I wonder if potential new NASA top dog Charles Bolden reads the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal? Because if he does, he may get some good funding ideas.
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Of course, for a lot of Senators, he’ll have to explain what Mars is first…
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
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May 31st, 2009 at 8:21 am
Here’s another way…
May 31st, 2009 at 8:27 am
NASA funded inventions should not be made public-domain, but offered for royalty.
Isn’t that sort of the way MIB did it?
May 31st, 2009 at 8:32 am
NASA could get all the money it wants. Here’s a few ideas:
1. Pony up one of them crashed UFOs and a few aliens.
2. Finally tell the truth about the moonbabes with silver uniforms and purple hair.
3. Lunar cheese prolongs erections and grows your hair.
4. Mars has oil. And gold!
5. Tours of the fake moon landing sets.
6. Use Hubble to find Bigfoot and Nessie.
7. International Space Station. Zero G. Sex. Sells itself.
NASA can have the above ideas free, just give me credit for them when you use them.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:48 am
I always thought that a “Congresscritter in Space” incentive would be a good way to get funding. I have no idea what criteria could be used to determine who goes, but there are probably a few of them who would jump at the chance.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:56 am
8. Men are from Mars, let’s go to see an original Monster Truck race and eat steak dinners without any vegetables.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:57 am
Just offer to send an expedition to find proof of Creationist Astronomy. The fundie senators will be all over it. They’ll twist whatever NASA finds to their satisfaction.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:00 am
@ Mena:
I always thought that a “Congresscritter in Space” incentive would be a good way to get funding
Yeah, especially if you strap ‘em to a Delta for a one-way trip.
The flaw in this plan, however, would be the threat of outgassing once in space. Presumably members of Congress have enough collective propellent to modify their trajectory and head back to earth under their own power. Of course, absent a heat shield (trimmed from the budget as an unnecessary bit of pork) they’d make an awful purdy display on the way back through the atmosphere…
May 31st, 2009 at 9:07 am
Of course, for a lot of Senators, he’ll have to explain what Mars is first…
Oh come on! Everybody knows what Mars is!
Its a chocolate bar!
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Hey, somebody had to make that joke.. I just got there first.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:14 am
@ # 6 Kuhnigget & # 3 Mena :
Congressmen in space?
There’s already been at least one of those. Have you already forgotten about John Glenn?
(Mercury 7 and elderly shuttle astronaut, senator /congresscritter and presidential candidate plus the first American to orbit the Earth.)
Still sending a few more congressmen into space sure wouldn’t hurt ..
… although bringing them back might!
Actually I wonder if sending critics of the space program into space may change their minds – perhaps sending some of the parochial, Christian fundamentalists senators and congressfolk up to the International Space Station may totally shake up their restricted worldview and make them contemplate how things truly are and how small the Earth really is … We can hope I guess. Not a bad idea for sure.
However NASA gets funded I just hope it does get the money it needs – rather than same cash being wasted on needless, futile wars and supporting the apartheid military theocracy of Israel in its brutal and illegal occupation of Palestine and parts of Syria. I say take away all funding to Israel until it decides to end the Occupations and get along peacefully with its neighbours and put all that money into NASA instead! That’s over $3 billion a year US, folks.
Plus end the counter productive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq immediately, declare the humbug “war against terror” over and that’s not just billions but trillions more that can be put into space exploration and science rather than bloodthirsty violence against the Muslim world.
Now that should just about do the trick funding-wise! We just need everybody to demand & insist that it happens.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:28 am
@ Romeo Vitelli
But you are forgetting that Creationists already have their proof so why bother spending billions of dollars proving what they already know is the truth? Ray Comfort’s blog basically made that claim the last time we sent something to Mars.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:28 am
John Glenn went because he was extremely well qualified and had more than a little bit of teh awesome. This would simply be an incentive for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. The kind of people who are career politicians, for example.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:46 am
I hope that China beats the yanks in the space race to Mars!
May 31st, 2009 at 9:46 am
Here’s a better idea:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/05/nasa_sponsors.jpg
May 31st, 2009 at 9:46 am
This world needs people of science as their leaders!
May 31st, 2009 at 9:57 am
‘Congressmen In Space’? Wasn’t it a movie with Clint Eastwood?
May 31st, 2009 at 11:47 am
StevoRaine wrote (in part): “There’s already been at least one of those. Have you already forgotten about John Glenn?”
Yup. Also Jake Garn and Bill Nelson. Some perks, eh?
May 31st, 2009 at 11:54 am
@Quasar:
Do you want to say that China is run by “people of science”?
May 31st, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Moon dust, $100/100 mg. No, wait – that’s not NASA breakeven.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I bet there are companies begging to get their name on the side of a NASA rocket, or even better, one of the remaining Shuttle Flights.
Who wouldn’t love to see ‘Viagra’ emblazoned on the side of a rocket as it roars into space???
May 31st, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Posted without comment:
May 31st, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Don’t forget that space has a lot of cheap vacuum. Bottle it up and sell at high ROI value for environmentally friendly vacuum cleaners. “Clean as space.”
In fact you don’t need to go to space to extract this valuable resource. Politicians are full of it.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Photoshop the “Martian Bigfoot” into Osama bin Laden?
J/P=?
PS(does anyone remember him?)
May 31st, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Non-Sequitur has been running a thread on Mars, starting on May 25:
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2009/05/25/
I think this may help with funding:
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2009/05/29/
May 31st, 2009 at 2:06 pm
@ DrFlimmer
No. But China is not governed by antiscientists and it has hostile views towards the opium of the masses!
May 31st, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Someone did a funny video version of this too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mVWN5yy1AY
May 31st, 2009 at 2:30 pm
China is so last year. North Korea is the country to beat now!
May 31st, 2009 at 2:43 pm
@ Elin
I think you went off your meds.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Which one? The Martian micro-bigfoot was pretty cool, but I never heard of the other guy.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
@llewelly–
. . . I never heard of the other guy.
There’s about 3000 dead New Yorkers who were in the WTC that wish they had never heard of the other guy. Shame on you.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:55 pm
China beating the US back the moon (if the US still wants to go) is conceivable, but beating the US to Mars? Given the current gap in space technology for that to happen the Americans would have to seriously, seriously drop the ball, like down into a naked singularity.
Not that the US aren’t fully equipped and capable of dropping said ball, but in this case they’d almost have to actively obstruct their own efforts, while giving covert help to the Chinese at the same time, though on some days it seems they are doing exactly this.
May 31st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Phil, and 1. IVAN3MAN… this is another thing my brother said, why not have private industry fund space exploration?, he just doesn’t get it and doesn’t care. Phil I asked you that at the nature center in Kalamazoo last night. “why explore space”? i really enjoyed the answer. hope you could make a youtube vid about the importance of space exploration and scientific exploration in general
May 31st, 2009 at 5:42 pm
@ SkeptikSnarf,
Why explore space? Because of…
May 31st, 2009 at 6:03 pm
A Chinese or perhaps Indian space spectacular is not outside the realm of possibility, especially if they are willing to take a shortcut and use a nuclear upper stage. I call this the Sputnik from Hell, since I am one of the few posters who can actually remember the Sputnik panic of 1957-58. It was borderline crazy, accurately though fictitiously portrayed in the Right Stuff (eg “Armageddon!” “the final showdown between good and evil). Paranoid to be sure, but it did open the floodgates for all kinds of science funding and a whole generation of scientists benefited from it (including my humble self). Phil is on record as opposing this kind of thing, national rivalry driving space flight, but I think it might be beneficial if it could be kept on a benign basis, more analogous to the Olympics than to Armageddon.
May 31st, 2009 at 6:23 pm
For private industry to fund space travel, there needs to be some kind of payoff/profit. Space tourism is a very, very, very small venture – ultimately, unless you can show a corporation that spending billions in R&D will result in tens of billions of dollars in revenue and commensurate profit, it just won’t happen.
May 31st, 2009 at 6:28 pm
33. Ad Hominid Says:
A Chinese or perhaps Indian space spectacular is not outside the realm of possibility, especially if they are willing to take a shortcut and use a nuclear upper stage. I call this the Sputnik from Hell, since I am one of the few posters who can actually remember the Sputnik panic of 1957-58.
Another ‘oldie’. When Sputnik went up, I was about 4, and wore an old ‘doughboy’ helmet for several weeks (?) afterward.
J/P=?
May 31st, 2009 at 8:38 pm
@IVAN3MAN: You need to update that one – change ‘Sun’ to ‘Oracle’. One of the engineers at this place I used to work at had a poster like that.
@Ad Hominid: Sputnik was awesome – it was much more fun to track on radio than those big reflective balloons. It may also have been one of the major events that resulted in funding the Vanguard project and really getting the space race going. While the Sputniks have been lost to orbit degradation, Vanguard I is still flying.
@Elin: North Korea is nothing compared to China (which is fortunate because the loony-in-charge is at least as loony as big daddy loon – but daddy loon didn’t have nukes and long-range rockets).
May 31st, 2009 at 11:06 pm
How about just bankrupting themselves through poor business practices and ask for a 200 billiob dollar bailout with the chance of an aditional 100 billion after you blow the first 200
June 1st, 2009 at 2:10 am
[...] Bad Astronomy [...]
June 1st, 2009 at 6:18 am
Ad Hominid:
Yeah, I was living with my grand mother in Nevada when Sputnik went up, on Oct 4th 1957. She came running in to tell me we were all doomed. When I laughed she said “Oh grandson. You just don’t understand how terrible this is,,,”. Which was really funny to me, since I’d already been reading SciFi for four years and saw the Sputnik as the first indicator of a headlong rush into space. Sputnik was obviously a challenge to get us off our fat, lazy butts and raise the gauntlet. It worked too, for a while. Too bad the Ruskies couldn’t keep up with us. They were interesting competitors,,,
GAry 7
June 1st, 2009 at 7:51 am
PS:
Hey Phil, I’m occasionally a betting man and I’m betting you’re already familiar with the PhD comic strip but if I’m wrong, here’s a link to one comic that mentions astronomers in an enviable light,,,
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=791
You will see what I mean if you look down about six panels to the right.
So, is it true? Do astronomers really have lives beyond grad school???
GAry 7
June 1st, 2009 at 8:31 am
Gary Ansorge,
And an interesting twist today, we’re using their Soyuz to send US and other astronauts to ISS.
June 1st, 2009 at 5:24 pm
I recall a good answer by a NASA scientist about a cover-up concerning aliens. It was to the effect that if we REALLY had aliens in Area 51 or whatever, we’d shout it from the rooftops. Do you have any idea the funding we would get, he said? It would make Apollo look like pocket change. Anybody with a Ph. D. in physics or astronomy would have money thrown at them by the bushel basket! Cover it up? Idiotic. Besides, the only way 3 scientists can keep a secret is if all three are dead; and they have probably published it anyway!
June 14th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
has no comedy nerd posted this yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj7vMKy4EI
[from Mr. Show with Bob and David c.1997]