Obama just cut all funding to NASA??? WHAT??? That's the last straw... I'm officially against ALL politicians now!!!
The dude was funny, but I'm glad I live closer to the atlantic then I do the pacific.
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*taps again on shoulder* *coughs*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxrJlLgitnc
Scientist are already exploring dark matter and dark energy. Things we have not conceptualized today, will be the driving force and the "no duh!" things of tomorrow.
The only thing that will stop us from getting to other galaxies is if we kill ourselves before we do.
This sort of trite logic based on the fact that mankind's expectations were wrong in the past reminds me of my dad. We do know some things for certain. We cannot travel at the speed of light unless our mass is exactly zero. The energy it takes for a spacecraft to travel at a a hundredth of a percent of the speed of light is far beyond anything we can comprehend. There are also no materials that would survive a collision with a mote of dust at these speeds. The argument that maybe.. we just don't know yet... we could think of something... is just wrong. We've found insurmountable roadblocks that give us the certainty that it is impossible. I think some people in this thread have been taking too much bs from Dr. Michio Kaku.
We're thirty thousand lightyears from galactic central point,
We go round every two hundred million years.
And our galazy is only one of millions of billions,
in this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz.
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
Twelve Million miles a minute and thats the fastest speed there is.
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth.
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
because there's bugger all down here on earth!
Ok, as everyone here, i like the idea of space travel but let us face reality : we don't have the technology to go out in our solar system efficiently. We are still using the same engines that the ones used in the appolo project in 1969. Ok, they got a little bit of efficiency between there and now but it remains VERY difficult to go to space.
To escape from the earth gravitational field (and so go to the moon, mars, whatever), you need the object to be propelled at 11.2 km per SECOND. Man, that means a LOT of energy for a 750 tons Ariane 5 rocket including 700 tons of fuel.
It means 90% of the INITIAL rocket mass is just useless once in space.
Do you understand now ? It is not about Obama, it is about TECHNOLOGY. That's real stuff, you can't do anything about it except improving it. And that needs time.
Yes, space exploration is important indeed for science. But sending men, not probes, to moon, mars, etc... is about a nation pride. If you think spending money for pride is more important than in real stuff like social projects in our good old earth, your choice. Create a lobby for space exploration but don't claim loudly non-sense things like "Obama is a stupid politician". Maybe he is, maybe he isn't, it has nothing to do with it. We need something more efficient than mere rockets to go to space and now, it just doesn't exist.
Nowadays, would we discover lots of platinum ingots on the moon, it would still cost more money to bring them back here than what they are worth (and please stop with that nonsense about fusion : please understand the nuclear theory besides before talking about it. Every atom in the universe can fusion with an another one if you inject enough energy in them, not just only the Helium 3 : basically, you can do it with deuterium and tritium and there is plenty of those two on earth. It is just less efficient. And we are still decades far from making a fusion energy plant.)
Myself, i am an ingeneer student and then a true scientist. As then, i don't bother about a nation's pride but about the maximum amount of knowledge you can get from one amount of money. And as today, it means sending probes, not human in space. I am happy that the completely unrealistic NASA project went down as it will mean more money in really valuable projects.
One day, a time may come when the science would be discovering a way to go to the stars without consuming slices of entire countries'GDP. You just need to be patient.
INgeneer sounds like the name of some reality show about fashion
You're spot on otherwise. Also, from the political/economic standpoint, we spend less than 6 cents for every tax dollar to a general fund that is basically the government's 'other' category. Then, a small piece of that fund pays for all of the space programs in the US.
It's $15 billion over five years, that's not even real money. If he were doing something like cutting out a substantial portion of that $2 trillion increase in the size of the budget, I might be more supportive of the move.
Instead, that jackoff for a president is submitting $3.6 trillion, fiscal responsiblity my ass. That's exactly double the requested budget for Y2k, and doesn't even count the $600 billion plus in off budget spending. He's making that progressive putz Bush look real responsible right about now.
Myself, i am an ingeneer student and then a true scientist.
I call bullshit. Higher mass atoms require more energy to fuse than you get out of the reaction. This is why fission reactors use really heavy elements which split. IIRC iron is approximately at the tipping point.
Second bullshit: there is no plentiful tritium on earth. What we use is a byproduct from fission reactors, as the stuff has a halflife of a dozen years or so and can't exist on its own in nature (or at least terrestrial nature).
The reality is that fusion reactors use deuterium/tritium or deuterium/He3 because 1) those reactions give off a lot of energy and 2) those reactions can run at temperatures/pressures we can realistically create on earth. Even the fission trigger of a thermonuclear bomb can't get high enough to start a H1/H1 fusion reaction like the one the sun uses. Instead they use a T/Li7D mix.
To put this in perspective, that's $10 per person, per year. Compare that to Obama's proposed budget, which is $12,000 per person, per year.
All I want is to go ice-fishing on Europa... that's all... see if anything is alive under there.. And we have the technology to make that happen right now!!!
Yeah, you can shit in your space suit for a few years both ways, it would be totally awesome!
There are a lot of positives for civilization as a whole staying out of space development. In society today, its a space race. Next thing you know, we'll have nukes in space. Go look up the rods of god program. Scary shit. Im pretty glad that NASA funding got cut. I hope all funding gets cut for all space programs. When it becomes cheap and militarily effective, we will have nukes and weapons of great variety just floating about in our orbit. I don't trust civilization with technology yet, we seem to keep screwing it up with the same kinds of ancient established institutions, thought processes, and value systems that have been leading to destructive behavior amongst all humans. Value systems(not petty morals), thought processes and emergent institutions need to directly reflect what will benefit civilization both in the short and long term, in order for space programs to be innocent. Right now, we are so self destructive that its almost a guarentee that we will construct nukes in space if its beneficial enough for the entities at power. Im an asshole.
Dead or alive? I'd be willing to bet that some time in the near future some rich [b/m]illionaire will pay to have his body shot into space on a trajectory that will take it out of the galaxy (eventually, it will take a loooong time). There are already people who have had their ashes put into orbit/scattered into space.
No we don't. Not if you want to get back from Europa.
We don't need nukes in space to totally #$%& eachother up with. That's what ICBM's and submarines are for. There are tons and tons of ways for one country to wipe another country off the map that completely stopping all space programs would be of no consequence.
I'm beginning to wish I had just kept my mouth shut... some of you are so hateful...
Makes me wish I could get off this rock just to get away from all the hate.
Dead or alive? I'd be willing to bet that some time in the near future some rich [b/m]illionaire will pay to have his body shot into space on a trajectory that will take it out of the galaxy
There are lots of rocks and things to bump into in space, not to mention a little thing Einstein called gravity. He wouldn't stand a chance of making it out just floating. That's right Newton, screw your inertia!
Then how have Voyager 1 & 2 made it so far? Voyager 1 has gone past the farthest known objects in the solar system, and it's still going, without any rocks putting holes in it. And there are certainly ways to get around gravity. The Voyagers both used it to "slingshot" them faster.
obama spent nearly 2 trillion dollars in one year. nasa needed 3 billion dollars for five years. please tell me what the 15 billion dollars was going to help do. remember nasa returns 3x plus for ever dollar they spend. so we would have gotten at least 45 billion back out of that 15 billion.
I know what you mean. It would be nice to send all the brainless fluffballs into space, wouldn't it?
Next time I think you're making fun of the situation, I'll pretend you're serious and not carry on the joke, ok?
naaa, I figured you were joking... but some of the replies make me wonder...
I'm willing to bet you that NASA is just fine with this decision. Going way back to the '80s I can recall NASA promising to go back to the Moon or go to Mars "in the next ten years". It is a promise that has been renewed every ten years for the last 30! Truth is, NASA doesn't not want to undertake some risky mission, especially one that will tie up a huge portion of their resources. Even going back to the start of the space program, NASA (then NACA) officials had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the whole moon-shot program. When Mondale finally succeeded in killing the Apollo missions, there was a collective sigh of relief from the NASA bureaucracy as even then, after all their successes, they still wanted to stop.
A good overview of this is provided in the book "No Downlink". I have also read similar sentiments expressed in The Planetary Society's space-race debates, as well as a bit of it being shown in HBO's From the Earth to the Moon ("Who here want's my job?" quote from Webb, IIRC).
Bear in mind the President can only propose cutting the budget. It is congress which actually votes on and decides what the budget of the U.S. is.
I can only hope it fares the same as the Carbon Cap and Trade proposal.
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