TR: There's a longstanding debate about whether NASA should be putting more resources into robotic space exploration or manned spaceflight. How will the new budget affect that debate?
LF: We fully support the goal of human space flight. But this "anti-science" budget will basically bring a negative reaction from the science community and reopen that "human versus robot" contentiousness -- which had largely been done away with.
TR: Okay, so what balance should NASA try to strike between space science and manned exploration?
LF: They need to be seen working together. The president's moon-Mars vision seemed to have that. It was going to be a mix of things being done on Mars robotically, with successive steps to set up a human lunar presence that would in turn lead to a Mars mission. It was all seen as leading to sending humans to Mars.
Now they seem to be getting lost in the details. John F. Kennedy said that we were going to send humans to the moon and return them and we're going to do it in this decade. He didn't say we're going to have orbiters and CEVs and moon bases and new launch vehicles. He relegated all that to five words in his speech -- "and do the other things." The reverse seems to be happening now. They seem to be doing all the other things and not moving toward the goal.
They need to have a program of exploration that's seen to be moving the human presence outward and answering questions about the universe. That's what excited the public about the Mars Rovers and the Hubble Space Telescope. And I'm afraid they're going to lose that.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
Missions to Europa and the TPF are absolute challenges and will need a lot of outstanding engineering but (hopefully or unfortunately) we may have to wait for Japan or China to step in here.
Hoping for better news ...
Somebody out of Austria.
02/08/2006
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02/08/2006
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02/08/2006
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Bush's bulging deficits | Economist.com : POLITICAL speech is always full of slippery locutions, but George Bush's state-of-the-union address last week may have set a new standard for involuted meaning when he urged Congress to “act responsibly, and make the tax cuts permanent”. At that time, the official White House projection of the budget deficit for the 2006 fiscal year was $341 billion, a substantial portion of which could have been erased by rolling back the tax cuts so dear to Mr Bush’s heart.
02/08/2006
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02/08/2006
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02/08/2006
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NASA has suffered so badly at the hands of so many uninformed adminnistration officials that it has developed Helsinki syndrome at its top levels.
The robotic and Class-M planet investigations are needed for one very political reason - energy will be the engine for the maintenance of civilization and the destabilization of geo-political assumptions for a long time. NASA needs to help the US find energy sources on other planets.
04/26/2006
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