NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, which some time back scraped up direct evidence of water on Mars’s surface, is slipping gently into the night. Not a surprise; the mission was always scheduled to last just a few months, and at this time of Martian year there just isn’t enough sunshine to keep the batteries charged.
Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on November 2, the space agency said.
Rumor has it that the signal read “Yes We Can!”
The future of NASA is going to be one out of approximately 50 million pressing challenges faced by the new President. Under the previous administration (what was that guy’s name again? I seem to have repressed it), the agency drifted, ranging from embarrassing ideological scandals to hopelessly inept planning to blatant censorship on climate change to a depressing de-emphasis of real science. Obama, and whoever he appoints as NASA administrator, will have a very difficult job balancing competing pressures: rebuilding a science program that has been devastated by funding cuts, while also restoring our capacity to send astronauts into space, and doing so in a time of tremendous budgetary pressures. Darksyde at Daily Kos has a good post about what some of these challenges are, and some of the struggles of current administrator Michael Griffin. It will be very interesting to see what direction the agency takes; in a multipolar world, the U.S. won’t be the only important player in space exploration and space science, but hopefully we won’t just sit on the sidelines, either.
(Did you notice the link to an article on Discover at the beginning of that paragraph? That’s because, when I cut open a vein to sign our new blogging agreement in blood [don’t worry, it wasn’t my vein], part of the contract was that we would link back to the site in every single blog post we do. I’m sure nobody will notice.)
I believe the name you’re looking for is William Jefferson Clinton.
Sean,
Most of the readers read it on Google Reader. So, more chances that nobody would notice it. 😉
I see this as an opportunity to let the Constellation program fade into oblivion.
Meanwhile, the current crop of Deltas and Atlases, esp. the newly-minted heavies, can handle just about any orbital, lunar, or interplanetary robotic mission we are likely to build in the foreseeable future. We don’t need new boosters, and we sure as heck don’t need manned space flight to meet a vibrant science mandate.
Seems pretty simple to me: Scrap this ludicrous return-to-Moon and Mars stuff and use the money for research. If China wants to blow its wad planting more flags, let them.
Ouch. Sean, did the cut have to be so deep? Couldn’t we have just arranged a nosebleed?
Congratulations on selling out to the Man, and please enjoy your red stapler.
Y’know, the funny thing is, America actually HAS plenty of money, and a fundamentally sound economic base. If Obama has the courage to reallocate funds, he can easily initiate a Renaissance in the arts, sciences, and education. http://tinyurl.com/6yccb9
Whether or not he’ll have the vision to do that, well, we shall see, shall we?
Well … so far so bad …
I kept thinking “Why are people calling Phil ‘Sean’?”
Poor Phoenix. Poor thing overreached herself in the end.
I agree with previous posters: the top of the page should read:
Will NASA Rise from the Ashes?
November 11th, 2008 by Sean in Science, Science and Politics | 6 comments”
“Meanwhile, the current crop of Deltas and Atlases, esp. the newly-minted heavies, can handle just about any orbital, lunar, or interplanetary robotic mission we are likely to build in the foreseeable future.”
This is a meaningless statement, because missions are designed to be launched by available resources.
If, instead, you were to ask,
“Can the current fleet launch robotic missions than can perform all the science we’d really like to do”, then the answer is no. In order to run a decent-sized sample return mission from another terrestrial planet, much less from a Jovian moon, we need larger launch vehicles. A program like DIRECT, which builds on available assets to yield an affordable, adaptable heavy launch system, would greatly increase the scope of what is possible.
“… while also restoring our capacity to send astronauts into space, …”
This is where I have questions. Without some clear set of missions for astronauts on the moon this can just amount to packing people in cans sent into space. Maybe scientific infrastructure for astonomy and maybe particle physics (cosmic rays etc) can be deployed on the moon, which in turn require an intermittent human presence. As yet there are no such NASA policy initiative in connection with the Return To Moon (RTM) program. Indeed, so far the biggest idea bandied about is for a lunar base. Yep!, we really need that one, just as the current space station is a real science winner 🙂 .
Lawrence B. Crowell
On the subject of meaningless statements, what is a “decent-sized” sample return mission? Is it impossible to use current rocket and booster configurations to conduct sample return missions of any size? Is there some lower cutoff that somehow makes less than “decent” masses so beyond the pale as to be pointless to try? I call B.S. on the imminent need for Constellation or DIRECT. Anything, really, that has manned transport as its primary goal should get the axe, IMO. Criteria like “decent-sized” strike me as yet another way for human-cargo aficionados to argue that their oversized goals have some other utility than the usual with manned space flight, which is virtually zero, as the ISS and STS have amply demonstrated.
“decent-sized” = large enough so that sample size is not the main barrier to analysis. In practical terms, tens to thousands of grams per sample.
As for Lawrence’s point about science objectives, one of the primary purposes of the various lunar orbiters currently around or in-route to the moon is to locate areas of high scientific value. Whether lunar exploration is ultimately robotic or manned, putting a lander there is going to cost money, so we might as well select the best spots.
There is no shortage of science left to do up there- we desperately need a new seismic network, for example. But getting any funding for lunar science WITHOUT putting a person up there is extremely difficult.
Low Math, I am more or less with you, but I am not totally against human space travel. I will say that we can take a hint from the space shuttle. The only valuable missions were the Solar Max and Hubble repair missions. Most of the rest amounted to gynmastics in weightlessness and expensive science fair type of projects in orbit. If there is to be some place for humanity in space it has to be demonstrated with the deployment and maintenance of facilities.
The thing which bothers me about completely cancelling manned space flight is that our entire connection with space becomes in a way virtual reality. Of course robots, probes and telepresence are largely preferable, and less expensive. However, we might find that as virtual reality grows around us it will be difficult for many people to distinguish between virtual and physical reality, and space exploration could become lost in virtual reality confusion. It is interesting to note that some 10% of Americans think the moon missions were faked. So there might be something to having a few people who actually go out there. Better yet if they can accomplish something worthwhile.
Lawrence B. Crowell
There is absolutely no reason to build up a manned lunar system to explore the moon. If we want to study the geology of the moon it can be done robotically very well. If we are to send astronauts to the moon it will be primarily to deploy gravity wave interferometers, optical arrays, cosmic ray detectors, and so forth. We could put particle detectors on the moon, with the muon detector placed deep in a lunar lava tube beneath the calorimeter or what ever configuration is used. As I see it we will ultimately be forced to get serious about cosmic ray particle physics. So accomplishing any of these might require astronauts to deploy them with occassional maintenance missions. Largely of course these would be run robotically and from the ground.
Sending astronauts to mars is of course out of the question IMO. Putting up a manned lunar base would be a collosal white elephant dwarfing the space station in its silliness.
Lawrence B. Crowell
I’m not at all against humans in space, I just don’t at all think taxpayers should be footing the bill. Quite frankly, I think NASA would be about the last agency in the U.S. govt. I’d trust with a budget or performance estimate, given the monstrous cost overruns of the STS ($1.3 billion per launch!), making the entire program worse than worthless (I won’t even get into the loss of life). Add to that the roughly $100 billion sunk on the ISS, and I’d say our drive to put men and women in space in the name of “science” and “exploration” has been downright self-destructive. Meanwhile, on the JPL end of things, even with the Mars Curse, who could deny the incredible science returns we’ve gotten out of Phoenix, Spirit, Discovery, Odyssey, the MRO, just to name the most recent missions to one particular planet. It would appear that NASA does robotic missions with clear goals very well. Human spaceflight for the past three decades, at least, has been an aimless, oversold, underachieving, mission-creeping, downright suicidal disaster.
I suppose I could get behind increased launch capabilities if it really were the case that extant commercial interests like the Atlas and Delta launchers really weren’t up to the task of furthering compelling science goals, and that development from those platforms (with hopefully commercial applications to boot) was truly less favorable than creating a whole new, publicly-funded series of rockets. As one can easily tell, I’ve gotten extremely cynical about arguments in any way relating to the purported synergies of programs geared toward putting humans in space. They become less and less convincing with every passing year, to the point now I’d say they’ve lost all credibility, both in terms of benefits to science and to industry. Hubble’s great, but we could have had a fleet of them, and maybe even launched a new one every time an old one failed, for what the Shuttle wound up costing us. The ability to repair it in orbit nowhere near justified the STS’s existence, as far as I can tell, and I fear that the future of govt.-funded human space flight is more of the same, if it’s allowed to continue. Reports already of the ballooning costs of Ares alone lead me to believe NASA’s bureaucracy and its Congressional overseers have learned little from past. I’ve no confidence DIRECT or anything like it would offer enough of a correction to make implementing it a worthwhile alternative. There’s nothing that I can see to derive confidence from, just more talk about “inspiration”.
I think the success of Spirit and Opportunity illustrate how successful a robotic moon mission could be. And with a delay time of only a few seconds, it seems likely that lunar robots could be practically employed for all sorts of complex tasks.
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