Bye-bye Bridenstine: Outgoing chief leaves NASA in good shape, though Boots on Moon by '24 goal looks doubtful NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has left the US space agency with none of the drama associated with certain other American government handovers. Bridenstine's departure was somewhat inevitable. He began work in 2018 under the Trump administration and has stepped down with the inauguration of a new US president. During …
Really? I think the current state of the program is... somewhat... not that great. It is over budget and delayed, despite using a lot of old technology (oh sorry, "proven technology", except it doesn't seem to be). Looking at what the private sector has achieved so far makes my mind boggle. _There_ is your leadership in space technology!
Plus look at the speed at which China and India are putting stuff on other celestial bodies, I very much doubt that without the strong funding and strong focus on a single goal (put human boots on the moon in this decade, or something along these lines) - and taking the risk that goes with it - the US (or any Western nation) will be able to keep up.
Do I like it? No, but I can totally see reasons for calling quits that have nothing to do with "spite".
Artemis is a white elephant, a pointless flag-waving exercise in wasting money that would never deliver a permanent presence beyond LEO.
It looked increasingly like Bridenstine was keeping it on life support because of its political value, while new space developed the capability to do everything the SLS is supposed to do but for a fraction of the cost, with reusable hardware. It's just a shame that Blue Origin didn't step up as well as SpaceX and create a robust commercial space ecosystem that Boeing/ULA's pork barrel oligopoly couldn't crush. I think Bezos might regret dragging his heels.
The big risk is that Biden will use manned spaceflight as a trading chip in the House and Senate, and waste the progress towards making manned spaceflight a commercially-sustainable and affordable reality.
IMO, Bridenstine is the only Trump appointee that Trump-haters like myself will miss.
If Biden switches the goal to a manned Mars landing you *know* it will never happen. That'll be the end of the U.S. lead in space exploration. It will merely be a jobs program that only produces PowerPoint slides and costs tens of billions without ever launching anything.
With a manned lunar landing there's at least some chance it will occur, if only to head off the Chinese at the pass.
The U.S. cannot rely on some crazy billionaire that has a dream of settling Mars. If Musk dies for whatever reason his dream dies with him.
Until space travel is closer to perfection, humans no longer have business traveling to other places space, we've gone into space, visited the moon, some have died in the process. We now know what space can to the human body, The advance in technology since the 60s and 70s rules out the need for human lives to be risked. Sure, head out the to front yard and play in the space station, but don't cross the street...
I love people that say "we don't need to do X, until X is closer to perfection."
A friend says this about electric vehicles. "We shouldn't spend money on EVs until we have perfect batteries"
So we'll magically perfect X without spending any effort working on it?
Probably true but it does depend. I forget where the article was (so I'm probably going to get the figures wrong) but for all the amazing success and endurance of the spirit and opportunity rovers, the science they did could probably have been carried out by a pair of humans in a "few days". Now, the time ratio is not the same as the cost ratio so can still be argued as uneconomic but the other piece that humans bring is adaptability. Robotic and automated missions rely on you have a pretty good idea of what you are going to find before you get there. Yes, you can do a bit of reprogramming but fundamentally if the conditions are not what you expect then there is nothing to be done (c.f. the mars drill that they have finally had to give up on). Likewise, you are only likely to see what you were looking for. Again I forget where the article was but I think some tests were done in the "Mars Yard" (putting a stuffed animal behind a rock, etc.) to see if the rover operators would notice and, mostly, they did not.
Of course the humans do have an additional advantage that the resources and equipment necessary to deliver them mean that they are likely to have a wide range of equipment and tools to try something else whereas, by design, the robotic missions are pared to the bare essentials - so this isn't an entirely fair comparison.
Still it is nice to think that us meatsacks could still have an important role such as moving the mars drill out the way, dropping a metal pole in, smacking it with a rock a few times and then saying "there you go buddy, I've loosened it up for you, have another try"...
> Still it is nice to think that us meatsacks could still have an important role such as moving the mars drill out the way, dropping a metal pole in, smacking it with a rock a few times and then saying "there you go buddy, I've loosened it up for you, have another try"...
The problem with that isea, is that the energy and financial costs of getting a human there and keeping them alive to do it, are a few hundred or thousand times higher than the energy/financial budget allocated for the robot
Puting that money into the robot would have a far greater cost/benefit ratio
(I'm not saying that humans shouldn't go to Mars, but the costs of going there and keeping people alive vs what's being spent on robots needs to be taken into account)
I AM in favor of development, but until lives can be safely risked, let's keep people out of it. I don't think they use real people as crash test dummies in the automotive industry, gas or electric or balloon juice. Why should humans be crash test dummies in space?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
