timujin: 7of7: They're just saying that so they'll get more funding. NASA can never stick to deadlines anyway. Remember how long the Mars rovers were supposed to operate? 90 days. They're up to several years now.

That's, um, apples and, I don't know, Volkswagens...

While it's true that NASA has trouble sticking to deadlines this has absolutely nothing to do with why the Mars rovers are still in operation. Their expected lifespan was 90 days. The fact that they're still running more than five years later is a testament to how well they were built.
Now, if you want to talk about missed deadlines, we can discuss innumerable missed shuttle launches or even the next robot to go to Mars, the MSL.
Spirit and Opportunity, on the other hand, are two shining success stories.

I see that joke went over your head.

eqtworld: Alacritous: eqtworld: What about keeping the shuttle program as our only method getting to space for 30 year?

The space shuttle has acquitted itself with honor. It's done very well considering what it had to do. accidents aside.

Original design specs were to do a launch ever two weeks.

We've averaged about 4 per year, and 2 of the 5 Space Shuttles blew up killing all on board and destroying the entire vehicle.

It costs more per pound to get into orbit than with a disposable craft.

We are basically going back to making the Saturn V after the disaster that is the Shuttle program

Of all Mankind's achievements I have to say the Saturn V is one of the best, you yanks can be proud of that one :)

On the topic of lightweight power for space flight, I have high hopes for the Polywell reactor, aka the wiffleball. They recently had a peer review and the American ONR renewed their contract.

TheGreatZarquon: Killing the ISS after so much time and investment, and while it still has so much potential, makes so little sense that the idea alone should create a singularity of stupid in the head of whoever thought it up.
"Singularity of Stupid"? That is so awesome it's the X-ray that escaped as the idiots head imploded!

dragonchild: It doesn't have to be convincing. Feel free to hate on NASA all you like.

I'm not hating on NASA, I'm asking for intellectually honest arguments for funding it. Every other scientist that get a taxpayer grant has to show a cost/benefit for his/her research.

That said, this is a form of budget triage. If you're getting, say, an unverifiable 10% RoI on NASA but a guaranteed zero percent RoI in tax-subsidized professional sports...

You miss the point. I get that sports subsidies are a waste. That doesn't justify spending extra money on NASA. If I said: the Iraq war was a mistake, so let's give my perpetual motion research project 20 billion, you'd object.

First, everyone here who believes the headline that NASA is just shooting money into space doesn't understand the most basic points of economics.

HINT: ALL THE MONEY STAYS HERE ON EARTH

You can't spend money in space - there is no Burger King there. All that money is spent here in the USA, on engineers who design things and employees who build them and even the astronauts who fly on the spacecraft. It's 100% stimulus spending because all these people who get paid own houses or rent, buy cars, buy food, and buy other stuff at Wal-Mart.

The Icelander: impaler: BTW, when I say "other technology" FUSION is the big one. Interstellar space crafts need energy, and lots of it.

First, we're not going to build interstellar spacecraft with the materials we have on Earth. There's not enough stuff here, and it's prohibitively expensive to launch it all.

Second, we don't have to leave the solar system for a couple billion years. But keeping humanity confined to one planet in that solar system is both limiting and dangerous.

So we get humans into space to colonize other worlds and to harvest materials for use on Earth. Especially things like heavy metals that are very rare here but readily available on places that lack plate tectonics like the Moon, Mars and asteroids.

You think it's prohibitively expensive to launch all the materials needed to build interstellar craft from Earth? How expensive will it be to launch all the materials needed to colonize other worlds with humans, then for them to recover needed resources from other worlds, and THEN to launch those materials from those worlds to get them back to Earth to use them here?

Also, if you understand the lifecycle of the sun, Earth has less than 1 billion years left with human life on the planet.

Wikipedia: During its current life in the main sequence, the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. The Sun used to be fainter in the past, which is possibly the reason why life on Earth has only existed for about 1 billion years on land. The increase in solar temperatures is such that already in about a billion years, the surface of the Earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life.

As a ballpark figure, I'd say we have 500 million years to get our act together as the climate slowly heats up. That seems like a LONG time, but we've got to "front load" as much progress as possible so that we can be ahead of other unforeseen incidents that we can't prevent. It's only a matter of time before an asteroid strikes Earth with possibly devastating effects, and we might not be able to prevent that even with the best technology that we might develop in the future. We've got to get humans into "lifeboats" by colonizing other worlds in the universe with as much speed as possible, lest human intelligence become extinct.

mrmopar5287: As a ballpark figure, I'd say we have 500 million years to get our act together as the climate slowly heats up.

Not to sound flip, but in 500 million years we could make a decent stab at moving Earth's orbit outward by a few million miles.

mrmopar5287: You think it's prohibitively expensive to launch all the materials needed to build interstellar craft from Earth? How expensive will it be to launch all the materials needed to colonize other worlds with humans, then for them to recover needed resources from other worlds, and THEN to launch those materials from those worlds to get them back to Earth to use them here?

Earth resources are prohibitively expensive. How much copper, aluminum and iron do you think you'd need to build a ship to sustain a large population of humans for the couple thousand years it'll take to get to another star? We've already got people stealing copper from the power grid to sell it.

The only way to bring the costs down are to harvest the materials from the asteroid belt for use in building the ship. And the cost of launching from asteroids is virtually zero, since their gravitational force is so small.

Think of it this way: If you had shown the Dutch a picture of the island of Manhattan from 2006 and said that this island would turn into a metropolis, they wouldn't have thought that they'd be bringing all the iron and stone and wood from Europe. They'd understand that you'd build things with what you have available, in iterative steps. We're not going to go from LEO to Alpha Centauri in one go.

Not to mention that there's enough Helium-3 on Neptune and Uranus to power hundreds of thousands of generation ships.

Read the book "Mining the Sky" ^{(^)} for more information.

theorellior: Not to sound flip, but in 500 million years we could make a decent stab at moving Earth's orbit outward by a few million miles.

Simple way to do it would be to use gravitational tugs or mass drivers to put asteroids in a reverse gravitational slingshot to the Earth. That way, the angular momentum of the asteroid would be added to that of the Earth, boosting it into a higher orbit.

But the disadvantage is that there's a chance of an asteroid hitting the Earth, and it still requires that we use humans to at least maintain the mass drivers or space tugs.

impaler: It's funny how pissed people get when one rationally criticizes MANNED space flight. Ask them why, and you usually get "TANG!!! VELCRO!!!" which were ironically not invented by any space program.

SPACE PEN!!!

You don't set a date to bring down a space station. You try to keep it going until you can't. Eventually accidents happen and you can no longer mitigate the risks and only then do you give up. A couple collisions, a couple fires, a couple modules becoming uninhabitable. Eventually everyone knows it's time to get out and let it burn. That's how Mir ended and that's how ISS should end. Part of the value of a space station is experiencing its deterioration and learning the lessons of emergency response, jury-rigging, and how to improve everything next time. Yes, it puts astronauts at risk but that's pretty much their entire job, to learn how to avoid dying in space. If we shut it down arbitrarily we're not getting our money's worth.

If Russia can find the money (probably partnered with China), you can bet they'd be willing to keep ISS going way longer than NASA thinks it should keep going. Once the shuttle is no longer flying the US will not have a physical means to prevent Russia from doing whatever they want with it.

Too many comments so I don't know if this was already said: Isn't it the International Space Station? Also, what harm is just for the US to stop using it and leave it up there. If someone else wants to use it, great. Why destroy it?

BackAssward: Too many comments so I don't know if this was already said: Isn't it the International Space Station? Also, what harm is just for the US to stop using it and leave it up there. If someone else wants to use it, great. Why destroy it?

Thank You!!! I scanned 116 other comments before you pointed out the obvious.

Thanks NASA for all your hard work looking after things, but just cause you can't continue to fund it doesn't mean you can take the toys with you when you leave.

IF I CAN'T PLAY WITH IT...NOBODY CAN PLAY WITH IT!

/I'll sit down and be quiet now

$100 Billion?
Hell, we've spent far more than that on individual company bailouts just this year and none of those banks or corporations do much science, either.

They also don't provide a platform where the nations of the world can actually try to work together instead of fighting all the time.

I love Star Trek as much as the next guy but for those who are so concerned about starvation and over population, it would be infinitely easier to harvest the oceans and terraform our deserts than it would to break the laws of physics as we know them to find a class M planet somewhere that may not even exist.

Face it, you just want to fark green slave girls and make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. So do I but instead of using the space program to flee this planet, maybe we could just fix this one first.

Once again, I feel ashamed to be an American.

Mugato: I love Star Trek as much as the next guy but for those who are so concerned about starvation and over population, it would be infinitely easier to harvest the oceans and terraform our deserts than it would to break the laws of physics as we know them to find a class M planet somewhere that may not even exist.

Face it, you just want to fark green slave girls and make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. So do I but instead of using the space program to flee this planet, maybe we could just fix this one first.

Sure. And considering all of NASA's budgets since it was founded is still less than the TARP bailout, let me ask you.... which dollar do you think you're getting a better return on investment from?

Even if NASA were just a jobs program, which many people say it is, at least it's a jobs program that produces scientific advancement.

Mugato: Face it, you just want to fark green slave girls and make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Who doesn't?

Mugato: I love Star Trek as much as the next guy but for those who are so concerned about starvation and over population, it would be infinitely easier to harvest the oceans and terraform our deserts than it would to break the laws of physics as we know them to find a class M planet somewhere that may not even exist.

It's not really a matter of starvation and overpopulation - that takes care of itself in the form of a self-stabilizing population level.

The concern that us futurists have is that the sun will eventually burn out. Like I said in my previous post, Earth has about 500 million years left of human survival; assuming that something else doesn't happen first to wipe us out of the history of the universe. I do have a desire to see my offspring survive as far into the future as possible, and continue to create advancements that let humans (and all other sentient beings that may exist in the universe) to live rich and rewarding lives. That means getting the human race off of a single ball of rock so as to not have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak.

Hobodeluxe: Bored Horde: Let me know when a corporation manages to get something beyond geosynch orbit

the only thing that might be feasible for them is asteroid mining and that's a long way off. other than that there's not much out there for them.

Strip-mining Luna might be worth it. Or Mars.

I mean, really, no environment to impact, and you can dump as much CO2 as you want.

Of course, that won't stop the hippies from wharrgabling against it.

Mugato: I love Star Trek as much as the next guy but for those who are so concerned about starvation and over population, it would be infinitely easier to harvest the oceans and terraform our deserts than it would to break the laws of physics as we know them to find a class M planet somewhere that may not even exist.

Face it, you just want to fark green slave girls and make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. So do I but instead of using the space program to flee this planet, maybe we could just fix this one first.

Science Fiction based in space would have no audience if not for humanity's constant desire to explore. We will go into space just as surely as our ancestors wandered into new lands and across unknown seas. It's in our nature, and as long as nothing destroys us first, we will spread out into the galaxy eventually.

mrmopar5287: The concern that us futurists have is that the sun will eventually burn out. Like I said in my previous post, Earth has about 500 million years left of human survival; assuming that something else doesn't happen first to wipe us out of the history of the universe. I do have a desire to see my offspring survive as far into the future as possible, and continue to create advancements that let humans (and all other sentient beings that may exist in the universe) to live rich and rewarding lives. That means getting the human race off of a single ball of rock so as to not have all our eggs in one basket, so to speak.

True. We don't know how long it will take to learn how to survive beyond earth, and we don't know exactly how much time we have before we need to know. We know it's a very hard problem. It makes sense to start as early as possible and be as ready as we can be when the time comes.

The naysayer argument that all things end and we and should accept eventual extinction is foolish. The human species is unique because no previous species was capable of thinking about the fact it could go extinct, or that it might have a choice in the matter. Knowingly accepting extinction would be just as unprecedented as making the attempt to defy it.

Intentionally neglecting space exploration and letting everyone and all progress be wiped out would be stupid. If there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, is every one of those civilizations supposed to die with their planets? Says who? If any life has ever achieved interstellar migration, their first step was defeating those among them who didn't want to go.

Why de-orbit and waste all the money put in to the property. Treat it like real estate and sell it.

Also they said there was no money for space based on
* $360 billion - Unemployment/Welfare/Other
* $26 billion - National Aeronautics and Space Administration & National Science Foundation

A good part of the people getting Unemployment/Welfare could get some training and then be put to work working and building on the projects for the National Science Foundation and NASA.

NASA detractors were the same in the 1960s:

WWII is long over and just because Russia wants to send things into space doesn't mean WE should. What a waste of money? Crazy astronauts! You got your head in the clouds.

We should be spending that money on Earth, on education and tanks and stuff. They aren't worth funding for unknown unforeseen "inventions" from 1958 on. I don't see any reason why we should be flying around to other planets or the moon with robots OR humans. What a dumb idea.
================================================================
It's that ignorant and short-sighted attitude that would have cast a mini-Dark-Ages on all of this:

Wiki NASA SPINOFFS (new window)

Now, people are still the same. Just because they can't understand that NASA is one of our only pure research organizations. They invent unexpectedly. They don't set out to revolutionize, they do things that are HARD, that stress the creativity and imagination of the best scientists. And when they do that, they create and develop unique new things that benefit humanity.

But, I'm sure YOU, Mr. Dark Ages, know which programs are better for them right now, and what should and shouldn't be funded.

Keep the ISS in space!

anyone else remember the space station in the 70s... skylab?

dj42: But, I'm sure YOU, Mr. Dark Ages, know which programs are better for them right now, and what should and shouldn't be funded

Okay, calm down, FutureBoy. I'm all for space exploration. I had SETI running on two boxes for three years looking for shiat. My only point is that the Earth isn't just a "rock" and there's a lot of research that can be conducted right here that might help up there.

And if you think colonizing other worlds is going to bring this world together, I have a Death Star to sell you.

General Vayo: I mean, really, no environment to impact, and you can dump as much CO2 as you want.

To dump CO2, first you need oxygen.

MrBentor: A good part of the people getting Unemployment/Welfare could get some training and then be put to work working and building on the projects for the National Science Foundation and NASA.

I'm not sure I'd want the same people who are on welfare to be the ones working for NASA.

impaler: It's funny how pissed people get when one rationally criticizes MANNED space flight. Ask them why, and you usually get "TANG!!! VELCRO!!!" which were ironically not invented by any space program.

its well known that Velcro was the result of manned space flight. If the Vulcans had not crash landed on earth and befriended a kid in a mining town then sold a sample to pay for his college we would not have it today.

whenIsayGO: I'm not sure I'd want the same people who are on welfare to be the ones working for NASA.

why not you would never have to worry about them getting feet and meters (new window) mixed up, they don't have a clue what a meter is.

Plans to come out of retirement in 2016.

/hot like molten de-orbited space junk

pnjunction: a prominent critic of human spaceflight, physicist Robert L. Park

What kind of douche is a 'critic of human spaceflight'? Shutup douche, getting off this rock is going to essential to our survival as a species someday.

Fundies man, they don't see it important since jesus is coming

NASA might not get a chance to do a controlled de-orbit.

Kessler Syndrome (new window)

cardex: impaler: It's funny how pissed people get when one rationally criticizes MANNED space flight. Ask them why, and you usually get "TANG!!! VELCRO!!!" which were ironically not invented by any space program.

its well known that Velcro was the result of manned space flight. If the Vulcans had not crash landed on earth and befriended a kid in a mining town then sold a sample to pay for his college we would not have it today.

I used to be foreman on a velcro ranch, until a lint storm wiped us out.

There is an easy solution to this dilemma.

By 2016, shouldn't the first private space port be completed on earth?

Put a few more modules on the space station, or have a private company pay for it, and make it a resort/research facility. We can have private companies (eg Virgin Galactic) take payloads, experiments, and people up.

It will be like a GPS-type deal, fund it with corporate money and let everyone use it.

UNAUTHORIZED FINGER:

I used to be foreman on a velcro ranch, until a lint storm wiped us out.

Should have diversified into dental floss.

eqtworld: What about keeping the shuttle program as our only method getting to space for 30 year?

I was miffed why Nasa abandoned a fully re-usable space craft in favour of the Ares. Now I actually read up on it I'm 110% excited for it.

Following the Stacking on Twitter.

Also phsyched for the LRO to start snapping Apollo sites.

maxheck: UNAUTHORIZED FINGER:

I used to be foreman on a velcro ranch, until a lint storm wiped us out.

Should have diversified into dental floss.

Thanks for that. I watched the whole thing. One of my favorites. Now I'm gonna make my nephew watch it.

Angry taxpayer. I grew up loving NASA, however I'm learning to hate them.

Fear_and_Loathing: Angry taxpayer. I grew up loving NASA, however I'm learning to hate them.

I know that in this thread that I vaguely ridiculed the idea of colonizing other planets to escape Earth's inevitable destruction!!! but your precious tax dollars are spent a lot more wastefully than anything that is given to NASA. And I'm not talking about the welfare mothers.

People who complain about how their tax dollars are used annoy me. You're paying the same amount no matter what they use it for and it's all money that doesn't even exist anyway.

Gsm136: eqtworld: What about keeping the shuttle program as our only method getting to space for 30 year?

I was miffed why Nasa abandoned a fully re-usable space craft in favour of the Ares. Now I actually read up on it I'm 110% excited for it.

Following the Stacking on Twitter.

Also phsyched for the LRO to start snapping Apollo sites.

NASA's abandoning Ares...


http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/orl-nasa-ares-moon-mission-changes-07 1 409,0,2316961.story

This ISS nonsense has bothered me from the day it started. Sure i had it pointed out to me while i was smoking a cig outside a hockey game, but otherwise it seems as if its as much of a waste as the shuttle program. Why the hell should we continue to fund the thing when we have bigger geopolitical goals to accomplish on the moon? It represents a mere pleasure yacht to the king of the netherlands, while the king of portugal is out there learning to navigate and conquer the new world.


I could see it being valuable if it was outside our magnetosphere, but as it is not, there is nothing to be learned except for micro-gravity reactions. We don't even intend to go to other bodies without some form of artificially induced gravity, so wtf? Might as well deorbit the thing early and spend the money finishing off a new heavy lifter to inch us closer to our ultimate destination. You want to see how a plant will grow in micro-gravity? Send a capsule.

7of7: They're just saying that so they'll get more funding. NASA can never stick to deadlines anyway. Remember how long the Mars rovers were supposed to operate? 90 days. They're up to several years now.

The ISS was always supposed to be brought down around that time frame, Its just that NASA has been way behind schedule in getting the ISS completed. I really hope somebody changes the schedule, the ISS has way more life left in it than that.