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| Science & Technology |
| Obama abandons the man to moon bid |
| 2010-02-01 |
| US President Barack Obama will today formally propose abandoning plans to return US astronauts to the moon. B.O.'s admission that we're no longer a great power... The move means the President will be ending the costly Constellation next-generation rocket program. "The money can be better spend here, on social programs..." Arguing it must trim spending in tough times, the administration will instead direct NASA to turn to long-range research and development which could eventually lead to a manned space program to Mars, a senior US official said. "We are cancelling the program, not delaying it,'' Obama's budget chief Peter Orszag told reporters. "Make no mistake: We're no more exceptional than Paraguay." The decision will mean NASA will be constrained to low-earth orbits for years to come, and will transform the aspirations of the US space program following the planned retirement of the Shuttle fleet in September. A few years from now NASA can either quietly disband -- unheard of among bureaucracies -- or be folded into HHS... Under the new plan, Obama will also propose boosting the development of commercial rockets and other vehicles that can ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), an outside US government advisor said. The Constellation program was launched in 2004 by then-president George W Bush after the Columbia space shuttle mission ended in disaster with the death of all seven crew members in 2003. NASA has faced growing pressure to cut its budget as the US government's debt soars and the United States buckles under the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The agency has also seen dwindling political support, with its White House and congressional paymasters reluctant to fund the type of expensive manned space exploration that saw the agency put 12 men on the moon. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #20 True Glenmore but it's even worse in the commercial space arena as they may wind up regulating something that doesn't even exist yet. Regulations should follow problems but never lead them. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2010-02-01 22:21 |
| #19 "wonder what might have come to pass if only we'd kept the bureaucrats at bay for a bit longer." By and large, bureaucrats do bureaucracy because they CAN'T do science and engineering, and it enhances their self-esteem to be able to rule over those who can. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2010-02-01 19:34 |
| #18 He just doesn't want to disturb mohamed. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2010-02-01 16:50 |
| #17 Problem is we could put a man on the moon when I was just turning old enough to vote, but we can't put a man on the moon when I'm creeping up on social security. |
| Posted by: Fred 2010-02-01 16:47 |
| #16 Remember if you can put a man on the moon, you can put 535 Congresscritters, the VP and the Prez there too. This was a defensive move. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2010-02-01 15:35 |
| #15 You weren't going to get that out of Ares, Mizzou; it would probably have had terminal vibration problems. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2010-02-01 15:34 |
| #14 Frak Rutan and frak commercial space flight. I'm 40. Getting old. I want my fraking moon base NOW. Not in 50 years, when it becomes 'commercially viable'. Hell, I'm never going to be able to afford one of the commercial suborbital flights. Yeah, I agree with above posters. It's a boondoggle. But if we're gonna have government boondoggles, I can't think of many better, and more meaningful. This kind of shiat allows the U.S. to wave its fraking foam finger and say "We're No. 1". How many future scientists, etc., did we get out of the Apollo project?, something that proved nothing other than our big govt. entity can beat your commie big govt. entity, and 'how does our ass taste, Russia?' I fear we're quickly going to go the way of Portugal after the discovery of the Americas. Those that don't set the trends - are footnotes, at best. I want telescopes looking for extrasolar life. I want a submarine underneath the ice pack on Europa, looking for life, Jim, but not as we know it. I want a man on Mars. And women, too. Mars needs women. I want to tank up my vehicle on the petrol-covered surface of Titan. I want to mine the asteroid belt. I want to look at the rings of Saturn from a viewing platform. At least a virtual one. Chop, chop. Frak you, Obama. /Rant off |
| Posted by: Mizzou Mafia 2010-02-01 13:34 |
| #13 AC - At the dawn of the 20th Century Henry Ford and other entrepreneurs were tinkering with horseless carriages powered by internal combustion engines. By 1909 Ford had begun producing the Model T at his Piquette plant at an initial rate of 11 per month and selling the same for $850. By 1915 he'd moved to a new facility at Highland Park, cut his assembly cycle time by a factor of 8, greatly reduced his manpower needs on a per-unit basis and had reduced the retail price of a basic Model T to around $450. Could Ford have put the Model T on the road in 1909 if a blizzard of regulatory agencies had popped up to regulate every aspect of the production, operation, sale & use of the product prior to its initial commercial availability? Could he have cut his production cycle time, manpower demands and (most importantly) the retail price of the product if he'd had to contend with with OSHA, the EPA, the NRLB and a dozen other agencies battling & thwarting him and imposing massive costs by regulatory fiat at every turn? Had Ford had to contend with precisely the sort of environment you propose as the best available alternative for commercial space the 1915 Model T would probably have carried a per unit retail price tag closer to $45,000.00 ($955,000 2009 dollars) than $450 ($9,500 2009 dollars). Had that happened would any of the massive advances in quality of life in the developed world, nearly *all* of which are due directly or (barely) indirectly to cheap & readily available transportation have happened? That's not to say that there isn't a perfectly reasonable role for the government to play. Basic science comes to mind or, with respect to the commercialization of space, how about pioneering the process of automated propellant production from materials native to the moon & mars and dropping a few prototype factories in those locations? Entrepreneurs will reach low Earth orbit quickly & routinely if allowed to do so, the proper governmental role, if such exists, is to induce them to take the larger risk and go much farther much sooner. If the government simply tosses the Frisbee an enormous number of entrepreneurs will spend their own money attempting to fetch it. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, Burt Rutan [insert your favorite here] and other entrepreneurs are hanging around out in the desert kicking around ways to slip the surly bonds of Earth in a cost effective way. If they succeed they'll have a more dramatic effect on the human race than did Henry Ford though it's going to take a very long time. If I should be so fortunate as to live that long I'd hate to look back from the dawn of the 22nd Century and wonder what might have come to pass if only we'd kept the bureaucrats at bay for a bit longer. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2010-02-01 13:19 |
| #12 Not only has he canceled the moon project, he has also canceled the space shuttle replacement. So the US now has NO manned space flight program and we are completely dependent on the Russians for that capability. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2010-02-01 12:41 |
| #11 Az, we would do well to incite a bureaucratic turf battle over space regulation. NASA has a superficially obvious case for it but the FAA and the Pentagon could equally claim part of the pie. So could the State Department if civilian efforts actually reach the Moon. The trick is to keep any one of these competing entities from accreting enough power to seriously interfere with progress. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2010-02-01 12:10 |
| #10 AlmostAnonymous5839, they expired in 2002. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2010-02-01 11:50 |
| #9 Does this mean my Pan Am tickets to Clavius are no good? Heywood Floyd |
| Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 2010-02-01 11:31 |
| #8 I couldn't agree more AC. My objection is to the installation of NASA as regulatory overlord of an industry that does not yet exist and likely never will if the bureaucratic sclerosis settles in before the industry is both well established and highly profitable. Commercial space needs to be allowed its wild west days before we kill it via regulatory fiat. Given the extraordinary amount of time that has passed since NASA's last successful new manned spaceflight program it's a near certainty that the organization lacks the requisite competence to oversee the commercialization of manned spaceflight and its attendant new architectures. Regulation requires at minimum competent regulators and we, essentially, have none. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2010-02-01 11:22 |
| #7 Az, I suspect that anyone with the money to undertake something like this will understand the risk. If not, there will be plenty of luddites, naysayers, and class envyists around to tell them. Hollywood celebrities and other pop-culturists might be an exception but if they get blown up in the cause of science who cares? The resulting bump on the learning curve will probably be the closest they have ever come to a worthwhile contribution to human progress. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2010-02-01 10:34 |
| #6 Carve out the part of NASA that focuses on manned-space flight safety and have them regulate the private industry much like the FAA does airline safety. Because federal regulation of industry is, y'know, just soooo efficient. That's a recipe for guaranteeing that the US never develops a successful commercial manned space industry. Let the private sector sort it out and if a few unsuspecting citizens purchase seats not comprehending that strapping themselves to thousands of tons of high explosive in an effort to reach an environment that will kill them in seconds should they be exposed to it is an activity that carries with it a few inherent risks of which the nanny state need not inform them in great detail beforehand, so be it. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2010-02-01 10:24 |
| #5 I predicted several years ago that Constellation/Ares would never get off the ground since it would be superceded by events long before it could actually fly. SpaceX has been very successful with its Falcon rockets and will have the ability to put humans in orbit within a couple of years. Once you reach Earth orbit you are halfway to the Moon. All this is being done for a tiny fraction of what NASA had budgeted for Ares development alone. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2010-02-01 10:03 |
| #4 Y'all miss the point of NASA. It's a jobs program. For the South. That's what LBJ wanted from his days as a Senator, and once he became President he made it happen. Houston. Huntsville. Canaveral. Contractors who understood what was what made sure the jobs got spread around the south as well as in their home towns. They got it. The Ares/Constellation project was just one more major jobs program. Didn't matter if the sucker ever worked or not as long as several thousand engineers and technicians were employed. This is one thing Obama has done that I'd actually support. Let NASA be an R & D, pure science organization. Carve out the part of NASA that focuses on manned-space flight safety and have them regulate the private industry much like the FAA does airline safety. Then let the government contract for complete spaceflight packages instead of hiring a contractor like Boeing or Lockheed to 'manage' a facility. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2010-02-01 09:33 |
| #3 Correct VS. Most gov't agencies should be put to death by age 20 with functions (if still required) privatized or moved elsewhere. I give you the Departments of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, DOS, Education, and the miserably failed Department of Commerce are just a few prime examples. A longer list can be found here. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-02-01 08:02 |
| #2 NASA has outgrown it's use. Spin-off the directly military applicable functions to the Pentagon and privatise the rest to serve as competition to Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic etc. |
| Posted by: Vespasian Sport4266 2010-02-01 07:47 |
| #1 Replace the 'N' in NASA with an 'I' as in International. Move the entire kit and kaboodle to Chicago. He'll replace all the scientists and engineers with Cook County patronage employees and fund it immediately. Florida and Texas are for rich people and jooos. Few of them play basketball. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-02-01 07:26 |