Trump may end funding for ISS

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Peartree said:
Why? Congre$$ would be quick to give you about 25 billion rea$on$


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Are you not a supporter of the space program???? I ask because I know rocket people who dont care one way or another. I want America to go to Mars, but for other reasons I do not think man will go to Mars ever. I cannot speak of those reasons b/c people here may get upset.
 
ColumbiaNX01 said:
Are you not a supporter of the space program???? I ask because I know rocket people who dont care one way or another. I want America to go to Mars, but for other reasons I do not think man will go to Mars ever. I cannot speak of those reasons b/c people here may get upset.
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I didn't say a word about how I felt. Only that while a moon base is technologically feasible, it's current estimated cost is somewhere between 10 and 50 BILLION U.S. dollars. The reality is that Congress will likely never agree to spend that kind of money. Mars will cost more than that.
 
When I was young, I was looking forward to the year 1999, when the Sci fi TV show could (and would!!) be a reality..

The moon is easy, been done already..

Mars is feasible, but we all need to work together, and go after it as a group, a team effort, a global / cooperative effort..
 
ColumbiaNX01 said:
Are you not a supporter of the space program???? I ask because I know rocket people who dont care one way or another. I want America to go to Mars, but for other reasons I do not think man will go to Mars ever. I cannot speak of those reasons b/c people here may get upset.
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God, I hope we don't goto mars. It'd be like taking a family vacation to Delaware.
 
DavidMcCann said:
God, I hope we don't goto mars. It'd be like taking a family vacation to Delaware.
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Whoa! What's up with the Delaware hatin' ?!? Fond memories of riding in the back of the family truckster, heading to Rehoboth Beach. Dad always made a pit stop near Dover AFB to watch the big transports comin' in, maybe on the last leg of a trip from Da Nang or Bien Hoa. The nothing but corn fields from there to the beach. Best sweet corn in the USA, maybe the world. Probably all gone now, IDK. Couldn't let that little dig pass, bud. :cool:
 
samb said:
Whoa! What's up with the Delaware hatin' ?!? Fond memories of riding in the back of the family truckster, heading to Rehoboth Beach. Dad always made a pit stop near Dover AFB to watch the big transports comin' in, maybe on the last leg of a trip from Da Nang or Bien Hoa. The nothing but corn fields from there to the beach. Best sweet corn in the USA, maybe the world. Probably all gone now, IDK. Couldn't let that little dig pass, bud. :cool:
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https://youtu.be/TK_FiRm6ZK8

;)
 
Sorry for the digression. Perhaps a review is in order now.

- the ISS is expensive
- some modification of US/NASA involvement after 2024 is not new news
- gettin' out of the gravity well is expensive; gettin' alot/heavy stuff out of the gravity well is alot expensive
- orbital mechanics is complicated
- it's not a race anymore
 
The other question that seems to be lacking- “is there any good reason to have a station?”
 
Delaware is so similar to Mars that it is often used as a Mars analog habitat to simulate the physical and psychological environment of a Martian exploration mission. Delaware is used to study the equipment and techniques that will be used to analyze the surface of Mars during a future manned mission. The simulated isolation of the volunteer inhabitants of Delaware allows scientists to study the medical and psychosocial effects of long-term space missions.
 
I would love to have a space station or two, a moon base, a Mars base, scientists to go looking for fossilized life remains on Mars, and all sorts of stuff.

But of the ~US government yearly budget (around $4 trillion in expenditures), NASA gets shy of $20 billion. So, half of a percent of the US budget.

In this reality prioritization is key.

Would I personally be willing to double that portion of my taxes that goes to NASA to enable a $40B budget? Sure, but it doesn't work that way.

My personal priorities for NASA are:
1. Support for Earth related climate / Geo science and related things that impact us all on a daily basis. Sure most weathersats are commercial now but we derive a lot of benefit from studying the earth from space.

2. We should but don't have a program to quickly scan for and identify any earth-threatening asteroid/comets to give us decades of response time. It is criminal we haven't done this as a human race yet. I would prefer the US contribute to a global effort (we do on small scale), but we should go it alone if necessary. Seriously this should have been done decades ago and the clock is ticking. Note, my opinion is budget for any needed response to such identified threats should come from defense budget. But yes, I would gladly trade ISS for a good asteroid scanning program.

3. Robotic science probes. OMG the amount of science per dollar a robot can do. For a tenth of what a manned mission to Mars would cost we could send a several groups of microprobes with different functions for visual observation, chemical analysis, etc. Small redundant things, hundreds of them, many will crash or fail fast but many will survive. We should send them to interesting places in the solar system.

4. I put manned space science near the bottom of my list. Yes, I want it, but if I have to trade something off, this gets cut way back. We need budget increases if we want to do this right, and until there is political will based on an economic benefit for doing it, I don't think it will happen.


That's my own priority list. What's yours?

Edit: things like space telescopes are in my view part of category 3. I went off on probes we send out I neglected to mention orbital outward facing science platforms.
 
The Barbarian's pilin' on now !?! From the left coast no less !?!?! Where are my Delaware peeps ? :horse:
 
DavidMcCann said:
The other question that seems to be lacking- “is there any good reason to have a station?”
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Make an argument against having a space station. An argument against having lots of space stations.

The problem,of course, is that most folks have it backwards -- thinking that space exploration is, or ought to be, in service of something else. Space exploration IS the thing of value that you realize by exploring space.
 
jlabrasca said:
Make an argument against having a space station. An argument against having lots of space stations.

The problem,of course, is that most folks have it backwards -- thinking that space exploration is, or ought to be, in service of something else. Space exploration IS the thing of value that you realize by exploring space.
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Sorry, but no. You need to justify the cost. Not just say "we need this. prove we don't"

Nice try, but faulty logic.

No payoff... No reason to invest in it. Human space exploration is now a novelty without payoff. Robots are doing it better and cheaper with the limited resources we have.
 
DavidMcCann said:
Sorry, but no. You need to justify the cost. Not just say "we need this. prove we don't"

Nice try, but faulty logic.

No payoff... No reason to invest in it. Human space exploration is now a novelty without payoff. Robots are doing it better and cheaper with the limited resources we have.
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Its not either or. Its more of both. Another mistake people make, treating indefensibly screwed-up priorities in allocation as the same as scarcity.

Seriously, though, we should put people on Mars for lots of reasons. A human geologist walking around on the surface with a trowel and a hand lens is going to find more things in a day than Curiosity found in a year (terrestrial or martian).

But there is also the whole thing about actually going where we can go, and figuring out how to get to places where cannot now go, and doing things not ONLY because there is new knowledge to be gained, but because ONLY sending cameras and sniffers to look at things for us will NOT "...serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skill..."
 
jlabrasca said:
Its not either or. Its more of both. Another mistake people make, treating indefensibly screwed-up priorities in allocation as the same as scarcity.

Seriously, though, we should put people on Mars for lots of reasons. A human geologist walking around on the surface with a trowel and a hand lens is going to find more things in a day than Curiosity found in a year (terrestrial or martian).
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Anyone on mars is going to find the same thing... nothing. Oh, and probably be dead. So... yea. fun times.
 
DavidMcCann said:
Sorry, but no. You need to justify the cost. Not just say "we need this. prove we don't"

Nice try, but faulty logic.

No payoff... No reason to invest in it. Human space exploration is now a novelty without payoff. Robots are doing it better and cheaper with the limited resources we have.
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Reductio as absurdum, because it's there and we want to. Same as Everest, Antarctica, & Black Rock.
 
Space exploration is not, nor is ever likely to be, an immediately profitable economic enterprise.

If that’s the basis on which the decision’s being made, might as well forget the whole thing.
 
dhbarr said:
Reductio as absurdum, because it's there and we want to. Same as Everest, Antarctica, & Black Rock.
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Quae nos Latine loqui? Sorry I mentioned the lions. <grin>

But, since I've already identified myself as a pretentious gasbag: DavidMcCann's repeated assertions that manned space exploration is "without payoff" is a pretty good example of an ad nauseam argument. He also presents a false dichotomy, assuming that money and effort spent for human space exploration will necessarily defund endeavors which will yield, or will be more likely to yield greater benefits. And he begs the question -- concluding that human exploration of Mars will not be worthwhile because we may assume that it will not yield anything sufficiently good or beneficial to warrant the risk and cost.

I am a huge John Stuart Mill nerd, but the problem with utilitarianism is always in the definition of words like "beneficial" and "useful". Franklin's observation that newborn babies are, as a matter of immediate economic benefit, less than useless isn't quite apt, but I think it points towards an argument for the utility of manned space exploration. For my part, I suspect that the greatest benefit of human space exploration is not a future economic return -- rather it is that the endeavor is so costly, and has such long time horizons. It is something that requires a belief that there will be a future which will be populated by real people.
 
jlabrasca said:
I am a huge John Stuart Mill nerd, but the problem with utilitarianism is always in the definition of words like "beneficial" and "useful". Franklin's observation that newborn babies are, as a matter of immediate economic benefit, less than useless isn't quite apt, but I think it points towards an argument for the utility of manned space exploration. For my part, I suspect that the greatest benefit of human space exploration is not a future economic return -- rather it is that the endeavor is so costly, and has such long time horizons. It is something that requires a belief that there will be a future which will be populated by real people.
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Sorry, your proposal doesn't make my chart turn green and go up and to the right this quarter. /s

https://longnow.org/clock/
 
resources are limited. I fail to see how that&#8217;s a false dichotomy.

There can be benefit in taking on a large, difficult task. But by that argument I could defend the idea of building a base on the ocean floor over space travel. You still have not presented a compelling reason for manned space flight.
 
DavidMcCann said:
resources are limited. I fail to see how that&#8217;s a false dichotomy.

There can be benefit in taking on a large, difficult task. But by that argument I could defend the idea of building a base on the ocean floor over space travel. You still have not presented a compelling reason for manned space flight.
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I would be interested if anyone has seen specific studies done on this, but I would speculate, based on what happened in the 60's and 70's that when we really stretch as a nation and as a species, we inspire one another. The space race was the impetus to create government funded college scholarships (only for studying the sciences at the time) because we didn't have enough engineers and scientists to get the job done. But the excitement of the Gemini and Apollo programs themselves fueled an interest in studying science and engineering and led a great many of us toward those careers in the 80's and 90's and beyond. What is the value to our economy that was created by attracting thousands of us into engineering, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and dozens of other fields? What is the value to tomorrow's economy of inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers who will found the next Intel or Microsoft, discover the next miracle drug, develop the next supercomputer, or invent the next technological leap forward in spaceflight, deep sea exploration, medicine, or any number of other things?

The reality is that our children have grown up in a world increasingly filled with robots. Robots are ordinary, perhaps even boring. Would you tune in to watch an international competition of robots developed by engineers from every nation on earth? Some would, but not very many. But the Olympic games attract viewers by the tens of millions. They are inspiring, and largely so, because they are human. Machines and robots might occasionally be impressive, but rarely, if ever, will they inspire. Robotic spaceflight is mildly interesting. Human spaceflight is different. We only really inspire when we are at our best, and when we stretch toward the unknown, grasp toward the unreachable, risk danger, and attempt the impossible.

It's difficult to put numbers on those kinds of things.
 

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