NASA Administrator says space shuttles and stations are mistakes big time!!!!

www.usatoday.com...

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

In a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

“It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,” Griffin said. “We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.”

The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it's finished — in 2010 or later — may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of that.

Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule.

do u think they are mistakes? i mean we seem to be able to reach the moon but then lost interest and just stay near our orbit with earth but thats it. yeah we sent probes to other distant planets and chase after comets but we need to send manned vehicles to see things ourselves. like back to the moon and and to colonize mars is ambitious but a good idea. people may say that we are moving too fast and that the technology is not there yet and just use space stations and shuttles just to earn more experience and develop new technology before we decide to go ahead and reach to distant planets with manned vehicles and become self sufficient. in my mind we should colonize the moon as a stepping stone instead of just stayin in our orbit. the moon is a great place to start to see if we can go and colonize a distant planet like mars and be self sufficient. if people on the moon needs help we can respond in days. where mars is in couple of years i believe.

Well...

The Apollo missions were sort of a "Hey U.S.S.R., look what we can do!" dealie, whereas the shuttles and space station had calmed down a little bit and were more interested in studying the effects of living, working, and conducting scientific experiments in space.

Now that we've got a little more practical experience, though, I agree; it's time to move on to bigger, better, and more expensive things. Like Mars, for instance.

I saw an interview with this guy on CNN, and I have to wonder why is he speaking out now? It is easy to criticize after the fact.

But still I do agree that too much money has been spent on the shuttle, and it has been in commission for too long. They went way over budget in the beginning, as usual, and it cost more per launch than projected. The real problem is that NASA does a poor job of estimating budgets. Still though part of the process of learning is you don't know until you try. There has been a lot to learn from any space venture, even if it is a way NOT to do something.

I am looking forward to the new CEV, but you know it will cost twice as much as they say it will.

What he fails to state is what we will receive from having men on the moon. Kennedy only wanted men on the moon for his own political goals, never for scientific. Now we must go forth to the moon because of Bush's politics? The shuttle progrom was a horror as it never turned out to be the manned space physics lab it was meant to be, it only continues and continues to exist for show. The space station is a logistical nightmare costing 10 times what Reagan said it would cost.

Originally posted by Hal9000
I saw an interview with this guy on CNN, and I have to wonder why is he speaking out now? It is easy to criticize after the fact.

because he's only had the job for a short time, and is jumping on his master's bandwagon while trying to shift nasa's gears to the moon and mars. basically he's just saying "i didnt screw it up, but i'm gonna fix it."

now as to whether or not it's actually screwed up, i'm on the fence. the work we've been doing in low orbit over the last 20 years will certainly pay off for the longer missions to the moon and mars, and the international space station could be a great place to prepare and start from if used properly. but we have wasted alot of time doing the same experiments over and over, when we could have been getting practical experience on the moon (as well as checking out exactly what kind of usable resources there may be there). either way, i dont think anything we've done in space has necessarily been a waste of money. what we learn there always has its dividends back here on earth.

The Shuttle was like Concorde, a bad idea that was overhyped as a good idea.

And as for his comments on the ISS... "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in," - Michael Griffin

It is about time that someone from NASA stood-up and gave the citizens the cold hard truth about the program. I knew years ago that it seemed that we were going backwards in our space program. Why build a space station while decades before, we put men on the moon? IMHO we should have continued to stay on track with the moon missions and now look where we are. It appears that the Chinese will be there waiting for us by the time we get our act together. It also seems that with the addmission of this truth the taxpayers got feces for the past 3 decades while we just sat and fed the NASA game. If someone would give me what we spent post moon missions some $>150 billion I would have a Pizza Hut on the Lunar surface.

If someone would give me what we spent post moon missions some $>150 billion I would have a Pizza Hut on the Lunar surface.

yeah, but lets put that in perspective....$197 billion in the iraq war so far vs. $150 billion over 40 years (if your number is correct). not that i'm defending nasa, but with a budget like that, how exactly were they supposed to keep moving towards the moon and mars?

Just imagine where we'd be today if we had kept the Apollo-1B / Saturn 5 system of the early 70's instead of all the spending done on the shuttle.

Now we're going to spend billions to return to that launch archatecture and repeat the small steps for a man we made 35 years ago. A pity.

Encouraging, though, that Griffin recognizes his key problem.

Originally posted by snafu7700

Originally posted by Hal9000
I saw an interview with this guy on CNN, and I have to wonder why is he speaking out now? It is easy to criticize after the fact.

because he's only had the job for a short time, and is jumping on his master's bandwagon while trying to shift nasa's gears to the moon and mars. basically he's just saying "i didnt screw it up, but i'm gonna fix it."

now as to whether or not it's actually screwed up, i'm on the fence. the work we've been doing in low orbit over the last 20 years will certainly pay off for the longer missions to the moon and mars, and the international space station could be a great place to prepare and start from if used properly. but we have wasted alot of time doing the same experiments over and over, when we could have been getting practical experience on the moon (as well as checking out exactly what kind of usable resources there may be there). either way, i dont think anything we've done in space has necessarily been a waste of money. what we learn there always has its dividends back here on earth.

You mean like Tang and learning how spiders spin webs in space? And teflon. and the temperpedic bed. And tiles? I guess not tiles. They don't stick very well, do they?

Originally posted by Realist05
Just imagine where we'd be today if we had kept the Apollo-1B / Saturn 5 system of the early 70's instead of all the spending done on the shuttle.

Now we're going to spend billions to return to that launch archatecture and repeat the small steps for a man we made 35 years ago. A pity.

Encouraging, though, that Griffin recognizes his key problem.

Don't forget the unmanned satellites. I think they'd be doing good just to get a soft landing unmanned satellite on the moon. Maybe they could find that 36 inch diameter laser mirror we've all heard about, that anybody can find if they shoot a laser to the moon and are so lucky to be able to hit it. And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

(Did you know we've been bouncing lasers off the moon since lasers were first invented? We don't NEED any "laser mirror" on the moon, and even if we did, how you going to locate a 36 inch laser mirror on the moon from earth?)

Welcome to the fight, Resistance. Truth is, a lot of what NASA takes credit for, in particular the high-density viscoelastic polyurethane foam marketed under the "Tempurpedic" corporation, they did not invent.
Doesn't stop them from accepting money for the space foundation from the same company and lending them what little prestige the gullible public percieves.

Realist -- And of course I'm told by a lot of people that the biggest proof we have that we ever even actually WENT to the moon (which I don't believe we did) is the silly laser mirror supposedly up there and verified by pictures.

And anybody that believes NASA's pictures has been watching too many Star Trek programs.

And Hubble's pics are virtual relality. It's more of a computer than it is a telescope. It can't even get us a good picture of the moon, let alone all this stuff it's supposed to be telling us. It's just fanciful virtual reality based on the dreams of the people programming the contraption.

It's a fallacy that the bigger the telescope the farther out in space you can see. It's just a falacy. You can't see what isn't there. So what you have instead is a big computer floating in space telling you what you WOULD see if you COULD see based on what it's told MIGHT be out there.

If you think the Space Shuttle program has been a big flimflam, you ain't seen nothing yet when they get going on their big Mars and Moon expeditions. I even expect them to trot out a fake alien and try to pawn it off on the gullible public. I'm not buying it.

Did you see Bart Slibel's website? He's the producer of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon. He's got excerpts put up, and the funniest one that is so priceless is the one called Astronauts Gone Wild where he shows the first and only "press conference" by the astroNOTS and how they were squirming around looking so guilty. None of these guys talk about their "historic" accomplshment, mum's the word. So Slibel managed to get an interview with Buzz Aldrin -- who later threatened to sue him if he published one second of it. And -- you just gotta see it.

Go to www.moonmovie.com. Read the entire site -- the facs, clues, intro, everything.

[edit on 29-9-2005 by resistance]

The problem is this.

Humanities goal (us) should be declared, as moving humanity off of this rock, and out into deep solar space and beyond. The reason to do this is to relieve the eventual overpopulation of the planet earth, to move humans away from living in one location were disease, the sun, climate, volcano, asteroid, comet or other unkown space objects such as rogue undetectable small black holes, rogue planetoids, dark mater (unseeble gas, ice and dust) could destroy the earths ability to support life.

It is not far fetched in fact the Sun will one day destroy earth. The earths history points to numerous mass extinctions. We are the first living creatures smart enough to survive such catastrophy.That will do us no good if we do not act before such things happen.

We need to state clearly that NASA intends to explore the Solar system and beyond with the intent to find locations and create techknowlogy for humanity to colonize and move away from earth.

Spreading humanity out away from earth, and developeing new tech is the only real reason to do space. Of course you can also set it up, so you can farm the solar system for resources needed on earth.

We can build ships right now that can survive and thrive in deep space. The only problem is getting materials up to space to build things.

This is why we should really be developing the space elevator right along with the new moon mission hardware, so that when we do go to mars, we will have the elevator available to build a truely awesome, safe ship to go to mars and beyond in.

People are afriad to state the obvious because of politics and cost. It's worth every penny we could spend on this endevor, because eventually it will save humanity.

If I was in charge we would develope a simple ship like soyuz to support what we have now, and spend the cash on getting that elevator up there. Once we have the elevator you can build ships as large and modern as naval ships at nearly the same cost.

The shuttle was a waste, but we had hopes of flying ships into space like airplanes from an airfield. The military gave up on the space plane so what we learned from the shuttle was mostly useless. We learned that its to expensive and dangerous to try and fly planes into space with cargo.

The elevator is our gateway to a true space program and that is were the money should be going.

This NASA administrator is making new mistakes that some future administrator will say. The NASA in the early 2000's made mistakes. Instead of building the space elevator we wasted billions on one time use capsules that could not deliver colonization supplies and equipment.

I think several of the world powers know that something dreadfull is going to happen to earth in the next 50 or so years and that is why you see the new space race developing.

Will see I guess.


[edit on 29-9-2005 by Xeven]

Originally posted by Xeven
The problem is this.


I think several of the world powers know that something dreadfull is going to happen to earth in the next 50 or so years and that is why you see the new space race developing.

Will see I guess

I agree something dreadful is going to happen. But the new space race is developing for other, more sinister, reasons. NASA fosters the belief in gullible people that man can travel in space. He can't. But NASA's job is to make people THINK we can. Why? Because the plan of the Illuminist conspirators for their NWO involves total control of the population. The people on this earth will be led to believe that "Aliens" are "helping" us to run our planet to turn it into a utopia. The people at the helm of this flimflam will have total control -- physical and mental -- of the entire world. It will be the biggest delusion since -- well, I won't say because you wouldn't believe me on that one either.

But when it happens, maybe you'll remember that I told you so? The Bible says there will be a "strong delusion" -- that the people "will believe a lie" -- in the last days when the world is run by world government and a man who survives a "Mortal wound to the head."

[edit on 29-9-2005 by resistance]

I can't believe Micheal Griffin has made it this easy for some of you to buy into Bush's political goal. This is propoganda people, such as it was the first time. Let's get to the moon first before the commies do. That's what this is all about. There is nothing on the moon worth going back to, this is the cold hard truth.

Originally posted by Frosty
I can't believe Micheal Griffin has made it this easy for some of you to buy into Bush's political goal. This is propoganda people, such as it was the first time. Let's get to the moon first before the commies do. That's what this is all about. There is nothing on the moon worth going back to, this is the cold hard truth.

Actually, it's not that there's nothing worth going back to as regards the moon. We never went there in the first place. If we went there once we'd have gone there again. This is just hilarious that they're saying they "forgot" how to go to the moon because they got distracted by the space shuttle, and that in 2018 we're goign to go there. Hilarious! It's all the shuttle's fault because they forgot all their high tech stuff while they were messing around with the shuttle. Why do they need 13 years to figure it out when we've already done it (supposedly) 40 years ago?

This is TOO FUNNY FOR WORDS!

I wouldn't say they were mistakes. I would say they are unwise decisions. They were hyped up after their great sucess on Mercuery, Gemini, and Apollo then decidde to go into low earth orbit. By far the greatest mission that came out of this were the skylab missions. In my opinion skylab was the most productive thing we ever did in space. Mostly because it was a comftorable habitat. If you look at interior pictures of skylab and the ISS sklab is like the Hilton. I believe we focused too much on what was going on now and not what to do in the future.

NASA has had, seince the 70's, a plan on the draqying board for a aircraft rocket that could take off like a plane and land like one. This spawned from the work i the X planes that were used in breakign the sound barrier. IT was never implmented because the shuttle had a payload capacity far greater and it had flown so many sucessful missions already. They stuck with the same stuff too long and didn't really work on any other mande projects. While NASA had much sucess with all of its planetary missions and the voyager crafts and what not they didn't focus on the futer of manded space exploration. The ISS is a major let down and verry little has come from it compared to the Soyuze, Mir (great program also until the colapse of the C.C.C.P.) and skylab space station programs.

The shuttle wasn't that big a of a mistake, the problem with it was that it never really got off the ground so to speak in the fassion it was meant to and now its just out dated.

SOmething else people dont realize about the early US space program. It was not really run by Kenedy. Kenedy really didnt know anyting it was Johnson that pushed to program. He pushed for NASA when KEnedy was still alive and then whene he died Johnson took over and was in control and took NASA under his wing. THats why it flourshed so much in the 60's and 70's

Originally posted by Xeven
The elevator is our gateway to a true space program and that is were the money should be going.

I agree to an extent. I also think a space elevator will revolutionize space, but we still need a way to build it. The new CEV will be a way to do it, and can be used while the technology is being developed. The space elevator is still a ways off, but I also agree that more money should be devoted to it.

But once the first elevator is put into use, others can be built at a much lower cost, and the CEV would then be obsolete.

Mizar -- How is that we have to wait until 2018 to send a man to the moon? What's so hard? They did it 40 years ago, several times, and were able supposedly to send two men down to the moon to explore and dig and all that and then beam back up 60 miles to the mother craft. That was 40 years ago? So what's the big deal? Piece of cake. What are we waiting for? Do you buy the argument that they forgot everything they knew? They have all their spacecraft sitting in the museum. The astroNOTs, many of them, are still alive. Why not ask THEM how to get back to the moon?