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| 2009 | |
| October | |
| Mon Oct 26 23:16:45 2009 No Moon |
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| Mon Oct 26 23:16:45 2009 No Moon NASA reconsiders its spending |
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| Last year,
I whined about poor spending decisions at
NASA.
Well, it's clear that my high-profile blogging has finally attracted the attention of the White House! A few days ago, a White House panel concluded that NASA should avoid the moon for now, because it was too expensive and not a good use of money. Instead, the panel recommended "concentrating on new rockets and new places to explore." That's great! My original 2008 post said: NASA should focus on cheaper, robotic missions to meet scientific aims, and also work on parallel tracks on the chief obstacles to human missions: getting into space cheaply (propulsion out of Earth's gravity well), and surviving in a self-contained environment. So I feel somewhat vindicated. The panel has recognized the poor economics of a moon landing, and has also decided to focus on propulsion. Excellent! For some reason, NASA is still really keen on both the International Space Station, and manned spaceflight in general, which strikes me as just launching money into space. Don't get me wrong! I think we need manned spaceflight. But it is still too expensive. We need to work on the core technologies to make human spaceflight cheaper (and survivable) before we throw money at long-range manned missions. So I predict that NASA (and/or this panel) will come to the same conclusions eventually. That is, someone will sooner or later recommend scaling back human missions for now, in favor of more robotic ones. But in the meantime, this is a good sign. We'll get a lot more use out of our NASA dollars by skipping the moon! Comments |
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