2010: An Earth Odyssey

imagine the knowledge gained if there were dozens of huge stationary telescopes on the surface of the moon, TOTALLY free of atmospheric interference of course.

or tens of thousands of limited function satellites swarming the solar system, poking around looking for interesting things for their big sister to check out later.

not gonna happen in this generation or the next; too close to pure science and not enough macho humans-in-space angle.

pace Joyce(le maitre)

'climate change is the old sow that eats her own farrow'

So if the alarmists believe that this planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, then why are they cutting our only life-line? (space exploration)

So if the alarmists believe that this planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, then why are they cutting our only life-line?
~Luke

Because in space, nobody can hear them scream?

now that some real NASA scientists are going to see their budgets cut so that the NASA/GISS Climastrologists budget can be increased, the real internal fights will start.

Up until now, everyone got some lolly. The rocket kiddies will fightback & hard to derail the GISS fools.

This is all so perfectly moonbattish.

The media are mostly interested in manned spaceflight. But what will happen to the
successors of the Great Observatories, which
have investigated deep space with so much success?

Probably the cancellation of the F22 project
will be more damaging in the intermediate term,
when it becomes obvious that the US has lost
air superiority.

The truth of Thomas Sowell's remark, that if all
Obama did was to wreck the US economy, he (Sowell)
would be relieved, becomes
more and more apparent.

Now we'll see if the rocket scientists are smarter than the climate scientists.

About to be listed on Craig's List out of Houston

For Sale: One Space Station, used but in good working order.

Best Offers accepted or will exchange for a suitable number of "honest" global warming "peer reviewed" (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) scientific papers.

Directing NASA to further research into climate change is disturbing. James Delingpole of the UK Telegraph has an article in which Prince Charles recently praised the CRU for a job well done. It seems Charles does not read the papers.

You know how a chick attaches itself to the first thing it sees after it hatches? The first MSM Climategate column I read was Delingpole's. I love him.

They can't afford it, unfortunately. They need to get their debt house in order, which doesnt happen by pouring money down the entitlement hole.

It's on now - with their budgets and careers on the line, look for the space guys to destroy the climate 'science' industry.

I really don't see a turn-around in attitude at NASA with the article, in the headline, perhaps.

With the shuttles going EOL soon and no replacement vehicle in sight, shutting down the ISS is probably inevitable.

Just make sure it's in a stable orbit first, ok?

Wow, some people will NEVER give up on "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever new catchphrase comes up.

Well, all our eggs are now in one big Obamasized basket...guess it's time to feel more uncomfortable.

No future missions to the moon, there goes the chance of getting rid of all the moonbats.

Good.

NASA's a giant piece of pork anyway, and I'd far rather see space explored and developed by private enterprise.

(And real "earth science" is a useful thing, if we could get NASA to do some. Pity they're not really trustworthy there, but perhaps firing some people would fix that.)

(Or at least, commercially developed by same, and then state-funded exploration, if any, can piggyback on their improved-by-competition pricing and capacity.

The idea that the State needs to make access to space happen was plausible in 1964. It's not plausible now.)

RIP Ralph Kramden! Alice is safe!

I dunno. I never paid any attention to environmental issues until the CRU-emails and codes were released. The silence of the main stream media and our politicians was pretty loud. It is sites like smalldeadanimals and others leave a pretty ugly picture of what is down the road if this issue remains ignored. I hope Canada is very careful about signing any international agreements. It would be nice to know our politicians are on top of this yet they remain silent. With all the information that is coming our regarding the IPCC and CRU you would they would have some comment. The silence getting louder.

"it's not rocket science"

uh, yes it is mr omoonbatma. you need the 'rocket scientists' to set the bar among other things.

"look for the space guys to destroy the climate 'science' industry."

My thought also. It will be quite the amusing spectacle!

I have my beer and popcorn ready.

heard via some communications link from the White House... " roger that China, The moon is yours..."

//Well, all our eggs are now in one big Obamasized basket//

Yes, we are stuck with the earth. Time to get potty-trained before going out & about.

Thanks for the Great link!

Well it is great that NASA is just another organization ruined by libreals for their own ends. It just proves once again they cannot look forward to a world where their silly theories are not valid, so they corrupt and move public policy to back up their own theories. Forget hard science or true peer review, instead back only science you like.

NASA not having a reliable space system to put astronauts up to the space station means the US just put a spacestation in orbit for the rest of the world to use, and now doesn't have any real interest in making sure it is used for honourable purposes. Great move that is...

"Yes, we are stuck with the earth. Time to get potty-trained before going out & about"

Suggesting we should learn to take care of the earth before we go out and...what,exactly? Cause environmental damage to the moon, or Mars?

Perhaps you'd be more interested to know what Aerospace has given us, and why it's important?

http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html

The Kennedy's are well and truly buried.

Alan Shepard, Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and Gordon Cooper are rolling in their graves.

Their went Americas future. Space factories & unlimited resources spurned by the Marxist nerd.
Even the Iranians know better, certainly the Chinese.
Really the phony IPPPC graph with its accompanying BS tells you all you need to know.
About what a bunch of crooks your dealing with. They seem a lot like Martins, lot or Chretien's Liberals. Steeped in corruption with avaricious eye's. Kill a program that actually does have green spin offers or pollution reducing tech. Smart move Obama!!!
JMO

now to Obaminize the language.
T minus will now only refer to temperature.

Houston , the Eagle has crapped.

If I had to choose between the space program or the climate research I would - I would... Danged if I know! Climate science is a bunch of bunk but space exploration ran out of ideas years ago. Unless of course they could put all the climate gurus and Obambam in a rocket and send them on a round trip to Alpha Centauri. By the time they get back the US might be recovering from all the damage Obambam has inflicted.

Oz
[........Now we'll see if the rocket scientists are smarter than the climate scientists.]

Well...we all know who has the right stuff....it ain't GISS!

The Obama administration wants to outsource whole swaths of the space program to the private sector. NASA would stick around, but proponents of the plan see it turning into a "conduit" for tech developed outside the federal government.
http://www.businessinsider.com/startups-in-space-2009-8
In related news: NASA slashes price of spaceships like Atlantis and Endeavour - by 50 percent
You have until Feb. 19 to put in your offer to buy these spaceships.
http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/01/21/2010-01-21_far_out_nasa_slashes_price_of_spaceships__by_50.html

In the 1950s, Canada developed the most sophisticated fighter aircraft the world had ever seen. The CF105 Arrow was big, beautiful, fast and expensive. Because of its cost the program was scrapped and all prototypes were put to the cutting torch. The engineers and "rocket scientists" dispersed to other projects around the world, many of them going to NASA. Canada's aerospace industry died as a result of that decision.
As for using NASA to study "climate change", they might as well launch a satellite to take pictures of Santa's workshop.

Deja vu all over again. Didn't we go thru this with Jimmy "peanut man"? The dream of space is gone again for another generation. How very sad.

Because lintpicking navel gazers can't deal with actually learning about or doing new stuff.

This is one of those topics that if you don't follow closely, you really should be commenting on. This IS the most positive thing to happen for NASA in 10 years. No, the global warming bits are dumb, but the approval to redesign the heavy lift rocket was much much needed. The POR was never funded under Bush, was a terrible rocket design, and would have been exorbitant in cost. Some of the beyond earth orbit missions that will be available in the future are as interesting, if not more so, than going back to the moon. L1, L2, NEO, etc.

I really cannot see this going anywhere but the way of crap & tax.

There are 19K people working directly for NASA and tens-of-thousands of private sector jobs that depend (90% of all projects are out-sourced) on building space-related equipment for NASA. Billions and billions of dollars are at play here and the players involved will most definitely not go quietly into the night.

I do agree that the 'returning to the moon' thing is a waste of time; been there, done that, time to move on to other projects. Having said that, it would be nice to see NASA focus on what they are good at: physics, hard science and the exploration of the still largely unknown final frontier.

Obama and his gang of lefties are are going to change the world order (Osama must be smiling), I worry for my grandchildren, if he isn't gone in 2012

Relax folks,

India reports that it will launch its first manned space mission in 2016 – Drudge Report.

You see, even a country with millions upon millions of starving and homeless wretches can afford to go to space.

The US still has a long way to go before it catches up with India, regardless of how hard Obamba tries.

Yea, why waste money on space when we could just give the money to Al Gore & Haiti and be done with it.

After all we know by Einstein and others that interstellar space travel is mathematically and scientifically impossible.

It is far better that we spend billions of dollars instead to build telescopes and just observe the heavens. Better yet why not build modern day Stone Hendge’s around the world and we can all gather and beat skin drums on the solstices (not real skin obviously).

If it wasn’t for idiots like Columbus, we’d still have a powerful and mighty Aztec empire thriving in the Americas with their own cute little pyramid observatories. We could all be one with nature telepathically and re-teach our children that the world is flat again.

Watch for the serious rocket scientists to pack up and move to India or China now.

Unfortunately despite all of its faults, NASA is the only way to get into space now from the US. Hopefully some of the private enterprise options to get to LEO will be able to get enough funding together to get some of their very innovative launch options happening. They have the potential to drastically lower the cost/lb of sending materials into orbit as they aren't fossilized bureaucracies like NASA.

If I was one of the real science guys at NASA (not the post-modern science climate types) I would put forth an ambitious program to prevent the most devastating type of climate change namely the danger of big rocks falling down earths gravity well. The effects of a single 0.5 km asteroid coming in at 22 km/sec would show just how ineffectual humanity is at altering the worlds climate.

To prevent this form of climate change one needs dramatically increased heavy lift capability, a much larger manned presence in space and a huge space telescope array optimized for detecting small fast moving objects that might be fairly dark. Also needed is a crash program to find ways of moving asteroids which might be as simple as light sails with areas of a few thousand km^2, ion rockets or the use of nuclear explosives to fragment asteroids that come too close. These would need to be tested far away from the earth and that means getting out to the asteroid belt which means we need a Mars base. I'm sure with the right advertising company involved they could panic the population enough that they would demand that NASA develop an interplanetary transportation capability NOW before the polar bears get killed by a dinosaur killer meteor.

I don't think that the military would take very kindly to cuts in funding for NASA as space access is crucial for national defence. NASA now has the only capability for manned flight in the US and there are a lot of operations that can only be done by humans. If machines are as good as those people who claim that they can do all space exploration, then we'd be replacing all sorts of people with machines. Oops, I've forgot that we've already started this process with the TOTUS and we've seen how well that is playing out.

It is instructive to read how complicated it is to get even simple things to happen in software when one is millions of miles away and can't just reach over and reboot a system. Aside from needing more weight to support it, wetware is still way superior than hardware/software in dealing with unexpected situations.

India and China are close to developing capability to land on the moon (which could have been developed by Nazi Germany had not a few inconvenient things happened like the Ultra machine code being cracked). The whole US moon landing program was headed by Werner von Braun who didn't do much more than scale up the technology used in the V2 to make the Saturn 5. What he did was extremely impressive, but he probably could have done it in 1950 given enough resources. China and India have technology that is more advanced than 1950's US technology and, more importantly, the will to get into space.

It's infuriating to be in 2010 and still no closer to getting into space than we were in 1969. I hadn't planned on learning to speak Mandarin as part of the process of getting to space.

Loki, IMHO the dorks at NASA have done more to damage manned space flight in the last 30 years than Obama could ever hope to do. Him jamming a stick in their eye might actually help.

They got hooked on the shuttle program and stopped there. They haven't done a damn thing in manned space flight except fly the shuttle since I was about 20. The shuttle is kool, but its 1960's tech and its getting rickety. Yet we see no new birds even in the planning stage, never mind testing. They don't even have a life boat for the space station.

At this time Sir Richard "Look At ME!" Branson is the future of space flight, because he's giving money to Burt Rutan. Burt seems to be the only guy out there right now who wants to get humans into orbit and God forbid make a buck doing it.

Which sucks, you ask me. We should have scramjet satellite launch vehicles and two-hours-to-Tokyo sub-orbitals by now. You know, stuff that actually makes money for its owners.

Phantom, do you think that if 25% of airflights were replaced by scramjet craft that it might, at some point, be difficult to distinguish the scramjets from ICBMs?

Another question, just throwing it out there in general, what happens to the U.S. spy satellites as they decay in orbit and have to be replaced if Barry guts NASA?
Will NASA be able to replace them?
(a lot of western defence is dependent on the intelligence they gather and NASA was originally created to put them in orbit as a response to Sputnik)

The NASA of old spun many offshoots to the benefit of all. They were unique problems that required original thought. The 'new' NASA has the potential to increase revenue for the gov't. at little cost.

Phantom, I sometimes think the same thing about NASA and agree that all too often organizations can get so fossilized that destroying them and starting over again is the only way to go.

NASA today is a far far different creature than the NASA of the 1960's where it actually took risks and thought big. The problem with NASA is that, despite its numerous faults, it is the only organization with the capability to put people into orbit. Losing that capability would be a devastating blow to the US.

What I hope happens is that the entrepeneurial Russians will team up with people like Burt Rutan and come up with a totally private launch facility in Russia. Once this happens, (and we had similar private launch facilities in N. America) then we can start dismantling NASA. I never thought I'd see the day when Russia would be one of the few places in the world that true capitalism exists and the Russian premier is lecturing the US president on the dangers of socialism.