when you put your mind to it, anything is possible
A bold step by Obama–A larger step backward for all Human-kind
In what has to be one of the most disheartening decisions by the Obama administration I’ve seen in recent months, the announcement came today that NASA is making plans to end Project Constellation and post-pone efforts to send people back to the moon and arguably beyond.
What has become of the National Space and Aeronautics Agency? Huge budgets to plan for trips to the stars have plagued their ability to get and secure funding to plan for the on-going journey into the stars. Is the direction of the Administration to privatize this function to outside vendors in favor of carrying this out within internal government agencies? Would we see similar types of mis-spending and questionable practices as we saw out of Blackwater and Halliburton in Iraq and Afghan?
There is one point to this article that I can’t argue with–in the 40+ years since we have put a man on the moon, the agency has failed to progress the innovation and technology necessary to put a humans further into space. While rocket development has come a long way, the sheer scale and depth of a project necessary to go to Mars is currently so astronomical (no pun intended) that it just doesn’t seem feasible with today’s technology.
While the need still exists to provide funding for research and development into area’s of off-planet exploration, guidelines and expectations still need to be set in order to ensure that those monies are going to worthwhile causes and not into some skunkworks project that will only marginally improve the current rocketry and propulsion understanding. I’m not advocating
that our goal should be warp drives and sub-light engines, but clearly we need to have a new approach to how we:
- Get humans into space, so overcoming the forces of gravity that will allow us to carry heavy payloads into orbit,
- Cover off the massive distance between Earth and Mars (at it’s closest distance Mars is about 36 million miles and at it’s furthest is over 250 million miles)
By decreasing the total time in space to cover the distance between Earth and Mars we will have to carry considerably less fuel, supplies, and equipment than if we had to cover that distance off using conventional rocketry. Subsequently if we had a way to send all the necessary supplies and fuel into space and construct the ship while in order, the shape and construction of the vehicle would be considerably different as there would not be a need to withstand the tremendous forces (near to 9 thousand degrees on re-entry) that current space vehicles are required to be constructed to meet. If you look at the lunar module, because it was only designed to operate in space or low atmosphere conditions, the construction of the lunar module to the command module on the Saturn V rockets were considerably different.
What we need in NASA is some visions of the future, what is it that we want to accomplish and how do we need to improve our current understandings in order to get there? Or is the end goal so impossible that we should alter our course now and save ourselves the headaches and hassle of even trying to put that square peg (travel to another planet) into the round hole (the financial burdens required to invest in such a trip). Also even if we were to expend a vast amount of financial resources towards this type or project, would we be able to rinse and repeat that activity in a way that makes going to Mars worthwhile or is this a one shot trip? We do it once to say that we can or did, but the feasibility of going back makes this not practical?
