No Moon trip for NASA without new funds

No Moon trip for NASA without new funds

www.presstv.ir

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) needs an extra $3 billion a year in a bid to conduct meaningful missions, a White House panel has said.

"The committee finds that no plan compatible with the [Financial Year] 2010 budget profile permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way,” a panel convened by the White House to review human spaceflight plans said on Tuesday.

"The committee further finds that it is possible to conduct a viable exploration program with a budget rising to about $3 billion annually above the FY 2010 budget profile," it added.

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Wow to think they did this in the late 60's in a tin can and now they are making it sound like an unreachable goal.

If they did goto the moon in the late 60's then you would think they would of mastered it by now and other countries would of followed.

Is it the Vanallen radiation belt that keeps humans away from the moon? I read the the Russian admitted that they would need a capsule with walls 3 inches thick of lead shielding to get to the moon and that would make it almost impossible considering the weight.

www.presstv.ir
(visit the link for the full news article)



[edit on 15-9-2009 by CaptainAmerica2012]

In the 60's it was a heavily supported National Goal. If Obama was serious about improving the economy NASA should have benefitted heavily from stimulus spending. You could have tied the spending to education in the hard sciences and engineering and given students a goal to achieve. We all know why this wasn't done. NASA would have had to buy the spacecraft from the evil profit driven military industrial companies. Better give the money to ACORN.

I could never figure out why the environmental movement never got behind NASA? The perfect place for a massive solar array would be the Moon. All that is needed is a way to transport the energy back to Earth. We could have probably moved some of the heavier industrial polluters to orbit or the Moon by now. Not to mention mining the Moon and asteroids for resources, while leaving the Earth alone. Unless of course the enfironmentalist's goals are based more in politics than the environment. Just a thought.

[edit on 15-9-2009 by JIMC5499]

reply to post by JIMC5499


I heard that in the 60s NASA had 3% of the national budget at their disposal for the moon landings and now they are at something like .3 and falling. So much for America's space program oh well it was nice while it lasted.

China will be the first to return to the moon and it will be celebrated, internationally, as "the return". Obama's philistine attitude to the space program and science is quite insulting to scientists and biologists.

Humanity needs to expand out into space, not waste time and effort sending robots or looking through telescopes

Originally posted by infinite

Humanity needs to expand out into space, not waste time and effort sending robots or looking through telescopes

I don't know....

I agree we need more manned flight no doubt. But there has been solid science learned with those unmanned programs.

Isn't there a military space department at least as well funded as NASA?
Because if there is they surely have manned flights going up there on a regular basis... So I don't mind NASA getting budget cuts, maybe it is because the military sector is much more advanced and NASA is getting "useless"?!

Within a decade NASA will be entirely obsolete in any case. Spaceflight is nowhere near as expensive as they continue to make it out to be, and we are about to experience a veritable explosion of private space exploration programs.

Armadillo Aerospace has designed, built, and flown a cheap little buggy that can take us to LEO for almost nothing, as well as a new form of lunar lander that is incredibly efficient. All this from the guy who programmed Doom (John Carmack is an untapped genius).

With the incredible raw material wealth present in the asteroid belt, not to mention the Moon and Mars, corporations should be chomping at the bit to get out there and exploit it. We'll see private space platforms building private exploration fleets within the next two decades, mark my words.

[edit on 16-9-2009 by D.E.M.]

reply to post by CaptainAmerica2012

Is it the Vanallen radiation belt that keeps humans away from the moon?

NO. That is a very old fallacy started by the Moon "hoax" people years ago. Dr. Van Allen himself refuted it.

I read the the Russian admitted that they would need a capsule with walls 3 inches thick of lead shielding to get to the moon and that would make it almost impossible considering the weight.

Again, more nonsense put out by people who don't know any better. It's easy to make something up, post it on the Web, and once enough people begin to believe it, it suddenly is "I heard this....", or "I heard that..."

And all of a sudden, it's a "truth" to those who don't bother to study any further...

I have looked it up, and posted in other threads. I suggest all one has to do is research the cumulative radiation exposure that has been measured on various satellites that orbit Earth, and pass through the VA Belts regularly. Pay particular attention to the number of Rem accumulated during the period of one year. AND what an average person accumulates on the Earth's surface.

THEN, consider that the Apollo ships only had to pass through the Belts for brief periods (twice, once outbound, once inbound) and the areas selected were chosen because they were the thinnest parts....

You will find that the Astronauts were exposed to more than average, but certainly not a fatal dose. About three times what you'd encounter in one year on Earth.

Increased risk of cataracts as they got older. AND, also, look into the materials (lightweight) that were sandwiched in the Apollo CM skin that helped minimaize the radiation. Lead was NOT required! That is another unscientific fallacy.

reply to post by SLAYER69


Why would they need to continue funding NASA?
The Space Program has gone black long ago. NASA is just the feel good front at this point.

What they are doing is shifting peoples' attentions away from the positive aspects of life to the negative aspects that THEY create while THEY traverse the heavens at their leisure.

The Van Allen radiation fallacy still seems to roll on no matter how many times it gets debunked.

I seem to recall that the speed of transit through the belt resulted in a radiation exposure equivalent to roughly 3 chest x-rays.

12 months in the inner belt (that's the dangerous one) will earn you a 2,500 rem exposure if your shielding is just 3mm of aluminum, death is pretty much guaranteed beyond 1000 rem.

Apollo had better shielding and was in the belt for what, less than 24 hours.

Do the math, they could have stayed in there a lot longer, although there has been a lot of talk about the astronauts suffering from high rates of cancer - something that is statistically difficult to prove with only 24 of them.

There are however some fascinating close up photos of one astronaut's spacesuit helmet where you can actually see the path of the ions as they partially melted the helmet material on the way out - sort of like miniature stalactites, wish I could find it again.

[edit on 16-9-2009 by Retseh]

reply to post by JayinAR


Fair enough...

Sooner or later NASA needs to go away IMO. Private industry has to take over before we can really get going out there. "Publicly" I mean. The Secret military Space program will be just as it is now compared to the private industry in air travel, infinity more advanced and that is probably already the case.