Would you believe they put a man on the moon?
Good news: NASA is getting rid of boring climate satellites which only measure complicated data on climate change, global warming and weather predictions that no-one cares about in favour of the much more exciting goal of getting man back on the moon by 2020. Yay!
[Hat-tip to BJ Chip for this story]
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June 12th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
This just in as well:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-06-11-nasa-pork_x.htm? POE=TECISVA
Pork threatens NASA plans: Congress’ pet projects take $3 billion from budget
By John Kelly, Florida Today
NASA must slash science, engineering and education programs to pay for billions of dollars in congressional pet projects, most of which have little to do with the agency’s mission to explore space.
June 12th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
I am going to make sure my children receive instruction in Mandarin Chinese…. as this is going to be the language used by Astronauts in the future… if there are any.
respectfully
BJ
June 12th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Just privatise all of it. Next?
June 12th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
its absolutely outrageous, and although the story says that “scientists interviewed for this story said they do not believe the earth science cuts are a deliberate attempt to stall science on climate change”, it is hard to believe that this is not the case, I certainly wouldn’t put it past Bush to have prioritised moon/mars for this reason.
Aparantly the global precipitation measuring satelite was supposed to be replaced last year and there is still no sign of the replacement and the current one could fail, leaving a gap in the record. I can well imagine that if this happened, the global warming skeptics would add “oh the models can’t be correct because there is a gap in the record” to their list of complaints.
June 12th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
I suggest that we ignore the obvious troll here.
respectfully
BJ
June 12th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
hey frog, you could link to this story:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2208385.html
you could title the post “It’s the end of the world as we know it”
June 12th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Very interesting article. Shows how far the Europeans have moved on beyond the primitive level of debate over here. Appleyard is posing a false dichotomy, of course, but it makes good reading.
June 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Gah, they were going to ditch the Hubble Space Telescope too until the outcry from the astronomers. Looks like some funny priorities at Nasa, presumably their budget is not big enough to do everything they need to do. Meanwhile, the Iraq civil war drags on at $1Billion a day or something ridiculous, no shortage of money for that.
It always annoys me that we could probably have a moonbase, maybe a Mars colony, interplanetary space travel… Instead we have 10,000 advanced nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert from submarines and missile bases around the world. Pretty crappy tradeoff if you ask me.
June 13th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Not a billion a day, at least as far as the estimates we can make go:
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182
But about 6 x NASA’s total budget every year.
NASA priorities screwy? You’d need at least 2 extra dementions and a klein bottle to illustrate the distortions being imposed. For the US Budget mere dementia is not enough.
respectfully
BJ
June 13th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
BJ, once again you have earned your right to stay in our fair country.
Truly awesomely scary decision-making going on in NASA.
How do they expect to find a launch window if they neglect to keep up such basic info as which way the planetary wind/cloud/precipitation patterns are forming over the period of the mission? :-0
Let’s just hope they don’t lose anything over the pacific! I can still remember bits of skylab coming home to roost…
cheers, katie
June 15th, 2006 at 11:10 am
The only solution to replacing oil is new technological solutions.
This promotes growth and a better way of doing things.
June 15th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Mark …
TINA anyone ?
June 15th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
I’ ve got no objection to getting back to the moon - if it’s done in a more useful way (as in doing science there, or using it as a stepping-stone) than the “Let’s get there to beat the Soviets then not go back” way it was done in the 60s and 70s.
Cutting the science programme, particularly the climate science programme, to do it is just shortsighted and either evil or stupid - take your pick.
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:15 pm
so this good the american put their first man on the moon soon,