(Untitled)

[courtknee]

the moon is "dead"

The lede of today’s Orlando Sentinel article is blunt: “NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead.” So, it claims, are the Ares 1 and 5 rockets, which will not be funded in the FY2011 budget proposal to be released on Monday. “There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all,” the

Comments

[tartary_lamb]

D:

[courtknee]

hold me.

[tartary_lamb]

I can't, I'm too busy rocking back and forth in the fetal position.

[courtknee]

*holds you*

[haruhiko]

Aasdfjhasdlfkjfhljkl

I still dream of a time when we radically defund the shit out of our military-industrial complex and pump that $$$$$$$$ into education/NASA/science/the environment/infrastructure. I would JIZZ IN MY PANTS

[kiarasayre]

T____________T

I can't say I'm particularly surprised, though. Astronomy (and, for that matter, space investigation in general) doesn't tend to be looked at as one of the more practical sciences, and with a budget crunch like this, something's got to go. I just would have hoped it wasn't my childhood dreams. :(

[courtknee]

Basically this. I'm not surprised in the least, but I was holding on to that hope for dear life. ugh.

[kidantarctica]

[orionaram]

Well the ball is certainly in Branson's court now.

[morbidimpishfae]

This isn't likely to be a popular opinion - but, well, good. We're not really ready for SERIOUS space expansion yet IMO, and manned missions puttering back and forth seem like a massive waste of resources. We still have SO much space here on the planet that would be far more easy to make livable than Mars or the Moon (the Arctic, Antarctica, TONS of ocean floor) and we haven't discovered any resources off world that are cheaper or easier to obtain then they are here (YET)... From a purely pragmatic stand-point space just doesn't make sense (again, YET.)

[courtknee]

HDU.

[haruhiko]

But the point isn't just to look for resources or find possible spaces that could be made livable: Space exploration gives us a better understanding of our own planet and how it compares to other like bodies as well as helping us understand the greater universe.

I agree that missions that utilize robots can be far more efficient than human missions and that costs have to be weighted against benefits but I would also argue that if we changed the way our country taxed corporations and the upper-class and if we shifted the priorities of government so that science was more important than war spending and corporate welfare, we could afford the expensive human missions on top of other smaller-scale missions.

[morbidimpishfae]

True, and I would love it if our spending priorities and our tax structure were changed - I'm just not idealistic enough to think it's going to happen any time soon... :(