We were going to conquer space, until NASA told us how much it would cost to get a flag on mars.
Published by Kyso Kisaen February 6th, 2007 in A million ways to mortgage the future, Governmental Failures, Imperialism for Dummies, Moola, PoliticsSpace, the final frontier. These will be the voyages of some other country’s ship, possibly that of a country that didn’t blow its wad on a trillion dollar war back when dollars were actually worth something.
NASA may not be able to launch the space shuttle’s replacement by 2014 as promised, according to the agency’s 2008 budget request to Congress.
The president that promised us a man on Mars in our lifetimes is hoping that maybe he’ll get a ride from Virgin Galactic.
This could increase the gap between the retirement of the space shuttles in 2010 and the launch of their successors, the Orion spacecraft and Ares I rocket, forcing NASA to rely on Russian Soyuz and future commercial spacecraft to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
A NASA budget cut wouldn’t normally bother me too much - any program like that would always love more money and is used to making tough choices when it doesn’t come through. It wouldn’t even be hypocrisy if Bush hadn’t been dangling space stations, moon landings, and Mars missions in our faces since at least 2004.
Today I announce a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system. We will begin the effort quickly, using existing programs and personnel. We’ll make steady progress — one mission, one voyage, one landing at a time.
Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started, we will meet our obligations to our 15 international partners on this project.
Not to mention their “Wild wild West” national space policy:
After four years and some 35 drafts, the Bush White House has finally released its long-awaited rewrite of the U.S. National Space Policy. Obviously, the administration was keen to get the word out – they quietly posted a 10-page unclassified summary on the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s website at 5 pm on Oct. 6 – the Friday before the Columbus Day long weekend…
While the Clinton policy aimed to highlight international cooperation and collective security in space, the Bush NSP takes a go–it-alone stance, using strong language that asserts U.S. unilateral rights in space while possibly also being intended to “negate” the rights of other space-faring nations. In ominous tones, the document threatens in one section to “dissuade or deter others from either impeding [U.S.] rights or developing capabilities intended to do so” – raising the specter of preemptive action against other nations’ dual-use space technology.
Indeed, even as the Bush policy emphasizes the importance of space security, it goes out of its way to make clear that this security may not, under any circumstances, come from (shudder) international law: “The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduce research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interests”
I guess the new plan for space is to hope that the Russians and the Chinese are cooler than we would have been about letting everyone see the stars.
“I’m concerned about our ability to bring these new capabilities online by 2014,” says NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. “If we do not quickly come to grips with this issue, we may have a prolonged gap between the end of the shuttle programme and the beginning of operational capability in our new systems, like that which occurred between 1975 and 1981, when we transitioned from Apollo to space shuttle.” He says the gap led to the loss of engineering know-how within NASA.
The gap between the retirement of the shuttles in 2010 and the first flights of Ares and Orion – which will occur no earlier than 2014 – will leave NASA dependent on other nations and private companies for launches to the ISS.
“Loss of engineering know-how,” that means that if we don’t give NASA some money to at least keep their current momentum going, they might have a hard time playing catch up later and the government will have to ask Google to use their space weaponry against America’s enemies. Which they won’t, since they’ll be too busy partying with Europe, Japan, and our corporate masters in space while we sit on the ground, waving our fists at the sky. “Oh, we’ll get up there again! And when we do…!”
But hey, why keep a perfectly good space program humming when there are intractable wars to be mired in until such a time as the inevitable defeat can be blamed on your political opponents?
On the bright side, it’s going to be pretty hard for the US to be assholes about our unilateral space rights when at this rate by the time we get there with our flag o’ ownership we’ll have to stick it between the Starbucks Galactic and the Mars branch campus of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This one really hits home for me…
I became the science/technology/computer geek I am because of the influence of the “moon race” when I was a child. I remember watching the early moon walks on TV, and being endlessly fascinated.
I loved the technology, the creativity, and the drive it took to solve the myriad problems and put men into space and then on the moon. Unfortunately, that America seems to have died long ago.
Now our greatest achievements seem to be things like the Enron assholes figuring out how to game California’s electricity market to extract obscene profits. We worship Donald Trump, while looking at Stephen Hawking as a freak…
Just like our leadership in almost every other area (except weapons technology) we’ve basically asked everyone else to eat our lunch, and unsurprisingly they are happy to take advantage of our self-imposed weakness.
Now that we’ve flushed a trillion down the Iraqi rathole, there’s not much left…
It breaks my heart.
I’m about forty now. I firmly believe I will see a flag planted on Mars in my lifetime.
But it will be Chinese.
Despite the pointless belligerence, I think Bush’s space policy has been one of the few areas where he’s gotten things mostly right. Pouring money into NASA tends to produce lots and lots of viewgraphs, but too often it stops there. NASA is profoundly broken. Because it specializes in gee-whiz projects there’s a base of public support, but the main stakeholders are the various NASA centers, scattered about in lots of strong congressional districts. This leads to dividing up the limited and shrinking pie based on politics rather than technology. People are inclined to forgive the absurd results that come from this dynamic because we’ve been told that ’space is hard.’ That’s beginning to wear a little thin, considering that the Russians are doing just fine with extremely dated technology thanks to their habit of not throwing things away just because something new comes along (see Apollo->Shuttle transition and now Shuttle->whatever). Gradual improvement has kept Soyuz operational for decades, with improvements in reliability and capability. There’s damn good reasons the Chinese went with a Soyuz variant for their astronaut program - it ain’t broke and it don’t need fixin’.
Rejecting international agreements on space is the right move at this point. I’d support anti weaponization treaties, but that’s about it. The problem with treaties regarding space is that we just don’t know what is out there and how it might affect human society for good or ill. I’m not talking about aliens, but rather resources: Most space geeks envision a future in which significant numbers of humans live and work off-planet. What the hell are they doing? Presumably there’s something of value up there (my money’s on Platinum Group metals), and folks are making a living extracting it. It’s tempting to sign on to treaties that sound good but utterly destroy the prospects of starting a business based on activity in space. Unless the benefit of the treaty outweighs the price in constraints on entrepreneurship it’s better to opt out. As is, we don’t understand the downside well enough to make that call.
togolosh, you seem to be forgetting, just as most people seem to forget, that NASA is not just putting people into space, or gee-whiz projects. It also is the basis of an amazing amount of pure science that is at risk if the funding falls out. In fact, with Bush pushing for men on Mars, this means that these important research areas are at the most risk of being cut, as they have had the funding slowly bleed out of them already over the past few years. Although we may not see practical improvements from much of astrophysics research, I believe that expanding our knowledge of the universe is well worthwhile, and am willing to argue that point.
I do admit to being unsatisfied with how NASA runs a lot of things, especially with how run they are by politics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are broken and should be set aside, at least not completely.