$78,000,000.00 of your money, smashed in the moon.

Eville wrote: More proof that FE will bash Obama for everything he does, even if it coincides with his own views. "WAAHHHH! OBAMA IS BEING FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE!"

Wait wait.  Obama favors a multi-trillion dollar budget and trumpets how he'll freeze spending to the tune of $250 billion over 10 years?  Really?  This is fiscally responsible?

When you go to make budget cuts... NEVER cut your investments in knowledge and your future.

Darur wrote: __sneaky__ wrote: When you go to make budget cuts... NEVER cut your investments in knowledge and your future. Amen This is a very depressing thing to hear

Truth. This earth isn't going to support us forever.

World population is expected to double in the next 40 years. At that point, it could easily be a little too late to start working on it. Let's face it, the first attempts will be very small, purely scientific facilities. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think we really have that much time to procrastinate.

Eville wrote: Wrong.  the poorer areas of the world do not have that much time to procrastinate.  Which is good because that means we will be sending less aid to them.  Which means fewer instances of Dutch Disease which is, in the long run, very beneficial to the inhabitants of the poorer nations.  which means by cutting moon bases from the budget, Obama has saved the world.  BAM!...

I don't think that theory is nearly as sound on paper as it is in your head.

Besides, Dutch Disease is a dicey-at-best theory which chooses to ignore the complications of the current global economy. It may have been an excellent model for post-colonial Europe, but it simply doesn't pan out when applied to the modern world.

I wrote a letter to President Obama today and will be mailing it out tomorrow. I doubt he'll actually ever see it, but I felt it was important to do on the off chance that it might actually make it to his desk.

One of the points that I wrote that you really don't see a lot is that with the planet experiencing drastic climate change, it is all the more important to spread out our assets in an interstellar sense. If all hell does break loose in the next century or so with the climate, it would be beneficial to have colonies on the moon, Mars, or even the moons of Jupiter which, in the event of a global disaster on earth, could come to our aid. Think of it, if an apocalyptic disaster occurred right now, we would be sent back to the dark ages, or even worse, to prehistoric levels of technology and knowledge. With an outside safe-haven where all of our knowledge to date could be retained by people, it would be possible to re-organize, re-educate, and re-build. The world in a post-apocalyptic situation without such a repository of living knowledge would probably resemble something on the level of "By The Waters Of Babylon" or "A Boy And His Dog" in the barbaric and technologically devolved senses.

We have come to a point as a species where we will no longer evolve on our own planet. Evolution ends when a species stops adapting to their environment and starts adapting their environment to themselves. We are beginning to lack biodiversity as a species and one day before too much longer, all sense of biodiversity as a species will be gone for good. All it will take is one good epidemic to wipe us out. It should be our priority as a species, for the survival of our species, to branch out to off-world colonies in an attempt to provide for our very own futures. Unless we get off-world, and soon, we're going to go the way of the dodo and quite a bit more quickly than we think. We've dodged a lot of bullets as a species, it's only a matter of time before we don't.

Edited by tallen702 - 28 January 2010 at 2:08am

So does this mean that NASA is run by robots that are fueled by burning money?

Or did that $79mil get sent to the workers and material companies that built and an everything?

You have to love the lawyers telling the engineers how to do their job.  

Edited by WGP guy2 - 28 January 2010 at 9:40am

Rumors are now that they are planning to go with the DIRECT 3.0 plan.

It uses existing technology from the shuttle launch system.  Not necessarily a bad thing but it is more of a 'meantime' plan IMO.  I still they they should continue with Constellation, perhaps at a slower rate, while they utilize the DIRECT plan.  There was already a lot of money and time put into it to stop now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRECT

Quite a few of the internships I applied for were working on the Constellation program.  None have been canceled so far; I guess we'll find out on Monday.

__sneaky__ wrote: Pro tip: As germany learned, don't piss off your physicists. We build your nukes. ;)

Along those lines, if they US doesn't want the Constellation program, maybe LM & Boeing can find a country that does. 


Edited by WGP guy2 - 28 January 2010 at 9:53am

What other country could afford it?

WGP covered most of my major problems with NASA.  Great, they got to the moon -- with a gigantic budget and the loss of three astronaut's lives.  They've shown a disregard for the dangers of operating on the cutting edge of technology, and it's cost them two shuttles and 14 astronauts, not to mention a couple of Mars missions.  I believe that the lack of economic pressure to produce cost-effective, safe technology, as well as the political  importance of sticking to launch schedules has hurt NASA to the point where they can no longer perform effectively.  I think the Constellation program shows promise, and at this point we should use it given the investment so far.  But I think drastic changes should be made in the way NASA is financed and run.

tallen702 wrote: WGP guy2 wrote: Along those lines, if they US doesn't want the Constellation program, maybe LM & Boeing can find a country that does. And WGP, while I like the fact that DIRECT makes use of current technology to fuel the missions, I don't like the fact that it is shuttle derived. I'd much rather see us go back to the Saturn V platform (albeit an expanded and improved version allowing for more thrust and thus, more direct lunar routes) than continue to use the booster-driven configuration that the DIRECT system envisions.

This was devised by almost exclusively engineers in their free time.  They weren't doing it for anyone or being payed to do it.  I'm going to assume they know what their doing, and that they surely have a reason for the technology they use.