Budget authorised to keep Shuttle flying through 2011

[Orbinaut Pete]

What the title says:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104302283670451.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/01/space_shuttle_extension/

 

[Moonwalker]

The STS program is a pain meanwhile.

 

[RisingFury]

Well, I saw that one coming... and might be extended beyond 2011 too...
Ares I is so far behind that extending the Space Shuttle is the only good thing that's come out of NASA lately

 

[Urwumpe]

The STS program is a pain meanwhile.

For some people more, for other people less.

 

[Artlav]

We need a cold war II with space race II.
How can we expect any development in any area when the public on one side and ruling party on the other side see no reasons to improve?

 

[BHawthorne]

We need a cold war II with space race II.
How can we expect any development in any area when the public on one side and ruling party on the other side see no reasons to improve?

That is all history. Cold War's red menice is replaced with 911 terror. Space Race is replaced by commercial X-Prize. IMHO, both on smaller scales. The media framed the picture and the public perspective over those old things and have different self-serving interest now than then. You'll never get anywhere unless you get the media to buy into the mindset and spread the agenda. Politics does not run the world. The media does by manipulating opinion and shaming politicians into doing things other than for thier own self interest. (Which is ofcourse hypacritical because the media is all self-serving too).

 

[Artlav]

That is all history.

What i mean is that one of the definitions of life is imbalance - if everything is good and everyone is trying to improve his life by making someone else's life bad, there will be little progress.

How easy is it to manipulate public "opinion"?
TV, the "zombie box" as we call it here, is all you need, and politicians have means to control the media.

But, everyone is trying to improve his state by disimproving someone else's.

 

[Moonwalker]

For some people more, for other people less.

More for NASA and its future, less for some NASA employees who just want to keep their jobs (understandably). The pain is that STS is going to continue to prevent a replacement program.

It's the right time to leave, just like many did in the 1970's, because there is absolutely no light at the end of the narrow tunnel. Artlav mentions the only requirement that would help, sadly.

The manned part of NASA is going to become a space junk restorer without any innovations. We won't see any manned stuff going on on the Moon and less than ever Mars for MANY decades...

 

[Urwumpe]

More for NASA and its future, less for some NASA employees who just want to keep their jobs (understandably). The pain is that STS is going to continue to prevent a replacement program.

Of course, the STS is to blame, that NASA was not able to get one STS replacement done in 30 years. And the lazy lazy engineers.

But never politicians and armchair NASA directors.

 

[Andy44]

We need a cold war II with space race II.
How can we expect any development in any area when the public on one side and ruling party on the other side see no reasons to improve?

Variant of the broken window fallacy, and just as fallacious.

The progress made due to the Cold War was largely sterile and unproductive. The technical data is good, of course, but very little actual progress was made in the conquest of space.

You can't pass a decree and force people to start embracing space for the sake of a nationalist dream and expect it to last beyond the next budget crisis or the end of an exhausting cold war; people have to find a personal stake in space in order to willingly develop it. When they do, wallets will start opening up to fund all this cool technology that we know works.

 

[Urwumpe]

The progress made due to the Cold War was largely sterile and unproductive. The technical data is good, of course, but very little actual progress was made in the conquest of space.

Also, I would recommend comparing the activities in the 80s and 90s with the two decades earlier. There is a big jump in spaceflight with the Shuttles for the USA, while the Mir space station did the same for the USSR.

 

[Moonwalker]

Almost anything of manned space flight of NASA and Roscosmos, except the ISS, is the result of the cold war and partly based on those events going on at Peenemunde during WWII and the "crazy" visions of von Braun and some other pioneers of that and the whole post-war era. But even the Concorde, Concordski and Airbus as well is the result of the cold war.

Today we see hopes on SpaceX and other potential newcomer who try to scrape at the edge of the outer earth atmosphere, while NASA already has landed men on the Moon 4 decades ago. NASA fiddles with technology that is more than 3 decades old, to assemble something in LEO that soon already is going enter its final years. Russia still operates their Soyuz.

Maybe I'm too blind but I can't see a real progress. If NASA is not going to land on the Moon, we won't see any progress in that direction for another decades. Mars just is out of scope anyway. We improve certain things but I would not call it amazing progresses. I'm tired to see always the same junk orbiting the earth for as long as I can remember because I sadly was born past the glory days of manned space flight.

 

[BHawthorne]

Frankly, it makes zero difference what the NASA faction does because that excludes 99.999% of the population. I'm more interested in the commercial side of things. In many ways NASA is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

 

[Pquardzvaark]

I'm a little curious how NASA is part of the problem? Are they preventing commercial enterprises from getting in space? They do buy the services of commercial launchers for their probes into space, so I'd say that's a boon.

Anyway, I'm not sure STS was to blame, but in light of those inevitable budgets that temporarily killed manned lunar excursions, might have something closer to Apollo been a superior alternative? After the Soviets gave up on their moon trip they still kept Soyuz instead of throwing it away.

 

[movieman]

I'm a little curious how NASA is part of the problem? Are they preventing commercial enterprises from getting in space?

Yes.

Imagine that NASA had never flown humans into space: there'd be a significant amount of money waiting for the first commercial venture to do so, if only via sponsorship, advertising, etc. But since NASA could collect billions of taxpayers dollars to do it, that entire market was largely eliminated.

Similarly for Apollo: as much as I appreciate the technical and human sides of the program, it was a disaster for commercial exploitation of near-Earth space... if not for tax-funded lunar programs there would certainly be commercial entities trying to send people there by now. Obviously there will be again, but it's probably much harder to fund such a program by getting billionaires to pay for tickets than by getting sponsorship from organisations who want to be associated with the first moon landing. How much would Coke have paid to have their logo above the door of the Apollo 11 LEM?

 

[Hielor]

Imagine that NASA had never flown humans into space: there'd be a significant amount of money waiting for the first commercial venture to do so, if only via sponsorship, advertising, etc. But since NASA could collect billions of taxpayers dollars to do it, that entire market was largely eliminated.

I disagree. There's nothing worth having for commercial purposes on the Moon.

 

[Urwumpe]

Wrong, as you forget to take technological risk in account - you can't do commercial spaceflight if you are decades away from break-even and can't even say when you will do so.

SpaceX does possibly not even work today without government involvement.

 

[movieman]

Wrong, as you forget to take technological risk in account - you can't do commercial spaceflight if you are decades away from break-even and can't even say when you will do so.

You rarely get technological innovation with government programs, because governments have a near-infinite amount of taxpayers' money to throw at technical problems: hence the 'brute force' approach of the Saturn V, which no commercial entity would have built for a lunar landing.

You only get cheap and innovative technological solutions when people do have to find commercial means of funding for their projects.

---------- Post added at 03:08 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:05 AM ----------

I disagree. There's nothing worth having for commercial purposes on the Moon.

Largely because NASA has 'been there, done that'.

Again, how much would Coke have paid to get their logo above the door of the LEM, or Pepsi to get their logo on Armstrong's space suit? Not enough to get to the Moon the NASA way, but with a few hundred more companies involved, almost certainly enough to get there in a cheaper and more innovative manner.

 

[tblaxland]

Again, how much would Coke have paid to get their logo above the door of the LEM, or Pepsi to get their logo on Armstrong's space suit? Not enough to get to the Moon the NASA way, but with a few hundred more companies involved, almost certainly enough to get there in a cheaper and more innovative manner.

OK, but other than turning your mission in to "Survivor - Spaceflight", do you foresee other commercial interests in a lunar expedition? I also question that you would be able to raise sufficient money. Consider the Altanta Olympics which cost about $2b IIRC and large chunk of that was from sponsorship. I have doubts that you would be able to attract more money than that, and that is not enough to fund a manned moon landing, regardless of how cost efficient you think any competitiveness may make the process.

 

[movieman]

that is not enough to fund a manned moon landing, regardless of how cost efficient you think any competitiveness may make the process.

How do you know that, when we've never tried anything other than the 'get there tomorrow at any cost' approach?

If I remember correctly there have been reasonable-sounding proposals for 'cheap and cheerful' missions to Mars and back for around $10-20 billion; if they're even remotely correct, it's hard for me to see that you couldn't get to the Moon and back for $2 billion if you were determined to do it that way. Particularly when you consider that much of the ground-work would already have been done for commercial satellite launches and the like.

And I think you'd get far more interest in the first landing on the Moon that in just another bloody Olympics.