Why is that a danger? I though we outgrew this cold war piffle. If the Chinese want to waste all that time and effort to get warm fuzzies about themselves, let them.

That said, I think manned spaceflight is essential if you want to see the scientific missions continue. No manned spaceflight = disinterested public = no JWST, Mars rovers, etc.

Complete nonsense.”

YOU are complete nonsense. No why, no how, just an unhelpful, derogatory remark. Guess what? You’re a troll on a science website. Feel good?

I agree with your hope/idea for international cooperation for manned missions. The ISS shows that we can work together instead of ‘racing’ to the finish line.

This whole “it’s not teh awesome if there’s no astronauts” attitude is silly and unrealistic.

MTU was not saying that. He has frequently complimented the mission teams for the robotic probes. To paraphrase him, it’s not exploration if there aren’t people out there.

If the JWTS needs other projects’ budgets to survive, then let it happen. The JWTS may unlock the secrets of the re-ionization era, and give us the best insights we’ve ever had into creation itself.

As for the Senate Launch System, while I like the design, it will also keep Americans out of space for a long time to come. SpaceX Dragon is the only hope we had of a quick return, and without funding, it won’t happen.

And that’s just stuff from the USA.

Cassini-Huygens was a joint NASA – ESA – ISA mission.

—

o.O

1990 – Hubble Space Telescope
1991 – Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory
1994 – Clementine lunar mapper
1995 – SOHO solar observer
1996 – NEAR Shoemaker
1996 – Mars Global Surveyor
1996 – Mars Pathfinder + Sojourner rover
1997 – Cassini-Huygens (successful landing on Titan! No Sirens observed)
1998 – Lunar Prospector
1999 – Chandra X-ray Observatory
2001 – Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
2001 – Mars Odyssey
2003 – Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit & Opportunity)
2004 – Mercury MESSENGER orbiter
2004 – Swift Gamma ray burst observatory
2005 – Comet Tempel 1 – Deep Impact
2005 – Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
2006 – New Horizons (to Pluto)
2007 – Phoenix Mars lander
2007 – Vesta/Ceres- Dawn
2008 – IBEX
2009 – Kepler
2011 – Juno (to Jupiter)

And that’s just stuff from the USA.

MASSIVE amounts of science have come from these probes. The WMAP revolutionized our understanding of the early universe. The dual Mars rovers were brilliant, and there’s a new big one the size of a small car being prepared. This whole “it’s not teh awesome if there’s no astronauts” attitude is silly and unrealistic.

The Space Shuttle was a marvellous piece of engineering

Shuttle: $60,000/kilo to LEO.
Current Russian Proton booster based on 1965 tech: $5,000/kilo

Yeah, brilliant. Not to mention the Shuttle program sucked funds from more efficient commercial expendable launch vehicle efforts, was a political football, the thermal tiles were a nightmare to maintain, you had to literally rebuild the engines every time, and so on. It delivered on pretty much none of its initial promises. We ordered new fully loaded Ford F-350 and got an old Morris J2 for the price of a Bugatti Veyron.

We should have stayed with the BDB (“Big Dumb Booster”) and pursued the SSTO- single stage to orbit- concept like they were exploring back with the old X plane program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0JLMBYYWkY

Cancelled.

Plan B :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/07/03/nasas-plan-b/

Whatever did happen to this?

Now plan C? :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulHd4g8Mmgw&feature=related

(There was also a separate Shuttle-C plan – click on my name for clip.)

For pity’s sake let’s pick one design, fund properly and stick with it and durn well make it fly!

It & its embedded talk also seems relevant and interesting here so its linked to my name for this this comment now.

***

Must say it really cheeses me off that we seem to have made such little progress in space exploration since the 1980′s.

The Space Shuttle was a marvellous piece of engineering and the future possibilities for now back then seemed so gloriously bright (shiny even!) but today we just seem to be treading water and sinking , going backwards if anything. That’s how it appears to me, anyhow. So frustrating and sad.

We built built such wonders once.

So many plans and dreams have promised and failed to come to be.

We know we can reach the Moon, fly seven people and space telescopes all at once.

Do so much.

If only we now had the money and the will to do so.

Let’s build and light and fly some candles!

Let’s give NASA all the money it needs. It’s an investment well worth making and would I think boost the United States economy & national mood.

(Hmm .. Maybe we can make sure we afford it by scrapping Congress altogether, please? That should save lotsa dough plus ease everyone’s problems bigtime!

(Yes, I’m joking about abolishing Congress – although, So. Very. Tempting.)

PS. Might’ve asked this before but can’t recall getting any answer : Is it possible at all for NASA to get private sponsorship or is that verboten?

I just think of all the unmanned missions we could have had for the money spent on the politically bloated Shuttle program and the ISS. We could have peppered Mars with all sorts of rovers and dirigibles and other little proxy explorers. We could have put up a *fleet* of Hubble scopes, each one more capable than the last.

Yeah.

Sadly, I don’t believe that, had the money not been spent on Shuttle and ISS, it would have been spent on unmanned space missions.

I’d just like to add a trio of favourite relevant quotes to those too :

“This [space] is the new ocean and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.”
- President John F. Kennedy after John Glenn’s first orbits in ‘Friendship-7’ on Feb. 20th 1962.

&

“Many people have asked me why I am taking this flight. I am doing it for many reasons. First of all, I believe that life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.”
- Stephen Hawking, 8th January 2007 – interviewed before taking a zero-gravity flight.

&

“But out of the whirlwind came a silent bird from the stars, a symbol of our ability to work with nature, to use our intelligence and within the limitations of our world, to do great things.”
- David Levy on witnessing the 4th landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia, Page 28, ‘Astronomy’ magazine October 1982.

*****

Let’s do some great things, build and fly marvels and never mind the nay-sayers, bean-counters and worthless politicians!

Oh & I’d recommend reading in full what the likes of Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov among other visionary authors have to say about spaceflight and its importance for Humanity’s future in some of their essays, stories and works. If only those two men were alive still today .. wonder what they’d say about this, sure they’d say it brilliantly.

“Earth is the cradle of Mankind, but no-one stays in the cradle forever”.

More recently, it was the American science-fiction writer, Robert A Heinlein, who said:

“The Earth is simply too small and fragile a basket for the human race to continue to keep all of its eggs in.”

I believe that those two comments deal with most of the points raised in the debate.

*takes up slow clap*
*slowly claps faster*
*looks around, realizes QD was being sarcastic*
*shrugs sheepishly, stops*

The SLS seems to also be a bad idea: it lifts about as much as a Saturn V, so how can it carry a crew to Mars? Earth-orbit rendezvous seems the only possible way no matter which rocket, and I don’t see why we can’t do that now with a Delta IV or Atlas V. This kind of manned spaceflight is quite an expensive way to have less scientific gain than an unmanned mission (even the JWST), but landing people on Mars has strong potential to discover any possibility for life on that planet. It may be better to stop having Congress build an Apollo rocket and focus what we have to free up resources for unmanned scientific gain. The private companies should be able to access the ISS, that’s sufficient and efficient. $3 billion will be allocated to the shuttle-Apollo tech rocket and capsule, yet only $400 million in comparison to private companies? That’s crazy. Unfortunately the public in general has no idea nor seems to care too much.

The ultimate answer for everything to work out is to double NASA’s budget, indeed (which seems to be dwindling percentage-wise by the year). Considering what useless programs we can afford, that is no problem to the economy which would benefit from new technology produced by NASA. Gee, that sounds like Neil Tyson.