The "New" NASA

Sgt Barone

Sgt Barone

CAGiversary!
Recently, the Obama administration cancelled the constellation project that was going to send manned spaceflight to the next generation. It was just that this shift will result in 7000 job cuts for the people involved in this program.

It was done in the name of saving a few billion dollars.

How is this small expence cut good for the scientific world and the morale of our nation.

It is sad to see something this iconic be thrown away.

Tell me what you think.
 
[quote name='Sgt Barone']Recently, the Obama administration cancelled the constellation project that was going to send manned spaceflight to the next generation. It was just that this shift will result in 7000 job cuts for the people involved in this program.

It was done in the name of saving a few billion dollars.

How is this small expence cut good for the scientific world and the morale of our nation.

It is sad to see something this iconic be thrown away.

Tell me what you think.[/QUOTE]

lol... well it sucks, but at this time I think we should stop worrying about going to the moon or mars because we need to fix our own problems.
 
He may have cut the constellation program, but on the bright side, he just created 7000 new members of the tea party movement ;)
 
Feel sorry that these people lost their jobs, but let Richard Branson take the bill for for pushing space flight forward. Nasa uses way to much money for the benefits they put forward. In my personal opinion.
 
[quote name='cindersphere']Feel sorry that these people lost their jobs, but let Richard Branson take the bill for for pushing space flight forward. Nasa uses way to much money for the benefits they put forward. In my personal opinion.[/QUOTE]

Remember that time they helped shoot down that satellite? I'd like them to have the money to do that, thank you.
 
[quote name='Chuplayer']Remember that time they helped shoot down that satellite? I'd like them to have the money to do that, thank you.[/QUOTE]
Remember how it was the Navy that supplied all the equipment and shot the missile?
 
[quote name='cindersphere']Remember how it was the Navy that supplied all the equipment and shot the missile?[/QUOTE]

10 bucks says NASA technology made it all possible.
 
I'm not against space exploration for scientific and military gain.

But let's get some of our debt knocked out of the way before we start blowing money on luxuries.
 
[quote name='Chuplayer']10 bucks says NASA technology made it all possible.[/QUOTE]

And you think that is a good investment of 17 billion dollars a year?
 
hmm, i seem to recall in our election thread that a lot of people clamored that they would lean (in some cases heavily) to the presidential candidate that supported the sciences (nasa came up more than once). so this is a little amusing.
 
I am not advocating spending less on science, I just happen to think that NASA is horribly inefficient. NASA does provide us with great amounts of knowledge, however the manned space programs are horribly inefficient.
 
I really don't like seeing cuts to NASA. I see spaceflight as important to our country. It does seem like we've been letting it go down hill.

I've heard there have been a lot of problems with the Constellation program with it going over budget and issues with the design. I think part of that was Congress wanting changes to the program and just micromanaging it more than they should. We should just give NASA a goal and let the engineers do their job.

If we have to cut the Constellation program, I think NASA should be focusing a lot of its effort into research. We've been doing the large rockets for a while now, but it is still costs a lot to send stuff out there. I think I've heard numbers in thousands of dollars per pound to launch stuff. We need to be looking into better propulsion systems. Let the private companies do the routine stuff like launching satellites. NASA is better suited to doing the long term projects that require the large R&D efforts that private companies aren't interested in funding.
 
I never really saw the point of another trip to the moon. I say that NASA take a break from flights and spend time on research for future craft. Something a little safer and more cost efficient than the shuttles.
 
If NASA isnt getting the job done why spend more money doing the same thing? Private company and Russia have some success with space tourism. When space travel becomes affordable for the average person, it is going to due to private companies, not NASA
 
[quote name='JolietJake']I never really saw the point of another trip to the moon. I say that NASA take a break from flights and spend time on research for future craft. Something a little safer and more cost efficient than the shuttles.[/QUOTE]

1. Helium 3.
2. Lunar Solar Power system.
3. Backup reserve and test colony for humanity.
4. Cheaper launch platform.

NASA lost its way when it left the moon. The Space Shuttle is the most expensive way to ship goods into space on purpose.
 
[quote name='RAMSTORIA']hmm, i seem to recall in our election thread that a lot of people clamored that they would lean (in some cases heavily) to the presidential candidate that supported the sciences (nasa came up more than once). so this is a little amusing.[/QUOTE]

I'm not sure what Obama is doing that would imply he is not supporting the sciences. It's not like he's saying fuck space, he's saying fuck manned space flights, lets focus on something else.
 
Houston sure is pissed. Eff em. It's rich people welfare. Those jerks haven't done anything worth writing home about in a long time.
 
I'm not a fan of it personally. I get that times are tight though, so I can understand the cut given the economic climate. But I hate seeing any cuts that set back science and the progress of human knowledge in anyway. At the same time, I'm not sure manned flights are crucial on that front vs. building fancier probes, doing more research on faster speeds and better communication technology to get probes further out into our solar system and beyond in a timely manner etc.
 
I'm okay with NASA cuts.

I'd greatly prefer widespread demilitarization, certain drug decriminalization and prison deinstitutionalization combined w/ rehabilitation efforts. But NASA cuts aren't going to cause me outrage.
 
Exactly, there's a lot of other cuts that could be made (our ridiculous defense spending being the prime example) etc. I think could and should be done before any cuts that affect science and advancing human knowledge.

But I'm not going to get outraged over cutting funding for manned flights by Nasa, as we're not going to learn much from that anytime soon until they improve technology and find ways for much faster space travel.

Research that, make better probes and rovers to learn more about planets other than Mars etc.

Get back on manned flights when we can get to Mars and beyond much quicker than we can with current technology.
 
[quote name='dmaul1114']Exactly, there's a lot of other cuts that could be made (our ridiculous defense spending being the prime example) etc. I think could and should be done before any cuts that affect science and advancing human knowledge.

But I'm not going to get outraged over cutting funding for manned flights by Nasa, as we're not going to learn much from that anytime soon until they improve technology and find ways for much faster space travel.

Research that, make better probes and rovers to learn more about planets other than Mars etc.

Get back on manned flights when we can get to Mars and beyond much quicker than we can with current technology.[/QUOTE]

I'm paraphrasing something I saw on the Science channel a few months back: The most advanced rovers and robots take six months to perform the research a human could perform in 5 minutes. I know that is an exaggeration, but it is closer to truth than falsehood. Robots are horribly inferior to boots on the ground.

As far as Mars, you only have to buy a one way ticket for the astronauts.

Mars' atmosphere has enough to it that you can generate fuel for the return trip. Gear to examine the surface, a return vehicle to reach Mars orbit and any living quarters sent on the first trip. Once enough of the gear is confirmed to have survived, the astronauts and backup gear and food can be sent on the second trip.

The Moon? That's a no brainer and it only takes 3 days to reach. The dust on the moon is rich in oxygen and you have a nearly unlimited supply of energy to boil it out.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17931-blasted-into-space-from-a-giant-air-gun.html

The trick is to fire very large and frozen blocks of ice into orbit and have a much smaller rocket ferry the blocks to the moon. Then, the cost of manning the moon drops to manageable levels.
 
Oh of course. There are unquestionable benefits to sending men in space, and like I said I don't like the cuts.

But they have to cut some stuff to ease up on criticism for the spending on the stimulus, health care etc., so I can see the logic behind it.

And I do think NASA could better spend money on improving space craft, speeding up travel etc. Both to get people to Mars faster, and to get proves further out in a timely manner etc. The latter is probably of more interest to most people as the questions everyone wants answered are things about what's beyond our solar system, how big is the universe, is their life out there etc. which can't be answered very likely by sending humans to Mars or the Moon.
 
Couldn't we do cuts elsewhere? NASA doesn't have a huge budget to begin with. How much money would a 1% cut to the DOD give NASA and the other science programs? NASA's budget probably doesn't even equal 1% of the DOD's budget.
 
[quote name='erehwon']Couldn't we do cuts elsewhere? NASA doesn't have a huge budget to begin with. How much money would a 1% cut to the DOD give NASA and the other science programs? NASA's budget probably doesn't even equal 1% of the DOD's budget.[/QUOTE]

Given the table posted the other day put US defense spending at $700 billion, a 1% cut would a be $7 billion that could go elsewhere.
 
[quote name='erehwon']Couldn't we do cuts elsewhere? NASA doesn't have a huge budget to begin with. How much money would a 1% cut to the DOD give NASA and the other science programs? NASA's budget probably doesn't even equal 1% of the DOD's budget.[/QUOTE]

Sorry, Obama can't do that because the Hannity of the world will paint him as weakening America.
 
[quote name='IRHari']Sorry, Obama can't do that because the Hannity of the world will paint him as weakening America.[/QUOTE]

Since when did Obama care about Hannity's opinion of his policies? :D
 
[quote name='cindersphere']I am not advocating spending less on science, I just happen to think that NASA is horribly inefficient. NASA does provide us with great amounts of knowledge, however the manned space programs are horribly inefficient.[/QUOTE]


true, but putting the manned space program in the hands of private companies who have only had a handful of test flights is also not very efficient
 
[quote name='fatherofcaitlyn']I'm paraphrasing something I saw on the Science channel a few months back: The most advanced rovers and robots take six months to perform the research a human could perform in 5 minutes. I know that is an exaggeration, but it is closer to truth than falsehood. Robots are horribly inferior to boots on the ground.[/QUOTE]


Humans are more efficient at research but it's less efficient to send humans into space. The whole water, oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, food, exercise thing makes sending people into space way more expensive.
 
[quote name='Sgt Barone']true, but putting the manned space program in the hands of private companies who have only had a handful of test flights is also not very efficient[/QUOTE]
So we should continue to fund an inefficient program to keep someone else from funding an inefficient program?
 
As somebody who gets woken up at three in the morning with all of my windows shaking like the house is going to come down...I don't care.
 
[quote name='depascal22']Humans are more efficient at research but it's less efficient to send humans into space. The whole water, oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, food, exercise thing makes sending people into space way more expensive.[/QUOTE]

That's your tradeoff. If you want to accomplish a lot of work, you're going to have send the best tools. The human brain is still the best tool out there. One thing that NASA should be perfecting is how to induce hibernation with hydrogen sulfide. With it, you can slow somebody's body functions to 1/60th of their normal rate. On a trip to Mars, you'll only need enough air, food and water for a week. Assuming the Moon landings were real, we've already done it. The astronauts would be effectively turned "off" during the trips, but real science gets done at the destination instead of watching a golf cart fumble in the sand.
 
who cares about that no-name project that no one heard about? Obama is diverting the funds to send a man to Mars, which is far more uplifting and symbolic like what JFK did with the moon. Obama truly is the next JFK and the greatest President our nation will ever have.
 
I'm gonna step in a clarify a few things:

1. NASA got a budget increase - +1.2 Billion/year - going from ~$18.6B to ~$19.8B

2. Constellation would have worked...eventually, but the operational costs were greater than that of Shuttle by a significant amount. Even today, other NASA programs were being gutted budget-wise to feed the beast. It wasn't the wisest use of funds, particularly when a Mars mission would require 1x Ares I and 7-8x Ares V just to be feasible.

3. NASA needs the R&D done to make future exploration possible. We currently do not have the radiation shielding, propulsion, or life support feasible of making it to Mars and back alive or in a reasonable time (6 month trip just to reach it). Trips to the ISS or the Moon are either short enough or still within the Earth's magnetic field to protect us from radiation from the Sun, but a trip to Mars would currently be lethal.

4. Which brings us back to further issues on Constellation. The vehicle was constantly changing over the 5-6 years it was being built, resulting in lesser capabilities and higher costs/delays. It is wiser to do a few years of R&D first to finalize those necessary technologies, then build the vehicle around that. Not build the vehicle first then modify it later to accommodate changing technology.

5. As for destination, it's NASA's job to explore, not settle. That means the likely of a permanent base on any surface more likely to come from a commercial entity than NASA, in my opinion. As for harvesting resources from the Moon, the fusion technology is still several decades away from making that viable, as well as the technology to harvest large quantities of it and ship it back home for processing.

~HotShotX
 
People need to get over a need for a return trip. Let's just make it a suicide mission. Explorers in the past had no guarantees of survival. Why should future explorers?
 
[quote name='JolietJake']Expendables 2: Expendable in Space.[/QUOTE]

Would you rather die at the age of 40 being one of the first terraformers on Mars or die at the age of 60 being denied medical coverage or die at the age of 50 being to close to a nuclear blast?

If they'd strap my ass to a rocket and guarantee my family would have no debts and the kids would have college paid for, I would die a happy man 100 million miles away from this rock. It beats tech support.
 
I'm still holding out for cryogenics. When I'm living on mars centuries from now I'll be sure to celebrate your contribution. ;)
 
[quote name='fatherofcaitlyn']Would you rather die at the age of 40 being one of the first terraformers on Mars or die at the age of 60 being denied medical coverage or die at the age of 50 being to close to a nuclear blast?

If they'd strap my ass to a rocket and guarantee my family would have no debts and the kids would have college paid for, I would die a happy man 100 million miles away from this rock. It beats tech support.[/QUOTE]

Very noble of you, but you'd still likely die of radiation poisoning on your (currently) 6 month one-way trip to Mars.

You can't terraform when your dead.

~HotShotX
 
[quote name='fatherofcaitlyn']http://www.astronautix.com/craft/marirect.htm

Other than the dubious http://origin.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,344491,00.html, do you have proof the trip to Mars would be lethal?[/QUOTE]

I stand corrected, as my source does not state that a Mars trip would be lethal due to radiation poisoning, only "potentially injurious to humans".

Aside from that, your Astronautix entry is 13 years old, and does not mention anything on radiation shielding. Furthermore, I did not mention that a vehicle was not capable of reaching Mars, just that the technology today would make it so slow and burdensome that it would take months and break the bank, when more R&D could break that down to weeks and reduce costs.

As for proof, I read legitimate sources:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/396093main_HSF_Cmte_FinalReport.pdf

See Chapter 7.0: "Critical Technologies for Sustainable Exploration"
Subchapter 7.1: "Fundamental Unknowns"

I'd actually recommend reading the entire 157 pages of the report. It's what the a majority of the President's decisions were based upon.

~HotShotX
 
OK.

"(1) the effects of prolonged exposure to solar and galactic cosmic rays on the human body; (2) the impact on humans of prolonged periods of weightlessness followed by a sudden need to function, without assistance, in a relatively strong gravitational
field; and (3) the psychological effects on individuals facing demanding tasks in extreme isolation for well over year with no possibility for direct outside human intervention."

1. Zubrin calculated the radiation would increase a person's chance of cancer (a deadly yet curable disease when caught early) over the course of that person's lifetime by 1%.

2. Zubrin wrote in Practical Methods for Near-Term Piloted Mars Missions that "Artificial gravity can be provided to the crew on the way out to Mars by tethering off the burnt out HLV upper stage and spinning up at 1 rpm." If humans require greater than 36% Earth's gravity to survive, we're boned. However, we won't find that out sitting here.

3. The crew would have near constant radio and video contact with people. The experiment of people trapped in an object the size of the mission craft for months was completed years ago. Guess what? Their biggest problem was adjusting their eyesight to seeing more than 40 feet out.

Explorers in the past had it far worse. If the astronauts were selected from enlisted men instead of officers, we'd already have generation ships a decade or so past the Kuiper belt.

Drop the expectations of long life or a return trip and you'll have impressive results.
 
I have never understood why we are exploring the moon when we have not even managed to finish exploring our own fucking planet. Honestly, most of the ocean is still unexplored and some scientsists think there is actually a huge body of water under the crust of the ocean...I say think because no one has actually be able to explore the idea.....yet we need to put a second man on the moon and a man on an asteroid by 2025! Seems like a brilliant idea to me, lets blast people onto barren rocks when we have possible resources unexplored right here on earth...
 
Let me dog this some more.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/17feb_radiation/
Posted on February 17, 2004...

Here's the meat of the article:

"We're not sure," says Cucinotta. According to a 2001 study of people exposed to large doses of radiation--e.g., Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors and, ironically, cancer patients who have undergone radiation therapy--the added risk of a 1000-day Mars mission lies somewhere between 1% and 19%. "The most likely answer is 3.4%," says Cucinotta, "but the error bars are wide."
The odds are even worse for women, he adds. "Because of breasts and ovaries, the risk to female astronauts is nearly double the risk to males."

Researchers who did the study assumed the Mars-ship would be built "mostly of aluminum, like an old Apollo command module," says Cucinotta. The spaceship's skin would absorb about half the radiation hitting it. "If the extra risk is only a few percent we're OK. We could build a spaceship using aluminum and head for Mars." (Aluminum is a favorite material for spaceship construction, because it's lightweight, strong, and familiar to engineers from long decades of use in the aerospace industry.)
"But if it's 19% our 40something astronaut would face a 20% + 19% = 39% chance of developing life-ending cancer after he returns to Earth. That's not acceptable."

I would argue shaving 20 years off the life of a handful of people to push the human race into intrastellar colonization is better than the millions of person-years shaved off annually by private insurance companies or McDonald's for corporate profits.

Are there any results yet? It's only been six years.

The vast majority of radiation is absorbed in transit. If you remove the possibility of a return trip, you remove a lot of the radiation risk.
 
I like Nasa's idea of capturing an asteroid and putting into an orbit around Earth to see if it's practically viable to harvest it for raw materials.

These budget cuts are more than just ending manned space missions. If you stop doing something for a generation you have no one to teach the next generation how to do it and you have to play catchup for many years. This was one of the main reasons we were so late to the game in terms of jet engine technology and most likely will be the same for Helium 3 if it becomes viable. If, god forbid, Helium 3 is a viable energy source and Russia or China controls the only ways to harvest it we're fucked economically as a country.
 
[quote name='MSI Magus']I have never understood why we are exploring the moon when we have not even managed to finish exploring our own fucking planet. Honestly, most of the ocean is still unexplored and some scientsists think there is actually a huge body of water under the crust of the ocean...I say think because no one has actually be able to explore the idea.....yet we need to put a second man on the moon and a man on an asteroid by 2025! Seems like a brilliant idea to me, lets blast people onto barren rocks when we have possible resources unexplored right here on earth...[/QUOTE]

How is that water under the ocean floor fundamentally different than water above the ocean floor?

Is there helium 3 on the ocean floor?

Will inhabiting the ocean floor protect us from the next extinction event?

Can the ocean floor be terraformed?

There is some merit in exploring the ocean. If a submersible can handle hundreds of times surface pressure, handle hundreds of degrees Celsius and keep the pilot safe, it would be perfect for Venus. The standard submersible would be perfect for Europa right now.
 
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