I see I really, really, really (...) underestimated the strength of Obamania... Silly me...
The Hubble Space Telescope is rumored to be a modified KH-12 spy satellite. AFAIK none of those have ever been repaired in space. While it may have been more expensive to do so, we could have just sent up replacements as we regularly do with the KH-12s.
Everyone simply ignoring Obama actually raising NASA's budget?
Looks like in this case he was listening to his scientific advisors not his PR staff.
No, he decided to pick few cherries from the Augustine report* and then started to pretend that he's doing it "Obama-way": cheaper, smarted, nicer. Too bad this doesn't really work in space research. Nor diplomacy. Nor military. Nor politics. Ugh...
(* = a group of 'experts' most of whom are connected with private space companies recommends to hand over space exploration to private space companies. Surprise surprise
)
The fact that a single human can do more then a robot isn't really relevant.
No, it is very relevant. Period.
Are you really trying to argue that we don't have finite resources and we shouldn't take account of this fact?
Funny, after all the posts I've made on this forum speaking in favour of conservation and intelligent use of resources, one would say nobody can accuse me of the contrary. But this is CFC, what did I expect?
If our aim is the preservation of humanity then we're wasting time by not taking into account the fact that space exploration has an opportunity cost. If there are better things to expend our resources on, we should cut back on manned exploration.
Ok, enough of this crap. Time for bigger fonts:
Annual expenses of ALL SPACE AGENCIES IN THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD COMBINED are less than 50 billion US dollars. That's like the military budget of France, in other words about 0.08% of the world's GDP. How could anybody POSSIBLY target this for "cost reductions" is really beyond my capacity to understand.
Let's move on.
For what it's worth Obama doesn't think it's as important as the other stuff they're spending money on.
A better word would be "wasting".
I agree that the U.S. defense budget is way too high, but that's what they want to spend their money on, so who are we to tell them otherwise? It's all about priorities, and I guess space exploration isn't that high on Obama's list in these tough economic times.
I said in one of my first posts in this thread that it's of course up to the Americans to decide what they want to spend/waste their money on. I am simply presenting my opinion on it, what's wrong about that?
Besides, a couple months ago the U.S. space program looked to be in a horrible shape - not only were there no plans to replace the space shuttle and continue human space exploration, but the ISS was also planned to be decomissioned, soon.
That's very inaccurate. NASA was kinda paralysed because nobody knew what the heck would Obama do to it. Nobody knew it - because Obama has changed his space plans about 5 times already (3 times during his campaign and then 2 times as the president).
At least now the ISS will continue flying.
That's like saying "
We're scrapping our entire navy, but hey, at least we won't raze our port facilities and drydocks!"
If this was Canada's space program we're talking about, I'd have a more emotional connection to these decisions, but as an outsider all I can do is say "Well, if that's what they want to spend their money on.. cool"
Are you aware that this will profoundly and negatively impact both the CSA and ESA, both of which rely on NASA for human spaceflight?
Eventually other countries will step up and in the end the U.S. is going to have to as well. It's not like the U.S. has an obligation to drive space exploration for humanity. Apparently they have other priorities, so whatever.
I imagine ESA won't be amused, since it operated under pretty clear assumption that the US provides manned spaceflight, while it plays the role of a sidekick, focusing on the less illustrious science. Now both Canada and Europe have their stuff on the ISS, but won't have access to it. Wonderful. On somewhat brighter note, perhaps this will finally persuade the Europeans to start looking after their own interests in space. Gods know we've been keeping low profile for way too long.
Winner praising something the russians did?
And Winner vs. americans? I'll grab the popcorn and just watch.
I mentioned many times that I admired the Russian space programme, so don't act surprised.
That kind of thing actually happened in 15th century Portugal. A silly, bellicose king, Afonso V, insistent on concentrating on the war against the moors in Morocco, because, you see, they were evil and so it was the right thing to do (ok, there were some good reasons, but that was the driving idea). So he wasted the country's resources trying to subdue a barren and unprofitable land (anyone sees historical parallels?), and failing at it. In the meanwhile he rented out, for 6 years, the exploration of the western coast of Africa to a wealthy merchant, Fernão Gomes, with the condition that he map about 500km of coast per year. The merchant did fulfill the contract. But unlike space exploration, there the private party had one big incentive: a monopoly on trade for the duration of the contract. And the main trade good found happened to be gold.
So, unless someone finds something really valuable on the moon...
One can really rely on you to
distort historical facts.
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Anyway, here's what's gonna happen now, if Obama's plans are accepted.
- NASA will have wasted 9 billion US dollars which it has already invested in its Constellation programme. That is the money used in development of Ares-1, the Orion spacecraft and other related projects. I don't have to say there are no refunds.
- NASA will lose thousands of engineers and scientists, who depended on it. This will make any future "restart" of major space exploration extremely difficult as NASA will have to create its team from scratch.
- US will lose its leadership in manned space exploration. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it will come back to haunt the Americans just as the end of Chinese maritime exploration turned out to be a gigantic mistake.
- Human Mars mission will be delayed by at least another decade. Robots will continue to send us pretty pictures and limited science data, but the real stuff we need to do ourselves will have to wait.
Let's quote Mike Griffin:
Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, an architect of the now-cancelled moon program, told CBS News the shift to commercial space operations was a profound mistake.
"I'm one of the biggest proponents of commercial spaceflight that there is, but it doesn't yet exist," he said.
"I would like an enlightened government policy to help bring it about, but I don't believe you get there by destroying all your government capability so there's no option but for the government to do whatever necessary to get the - quote - commercial operators - unquote - to succeed. That's not the way to do it.
"Basically, you're burning the bridge behind you. Even if it's successful, now what you've done is you've created not a space program for the United States, you've created a capability to get to low-Earth orbit but there's nothing to do there because there's no government program. Where's the market?"
Griffin added that "for the U.S. government to deliberately give up its lead in something which is fundamentally an enterprise of governments ... for the United States to give up something that's an important part of our national identity in favor of outsourcing it to commercial enterprises when and as they come into being is bizarre."
Source (Read the whole article if you can.)
Smart guy.
"
. Now that the bloated government is out of the way I'm sure the free market will have moon resort hotels in my lifetime.
Payback time for the post-WW2 brain drain 
