We should have learned one thing from the space shuttle. Having a Congressional committee design a spacecraft and a space program doesn’t work. Or shall I say, it isn’t optimal.

I’m sure there have been too many examples in the past where the cheap alternative is the one that failed because of penny-pinching. Those who vote for these things are under various pressures and many a worthwhile project has been affected, some catastrophically.

So the word ‘cheap’ should not be in the vocabulary of our fiscal arbitrators, nor should we give them any ideas that it would be O.K. on our behalf.

Ivan.

What do you mean? How can you possibly judge in advance how “necessary” a piece of knowledge is going to be?

In the UK, it is already difficult enough to obtain funding for “real” science (as opposed to applied science, by which I mean science with a targeted application such as various aspects of cancer research). By the very nature of the endeavour, certain fields of science must be speculative* – if we knew what we were going to find, we wouldn’t need to do the research.

* Such as the area of quantum gravity research, in which string theory and brane theory have yet to posit one practical experiment (unless I’m out of date on that one…).

How about free energy and a place for the explorers among us to check out.

Move manufacturing off of the earth…make steel and other metals offworld and spare earth the polution involved in the processes.

Living room for people eventualy.

Someday…sigh…

Of course, Ray’s point is equally valid. We’ll spend less on the VSP in the long run if we fund it more now. It’s the old fast-cheap-good problem of engineering, where you can only have two of the three. With the VSP, fast is a requirement if we want to have the CEV done in time to take over from the shuttle and good is… well, it’s good. So we may have to sacrifice some cash to get it done.

My representative voted for the amendment, as well, and it will be interesting to see his justification for this vote in his weekly newsletter.

The sooner a concrete plan to the Moon & Mars is funded the “cheaper” it will cost.

You’ve complained about the fact that this manned Mars initiative is starving other science projects of funding. It looks like this budget amendment would have prevented the Mars program from chewing into the dollars for those other projects.

It’s loose-loose. If you supported the amendment then there is more funding for other science related projects. If you rejected the amendment then the Mars initiative gets a boost but only because it simply redirected funds from the already tight budget.

If we’re serious about it, we’re not putting enough money into it. The whole thing is PR, much like a lot of airport security is more about airline and security PR than it is really about securing airplines.

If I thought that the Mars mission were a real thing that might really happen at anywhere near the costs currently being estimated, that might be one thing. But as it is, space science and general astronomer grants are being killed on the altar of the space station and the Mars mission… and, irrespective of what you think about the values of the latter, I don’t really think that it is even going to happen as a result of anything we’re doing right now. It’s kind of a hard pill to swallow.

-Rob