Nasa is dead.

[Wapiti]

Well, kinda. It will certainly be different. No more moon missions, no more manned missions? The Ares 1 rocket will be scrapped, I believe 9billion already spent on its development. Privatization of spacecraft, commercial, low orbit?

I'm not sure what to make of all this, the overall NASA budget is going up but where's the money going. Privatization sounds good in a way to me for creating jobs but the article states that 1700 jobs will be created yet 7000 cut when the Shuttle is retired. Sure, likely more jobs will be created elsewhere but 7000? And what about the experience of the people we will be losing? If the budget is increasing, where's the money going? Is it more expensive to oversee private industry? If so, why do it in this economy? Sounds like a diversion of funds of some sort to me.

One article here (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.), I'm sure there are more.

Quote from article.
"It means that essentially the U.S. has decided that they're not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future. The path that they're on with this budget is a path that can't work," Griffin said, anticipating the Monday announcement.

Now what does this really mean? The space program has been key in development of new technologies, integrated circuits for one, many more. Will this delay further breakthrough developments? I don't what all to make of it yet. Your thoughts?

[Shauru]

Well I would be tempted to say this may be temporary due to economic restrictions, but something tells me once we stop bankrolling NASA and the private guys get in, we may decide it's better off that way. I mean the companies have shown they can certainly do it cheaper.

I think the delay may occur, but as soon as the companies really get involved I think we may actually see things, well, skyrocket forward as far as technological advancements.

[Undead Bonzi]

That is sad and terrible news. One of the few remaining government programs that was actually intended to increase our knowledge and science base and now it is being scrapped? I generally don't like being alarmist but this news really disturbs me and it is hard for me to say exactly why. Is it just that we seem to finally have admitted that there is no future in space beyond more comercial satelites and tourist attractions for the uber wealthy?

The US got into space to remain in the lead in the tech race with the USSR and we have remained because it was needed to maintain parity with emerging tech powers. The fact that we are handing that off and leting private corporations and other countries take the leading hand with that implies that this may be another footnote in the story of waning US dominance. Don't get me wrong, I have no problems allowing private companies into such fields, but I don't see it as wise to just step down rather than scale back.

Where does this leave the Hubble Telescope when it needs fixed? The International Space Station? Those recent probes sent to Mars and the Moon?

[cannotseethe]

something tells me once we stop bankrolling NASA and the private guys get in, we may decide it's better off that way. I mean the companies have shown they can certainly do it cheaper.

NASA has frequently funded truly speculative scientific research. I strongly doubt that would continue if its funding were privatized. Frankly, I think we'd see something like what happened when media organizations were bought by private companies: NASA as a tool of some corporate interest. In other words: suck.

Disappointing news.

[Syntax]

Sending people into space is costly. We need stupid things like air and water and food. Robots, on the other hand, are becoming more and more viable alternatives. There's no longer any need to send people into space or to the moon, especially when all we did the first time was dick around in a modified dune-buggy. Good riddance NASA, there's a new guy on the block: To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.


Which isn't to say that I hope we never return to human space flight, rather, I just hate seeing that as the ends rather than the means to some more important ends. To an extent. Kinda. Actually it just occurred to me that it was pretty useful to have people in space when we fucked up Hubble the first time, so there's a bit of a gap in my argument...

[Aronnax]

Manned space flight isn't particularly important to exploration, it's sexy but not critical. Robots are cheaper, people don't get that upset when they're destroyed in an accident and you don't have to bring them back home.

The role of NASA is to deal with research and exploration that's too expensive for private enterprise to even consider touching. For those who think such things are a colossal waste of money: private enterprise is only able to consider low orbit rocketry because they're copying off of NASA's R&D. If we waited for someone to figure rocketry out from the ground up we'd still be waiting on satellites.

There's a lot of exploration work that needs to be done. I hope private enterprise takes over LEO launches, NASA has better things to do than play satellite babysitter. There's still a need for manned flight but it's mostly for orbital facility maintenance. We should bring back manned exploration when things like long term habitation become more practical, which is still a ways off.

[Shauru]

NASA has frequently funded truly speculative scientific research. I strongly doubt that would continue if its funding were privatized. Frankly, I think we'd see something like what happened when media organizations were bought by private companies: NASA as a tool of some corporate interest. In other words: suck.

Disappointing news.

While I agree it isn't ideal. Corporate interests are undoubtedly going to involve cheaper, faster, better ways to explore space. Most of the NASA innovations came out of trying to cope with the problems of space living. Something companies are going to also be faced with.

It's ashame, but it's not like NASA is the last best place for this research. There are plenty of independent scientific research facilities and universities. And places like the LHC really are probably not going to have anything to offer corporate greed.

[XMark]

My hopes of seeing Moon and Mars colonies in my lifetime are fading :(

Although, with the private sector coming more into play, things might even go faster. I'll be more confident in that whenever SpaceX finally gets that Falcon 9 rocket launched.

[Tristan]

I'm really disappointed, too. NASA has clear military and political gains and unclear economic gains, and it qualifies broadly as "military research." Nasa was also a branch of military spending that sworn enemies of military spending find less objectionable.

And then there's the fundamentals about space exploration. Space is the final frontier, and all that. We're living creatures, and we need to work on probing beyond the planet and extending life as far as possible. Has the Earth not practically given us that as homework? The death of the Sun may not come for several billions of years, but life will want to have some satisfactory arrangements by then to offset the inconvenience. NASA played its own little role, but there is much yet to do.

[Night Runner]

My hopes of seeing Moon and Mars colonies in my lifetime are fading :(
There will be colonies, but they'll be speaking Mandarin, not English... It's strange, really: our space program died so suddenly and quietly, and China won the space race by default.

[rahdam]

Practical consequence: Will kids still want to be astronauts when they grow up?
Consider it a microcosm for the loss of wonder we face.

[SeaCzar]

Do not be so quick to jump to conclusions quite yet, This is incredibly short sighted. Congress may yet find the funds for Nasa. I sure as fuck would rather see $$$ go to Nasa than those greedy bastards on Wall Street.

[cannotseethe]

It's ashame, but it's not like NASA is the last best place for this research.

It's not so much about NASA-as-institution as it about NASA-as-funding-source. And no, unfortunately there are not very many funding sources in the US that are like NASA. They're slowly disappearing.

NASA has funded research that was 40 years out. That is, stuff that no one thought would become at all practical for at least 40 years, if ever. Very high risk/high reward stuff. No corporation is going to fund research like that. There are few bodies left in the US that will fund stuff like that, so losing one (which seems to be happening with NASA) is a big deal.

The perception that the only value of an organization like NASA lies in making cheap space flight is unfortunately short-sighted in my opinion.

[zippikay]

the government should just proclaim that there is a huge deposit of oil in mars, that way we might have private firms bidding to get a piece of the action in NASA...

[thod]

What use are Moon and Mars bases? You have some people saying we could build interstellar ark ships and send colonists to other stars. Yet why? You would pay the costs and never see them again. You would not be selected to live on the moon. All you would get is a bill. Anything that needs to be done should be done by robots which can do it cheaper.

I understand the monkey dream of finding a new territory, uninhabited by other monkeys, where he can find food and breed offspring. That is all this other planet thing is, something from our hind brains. Maybe that's why we don't see Aliens, they have evolved the desire away.

[Doppelbock]

NASA isn't dead. Even if Obama's proposed NASA FY11 budget goes through (and it's a long way through Congress for that to happen), it's still an overall plus-up. It just means some major changes in how manned spaceflight is done. And these aren't all bad ideas either.

I currently work on the Constellation program, at JSC. If this goes through I will either get a new piece of work, or worst case will have to change jobs. But I think in the long run we'll be better off without Ares-I and with commercial launch capabilities, and with the investments that Prezbo has proposed in heavy lift capabilities, in-space refueling, etc. I think of this as one step backwards so we can then move forward much more aggressively.

[Aronnax]

It's not so much about NASA-as-institution as it about NASA-as-funding-source. And no, unfortunately there are not very many funding sources in the US that are like NASA. They're slowly disappearing.

NASA has funded research that was 40 years out. That is, stuff that no one thought would become at all practical for at least 40 years, if ever. Very high risk/high reward stuff. No corporation is going to fund research like that. There are few bodies left in the US that will fund stuff like that, so losing one (which seems to be happening with NASA) is a big deal.

The perception that the only value of an organization like NASA lies in making cheap space flight is unfortunately short-sighted in my opinion.

According to that article NASA's funding is being slightly increased and they're getting out of the business of cheap, manned space flight.

It seems to me like that would leave more money for probe based exploration and R&D in propulsion and robotics. The only loss I see associated with taking people off the agenda is a PR loss.

[HappyToBeMe]

Greed and science don't go together.
There goes my dream of flying to the Moon.

This is the link to NASA's 2011 budget and previous budgets in case you want to compare it with previous years.
Everything you need to know about NASA's 2011 budget. (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.)

[cannotseethe]

It seems to me like that would leave more money for probe based exploration and R&D in propulsion and robotics. The only loss I see associated with taking people off the agenda is a PR loss.

Yes, you're right; now that I've read about it more closely I can see they're intending to increase funding for research in certain scientific areas. That's good.

The thing that set me off was the idea of using private contractors to build and maintain spacecraft. I think that's a bad idea, as economically sound as it may seem in the short-term, because long-term it's a kind of hemorrhage.

[seraphicharm]

If this is some way to cut costs, I'm not sure this is the best place to start...but I do think that space exploration is something best left in the hands of the private sector. At least it would be more monetarily efficient (anyone remember the 'little' mistakes NASA has made in the past that screwed things up?).

[Monte314]

I live here on the "Space Coast"... it's really awful for the people who have spent the last 20+ years (many their entire careers) working on programs that are being terminated. Lots of smart people in the soup line, and no place to go.

[Aronnax]

Yes, you're right; now that I've read about it more closely I can see they're intending to increase funding for research in certain scientific areas. That's good.

The thing that set me off was the idea of using private contractors to build and maintain spacecraft. I think that's a bad idea, as economically sound as it may seem in the short-term, because long-term it's a kind of hemorrhage.

It depends on the type of spacecraft the contractors are building and how much oversight takes place. This will have to be tightly regulated, a failed rocket launch has the potential to turn into an intercontinental ballistic missile topped with a conventional warhead. Private contractors taking over the nuts and bolts economic stuff doesn't bother me much, placing and maintaining satellites ties up a lot of valuable NASA resources.

Returning to the Moon and visiting Mars are very cool but it's not practical unless we get serious about exploration. We seem to lack the political will to spend what's necessary to take those kinds of projects seriously. That's a huge personal disappointment but it just seems to be where we're at. If NASA is going to operate on a limited budget I'd rather see lots good research that lays the groundwork for more serious exploration and habitation than tunnel visioning a bare bones heavy lift project.

I'm assuming long distance space travel will remain the domain of NASA for some time to come. The tech we use to get out of the gravity well doesn't have a strong relation to the tech necessary for long distance travel. Figuring out how to assemble large ships in orbit, making atomic batteries more efficient and improving ion drives (or developing nuclear propulsion) is significantly different than earth assembled chemical rockets.

---------- Post added 02-02-2010 at 02:36 PM ----------

If this is some way to cut costs, I'm not sure this is the best place to start...but I do think that space exploration is something best left in the hands of the private sector. At least it would be more monetarily efficient (anyone remember the 'little' mistakes NASA has made in the past that screwed things up?).

The private sector is awful at exploration, time to payout is too long and they're too risk adverse. If real exploration had to wait exclusively on the market real exploration would be dead.

What the private market is good at is streamlining complex processes that have already been developed. The private market won't do something like develop a radical new design. What they will do is take a lot of the designs NASA developed, hire some of the engineers who were trained under NASA and try to create an efficient design that'll allow them to operate at a profit.

[Zombicide]

Sweet, good riddance to that completely unnecessary state run organization or at least I wish it were really dissolving, it is an unjustifiable waste of money. Even if they don't go to work in privatized space programs, with all their technical experience and the credential that they worked for NASA, most of those people will easily find good work elsewhere, which I'm thinking may be good for them considering what a shitty budget NASA had to operate with or at least that I've always heard them rightfully complaining about. Xprize long ago showed that the state is unnecessary for going into space. I understand having a national aeronautics and space administration in the old days but it is time for it to dissolve. I want to see a garage sale of the space shuttles.

---------- Post added 02-02-2010 at 02:52 PM ----------

Then again, do we want to take the chance of other nations or profiteers getting to that helium 3? Meh, I'm sure the private sector will do a good job with that ... yes.

[nacht]

It is worth noting that the vast majority of our research and knowledge--through NASA, even--has been unmanned. Especially when considered proportionate to cost.

Spirit is still up there as a "stationary research platform" a couple of thousand days after its 90 day mission was over. Opportunity, Spirit's twin, is still up there and doing fine. They were launched with Delta II rockets.

The DS1 probe was a great success, and we are still getting information from Voyager 1 & 2 and they are expected to keep giving us information through 2025.

Sad as it is that we aren't going back to the moon any time soon, in a way I am relieved: we need a dramatic restructuring of our thoughts in manned spaceflight before going back. Moving things to the private sector at this stage is also likely a good move. Regardless, however, saying that "NASA is dead" is nothing more than hyperbole.

---------- Post added 02-02-2010 at 04:04 PM ----------


Then again, do we want to take the chance of other nations or profiteers getting to that helium 3? Meh, I'm sure the private sector will do a good job with that ... yes.

Asteroid mining and moon mining are both very interesting topics these days, and I suspect that the private sector is more likely to pursue that aggressively if they see a profit in it than NASA. NASA has less incentive, is extremely conservative in their approach to new things (we've been using the shuttles for nearly 30 years, with the concept coming up two decades previous to that), and is mired in politics. None of which is conducive to setting up facilities for mining or even getting the equipment there.

[Warrior]

I think moving NASA away from basic space research and exploration is a bad idea. A lot of technology originally created for space flight is now common place in a wide variety of uses. I was disappointed to read that NASA is being redirected to do more climate change monitoring. I don't think we need any more of that.

NASA today is far cry from what it once was. I think this move, if it makes it through Congress, will diminish it even further.

[Zombicide]

Asteroid mining and moon mining are both very interesting topics these days, and I suspect that the private sector is more likely to pursue that aggressively if they see a profit in it than NASA. NASA has less incentive, is extremely conservative in their approach to new things (we've been using the shuttles for nearly 30 years, with the concept coming up two decades previous to that), and is mired in politics. None of which is conducive to setting up facilities for mining or even getting the equipment there.

Yes, you're right, I was considering the prospects (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) of the Bush administration's plan to return to the moon, and getting there before the likes of China but the private sector will decide that it's marketable and regulate that itself and it may not matter if the commies manage to lay claim to it anyway.

[Mader]

Moving potential space travel to the private sector now is a good idea. NASA has done a great job of R&D, but the government is never concerned about cost.

An example: In the US, the telephones used to be run by one company, with a lot of winking and such from the government. Once they got a telephone into most houses, they stopped development. I mean, my parents used to pay over $1.00 per minute to make a long distance phone call, in the 1960's!

Open up the telephone business to the market at first caused quite a mess, but then everyone figured out what they wanted to do and the industry and service exploded. Opening up the telephone market also opened a market for computer and satellite tv, etc.

I predict the space projects will change in the hands of the people, but it will continue.

[AnnoyingPony]

/agreed

NASA was supposed to be about exploring outer space, if I remember correctly.