Wired News: Wi-Fi Enters the Space Race.
Hm. Looks like something that would dovetail nicely with the work of Bill Clancey at the Mars Society habs.
[via NASAWatch]
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Wired News: Wi-Fi Enters the Space Race. Hm. Looks like something that would dovetail nicely with the work of Bill Clancey at the Mars Society habs. [via NASAWatch] Yale Astronomer Sabatino Sofia (who?) weighs in on the Moon-Mars plans.
I can understand the skepticism about this time around being any different, but (yet again) this skepticism seems to be based in part on the received wisdom of the $400B pricetag. Man…people have latched onto that “factoid” like they’ve latched on to the “imminent threat” B.S. — like blood-crazed pit-bulls latching onto a slab of raw meat, blissfully unaware that what they’ve clamped their jaws on is something less than the meat that it seems to be.
True. And that is why no attempt to produce a “second Apollo” has ever succeeded — Apollo was the product of a unique set of historical circumstances. But this doesn’t apply to the Bush plan, which so far does not look like an all-out, blank-check drive to get to the Moon and then Mars. It’s an almost boringly methodical, success-driven approach, more like a business development strategy than a Grand ProgramTM.
Funny, I keep seeing a $100B current-dollars figure cited for the total cost of the Apollo program…where does he get $50B per year? And he totally misses the boat with the rest of that excerpt — the big spending on the new plan doesn’t come until after our commitments to Shuttle and ISS end, freeing up all that money within NASA’s current funding levels. The money for implementing this “major new intiative” is, by and large, going to come from the money that would have been spent unproductively on ISS and Shuttle. Additional funding may be needed down the road, it’s true, but it is difficult to imagine what the President has proposed costing anywhere near $50B per year.
Says you…with a modicum of discipline and a clear goal to focus on, there’s no reason it needs to cost an arm and a leg. More than it needs to, perhaps, NASA being a government agency, but there is nothing fundamentally bankrupting about the plan as outlined to-date.
AAAARGH!!! There’s that number again!!!
“Yes, it’s true…if we just continue to circle the Earth in our LEO holding-pattern, someday, a miracle will occur, and warp-drive or wormholes or interplanetary stepping disks or commercial-grade astral projection will spontaneously spring into existence. Why, we would be foolish to expend any money or effort on developing now what the future will bring to us for free!”
Oh, I don’t know about that. If you have Mars as a jumping-off point, missions further out (manned or otherwise) become a great deal more imaginable…especially when you’ve already learned the tricks of crewed interplanetary travel by venturing to Mars in the first place.
Oh, nooo… No reason to visit Ganymede. Nothing to find on Europa. No attractions at all on Io. Why go?
Let’s see…We need a sample return mission because we can study Martian samples better here on Earth, but sending humans to where such samples can be obtained in great abundance at a moment’s notice from their native context is a bad idea? It’s smarter to spend $1.5B per shot to retrieve a few pounds of material from one or a few sites, than to spend $20-40B to send humans to where they can examine as many pounds of samples as they can handle, from many far-flung sites, day after day, for a year and a half? I don’t get it. What do astronomers have against manned space exploration? Is it really just that they see it as siphoning funds away from buying ever-bigger telescopes? Political gambits have Bush singing February blues
See, apparently he doesn’t get the point that I’ve been harping on here for the past three weeks: retirement of the Orbiter fleet is the one thing in this whole policy that Bush can assure before the end of a putative second term, and the one element of his plan that he seemed the most certain of during his speech on January 14. The phrase I’ve been looking for all this time is “precipitating a crisis”. The one thing that sets the Bush policy apart from that of his father or any number of other “NASA visions” of the past is that this one sets in motion a chain of events which will force the agency to change instead of continuing on with the untenable status quo. It’s such a subtle point that most pundits outside of space circles seem to have overlooked it in their breathless rush to criticize the Bush policy’s much more obvious and fundamental flaw: the fact that it was proposed by President Bush.
No. Not yet, anyway, and there’s no real reason it must do so. Like so many others, Marshall here is basing his opinion on little more than received wisdom: the Bush 41 Moon/Mars proposal (a.k.a. “the 90-Day Report”) came with a sticker price of $400B+, therefore, all Moon or Mars proposals must cost that much or more. But none of the pundits repeating that claim appear to be aware of the politics behind the $400B figure — namely, NASA threw in all sorts of nice-to-haves and gee-whiz science-fair elements, either due to the expectation of Apollo-style blank check funding or the desire to kill the initiative in favor of Space Station by making it so expensive as to be DOA in Congress (it depends on whose interpretation you read).
Funny — NASA appears to be taking the new policy seriously, or is at least doing more than sitting some Deputy Assistant Vice-Undersecretary in a broom closet with few blank viewgraph sheets and a box of Crayolas: NASA Announces New Headquarters Management Alignment: NASA Begins New Exploration Journey With FY 2005 Budget Yahoo! News – President Names Eight Moon Advisers Sounds to me like Josh Marshall doesn’t really know much about space policy. But hey, why let that stand in the way of taking a rhetorical poke at the President? The way the personal animosity towards Bush is driving the opposition to and ridicule of this new policy, I have to wonder how long it will be before the anti-Bush crowd starts calling him “President Space Cadet” and (as someone at Transterrestrial Musings suggested) demanding the immediate end to the space program simply to spite the “Smirking Chimp”. I wonder if you can actually buy one of these? Or the two classics pictured near the bottom of the page here? This in a Mars version would be every bit as gaudy and kitschy — yet, somehow geekily cool. I’ll pass on this one, though, thankyaveramuch. Now, there aren’t any Lowellian globes here, but you can download a spiffy contour-colored USGS topo map of Mars’ real terrain (and it’s even spiffier in the 18.9Mb PDF version). How disappointing: Trek star’s space travel unease I guess I shouldn’t be at all surprised, given the socialist utopian ethos of the TV series for which he is best known.
One of the more amusing and apt comments I read on this pointed out that he as an “entertainer” has no qualms about — indeed, he encourages — the several hundred billion dollars spent each year by an industry dedicated to the production of escapist fantasy. And at that, Hollywood’s success/failure track record is far, far worse than NASA’s or the broader space industry. Putting aside the “explorations of the human condition” and “cathartic expressions of feeling” and whatever self-serving emotion-based fluffy-cheese psychobabble “serious artists of the craft” like Stewart meringue their profession in, really, when it comes down to it, only the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of what they produce ultimately adds value to human civilization. If you want an example of a true waste of money, time, and resources, try renting Insurrection. In film, as in any medium, most art is vacuous, exploitative, unedifying, talentless, forgettable garbage produced by self-important people who think they are more significant than they are and that their opinions mean more than they do simply because they self-identify as “artist”, all the while looking down on their patrons (voluntary ones and involuntary alike) with contempt for being such easily deceivable “marks” for so unquestioningly eating up the fraud they serve. This contempt frequently morphs into a general misanthropy, which regards humanity in general as something irremediably flawed and unworthy, an attitude which in turn permeates the bilge that they pump out and foist on the paying public. And people like this have the nerve to claim that space exploration is a waste of money, and preach that manned exploration and settlement is morally wrong. You don’t like humans going into space and settling other worlds? Fine — don’t go…we’ll get along just fine without you. You don’t like your tax dollars being wasted on manned space exploration? Fine — I don’t like my tax dollars wasted subsidizing “art” and “culture” and “criticism” and “studies” and “thought” and “cinema” and all that other nonsense which appeals to a vanishingly small number of pretentious aficionados while intentionally offending or just being utterly useless to the rest of us…I’ll be happy to give up my favored federal line item when you give up yours.
I’m especially disappointed in Stewart for spewing the standard utopian bromide that always comes up with respect to space exploration and settlement. I would have expected someone involved with science fiction for so many years to have tired of this bit of undigested received wisdom — apparently not. It’s funny how no one seems to mandate such perfection in other endeavors on which taxpayer money is spent. Sure, one hears opinions that money spent on one thing (e.g.: defense procurement) would be better spent on another (e.g.: subsidies for organic bulgur farms), but only with space does one so predictably and frequently encounter the requirement that ALL social ills, economic shortcomings, medical maladies, personal maladjustments, and trivial victimologies must be addressed before any money can be spent. I’m sure no one would have suggested that the world must be perfect before the City of New York or American Airlines subsidized Stewart’s recent role in the broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker”. The obvious flaw in such an argument (or its best feature, if you’re the one making it) is that the perfection used as a standard here is impossible. To overcome the usually-cited social, economic, and other problems would require either orders of magnitude more money than is available — let alone what could be applied by diverting what pittance the government spends on space each year — or a complete overhaul of human nature to remove the innate flaws, behaviors, tendencies, instincts, or whatever it may be at their root. Another only slightly less transparent flaw/feature is that no matter how many of the typically-cited problems an all-out spare-no-expense global effort might succeed in resolving, the people making the argument today would be undeterred from finding other victims who need saving or problems that need fixing before we can even think about going into space. A lot of people fell for that argument during Apollo (or else consoled themselves with the thought that the ‘burning of the ships’ was a sacrifice for some nebulous but surely noble “greater good”), but as others have noted in great detail, the money saved was a drop in the ocean of cash poured into nearly forty years of failed solutions to the very problems still cited as higher priorities today. Hopefully the argument has come to seem as threadbare and silly to everyone else as it has to space advocates…or at least moreso than it has, apparently, to Mr. Stewart. |
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