Re: The decline/whither of NASA?

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

A mission to Mars is premature. The money would be better spent on returning to the moon, establishing a base there, and developing the hardware needed to go to Mars up there.

The moon offers a number of advantages.

First of all, it's only three days flight away (provided a back-up vehicle and crew are ready to go) and it's close enough that radio communications are nearly instantaneous. It has a far harsher environment than Mars, complete with vacuum, temperature extremes, lower gravity, and exposure to solar radiation. Nearly anything that can function properly under those conditions can, with some modifications for an atmosphere (such as resistance to dust abrasion), work on Mars.

Until all the bugs are worked out and reliable hardware and methods are available, a mission of Mars would be wasteful and foolhardy.


A lot of people all have their own opinions, based on rationales like above. Up in places like the Whitehouse and NASA headquarters, the rationales are/might include factors irrelevant to rationales like above. There might be: i) national pride,

Which was the reason JFK made his speeches on May 25, 1961 and September 12, 1962.

ii) gotta keep jobs, high tech
jobs, keep nation's spirit focused on futuristic goals, iii) serious budget competition and thus a need to find one or more scapegoats.

GWB most likely proposed the Moon/Mars project with the intention to cut it later.

The
SCSC was axed, what a decade ago, when congress was in, maybe, a bad mood.

The superconducting supercollider was a white elephant from the very beginning. I don't recall that there was sufficient scientific justification to build it. There was always the fear that once it was running the phenomena that it was built to find wouldn't appear.

CTR has been on the skids for a good decade (from two sources
close to CTR). Have there been any good sized mega-projects recently? Maybe 2 decades ago there were a couple of wide aperture optical telescope projects and that's it. Isn't Hubble being abandoned?

Not right away. There's at least one more repair mission scheduled, which should keep it going until the Webb telescope is in orbit.

And,
last time I heard, the ISS is overbudget and behind schedule all due to problems unforseen and all we need is a good piece of budget competition or crisis and it could be
killed. There is some international efforts to fund the ISS, but where will
that be in 10 years?

The orbiting white elephant it always was. It'll never fulfill its proposed potential.

There is also some private efforts to commercialize
space travel (joyrides for the rich; Russia has already flown some millinaires at about $20 mill per shot, and getting NASA very upset about it). 

Those joyrides just manage to cover the costs.

Something tells me that, while we're in a technology (cell 
phones, CPU-embeded gadgets, etc) mushroom, the
scientific "explorations" started decades ago might be in a sunset phase.
Maybe if little green men come out of a UFO that lands in the Rose Garden,
things might spark off again (ala Sputnik), but otherwise --whether y'all
like it or not--the writing might be on the wall.

You guys that don't like the Mars project....how about if India or China gets there and discovers something we want or something significant?

Estimates are that a mission could cost on the order of $300 *billion*. Do you think that either of those countries could afford that sort of money?

Might they claim it for themselves? The moonshot we did, long ago, didn't find much of economic value, but a lot of science was done. If more exploration is done, who knows what will be found. 

That's one reason why people explore.

Sure, I'm not
saying something WILL come out of it, but most explorations in the past turned up a fraction of knowledge of commercial value. So, I'll favor at least spending a fraction of our GDP on this. How big? I'll let the consensus decide that. 
.

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    ... And they should can that dumb ass mission to Mars. ... Until all the bugs are worked out and reliable hardware and methods are available, a mission of Mars would be wasteful and foolhardy. ... i) national pride, ii) gotta keep jobs, high tech jobs, keep nation's spirit focused on futuristic goals, iii) serious budget competition and thus a need to find one or more scapegoats. ... Sure, I'm not saying something WILL come out of it, but most explorations in the past turned up a fraction of knowledge of commercial value. ...
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    ... And they should can that dumb ass mission to Mars. ... i) national pride, ii) gotta keep jobs, high tech jobs, keep nation's spirit focused on futuristic goals, iii) serious budget competition and thus a need to find one or more scapegoats. ... Sure, I'm not saying something WILL come out of it, but most explorations in the past turned up a fraction of knowledge of commercial value. ...
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