Obama ends NASA space race with slow road to Mars

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7099244.ece

by gaius • 16 years ago

39 50 16 years ago

timesonline.co.uk

gaius3• 16 years ago

Dude should have committed to delivering something within his Presidency. 2030 is a long way off.

colinplamondon2• 16 years ago

He's the President of the United States, not 'Dude'.

gaius3• 16 years ago

Sorry, "His Majesty", "The Chosen One", "The Messiah" or whatever his adoring fans call him.

"Someone will do something at some point" is just more typical dithering from this lame-duck president. In office but not in power, we say in England.

natrius2• 16 years ago

Lots of people gave their lives for people to be free to call their democratically elected leader "dude". Unless you're interacting with the president in a professional context, it shouldn't matter at all what you call him (barring certain epithets and "Hitler").

jfager• 16 years ago

Because what we all really want from our politicians is a focus on short-term bullshit that they can run the next campaign on.

gaius3• 16 years ago

You want to do anything in the long term, you have to do something in the short term first.

yellowbkpk• 16 years ago

It sure would be nice to have something to get our younger people excited about science. When my parents were kids it was the Apollo mission and astronauts, when I was a kid it was computers and the Internet. My younger sister doesn't get excited about either of those things anymore: why would she? She's been able to sit in front of a computer and video-chat with people across the country and world since she was able to walk.

Obama's plan seems to say "Your newborns might have the space program to be excited about ... when they're 18 years old."

JabavuAdams4• 16 years ago

There's a new space race going on right now. It's being done by private enterprise on budgets from $1M to $100M. Check out:

Armadillo Aerospace

XCOR Aerospace

Masten Space Systems

Unreasonable Rocket

Scaled Composites

SpaceX

Blue Origin

If you want to talk to rocketeers who are actually building hardware, today, check out the arocket mailing list.

We don't need another space race to a destination. We need to build space infrastructure.

It's the difference between trying to get from the east coast of the US to the west with one wagon train, versus building railways and towns. That first wagon might just make it, but it doesn't help the next wagon.

josefresco• 16 years ago

This new space race might as well be a soap box derby in comparison to our military's space budget. While 100M might seem like a lot of space bucks, our Air Force has a roughly $12 billion dollar space budget which dwarfs what we spend on NASA or any of these private space ventures.

I wouldn't worry about space spending, or space infrastructure when our AF is spending oodles to put weapons and craft into space.

lehmannro• 16 years ago

Do you know any concise resource comparing current private space transportation businesses? I'd prefer reading one run-down article over investigating each company individually.

kingkawn• 16 years ago

cmon fellas, this is economics. maybe if you can mount a convincing hoax that Al Qaeda is trying to infiltrate Mars, we'll dump a few billion into it. Or maybe, more plausibly, if China decided to do increasingly elaborate manned-space flights, it might push us to follow suit.

kebaman• 16 years ago

Perhaps saving planet earth and kick starting clean alternative energy will be what excites the current or near future generation. After that, outer space exploration will still beckon. I can only hope I'm around to watch.

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

What I find quite funny about that is that for America, it will take 25 years to get to the Mars. In the meanwhile, my home town has been building a new subway line for the last 25 years and it's still far from being operational.

senki• 16 years ago

You are Hungarian, right? ;)

lispm2• 16 years ago

going to Mars does not get you a new subway

tgerhard• 16 years ago

I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone with nothing to fall back on in a crappy economy. This speech was meant to be encouraging to a broad constituency of a state Obama and the Democrats need for future elections.

As far as science goes, the better-faster-cheaper ethos NASA had with the Mars Rovers should be revived. Robots are a terrific way to get actual science done. That said, the lessons learned from building and working on the ISS would be a good starting point for creating a vehicle to take people to Mars - a place we can eventually make habitable (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm).

lkijuhyghjm2• 16 years ago

So you want faster-better-cheaper using COTS technologies but also want to keep the 1000s of pork-barrel in my state Nasa jobs ?

jerf• 16 years ago

I don't see where tgerhard claimed that was a desirable outcome. I only see tgerhard reporting on the opinion others have from a position of knowledge.

I live in Michigan, half my family works for car companies one way or another, and I was and am still against the auto bailouts. Locally healthy for me, perhaps, but in my opinion still bad policy for the country. (My point not being that I want to debate that point, but that location does not have to dictate opinion.)

tjic• 16 years ago

> I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone

Those aren't jobs - they're welfare checks, taken from working Americans in return for very very very little of value.

I hope that the folks on the Space Coast are right. They can all go get real jobs (even if it's at Target), and the free market space industry can deliver for several orders of magnitude less.

jbooth• 16 years ago

You know, I'm as hopeful about free market space flight as anyone, but as of now, there categorically isn't a free market space industry.

dackmilliken2• 16 years ago

I would much rather hand a "welfare" check to an aerospace engineer than an average Joe.

Also, if the free market space industry does pan out in our lifetimes, I think they would love to have these aerospace guys working for them even if they have such "little of value."

Qz2• 16 years ago

I think the asteroid landing plan is a smart one over the Mars goal. I think we're more obsessed with Mars than is due -- asteroids offer a wealth of potential resources without the immense cost of dropping into and climbing out of a planetary gravity well. Even a landing on one of Mars' fake-moons would be a better choice than Mars itself. Assuming we don't inadvertently open up the gates to hell or something like that...

markbnine• 16 years ago

Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.

Yeah, gravity sucks, but I find a trip to Mars far more interesting than one to an asteroid, E.g. the geology, water resources, valles marineris, the potential for life, colonization. Why not be obsessed?

ugh2• 16 years ago

What’s great about those asteroid landings is that they are relatively easy and nevertheless exciting enough. Much more exciting than the ISS or anything happening in low earth orbit. I think that’s the most important purpose of manned spaceflight. Robots will be able to tell you pretty much everything about geology, water and the potential of life on Mars.

Qz2• 16 years ago

Fake because they're probably just captured asteroids. Counts as a moon, but not quite as cool.

And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spectacular, but if we want to get to mars and stay on Mars, rather than what Apollo did by getting to the Moon and then saying ta-ta for 40 years, then building an incremental and sustainable interplanetary presence is far more important.

I'm not sure what the RoI on the moonshot has been factoring in all the stuff like tech industry stimulus and so on, but I imagine that the RoI on an asteroid settlement and mining plan would be way higher than RoI on a Mars-shot. Probably to the point where the asteroid program could fund the Mars-shot by itself.

I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that the most expensive part of our current program is just getting shit into orbit.

xiaoma• 16 years ago

>Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.

Clearly, they were just photoshopped in.

whyenot• 16 years ago

I've never understood why it's so important for humans to go to mars. We live on a planet where many people still endure tremendous suffering due to starvation, disease and war. In the next 50 years we will very likely have to begin large scale geo-engineering in order to mitigate climate change and ocean acidification. Prestige "science" like sending people to the moon and mars is a luxury.

jeebusroxors• 16 years ago

Where do you stop? I spent 5 bucks on lunch today. Should I have not eaten because people are hungry? What about the computer and internet you typed this on? Should we have not invested in those and spent all the money on curing disease?

lispm2• 16 years ago

that would be great

PostOnce• 16 years ago

I can't believe how insensitive you are. Do you know how many kids that computer you're using could feed? Sell that computer and buy orphan food. Right now. Otherwise you're Hitler.

colinake3• 16 years ago

NASA has shown itself incapable of meeting deadlines or staying within budget on many projects, and Obama is right to turn access to Low Earth Orbit over to commercial companies (on fixed price contracts, not the normal cost plus contracts). We've been building the same boring "get us to orbit" rocket since the 1960s. Wouldn't NASA's leadership (doing science and developing technologies that private companies cannot afford) be better spent on LEO and out? The moon, asteroids, Mars, Phobos, etc.

This is a great plan. It's a Good Thing for the aerospace economy in the long run even if there's going to be some displacement in the meantime.

It also opens the door for entrepreneurial companies - building rockets, engines, payload integrators, whatever - to make money in a way previously not possible. It's impossible to make money when the government is competing with you. This is a great thing for entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, and people everywhere. There's a better chance your kid will be struck by lightning than be a NASA astronaut, but now the door has opened and we'll see private astronaut corps pop up from a few different sources.

Get behind this plan, folks. It's a Good Thing and great for other entrepreneurs, even if we're not building web software. :)

Obama ends NASA space race with slow road to Mars

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