NASA should be scrapped in favor of a new agency, one with the sole objective of furthering America's exploration of deep space. So says Harrison Schmitt, the last man to set foot on the moon, in a proposal published online Wednesday.
Schmitt, a member of Apollo 17 in 1972 and later a one-term U.S. senator, proposed that the new space agency be called the National Space Exploration Administration.
Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's famous speech that set America on its glorious path to the moon, Schmitt, 75, said NASA has lost its focus. The Apollo program helped win the Cold War, strengthened national unity and set up the United States to take control of lunar resources, but NASA has withered under later presidencies, including Barack Obama's, Schmitt said.
"I don't blame NASA as much as I blame various administrations for not recognizing the geopolitical importance of space," he told Space.com.
Schmitt's call for overhauling the space program is partly a response to Obama's 2012 budget, which critics say increased the funding for space technology research at NASA but did not provide adequate funding for deep-space exploration.
Other Apollo astronauts have lamented the lack of focus on exploration.
In a May 24 op-ed in USA Today, Apollo mission commanders Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan wrote, "After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent."
Apollo 17 crewmates Cernan and Schmitt were the world's last moonwalkers.
If formed in 2013, the proposed NSEA could send Americans back to the moon by 2020, Schmitt says, and establish lunar settlements and Mars exploration and settlements in the decades after that. It also would develop the ability to deflect Earth-bound asteroids. All of NASA's current scientific endeavors would be within the purview of the National Science Foundation and other government-funded science organizations.
Schmitt, a member of Apollo 17 in 1972 and later a one-term U.S. senator, proposed that the new space agency be called the National Space Exploration Administration.
Thus heralding the way for the Galaxy Quest project!
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Quote:
NASA should be scrapped in favor of a new agency, one with the sole objective of furthering America's exploration of deep space.
Uh, so who does all that satellite based stuff, like earth observation or hubble?
Also, this guy seems to be confusing exploration with sending humans up. We'd want to do the latter sooner or later I'm sure, but IMO a number of recent NASA missions count as fairly awesome exploration.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Quote:
Originally Posted by fragment
Also, this guy seems to be confusing exploration with sending humans up. We'd want to do the latter sooner or later I'm sure, but IMO a number of recent NASA missions count as fairly awesome exploration.
Indeed. Humans are squishy bags of mostly-water. Subject them to comparatively minor acceleration or temperature changes, or deprive them of oxygen, and they die very quickly. At which point, their functional capacity declines rather seriously.
Robots can function over a vastly wider range of temperature, pressure, and radiation exposure. Plus they can do nifty things like see in ultraviolet and directly measure magnetic fields. You don't have to waste a lot of precious space providing water and air and food for them. You don't have to worry about bringing them back. And you can send them on years-long missions without worrying about them getting lonely or anything.
Believe me, I'm all for manned space exploration, and I hope we send people back to the Moon in the not-too-distant future, for example. But in almost every way, robots are hugely better-suited to the demands of space exploration than are humans.
Cheers,
Michael
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Agreed.
The one way where present-day robots aren't as well suited as humans to exploration is that they can't think.
Hopefully, future robots will be much smarter. Then the only good reason to send astronauts will be that they, and the people back on Earth, will find it a more interesting experience.
People back on Earth will probably always be more interested in astronauts than they will be in robots - no matter how smart the robots are.
At the astonishing distance of 17.4 billion km, the Nasa probe is the most far-flung object made by humans.
But it seems age and remoteness are no barriers to this veteran explorer.
Voyager is executing a series of roll manoeuvres to get one of its instruments into the optimum position to measure particles sweeping away from the Sun.
Controllers at the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, report a perfect response from the probe.
"I liken Voyager to an old car," said project manager Suzanne Dodds. "It's got simple electronics, not a lot of fancy gadgets - but because of that it can operate for longer; it's not as finicky."
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets. Since completing that mission, it has been making the push for deep space.
The probe is heading in the general direction of the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy and will, in the next few years, leave the space dominated by the influence of our Sun and enter the province between the stars - interstellar space.
Did you fucking read that? INTERSTELLAR SPACE! Go humanity!
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June 9, 2011: NASA's Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system.
Mission scientists say the probes have just sent back some very big news indeed.
It's bubbly out there.
"The Voyager probes appear to have entered a strange realm of frothy magnetic bubbles," says astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "This is very surprising."
Scientists working with NASA's Dawn spacecraft have created a new video showing the giant asteroid Vesta as the spacecraft approaches this unexplored world in the main asteroid belt.
The video loops 20 images obtained for navigation purposes on June 1. The images show a dark feature near Vesta's equator moving from left to right across the field of view as Vesta rotates. Images also show Vesta's jagged, irregular shape, hinting at the enormous crater known to exist at Vesta's south pole.
A historic day today in New Mexico as we will be opening the first commercial spaceport in the world - Spaceport America.
The first astronauts to join us on Virgin Galactic flights will be there with us, along with our Virgin Money Australia and #spacecheetah competition winners.
It promises to be a momentous occasion and another big step for our great space adventure.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Neat!
In semi-related news, I got to meet Colonel Greg Johnson yesterday, a pilot on Endeavour's final flight. Nice guy, as it turns out, and quite modest about his considerable accomplishments.
You know how, when you listen to the astronauts and other NASA personnel talking about missions, they typically seem to speak in somewhat breathless-sounding phrases? "This is the conclusion of STS-123; marking a great milestone in the history of space exploration" -- that sort of thing.
If Johnson is an example, they seem to speak that way whenever they're speaking in public. It's kind of endearing, though it makes them sound ultra-serious about everything. You almost want to say, "Not everything is of Earth-shaking significance, you know."
There must be some kind of training program or something ...
[He had a funny story about the effects of long-term weightlessness. Soon after returning to Earth, he was greeted by a high-ranking NASA official. At the time, Johnson was holding a diet Coke in one hand and his young daughter in the other. Without thinking, he let go of the Coke to shake the administrator's hand -- and, of course, it fell right onto the administrator's shoes and spilled all over them. His daughter asked him why he had just spilled Coke all over the administrator's shoes and Johnson replied that he'd thought it would just stay where it was, like he was used to things doing.]
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Oh, notice how many times the video shows Commander Hadfield (or the guitar) traveling down that corridor? Colonel Johnson mentioned that this was one of the favorite pasttimes on the ISS: launching yourself from one end of the corridor and seeing how far you could get before hitting a wall. He mentioned that it was really difficult, and newcomers to the station never got very far. But after a few weeks of getting used to moving around in microgravity, some of the "old hands" could go the entire length of the corridor without touching the sides.
A variation was to launch one of your companions down the corridor. The further (s)he traveled before hitting the wall, the more points you got. Bonus points for giving your companion a spin as (s)he traveled down the corridor.
__________________
“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
You call that an eclipse of Jupiter? I can still see the damn planet in that picture.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Re: The Final Frontier or Ye Olde Space-Exlporation Thrade
Go humanity! 
UPDATE!
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