As someone who grew up with the NASA manned space program as a beacon of innovation, strength, and hope for the future, it is a sad day for me, and I’m sure for many others.
While at ICCC6, I had the honor of once again meeting Dr. Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and the only geologist to ever walk the moon.
I made sure that my children met him, and he surprised me the next day by offering two signed photographs. A most gracious man and I offer my sincere thanks. He, like many others, must feel simultaneously a sense of pride and of emptiness today.
My family and I watched this final launch this morning, I made it mandatory to witness history, even if only on television.
et tu NASA?
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Related news from Aviation Week:
Lawmakers Seek To Kill Webb Space Telescope
A House panel recommends killing the Northrop Grumman-built James Webb Space Telescope, calling the Hubble successor “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.”
Overall, the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee backs funding NASA at $16.8 billion in fiscal 2012, a cut of $1.9 billion to President Barack Obama’s budget request, according to a committee statement. The subcommittee is scheduled to approve its draft of the spending bill that also covers the Commerce and Justice departments on July 7. The bill still must pass in the full House and be reconciled with a Senate version before becoming law.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) defends the committee’s decisions. “Given this time of fiscal crisis, it is also important that Congress make tough decisions to cut programs where necessary to give priority to programs with broad national reach that have the most benefit to the American people,” Rogers says.
NASA’s future space telescope has run into its share of trouble, going $1.5 billion over budget and seeing its launch date slip at least three years.
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Some people have seriously proposed a one-way mission. The person being sent would have all necessary items to keep them alive – maybe grow their own veg.
Also, RE: The space webb telescope… We should be putting scopes on the moon. It’s likely easier to maintain orientation stability than a spacecraft, and could be expanded over time as the base platform isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
It’s not just America that’s turning it’s back on the technological future. We Brits, and the French, retired Concorde a few years ago without a planned replacement. Where’s yesterday’s spirit?
“REPLY: I can see this line of thinking being relevant hundreds of years ago too. For example…
Christopher Columbus: My queen, I want to send ships and men to explore the great unknown beyond the horizon. It will be historic and will broaden our understanding.
Queen Isabella: It is too expensive and dangerous, let us wait for the future when robotic sailors are introduced. That will be the time./sarc
– Anthony
* * *
Maybe you should know that what was required to finance that famous exploration was the spanish inquisition – the most ‘profitable’ enterprise of the era. I’ll grant the man’s valid point.
The means to that end are wrong wrong wrong. People may ‘need’ heroes, but when their ‘heroes’ did nothing on their own – they are, in fact, rock stars of the U.S.A. and celebrated as much as a favored gladiator in Roman times for the same purposes and reasons. They are not heroic as individuals – such as, say, Burt Rutan who is entirely worthy for the very reasons a celebrity of a predatory institution can never be.
‘my queen’ should have been a clue – but somehow it was thoughtlessly overlooked, eh?
I just left a post on Andrea Rossi’s site (inventor of the E-Cat) pointing out that most of the fuel burned during a shuttle launch is expended simply to lift the rest of the fuel. Terribly wasteful.
With really practical, non-radioactive fusion energy, the cost per Kg lifted to orbit will plummet many fold. Even a shuttle might be practical!
I detect in some of the good riddance and ho-hum responses a complete lack of awareness of the nature of technological development. After Columbus, there was huge demand for shipping and races for New World (and very old world) trading and colonization. This made for bigger and better ships (Columbus’s three boats at 12 to 18 metres keel length were smaller than a lot of yachts parked in millionaire destinations) and ushered in the age of enlightenment.
So how much money would have been saved if the US hadn’t gone into space exploration, Well you have to measure that against the unimaginable, unprecedented leap in technological developments of the computer age that came out of this stuff. Trillions of dollars in wealth created (Bill Gates himself even had a tenth of a trillion bucks). Impossible strides taken in medical science and essentially all the sciences except for the new brand of political sciences, all industries benefitted – farmers even have computerized seed drills that detect if one of the drills gets plugged – don’t you hate it when your corn comes up with missing rows (lower yields). Resource exploration, environmental mapping, weather forecasting,.,,,,, everything.
Socialism is killing the US’s lead in technology – gee better spend the money getting more milk for your children,… only without tech development the milk for the children would be a heck of a lot more expensive and you may not have a job, Okay, the rant is over, You all get the point.
REPLY: my goodness, what a sourpuss you are.
With that attitude science exploration of any kind would never get anywhere. Note the /sarc tag which I added since you obviously didn’t get it the first time.
-Anthony
You make the rather silly assumption that manned space flight was the only way forward. In fact, unmanned space exploration has already given us more scientific knowledge of distant Mars than our ‘boots on the ground’ garnered from our nearby moon. Unmanned space exploration was there first, Anthony, and would have progressed farther and faster if NASA hadn’t squandered our technological energies on zero gravity toilets. ;-p
REPLY: Never made that assumption at all, you did. We can have both, we should have both. Tough noogies if you don’t like my opinion on it. – Anthony
Anthony– It was a sad day for me, too, since I used to help launch those shuttles from up front by those big glass windows. Before that, I was the lead instrumentation engineer for Atlantis. After that I also helped to convert MLP-3 from a “one-holer” (which launched Apollo-11 to the moon in 1969) to a “three-holer” to launch space shuttles. AFAIK, the last shuttle blasted off from “my” MLP-3.
It was great that somehow they managed to bring back Roberta Wyrick to be the Orbiter Test Conductor for this launch. She was the best OTC that ever was and…unfortunately…ever will be.
Ray;
The depth of your delusion is awesome. SpaceX will be renting access to the ISS at a fraction of the Russian charges, and already designed, built, launched and orbited, launched and recovered, the Dragon capsule (that is/was designed for both cargo and manned use from the beginning; crewed modification and testing has already been authorized and begun — about $76 Million, total) for well under ½ the amount spent on the Orion/Constellation which never even got to bending metal, much less launching it ($0.8 bn vs >$1.6 bn).
And its intention is to provide inexpensive fast “rented” access to Mars within 10 yrs. And to slash cost/lb to LEO by 10X, and then 10X again, and then possibly another 10X.
The gubmint (and everyone else) will save HUGE by “renting” from private launchers.
P.S. SpaceX’s launch costs are already lower than the touted Chinese effort, despite all their advantages of total in-house control and complaint-free labor pool, and the gap is accelerating.
SSam says:
July 8, 2011 at 10:03 am
—
That NASA is great at self promotion is a given. That it is accurate in it’s self promotion is not.
Everyone and there brother was interested in integrated circuits back then. For the same reason NASA was. Smaller, faster, used less power. NASA may have put up some of the money that was used in developing one IC chip, but there were other players in that market, at the same time, puting even more money into their development. The Apollo program still used discrete transistors in all of it’s logic boards. By the time the shuttle flew, it was using IC’s, but the IC’s it used were almost 15 years old.
@ur momisugly mkelly thanks for your service, Go Navy! @ur momisugly Retired Engineer please elaborate on certain senator, my humble understanding is that the central region of the mirror was too flat by a few nanometers, and, that it wasn’t discovered until first light (pic) May 20, 1990. Inspection of the back up revealed the mistake and the need for a contact lens. Nowhere, can I find any reference to prior knowledge of incorrect curvature. Who was it???
Nothing nowhere never be, chock’o fools daily in doses downed, mister no sister:
Rafer Hoxworth says: (and similar comments et.al.)
July 8, 2011 at 8:54 am
“I am in favor of space exploration, but manned missions to space, as of now, contribute nothing to our knowledge and exploration of space. A review of the Space Shuttle’s history shows it to be a very dangerous and expensive way to launch satellites.”
There is none so blind as he who will not see………
Jeremy;
“Asimov suffers a lack of understanding of human nature”? Gaaahhh … try reading the series. Real estate preparation and then transport of humans to it was a major phase of the “future history”. Do not criticize your betters without at least a cursory attempt to investigate them.
There is plenty of profit to be made in space. Mining asteroids for rare earth metals, mining the moon for aluminum and helium-3.
Additionally, if you want to build craft to go beyond earth, the place to build those craft is in orbit around the moon, using material from asteroids and from the moon. Much of the fuel for such a craft can be created on the moon as well.
Sorry Sean, I did not notice there was already a Sean when I posted the second Sean. bwanajohn says – lots of tech advances related to Apollo. With that amount of money in play, it would be really surprising if there were no inventions. Military spend has spin offs, but is not the only way to fund high tech research. The question is would the USA be a richer and more high tech country if NASA had closed down manned flight after Apollo and gone drone/probe? The unmanned stuff has been breath taking. I got Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Missions. Skylab burning up was the end of era.
Jeremy,
Everything NASA has done since its inception has had a political component. Some of the cost increases in manufacturing Military and NASA hardware is from the cost of placing major subcontractor operations in every major congressional district to make sure every politician has some skin in the game.
There were so many better designs than the shuttle, but this program had the most deceptive accounting on the cost per mission numbers. The others were closer to reality, but they also probably low-balled the numbers a bit.
It would have been better if NASA had done a new redesign of their space launch system every 15 years or so. That would have put the contract up for competitive bid and led to some real innovations in spaceflight vehicles. We are unfortunately doing the same thing to our military aircraft. Fighters should be replaced every 15 years, but the F15 has been the front line fighter now sine the mid 70’s. The F22 is now being cut to the point that in another 5-10 years the Air Force will have to replace everything again.
I fear the US has lost the will to do anything daring. The people have become selfish and self-centered and the politicians even more so. There are very few statesmen in this generation that I can see and very little vision for the future. I hope someone snaps us all out of this narcissism.
I could never understand why there was never a Shuttle mission into lunar orbit.
(I bet you could fit a LEM into the cargo bay, or take one up in bits to assemble.)
Still, the Shuttle did what it was designed to do- build the ISS.
Pity Ares has been cancelled, now we’ll never get to Mars in my lifetime, as I was promised in 1969.
“REPLY: Bzzzt! Sorry. Hubble would be a useless myopic hulk in space (or burned up in the atmosphere by now) if man hadn’t gone out to fix the optics and maintain it’s electronics and fuel.”
No Anthony, that’s simply wrong. If the space shuttle had never been built, we’d long since have cobbled together something Soyuz like and used it instead of the Space Shuttle to service Hubble. … Or we’d simply have built another Hubble with proper optics. Either would have been far cheaper than the shuttle which stands as a monument to grandstanding over common sense. In point of fact, the Shuttle was grossly oversold. It overran budgets, slipped schedules, sucked up money like it was going out of style, and never came close to meeting the promise of 40-50 launches a year where it might have been cheaper than the unmanned launches that were largely used instead.
IMHO, what Skylab (1973-1979) established was that there was no real need for either the shuttle or the space station that eventually became international when even the US could no longer afford that monstrosity. Skylab incidentally was the first of many operational failures for the Shuttle, which could not be finished in time to boost Skylab’s orbit before it was necessary to bring Skylab down.
My opinion, and I’m sure I’m a minority, is that I was against the shuttle in the 1970s because I didn’t think NASA could build a cost effective, reusable, launch vehicle. I think time has proved me right. We could have accomplished far more with far less money if we’d rejected the silly thing early on. Not a sad day at all, I think. Good goddamn riddance.
=====
The Webb observatory? I dunno. I’m in favor of space science. Lots of it. Cost overruns and schedule slips are normal for complex projects. But current estimates of a cost overrun of four times (6.8B) are a lot. (It’ll doubtless overrun more, they always do). And a four to eight year schedule slip? Maybe this is a doomed project and really should be scrapped and started over. My understanding (could be way wrong) is that the optical portion is largely being made redundant by large, ground based telescopes. Maybe try again as a Spitzer (infrared) telescope replacement?
It is never going to be over. It is just the end of the Shuttle Program.
I never listen to the Media….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_program ( It is still alive until Congress kills it, but they won’t )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_galactic
http://www.spacex.com/
http://www.nasa.gov/about/whats_next.html
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/
And much, much, more….
Have a great future.
Our fathers built NASA and the Interstate system, while we can’t pay for their routine maintenance.
There would be plenty to go around if everyone would do their part.
Slackers rule (via the proxy of bleeding hearts.)
The Russians proved themselves pretty good at low budget high achievement manned spaceflight and space residence. Perhaps a brighter future with a bigger emphasis on co-operation between nations would be more productive. U.S. high tech instruments, European launch vehicles, Russian space station knowhow, plus Chinese rocketry?
We need more probes in the solar system, I wouldn’t see the loss of Hubble’s successor as such a great loss if it meant more funding for exploration of Jupiter’s moons, Uranus’ strange axial tilt and magnetics, Mercury’s unexpectedly strong magnetosphere, Saturn’s superstorms.
A better understanding of our local solar system would bring about a better understanding of our planet’s climate systems too…
The era ending is the era of governments being able to do great things. No real leaders enter government service any more. The leaders who will lead the way are in private enterprise. Greatness, going forward, will be defined as being able to navigate the maze of government obstacles to actually accomplish something.
@New Light
Don’t hold your breath.
bladeshearerJack Maloney says:
July 8, 2011 at 12:03 pm
“The tremendous cost in of building human life support into our space vehicles was totally unnecessary and a dead weight on our progress in space. The one time human presence was needed was the Hubble repair. But for the cost of flying throttle-jockeys, we could have put up a dozen more Hubbles. The much-vaunted International Space Station will fizzle out within the decade without accomplishing anything significant. The manned space adventure was mostly a Cold War propaganda mission that was unnecessary and rather pointless. Good riddance.”
The tremendous cost comes from building, and subsequently, selling something once. The more times you can build and sell it, the lesser the cost. This is why stupid people pay a hundred dollars for one piece for crap that’s selling for a quarter if you pool together to order enough of a quantity.
However, since the goal was to put man in space and then man on the moon, cost was irrelevant to the progress of reaching that goal. So it was a highly necessary weight of a burden to carry, and just think about it, otherwise, the space industry, however federal funded, wouldn’t have spawned all that it did and you might not have had the time of day communicating so freely since a lot communications problems wouldn’t have been solved that early in the technological evolution (and perhaps never). So since the goal was to put a man on the moon, before the pesky evil communists, everything technological and logistic wise necessary for that to happen was mandatory.
To my recollection only sov. communists and religious, and green, extremist thought the whole idea of space flight was “pointless”, (the same people now thriving because of what the “pointlessness” gave to technological evolution), but then again they lost and don’t wont to revisit their losses.