Mars and Moon Are Out of NASA's Reach for Now, Review Panel Says (WaPo)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Don't try to put astronauts on Mars yet -- too hard, too costly. Go to the moon -- maybe. Or build rockets that could zip around the inner solar system, visiting asteroids, maybe a Martian moon. Keep the international space station going until 2020 rather than crash it into the Pacific in 2016. Help underwrite commercial spaceflight the same way the United States gave the airline business a boost in the 1920s with air mail.

And spend more money on space.

These are some of the best options for NASA in the years ahead, according to a blue-ribbon panel that spent the summer reviewing the human spaceflight program. The committee, headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, on Tuesday gave the White House and NASA the executive summary of its report, with the full report and more granular findings to come later this month.

Although taking a dim view of the status quo at NASA, the Augustine committee clearly endorsed the goal of a robust human spaceflight program and all but pleaded on behalf of the agency, which runs on an annual budget of about $18 billion. A space exploration program "that will be a source of pride for the nation" will require roughly an additional $3 billion a year, the committee found.

"The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science," the committee wrote.
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more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/08/AR2009090802464.html?hpid=sec-nation

PDF of the summary: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/384767main_SUMMARY%20REPORT%20-%20FINAL.pdf (summary of the summary: pp 11-12)


Note that this is a complex, wide-ranging review, and only an executive summary has been released so far. Lots of room for careless (or willful) misinterpretation. I have seen news articles presenting the whole thing as an argument of the Moon vs. Mars, which is grossly oversimplified.

[Warpy]

1. Any base on either the Moon or Mars

will have to be underground due to the constant danger of micrometeorites and radiation. They'll also have to do a lot better at counteracting the physiological consequences of low gravity.

Maybe they need to do a few years of unmanned exploration before they send fragile human beings there.

[derby378]

2. It's only because Bush spent all of our tax dollars on Iraq, Wall Street, and DHS

Screw him. We can find the money if we just start slashing a few of Bush's pet projects.

[Peace Patriot]

3. See, we gotta give trillions and trillions of dollars to banksters and war profiteers,

so, sorry, no money for the most exciting human adventure ever devised by engineers and scientists--and one that could lift us all out of our myopic, provincial, egocentric little world view to see the greater reality of the Big Universe. Meanwhile, with all this war profiteering, and oil profiteering, and corporate-induced wastrel habits, we're killing Mother Earth and have nowhere else to go. Time we started looking around, learning how planets work and getting our "terraforming" act together. A couple of years ago, the World Wildlife Fund gave us 50 years--at present levels of pollution and consumption--50 years to the death of the planet! Fini. Kaput. Goodbye and thanks for all the fish! And that was before Bush & brethren made things so much worse in every way. A whole decade wasted on a war for oil!

It's not money, friends. There is no lack of money. It's the colossally stupid, unrepresentative, vastly corrupt cabal of greedbag-enablers in Washington DC, who have no vision and no sense of beneficial priorities. And what do they do with a president who could have vision and rightful priorities? They tie him down like the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver!

Personally, I think there is one thing we could do to start changing this situation rather dramatically for the better: END electronic vote 'counting' using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code, owned and controlled by a handful of far rightwing corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. This would open up our elections to the possibility of truly democratic choices and elected representatives who owe the people, and not the corporations. It is not the only thing we must do, to restore intelligent leadership, but it is the FIRST thing we must do. This extremely insecure and manipulable vote 'counting' system--fast-tracked into place during the 2002 to 2004 period--has no other purpose but to be the final blockade to any real reform. We must bust it first, before we will be able to bust anything else and start re-creating a democracy. The last time we had real democracy, we put men on the moon and brought them all safely back to earth--in the most astonishing event in human history. That's what democracy does: the best ideas and the best people rise to the top. We are now enslaved to the worst ideas and (for the most part) the worst people--warmongers, greedbags, and small minds. And we cannot seem to correct this bad course. Democracy is supposed to be able to do that--correct course when the "ship of state" is headed in the wrong direction. I think it's the 'TRADE SECRET' code, and I think that's its purpose.

ES&S e-voting corp (which just bought Diebold)--and has been fucking up US elections at least since 2000*--has, as its initial funder and major investor, reclusive rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things). That's who is 'counting' all our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code. And we wonder why we can't put human beings on Mars! The people controlling the 'TRADE SECRET' code think God wants stupid people.

-------------------------

*(See Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens," at www.HD.net, which has a segment on the 2000 election.)

[Vidar]

6. Great post.

[and-justice-for-all]

4. Lame...

The time to go is this decade and 20 years, at the least, establishing a moon base. A base I think is important for us to go to Mars and beyond withing my life time.

[Orsino]

5. We've never really decided what we want from manned space exploration.

Beating the Russians to the moon drove us only until we'd walked the moon a few times. I don't think that beating the Chinese to Mars is gonna fly, so to speak, as a motivator. In the coming decades, we're gonna be busy instead trying to provide food, water and electricity to our millions, and NASA simply isn't going to get much in the way of budgeting. Bush said we were going to Mars--therefore we won't. :-(

[GreenStormCloud]

7. Why bother?

Mars and the moon aren't going anywhere. They will still be there in a few decades. Wait until we have intelligent robots, then send them. Much, much cheaper as they won't need human life support systems.

[pokerfan]

8. The ISS is out of NASA's reach

beginning some time next year.

[Occulus]

9. "Help underwrite commercial spaceflight"

Mine the asteroids. There are more resources in the Belt than Earth can provide. We will need these resources in the future, and we really should start thinking about how to do it now.

Ceres would be the logical position for a base of operations or even a refinery. Robot craft could ferry metals from the Belt to geosynchronous Earth orbit until we figure out fusion power/propulsion. From there, we would naturally move to manned missions, but again, we need to start thinking about this sooner rather than later.

[Odin2005]

10. Exactly, mine asteroids so we don;t have to fuck up Earth with mines here!

The technophobes that want us to go back to living in the Middle Ages will have a fit, though.