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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“A Hitch Hikers Guide To Low Earth Orbit… or how low the US of A has fallen.”
Authored by a generation of slackers, naysayers, and grasping socialist.
Douglass Adams may be able to find the ironic humor in this but I feel only the most profound despair for my failing country and the many comments on this story that applaud our fall from technical excellence. In your dotage, you can recall for your children and grand children that, for a brief 60 years, we Americans had the courage to harness the lightning and ride the thunder…. MtK
At some point, we need to make being in space pay. I’m afraid the way real progress in space will happen is through militarization. Isn’t that always the way it works? Of course, von Braun was a V2 rocket designer.
Since we are talking about things we’ve seen, I saw von Braun dedicate a satellite tracking antenna in North Carolina my dad worked on when I was a kid. Naturally, at that time I had no idea who von Braun was. Still, I don’t mind knowing I did see him in person.
I caught the end of Mercury and was glued to the TV to watch all the rest. July 20th, 1969 was awesome, but I really appreciated Christmas 1968, when Borman and crew went to the moon on Apollo 8 and saved a very bad year.
Another very terrible day was in January of 1986. Well, remember my dad worked in aerospace, in particular on the Titan III that had very similar solids with o-rings. UTC developed a method to prevent Titan IIIC solid failures due to launching on a cold day. The engineers had figured out you needed to hang heating blankets on the solids to keep them warm and remove them before launch.
Some claim the insulating foam on the external tank was changed to make it more “environmentally friendly”, lacking freon. Well, it was changed. However, Wiki claims the old foam stripped too, and the bipod ramps at the base of the struts were exempted from the foam change. Apparently, envirowhackism was not a factor in the loss of Columbia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster
Here is the new plan. I have no confidence we can go beyond the Moon in the Orion. Not without developing serious radiation protection technology for interplantetary space to keep the crew alive.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1417334557
Finally, take a look at the cool launch pic also at spaceweather.com:
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz648.htm
Nice atmospheric phenomenon.
Is there an Earth, or even space based, telescope powerful enough that could be pointed at any of the landing sites and see what the various bits of stuff left there looks like now?
That would be a cool project to mark the anniversary if it’s possible, if it’s not been done already?
“I have no confidence we can go beyond the Moon in the Orion. ”
Wll not that one maybe, but the Freeman Dyson/Ted Taylor Orion can.
Very sad to see the demise of half a century of innovation and daring. Looking in from outside America the US blossoms into a frenzy of inventive innovations when given a national goal, even when it seems a mission impossible. Thus was the space race to the moon, this gave the entire world a great leap forward. I am looking forward hopefully to a new leader in your country that has a vision that spurs America into a new frenzy of inventiveness. Perhaps a manned mission to Mars by the end of the decade with a months sojorn on the surface exploring, especially if it was made public that some oddities had been noted on Mars.
Don’t I remember that bean counters over-riding engineering risk taking is supposed to feature in the decline of the British Empire?
Well, lets be honest here. NASA could probably save a couple bilion dollars if it cut its funding of Real Cimate! 🙂
Regards
Mailman
Apparently no longer available.
At ICCC #4 I asked Harrison Schmitt about one of the claims of the we-faked-the-moon-landing crowd, namely why the van Allen radiation belts weren’t lethal. While he mentioned what I suspected, that they weren’t in them long enough, he volunteered that for longer trips, and I think even in the ISS, they can use water tanks as adequate shielding from solar storms. Kim Stanley Robinson used that as a plot device in Red Mars, the first place where I became aware of that shielding.
Oh good, I noticed that and it took a couple second to realize it was glory seen through a wide angle lens. It took another couple of seconds to realize I was also seeing the shadow of the smoke plume against the cloud deck.
Apollo and the Space Shuttle were engineering solutions to political objectives. Apollo, to beat the Soviets, Shuttle, to put California solidly in Nixon’s column for the 1972 election. The problem with political objectives is that once they change, support evaporates and you are left with a non-sustainable solution to a problem that no longer exists.
The US is broke, so anyone thinking that the glory days of NASA will return are dreaming. If Spacex’s numbers are correct, their Falcon will put twice as much mass into LEO for a third of the cost of Big Aerospace vehicles (Atlas, Delta etc.) That is a sixfold improvement. Even if Spacex is off by a factor of 3 it represents a two-fold improvement. Spacex doesn’t have to maintain plants and suppliers in key congressional districts. Their innovation and freedom to start from a clean sheet of paper is evident in using the orbital maneuvering thrusters to double as the launch escape system.
Look forward to reading the comments, but quickly: I’m a fiscal conservative, however justifying the expenditure on Man in Space (and robots, too, of course!) has never been a question for me. It’s part of our Manifest Destiny (in the best sense of the word), it’s building a new infrastructure for the future, much as building the railroads in the 19th century did (much of that government-assisted), and it’s essential for 21st-century national defense (he who holds the high ground wins).
Let’s see. The Dept. of Education budget is about $70 billion. The Dept. of Energy’s is about $24 billion. If we abolished the first, and maybe 90% of the second, we could double or triple NASA’s budget and still have money left over (i.e. not spent, returned to the taxpayers). It’s a no-brainer for me.
/Mr Lynn
For all its flaws the Space Shuttle served one essential purpose: the building of the International Space Station. Yes, I know that kept us in Low Earth Orbit for too long, but if we’re going to live on the Moon, and make long, dangerous journeys to Mars and beyond, we’ve got to learn to live and work in space, and the ISS serves that purpose very well, though it’s only a beginning.
I’m a big fan of Robert Zubrin’s imaginative schemes for getting to Mars and back with current technology, but supporting humans on long journeys in deep space presents problems we have only begun to deal with: the long-term effects of microgravity, cosmic radiation, confinement in close quarters, etc. The ISS and its Shuttle support system have proven vital tools in learning about these factors. They weren’t a waste; the ISS in particular remains an essential step in The Conquest of Space (to use the title of Willey Ley’s seminal book from the 1950s). Before Columbus took off from Spain, European mariners had to learn about the seas by navigating along the coasts.
The next step, I think, is a base on the Moon. Will we do it first, or leave it to the Chinese? Remember, it’s a nice place to put missiles. . .
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn says (July 9, 2011 at 5:27 pm): “Let’s see. The Dept. of Education budget is about $70 billion. The Dept. of Energy’s is about $24 billion. If we abolished the first, and maybe 90% of the second, we could double or triple NASA’s budget and still have money left over (i.e. not spent, returned to the taxpayers). It’s a no-brainer for me.”
Hmm. Abolish two Federal departments (presumably on the theory that government spends money wastefully), but give most of the money to another government agency because government…spends money…uh…wisely? Huh?
NASA certainly didn’t spend the money wisely last time, why would it do better if it had even more money to throw at problems?
Let’s just amputate two fiscal black holes and leave it at that, shall we? 🙂
Swings and roundabouts. Put the politics aside, no matter how much further all nations go this century, for absolute enthralling delight the Moon landing will never be equalled – enjoy remembering it was your nation that inspired all the world to a new way of thinking about it and ourselves in ever expanding horizons.
And, the shuttle was worth every penny just to keep Hubble going..
Point taken. However, I do think there is a role for the federal government in space, both civilian and military, though on the civilian side it may evolve into basic infrastructure and not hot rockets.
On the other hand, I would argue that there is no legitimate role for the federal government in education, and only a modest one in energy regulation (keeping track of nuclear material—that sort of thing; certainly not subsidizing ‘alternative’ forms of energy production).
/Mr Lynn
Yep. Can’t argue with that.
/Mr Lynn
BTW, some excellent photos from Shuttle history here (though I still have to avert my eyes from the one of the Challenger disaster):
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/07/the-history-of-the-space-shuttle/100097/
I have the last one (no. 61) on the desktop of my 27″ iMac.
/Mr Lynn
Myrrh says: July 10, 2011 at 1:06 pm “And, the shuttle was worth every penny just to keep Hubble going..”
No it wasn’t. All of that including the repairs could have been done with robots. NASA has not been worth the price for over 20 years, which is how long we’ve been putting up with their lies about AGW.
Mr Lynn says (July 10, 2011 at 7:18 pm): “On the other hand, I would argue that there is no legitimate role for the federal government in education, and only a modest one in energy regulation…”
Close enough. 🙂
RE: I just cannot understand how Americans have managed so quickly to lose their courage, sense of adventure, confidence and can-do attitude – the qualities that summed up a great nation and won the admiration of the world. The decline of America is tragic, and not just for Americans.
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Simply put, we decided at the mass / herd level that it was unsophisticated to embrace exceptionalism, and that we’d be better advised to emulate post WW2 Western European strategies inclusive of vast, expansive social welfare networks. OK, here we are.
RE: Maybe, Government isn’t the best organization to expand human achievement beyond the ordinary
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Maybe we need absolute monarchy.
Your targets are too modest. A 1-mi. dia. nickel-iron asteroid in Earth orbit could be readily mined (it’s mostly pre-separated material) for as much precious metal as has come from crustal mining in all history, about $1 million at current prices for every human on the planet. Plus the rare earths, base metals for space construction, and more.
Helium-3 mining will be unnecessary. pB11 fusion will be mastered and convenient and cheap long before it’s necessary to utilize exotic isotopes. See LPPhysics.com , and maybe TriAlpha, and maybe PolyWell for some near-term contenders.