Re: The decline/whither of NASA?

Straydog wrote: 


On Sat, 26 Nov 2005, BMJ wrote:

Straydog wrote:

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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.


We may never know why he proposed it and if it gets cut we may never know why, either, except for another rationalization: the war is a higher priority, military procurement is a higher, etc.

I remember when Bush, Sr. made a similar proposal in '89, along with the accompanying hoopla. Then Capitol Hill took a look at it and said, "Ya gotta be kidding!" and it slowly faded away.

A lot of projects that NASA undertook were first introduced with great publicity, but either disappeared or ran into problems and were shut down. Among them were the X-33, which was going to lead to single-stage-to-orbit capability, and the proposed Crew Return Vehicle (X-38, I think it was). That's why the space station crews can only go out there on a spacecraft designed forty years ago.

Several months ago, I watched an on-line video presentation made by Burt Rutan. He criticized NASA for its reluctance to follow through on something, lest it be seen to fail. One comment he was made was that, at worst, there would be a smoking hole in the ground because the craft crashed, but it would at least teach something.


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.


My recollections are that the physics community really wanted this. At least the community that would benefit from it.

Some of the high-energy researchers wanted it, but there were a number of dissenters who objected. I remember reading about it in "Science".

Since then, I don't
recall any new initiative for another, bigger "atom smasher." The era of constant growth is over.

After having the supercollider scuttled, there was little chance of anything of that sort ever being built.

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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.


Well, the bureacrasy, at least, wanted it.

It was originally proposed as a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses project as the Soviets had their Salyuts. When the Cold War ended, there was no real reason for the station to exist, but it had become horribly expensive and behind schedule. The only way to salvage it was to collaborate with other countries.

There was always a fraction
of the scientific community that wanted it, anotehr fraction that didn't, and the rest were silent.

The rest are silent because they don't benefit from it. Most of the science that was supposed to be done up there could just as easily have been done on the ground.


  It'll never fulfill its proposed

potential.


A little premature to say that; better to say overbudget and behind schedule.

The crews right now are spending more time in maintenance and repair than in operating the experiments which are now the justification for the space station. By the time it gets finished, if it ever gets finished, it'll be ready to be scrapped.

It would have been cheaper to build several Skylabs and there would have been more to show for it.


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.


Its excellent publicity and advertising.

It's all fine and good, but it won't contribute to cheap and reliable flights which would allow Joe Public to go out there.

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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?


I might want to be careful about that kind of prediction. With the excess dolars owned by China, etc., they might be able, one day, to hire the US, at depressed wages, to build the equipment to their specifications and put their flag on it and launch it from Cape Kennedy and land on whatever and still claim it for themselves.

China, so far, has tended to go it alone, with the Long March boosters and the Shenzhou missions being a good example. I somehow don't think it can afford to risk that sort of money on such a long shot.

Sending spacecraft to Mars has, historically, been a risky proposition. The Soviets were never successful in landing a spacecraft on Mars which operated for a signficant length of time.

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