

Obama ends NASA space race with slow road to Mars - gaius
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7099244.ece

======
DrJokepu
What I find quite funny about that is that for America, it will take 25 years
to get to the Mars. In the meanwhile, my home town has been building a new
subway line for the last 25 years and it's still far from being operational.

~~~
senki
You are Hungarian, right? ;)

------
Qz
I think the asteroid landing plan is a smart one over the Mars goal. I think
we're more obsessed with Mars than is due -- asteroids offer a wealth of
potential resources without the immense cost of dropping into and climbing out
of a planetary gravity well. Even a landing on one of Mars' fake-moons would
be a better choice than Mars itself. Assuming we don't inadvertently open up
the gates to hell or something like that...

~~~
markbnine
Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.

Yeah, gravity sucks, but I find a trip to Mars far more interesting than one
to an asteroid, E.g. the geology, water resources, valles marineris, the
potential for life, colonization. Why not be obsessed?

~~~
ugh
What’s great about those asteroid landings is that they are relatively easy
and nevertheless exciting enough. Much more exciting than the ISS or anything
happening in low earth orbit. I think that’s the most important purpose of
manned spaceflight. Robots will be able to tell you pretty much everything
about geology, water and the potential of life on Mars.

~~~
rbanffy
A robot cannot stand on the tallest volcano of the solar system and tell you
how it felt.

Robots can tell a lot, but not everything. Exploring is not only knowing
what's there, but actually experiencing it in human terms. The richness of the
reports from astronauts on the Moon cannot be approached by what a robot can
tell you. Also, a robot can only answer the questions it was designed to
answer and, thus, it embodies, in its own construction, a series of
assumptions about its target environment that may be completely off.

Humans are an extremely valuable resource.

~~~
ugh
I agree. The right strategy is to put humans on Mars. The right tactic is to
now focus on achievable goals.

~~~
rbanffy
The goal is to put humans on Mars (and every other place). We must focus on
what we need to learn to make that happen. Asteroids and the Moon seem good
steps in that direction.

------
colinake
NASA has shown itself incapable of meeting deadlines or staying within budget
on many projects, and Obama is right to turn access to Low Earth Orbit over to
commercial companies (on fixed price contracts, not the normal cost plus
contracts). We've been building the same boring "get us to orbit" rocket since
the 1960s. Wouldn't NASA's leadership (doing science and developing
technologies that private companies cannot afford) be better spent on LEO and
out? The moon, asteroids, Mars, Phobos, etc.

This is a great plan. It's a Good Thing for the aerospace economy in the long
run even if there's going to be some displacement in the meantime.

It also opens the door for entrepreneurial companies - building rockets,
engines, payload integrators, whatever - to make money in a way previously not
possible. It's impossible to make money when the government is competing with
you. This is a great thing for entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, and
people everywhere. There's a better chance your kid will be struck by
lightning than be a NASA astronaut, but now the door has opened and we'll see
private astronaut corps pop up from a few different sources.

Get behind this plan, folks. It's a Good Thing and great for other
entrepreneurs, even if we're not building web software. :)

------
tgerhard
I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear
that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone with nothing to fall back on
in a crappy economy. This speech was meant to be encouraging to a broad
constituency of a state Obama and the Democrats need for future elections.

As far as science goes, the better-faster-cheaper ethos NASA had with the Mars
Rovers should be revived. Robots are a terrific way to get actual science
done. That said, the lessons learned from building and working on the ISS
would be a good starting point for creating a vehicle to take people to Mars -
a place we can eventually make habitable
(<http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm>).

~~~
tjic
> I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear
> that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone

Those aren't jobs - they're welfare checks, taken from working Americans in
return for very very very little of value.

I hope that the folks on the Space Coast are right. They can all go get real
jobs (even if it's at Target), and the free market space industry can deliver
for several orders of magnitude less.

~~~
dackmilliken
I would much rather hand a "welfare" check to an aerospace engineer than an
average Joe.

Also, if the free market space industry does pan out in our lifetimes, I think
they would love to have these aerospace guys working for them even if they
have such "little of value."

------
kebaman
Perhaps saving planet earth and kick starting clean alternative energy will be
what excites the current or near future generation. After that, outer space
exploration will still beckon. I can only hope I'm around to watch.

------
yellowbkpk
It sure would be nice to have something to get our younger people excited
about science. When my parents were kids it was the Apollo mission and
astronauts, when I was a kid it was computers and the Internet. My younger
sister doesn't get excited about either of those things anymore: why would
she? She's been able to sit in front of a computer and video-chat with people
across the country and world since she was able to walk.

Obama's plan seems to say "Your newborns might have the space program to be
excited about ... when they're 18 years old."

~~~
JabavuAdams
There's a new space race going on right now. It's being done by private
enterprise on budgets from $1M to $100M. Check out:

Armadillo Aerospace

XCOR Aerospace

Masten Space Systems

Unreasonable Rocket

Scaled Composites

SpaceX

Blue Origin

If you want to talk to rocketeers who are actually building hardware, today,
check out the arocket mailing list.

We don't need another space race to a destination. We need to build space
infrastructure.

It's the difference between trying to get from the east coast of the US to the
west with one wagon train, versus building railways and towns. That first
wagon might just make it, but it doesn't help the next wagon.

~~~
josefresco
This new space race might as well be a soap box derby in comparison to our
military's space budget. While 100M might seem like a lot of space bucks, our
Air Force has a roughly $12 billion dollar space budget which dwarfs what we
spend on NASA or any of these private space ventures.

I wouldn't worry about space spending, or space infrastructure when our AF is
spending oodles to put weapons and craft into space.

~~~
JabavuAdams
I'm not so interested in the funding. I'm interested in results.

There are too many people in the space industry who can write a nice paper
showing what they could do if only you gave them a billion dollars.

Obviously private space (beyond GEO) is going to be huge at some point. The
problem is bootstrapping.

When you have a chicken and egg problem, the solution is to build some small
cheap thing that works to demonstrate your competence and attract larger
opportunities.

John Carmack's started his own space program on about $5M of his own money and
10 years of effort. How many people in the US buy homes for more than $5M? How
many shitty web apps get more funding than that?

~~~
waterlesscloud
While I admire what Carmack is doing on a "that's cool" level, what real
results have been produced?

He has a device that can lift off the ground, move a couple hundred meters to
the side, and land.

That's a long way from a space program.

~~~
colinake
It's reusable - something the government hasn't been able to produce. There
are a lot of applications - vertical takeoff and landing testbed, acceleration
of Technology Readiness Levels, microgravity research, upper atmospheric
research, heliophysic observation, etc. It's not a "space program," but
vehicles like ours and John's have a very real market.

------
whyenot
I've never understood why it's so important for humans to go to mars. We live
on a planet where many people still endure tremendous suffering due to
starvation, disease and war. In the next 50 years we will very likely have to
begin large scale geo-engineering in order to mitigate climate change and
ocean acidification. Prestige "science" like sending people to the moon and
mars is a luxury.

~~~
jeebusroxors
Where do you stop? I spent 5 bucks on lunch today. Should I have not eaten
because people are hungry? What about the computer and internet you typed this
on? Should we have not invested in those and spent all the money on curing
disease?

~~~
lispm
that would be great

------
kingkawn
cmon fellas, this is economics. maybe if you can mount a convincing hoax that
Al Qaeda is trying to infiltrate Mars, we'll dump a few billion into it. Or
maybe, more plausibly, if China decided to do increasingly elaborate manned-
space flights, it might push us to follow suit.

------
gaius
Dude should have committed to delivering _something_ within his Presidency.
2030 is a long way off.

~~~
colinplamondon
He's the President of the United States, not 'Dude'.

~~~
gaius
Sorry, "His Majesty", "The Chosen One", "The Messiah" or whatever his adoring
fans call him.

"Someone will do something at some point" is just more typical dithering from
this lame-duck president. In office but not in power, we say in England.

~~~
riffic
" _Mr. President_ " will do.

~~~
amanfredi
I thought it was funny.

