Neil Armstrong: US space program 'embarrassing' The first and last men to walk upon the moon have testified at a Congressional hearing that NASA is a national disgrace. The US space program is "embarrassing and unacceptable," said Neil Armstrong, who on July 21, 1969, first set foot on the surface of the earthly companion that, in his testimony, he referred to as Luna. " …
In the 1960s it was possible to draft the sons of middle class Americans and send them to Vietnam. That's because the US was a nation in those days, not just a place. Now even paying their taxes is seen as too much of a sacrifice by some 'citzens' and conscription is 'economic conscription'. If the US political system can't deliver health reform and replace its aging bridges (before they collapse) it is neither representative or capable of providing responsible government. Without the discipline of the Cold War the US appears to have as much future as the Roman Empire.
I have choice, spend all day at a desk running systems to store numbers that mean some people have more and bigger numbers than me or...spend my days hunting, eating, bonking, looking at stunning uninterrupted vistas and smoking all sorts of wierd and wonderful wacky-baccies....tough choice!!
It seems it would be acceptable to all these detractors if the current administration had just continued with the nothingness and lack of direction that was the NASA they inherited.
The end of the Shuttle program was announced before they took office with no clear direction as to when a replacement would be in place and with no funding in place for a replacement. Yet we heard nothing from anyone then . . now they all are shouting that the Current Administration kills the shuttle program and relegated us to second fiddle in space. Where were their voices when NASA was squandering away our children's future and needed some a kick in some direction. The current administration is not at fault the entire community is . . .
It would appear that the past three decades to much funds were sunk in the shuttle program with its limited reach and capacity and not enough on truly expanding the science of space exploration. For the amount of our money that goes into it I currently dont mind if they just close NASA and start over from scratch. The private companies seems to be achieving so much wit so little over such a short period.
Low earth orbit has been "done to death", and until we get a genuinely cheap way to get into orbit, there isn't much of a point of trying to commercially exploit space. After that, we have to be able to overcome the problems with available drive systems that keep interplanetary travel too dangerous becuase of the long times needed in combination with human physical problems with extended zero-g stays and cosmic ray exposure.
Until we have that, manned spaceflight or putting some more Americans/Chinese/Indians/whoever on the moon is just going to be a rehash of the Apollo program--we go, we camp for a couple days, we come back with a bag full of rocks and some pictures.
That's a hell of a way to spend money in this day and age. Better to explore the planets and asteroids with unmanned spacecraft, IDing important resource points as they are found. Then, once we have that cheap access to orbit and fast and heavy (well radiation shielded, large enough to spin and generate good atificial gravity, durable enough to endure micrometeorite strikes) spaceships, then we go out into space to do science and resource development/colonization.
Apollo had its day and still stands as an inspiration of what we can do if we set our minds to it, but rehashing Apollo either on the moon or much more dangerously on Mars is a bad investment unti you really do have that bus/truck service into orbit.
Highest of respect for what these gents has accomplished during their career including Dr Armstrong's post-NASA professorship at an university.
But I think they've misplaced the target of their anger. It is Congress that sets the spending parameters and they have been reluctant to increase NASA funding in turbulent economic times. So NASA could only afford one major programme not two, unfortunately.
NASA had to make a choice between a rock and a hard place. Either way, no real winners.
I am sure Mr Obama would have signed a bill into law that specified increased funding for NASA to cover a short-term transitional gap between one programme to another.
Part of the problem, though, is that nobody has a clearly articulated 'next step' vision. The Augustine Committee was tasked to find the most feasible option that could be affordable and implemented. The news they gave was bleak; no realistic short-term option at present funding levels -- perhaps by 2030s.
Hope right now is that private industry may be able to step up to fill the gap. SpaceX seems promising and there are others on the horizon. That may be several years away, though.
Ultimately I think Dr Armstrong and Mr Cernan may want to lobby Congress for increased NASA funding or continue their present life rather than blasting the President and NASA.
"But I think they've misplaced the target of their anger. It is Congress that sets the spending parameters and they have been reluctant to increase NASA funding in turbulent economic times. So NASA could only afford one major programme not two, unfortunately."
Not so. They have been keen to increase funding on *their* preferred (as in written into federal law) launch vehicle.
The Shuttle hardware (and costs) derived BAU, Cost+ SLS.
"Part of the problem, though, is that nobody has a clearly articulated 'next step' vision. The Augustine Committee was tasked to find the most feasible option that could be affordable and implemented. The news they gave was bleak; no realistic short-term option at present funding levels -- perhaps by 2030s."
Incorrect. Augstine was looking at Constellation (or CxP) and said it'd never fly *unless* Congress bumped up funding by about 50% to HSF. They suggested *alternatives* in the form of depots and a more incremental approach and pointed out that a bigger laucher in the 75mT class would be needed a *long* way in the future. The Moon was possible without it
The report basically said Congress needs to put up or shut up. They did neither. They fought Obama at every attempt to shut it down and replaced it with *another* look alike system. This time Administrator Bolden decided to find out the *real* likely costs before they went ahead.
Looks like (surprise surprise) the Congress *still* has not appropriated enough to get the job done.
in the 50's we saw the first computers. humongous beasts , vacuum tubes, few ten thousand calculations a second. engineers and scientists can create things faster.
in the 60's we transistorized them. clock goes up tenfold , we land people on the moon
in the 70 we integrate them. we get desktop calculators. now we are really cracking.
in the 80 we get personal computers. now everyone will be able to design complex things with the assitance of these wonderful machines.
que forward. 2011. The average cellphone has 1000 the computing power of the first vacuum tube machines, features haptoc feedback , 3d high resolution displays, all kinds of instant information access. And what does the human race do with them? THEY PLAY ANGRY BIRDS !
in other words, the technology has evolved to the point where the human race has devolved... we have fallen behind.
You're so right...
What's also interesting is to theorize the cause of all this. And my stance on that is "people are lazy", directly linked with "software dictates the hardware".
In the old days (Commodore 64) you had a whooping 64kbytes of memory. Yes ladies and gentlemen; a tenth of a megabyte (what's that you ask? Well, most part which goes onto a 3.5" floppy disk. "????"... ok, never mind ;-))
Seriously; C64 provided limitations. And we worked around those limitations to squeeze whatever we could out of the critter. And man did it kick ass !
But nowadays? People rely on higher level programming languages and take those to the max. But often ignoring the overhead caused from such languages (and yes; C comes close enough to break even).
But despite that most people that I know who are into programming hardly create their own library collections anymore; they see a problem, check the Internet if an existing solution is available and some of them will actually look into said solution where a lot simply copy and use said solution.
Even if said solution would only take you a couple of lines of code. Heck; even if said solution could easily be optimized by adding 2 lines of code. But in most cases people don't even wish to bother.
And I think that is one of the main causes as to why a lot of people can no longer achieve "easy stuff" on hardware which way outpowers that what was once considered to be making said stuff easy in the first place.
"in the 80s we get personal computers. now everyone will be able to design complex things with the assistance of these wonderful machines."
I heard someplace back in the mid '80s that the processing power in my then-new Mac Plus -- a Motorola 68K running at (iirc) 6Mhz -- was equal to all the computers used to control the Apollo missions -- which, at the time, took up an entire room. Along with my being amazed, it also struck me kind of funny somehow.
"que forward. 2011. The average cellphone has 1000 the computing power of the first vacuum tube machines, features haptoc feedback , 3d high resolution displays, all kinds of instant information access. And what does the human race do with them? THEY PLAY ANGRY BIRDS!"
Don't be too disappointed. As I recall, one of Doug Englebart's first demos of a mouse-driven GUI was a game remarkably similar to the 1979 arcade fave Space Wars. Also, in the Computer Club at my old high school in the early '70s, I puttered around a bit with Time-Shared BASIC on old networked HP terminals; the first working program I wrote was a single-player RPG.
In fact -- stop me if I'm wrong -- but in every generation of computer development, there were games involved somewhere, at some point. Text RPGs and Space Wars and Galaxians and Grid Wars and Crystal Raiders and Castle Wolfenstein and Doom and Quake and Angry Birds didn't code _themselves_, y'know.
A cold one for the guy who wrote Grid Wars, my favorite Mac game of all time.
Porn powered the uptake of home video cameras and players, just like video games kept the tech industry rolling along when there was no war to keep pushing it!
Playing Angry Birds on your mobile has to be a step up from posting on Facebook/Twitter such nuggets as "I is fabz!" and "Weez gitin wel mashd!".
twitter is for ,well you know , twit's ... (as in the monthy pyhon sketch 'the twit race' )
That is another thing. Instead of producing useful things , people waste tons of bandwidth , computing and storage to post the color of their 'output' this morning as it was taking a 'porcelain cruise' down the pipe... and nobody cares.
The human race (as a whole) can no longer keep up with the technological advances. Yes the human race makes these advances but they are made by a very few number of people. The other 99.9% can;t even keep up.
in the 80's you had the people that couldn't figure out how to set the VCR clock. in the 90's you had people that couldn't add a phone number to their cellphone.. Anything useful they can;t do. anything stupid they can... it's a sad sad day ...
Of course, former astronauts are more than a little biased. I think I'd take their assessment of "embarrassing" in preference to complete boondoggle.
The amount of productive science that could have otherwise been achieved, and useful knowledge gained, with the money that was spent on the moon landing and shuttle programs would have been immense.
It is a tragic setback that NASA is more focused on becoming a "PC" body. In my youth, I worshiped the Astronaut and Cosmonaut corps as gods. Sadly, after several losses of both people and craft, the US government has decided to give in to the pundits and rein in NASA's funding.
I don't care if I get flamed for this or not, but to me, a nation's space program, albeit frivelous to some, represents the pinnacle of achievement for all of humanity and rightfully so, the source of great national pride for said nation.
I find it sad (regardless of which moronic administration the decision actually came from) that my country has relagated NASA to a third rate government bureacracy.
Neil Armstrong has been one of the greatest heros in my life (after my late father), it was the achievements of him and his brothers and sisters, who risked their lives and sacraficed everything, that inspired me to want to persue a career in science.
You all can rant and rave about how much the US sucks, or for my fellow americans, which political party is the greater of the two evils, but for me, it ain't about the politics, it's just a plain sad day for the whole of humanity.
I remember the day when Apollo 11's LM landed, and I distinctly remember the entire world stopping for a brief moment in time, to celebrate as a temporarily united civilization. Apparently those days are long gone and will soon be forgotten, as demonstrated by a number of prior posts.
Flame away. Don't really give a damn.
"As unimaginable as it seems, we have now come full circle and ceded our leadership role in space back to the same country, albeit with a different name, that spurred our challenge five decades ago."
see icon.
Whilst I agree that the US should be doing more to secure funds for it's space program (maybe try not to invade anyone for a few years?) Using "The Russians" as a reason makes the astronauts appear to be out of touch and paranoid. I'm surprised he didn't tell congress they needed to protect their Precious Bodily Fluids as well.
I agree with others here that discontinuing the Shuttle is 10 years overdue. LEO is rife to be commercialized and NASA needs a cheaper way to explore deepspace.
Science and manufacturing are a much more level playing field than 1966, but that isn't NASA's fault. I don't see why everyone minimizes the massive achievement of the non-manned program, either.
"LEO is rife to be commercialized"
Umm, no-one has changed the technology of getting into LEO (or any other orbit, for that matter) for about 50 years, so the economics remain much as they ever were. The only significant changes are that satellites now don't need to weigh as much to do their job and robots are good enough that you don't need to send people. I see nothing to suggest that we are on the brink of some new phase in the exploitation of LEO.
I suppose he'll go with a Beretta then.
However, to address what you *meant* -- NASA is a lousy agency, so full of bureacracy and internal politics that they could not make a ham sandwich for less than a million dollars. Knock it in the head and bring in talent, not bureaucrats. Throwing more money at NASA just rewards the same level of crap we have become accustomed to. We on the right actually salute Obama for cutting it off. If NASA ever thought they were in a fight for survival, they might actually resort to doing what they were created for.
The problem with sacred cows is that some bureaucrat will figure out how to milk it.
Space is important because of the technology and spin-off benefits it generates. However I cannot help feel that while our technologically and supposedly enlightened world remains unable to feed people, get medicine to them or even deliver clean water to them, we are sorely missing a trick. Let's continue into space but not lose focus on solving - properly - the more urgent issues at lower altitude.
You might like to consider that more people now suffer from *obesity* than starvation on a *global* scale. Free liposuction and convert the resulting fat into something human edible perhaps?
Actually space is important because of it's ground coverage for communications satellites (the only bit where customers pay something like the *real* costs and make a profit doing so) and a potential place to go and live.
I think if you travel a bit, you'll find you're incorrect.
Hunger is caused by a lack of resources to produce food. This is fixable.
So called "poor" is a manufactured thingie, brought on by "western" concepts of laziness. This is also fixable, but only if you can convince people to ignore advertising and get their fingernails dirty.
"I think if you travel a bit, you'll find you're incorrect. Hunger is caused by a lack of resources to produce food. This is fixable."
Condescending and wrong in the context of the preceding comment. The current situation in the Horn of Africa, to take one example, has come about precisely because of war, not because there isn't enough food to feed people. The sad thing is that such regions continually suffer because of instability and warmongering.
It seems that NASA has had it's day, that the involvement of governments and government money in space exploration is dwindling, so ...
Turn back a number of centuries and take a look at the explorers who ventured to the 'new world', a great number of them were backed by private entities, by entrepreneurs.
Yes, it was as much about discovering (or stealing) wealth as it was about 'because we can' and the Kudos involved for the intrepid explorers - but it was this which drove exploration, discovery.
Some of these discoverers were not in it for the money, but for the glory - and either they used their own funds, or convinced businessmen to pony up the cash.
I see the same thing happening with the future of space exploration.
The likes of the X-Prize are just the beginnings of this.
It may take a long time, but if there's glory and possibly wealth beyond our wildest dreams, it'll happen. It may be a commercial nightmare scenario where the first men on Mars are sponsored by Coke - but heck, sci-fi writers have explored this route, its' completely viable, if a little distasteful.
...but the most important expeditions were almost-always state-sponsored. Expeditions were expensive, especially if it fails, so you needed a backer with enough cash to be able to take a gamble...and still be around if he lost, and you can't get much richer than a state treasury. Europe in the 15th century was in a "sea race", if you will: trying to colonize territories holding valuable resources to exploit. The Portuguese expeditions down Africa and eventually around the Horn were all motivated by people like Prince Henry (stood to reason, too; no Mediterranean access, so the only way to go was south). Christopher Columbus's expedition to find the far east via the back door was 2/3rd funded by Spain, who gambled on him because by then Portugal had already secured the Africa route. And once the Spanish realized they had virgin territory, they sent ships galore there: practically all state-sponsored.
.. I was a bit over enthusiastic about 'private' funding, it did exist, but your quite correct in the fact that entire countries would fund expeditions.
But it does seem that in modern times, given the hobbling of NASA, the last hope - at least for the foreseeable future - would be privately funded space exploration, or perhaps a combination.
I guess it's all down to what profits can be made and right now, that's satellites and 'joy rides'
Any other investment, aimed at, for instance, mining expeditions to asteroids, would be massively long term. Right now, that's not commercially viable.
I think people are making too much of the government - capitalist dichotomy. After all, Columbus was funded by government, albeit with a bonus scheme (grab what you can for yourself).
Incidentally, I also think that these eminences grises are putting too much blame on the current government. Fighting unfunded wars and handing out un-budgeted tax reductions has to count for something. Not to mention the general willingness of the public to accept high levels of public and private indebtedness, without a thought for the future.
"Great men"
True in their day.
"From a gentler time."
Discounting the ever present sense of a vast foreign block eager to enfold, extend and extinguish Western civilization or destroy it on 4 minutes notice.
Nostalgia unencumbered by facts is just your preferred deity's way of telling you too many of your brain cells have died for you to recall things accurately.
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