http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/obama-us-will-get-to-mars-in-his-lifetime/19441791?icid=main|aim|dl1|link1|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolnews.com%2Fnation%2Farticle%2Fobama-us-will-get-to-mars-in-his-lifetime%2F19441791#19441791

sounds like a jfk to me!

• http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/04/15/obama-lays-out-bold-and-visionary-revised-space-policy/
• http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/obama-resuscitates-orion-leaves-it-on-life-support.ars

I was wondering if we'd let the Chinese beat us there or not.

Hell yes, Mars in the 2030's.
Too bad that the next guy could just frak it all up.

You mean like the last "next guy" just did?

How do you figure?

NASA transitioning to research and development and passing on the reins to the private sector is LONG overdue. This is progressive. Letting NASA continue on like it was, was not.

Yknow I'd like to see them go back to the moon just to prove that they can still do it without massive failure and death.

I agree with the bacon. They might want to aim for a few flawless trips to (and on) the moon before aiming for the red planet.

OPERATION SPACEGRAVE.

What exactly is the rationale for putting a stop to manned missions to the moon? Is it merely financial? It seems to me that more manned missions to the moon would be very beneficial now that we're supposedly planning to go to Mars.

Actually, isn't the stop for the old shuttle flights we've been doing in the past decade or two? These haven't been going to the moon. Basically the idea is that we're not getting anywhere spending ridiculous amounts of ressources doing the same old shuttle launches to a space station and back.

Basically, from what I gather, he wants to focus these same ressources on development so we can push beyond the moon.

And to do that he canceled something like 6 years of development on a heavy lifter and put off any further developments on it for another half a decade.



The only part of the "private sector" that can actually lift significant payloads beyond suborbital so far is also coincidentally heavily funded by the Pentagon. That's your deep space private sector: The Military Industrial Complex.

Obamartian. Obartion. Whatever. He's going home.

Hopefully this will fix that. By opening this kind of thing up to private companies, I'm sure we will see much more action than what has been done previously.

Obamars

I applaud what Obama is doing here, because I definitely agree there kind of needs to be a re-focusing on what NASA has been doing the past decade or so, but not to the point where it employs people for doing nothing (which happens all the time in government because it's not for-profit). I think the move to private companies taking a bigger role will be an immense help, however, the government must manage this VERY carefully:

I can't begin to imagine the R+D/Investment costs that these private companies would be facing when trying to create this new tech. However, too much of a subsidy could incentivize a misallocation of capital and resources towards a sector that perhaps isn't the best at using them at this moment of time. Then again, the creation of this technology could result in lots of knowledge spillovers here on Earth in other technologies, so that's a good thing too! I would say there should be a reward system in place for future innovations. Rather than subsidies, I would hope Obama maybe come out and say "We will give you X amount if you figure this out", and boom, lump sum transfer. Lot more efficient and less wasteful than a subsidy.

But overall, I look forward to this producing some tangible results! There was no need to completely shut down NASA, so this re-focusing I think was just the right way to go. Government investment in infrastructure (whether it be through the army, etc) has resulted in some pretty amazing technological advances, so I think a plan of govt investment + joint incentivized private investment in race to Mars will be pretty good, just like the original space race.

FIRSTED, BEEYEAH

The space shuttles suck anyway. They don't do anything new and half of them have blown up and killed everyone inside.

This is insanely retarded. Obama loses several points in my book.

Spoiler: This kind of stuff has been going on repeatedly for at least twenty years, probably longer.

Bluntly speaking, you have no idea what you are talking about. That statement is completely false. It was true 10 years ago, but the reason it was true then is because NASA and the government kept the lock and key on the market. This forces them to change.

SpaceX will likely provide the launch vehicle and they are already years into development themselves.

http://www.spacex.com/

They're doing a hell of a better job in developing a reliable launch vehicle than NASA and is currently doing it by private investments.

Bigelow Aerospace is also doing a lot of hiring for (particularly former (or future former) NASA employees) for their commercial tourism.

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/

There are many, many, many other companies also in the process of ramping up that have had their ventures repressed by the US government in the past. Mostly because they started going to Russia, China, or Europe who haven't had a problem accepting their money.

Want to say why you think that?

Encouraging private sector development in space exploration, giving a nice defined goal for our efforts, these are things that can reap many rewards for our future. I'm not an Obama fan by any means, but he's doing some major good here by hopefully reshaping NASA to actually be of use.

Living in the future is awesome.

What kind of "stuff" exactly?

Falcon 9 has flown once, and, IIRC, Falcon 9 Heavy (The one that actually matters here) hasn't flown and is like 9 times more complex than anyone else would willingly build a launcher and thus most critics are are expecting it to explode on the launch pad.



Bigelow is great, but completely irrelevant without a launcher.

As far as I can tell your posts can be summed up as: "FREE MARKET!!!11". The only thing they do is masturbate to the theoretical and highly debatable prospects of civilian aerospace companies and don't actually address the problem of the US Space Program probably ending up 10-20 years behind everyone else. I also curiously note the absence of ULA in your post, despite it being the only one with a history of capable launches and money.



Generally stuff like long term plans getting reviewed/axed by the next guy in office and congress deciding to cancel good ideas for bad ones. I suppose we could take that all the way back to the end days of Apollo and the cancellation of Sea Dragon which if I'm not mistaken falls on Nixon's shoulders, though back in those days NASA really DID have a massive budget. Fast forward to 1990 and we have George Bush Sr. making plans for Mars landing by 2019...Fast forward twenty years later to 2010 and...heh.

wheres Kyle90 with his 2 lasers?

So, tax payers should continue to fund an organization that is more bureaucratic then progressive and has a long history of extremely poor book-keeping?

Besides, why do we need a "US Space Program"? What's the BFD? Who cares if the government is in the driver seat or not. They should share the lessons learned, safety standards, etc. They should also be a "consultant" of sorts as well. But keeping the private sector locked out isn't just selfish, it's retarded because it's holding us back. NASA had a chance to transition smoothly during the X-33/Venture Star program, but they canned that on the eve of success and breakthrough. They had their chance and NASA's administration slithered it's way out of it. So now it's being forced on them and I applaud it.

With the private sector being in the driver seat we're more likely to get to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond MUCH faster than NASA ever would (this according to several aerospace analysts who suggest that Constellation would continue to fail to meet deadlines).

Oh yeah, and Buzz Aldrin agrees with me.

not an earth citizen

Sorry, was playing MW2.

I'm gonna make a huge long post in here tomorrow with a bunch of pretty space pictures.

Let's just shovel money into a furnace. We'd probably be better off for it.

You don't think space travel will be any good at all to the human race ever?

The aerospace industry (Boeing and Lockheed, not this space tourism garbage) has always been long on promises and short on results. There is no economic incentive for space exploration: even if there were significant long-term opportunities for economic profit, modern corporate structuring effectively prohibits the necessary massive short-term investments. More importantly, an infrastructure for space exploration (launching facilities and technologies) is pretty much a public good, which means private industries will not (by definition) produce enough of those public goods in order for any sort of market efficiency.

fwiw this is the second time I've called you on your bull**** on this subject. Tip: if you're wrong about physics, math, biology, chemistry and everything else you post, people probably aren't going to believe you when you start talking about what "several" aerospace "analysts" have said.

I'm not having this argument with you again. You can go back to the other thread where I called your BS on this. Not everything in the world goes "by the book". You may be book smart, but you're not very wise.

I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject but would I be incorrect in assuming that it's possible that the private aerospace industry would have different agendas/goals than NASA?

The future is never clear, who knows what space travel experimentation will bring.
We could get Tang Plus!

Jon'C makes the good point about the costs. Left to private industry alone, space travel just would not be worth the investment. He's not debating whether the private market would be more efficient at it, but rather would they start it at all. Businesses engage in short term debt to achieve long-term profits, but in this case the long-term is probably a very very very long-term so no one really has the time to reap the reward. There is nothing wrong with the government letting the private market handle the R+D, and providing the reward for it. Doing so, the government might be able to escape with a lower bill if private industry does work more efficiently, rather than letting NASA handle it all internally.

And people here are right btw, Nasa has been using private contractors for a long time. However, in the case of Mars exploration, I'm unsure how much influence Boeing and such are having currently.

The lack of private funding for basic research is a major social problem today. But if you want to pretend you have a clue what you're talking about, I can't stop you.

I would say that the lack of private funding for research depends greatly on what sort of research you're attempting to develop.

For example, you can't tell me that there is barely any private investment in Cancer and AIDS research. But you CAN tell me that there is hardly any private investment in say, sporting research (i.e equipment, player effeciency, etc).

Of course. There's a lot of private research in pharmaceuticals, say, because there's a relatively straight path from research to a marketable product.
Space exploration is more like basic physics research, or fusion power research. There are no guaranteed returns, and whoever actually spends the trillions getting space travel to work right is f***ed in the long run because space travel is not a natural monopoly. (Bell Labs was the last big private researcher doing basic physics work.)

But hey, Star Trek is cool so I'm just going to pretend some really smart guy will build a warp engine out of an ICBM. lol im alco, im good at fizziks and kemistry and ekonomiqs.