber the issues that were important to Spain during those days, the things that citizens like you may have thought were more important than exploration, more necessary to spend their money on. Today though everyone remembers Columbus and remembers that Spain was the country that opened up the new world.
You couldn’t have stated more clearly than this that you don’t get it.
shrug. The current budget for human spaceflight is what it is. Since that portion of NASA’s budget is not going to be eliminated, what could be better than the development of modular, human rated hardware that can get us out of LEO?
We need to spend more than $100 billion on a decade-long NASA project that, by your own admission, isn’t even about science? This makes it sound like a worse idea than it did before! I’d like a reason to get behind this, I really would. The way I see it at present, a lot of NASA projects exist just to exist, and the best science is coming not from sending people into space, but from the telescopes and satellites and probes that have told us a lot about the universe. If sending more people to the moon would bring us anything of similar value, that’d be one thing. But now you’re saying it’s not even about science, it’s about pride we need to regain for something we have already done. Why did we stop sending people to the moon in the first place?
So we’re now in the same space race with China that we were with the Soviet Union 40 years ago? To do something we’ve already done? That not only fails to inspire, if anything it makes the feat - both in 1969 and 2018 - seem less worthwhile.
I think you may be conflating the importance or significance of an event with its memorability. I don’t claim to know which is the right one to apply here.
Why not eliminate all of it, and divert that money to better uses, rather than using that money to start a program that will inevitably suck up more money from the money pie, as all previous manned space programs have amply demonstrated their propensity for doing?
What do you think is more memorable today to the majority of the public? The wars for independance by the Spanish against the Moores, or Columbus discovering the new world? The moon shot in '69 will be remembered 500 years from now…while the Iraqi war will probably be relagated to the status held by the American occupation in the Philippines is today…i.e. I doubt many folks will even know anything about it at all.
We don’t have to do the Mercury and Gemini programs all over again. That’s trivial stuff compared to what the Space Shuttle does now.
We don’t have to do the Ranger and Surveyor programs all over again. We’ve already got the moon mapped every which way.
Effectively, we’re starting from a point analogous to 1966, not 1961: we’re trying to do what the 1960s program did in three years, only we’re saying let’s do it in 13.
With the Shuttle, we’d get a little return on our money (though admittedly not much: We should absolutely be looking to replace the Shuttle). With the Moon-Mars initiative, we’d get no return at all.
Mind you, I’m not being a cynical killjoy here. I’m enough of a romantic that I would consider humans on the Moon again or on Mars to be a return on investment. It’d be great if we had a program in place which could get us there.
But we don’t. NASA does not have the funding to achieve either of its goals. And note that I’m talking about the entire NASA budget, because that’s where the funding for Moon-Mars is coming from. It’s not just coming from the Shuttle and ISS programs, it’s coming from everything. We’ve managed to save the Hubble from the axe, but it’s still not being maintained, and every other science mission is getting the axe. And to what purpose? We’re not going to make any real progress towards the Moon with the budget we have, either. And eventually (after Bush has left office and will no longer bear the blame for it), the politicians are going to realize it, too. At which point the funding for Moon-Mars (which will be NASA’s entire budget) will be cut, too, and we’ll no longer have NASA at all.
The moon mission itself ain’t gonna produce any commercially viable spinoffs. It is from the pure research being done at the NASA operated laboratories (like Ames & Glenn & Langley) where beneficial tech transfer will come. Applied research is just that, research undertaken to solve a very specific problem - and that’s the type needed for a(nother) moon mission.
OK, but how many people remember who was the second person to successfully lead an expedition to the New World?
That’s how historically memorable the next Moon mission will be.
There’s nowhere to go out there, and there’s nothing to do once we get there, other than to say, “look, I got this hunk of human meat there without killing it.” Why bother?
What I get out of this is that it’s just another distraction from dealing with the problems of real life. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were a pretty good distraction, until Iraq kinda bogged down. (Bad, bad Iraq!) Now we’re going to go back to the Moon, and then to Mars.
It’s starting to look an awful lot like bread and circuses. And I’m wondering if that isn’t the point: give people something to say, “Ooh, shiny!” about, so they’ll forget that their job can be moved overseas anytime.
Nah, let’s fix our problems here. Let’s be freakin’ grownups, rather than kids wanting a new toy to play with while they don’t do their homework.
