NASA needs money like Mars

PeraclesPlease — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 11:41:23 +0000

In reply to Peracles this is well thought

NASA needs money like Mars needs women.

For advertising? Seriously? Let Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg colonize space then - it's just a click away, "search" for intelligent life: leave only cookies, take only selfies... that's one small imprint for man, one giant setup for mankind...

Maybe the bottom of the ocean's still safe.

Peracles this is well thought

Richard Day — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 17:41:47 +0000

In reply to It's partly about NASA

Peracles this is well thought out.

We need purpose.

We need aim.

And NASA needs money.

Advertising is one of NASA's fortes.

We get to see the robots on Mars and the drones revolving around Jupiter and Saturn and ....

All we have to do is go to Youtube and see it all or at least get new links.

Oh and competition from the likes of Japan and China do not hurt us.

the end

It's partly about NASA

PeraclesPlease — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 05:32:15 +0000

In reply to How Will NASA Fare Under a Trump or Clinton Presidency?

It's partly about NASA avoiding self-inflicted suicide as well. For 10 years they had a manager who basically drove them into a ditch and killed much of their hard science efforts, politicizing everything. While they're on a different scale, we get more of our next-gen excitement out Elon Musk's launches than NASA's Space Station, for example. The Space Station of course is hampered with the politics of being an internationally cooperative effort which say puts us at Russia's mercy as the only launch vehicle when we decommissioned the shuttle. The Aeronautics side of NASA is trying to do some interesting things with drones in US airspace, which might bear fruit.

A few years ago a few NASA tech heads helped launch the open source cloud effort with their Openstack project (at that time "Nova" compute), though their attempts to take it public/private were mixed (1 bought out at firesale rates by CIsco, the other just shuttered the doors, but that large companies like HP and RedHat have now adopted the tech itself is a success).

Will NASA come up with a truly compelling mission and game plan to present to the new incumbent, or will they rely on Washington types to shape their future for them? Amtrak has always held promise, and Congress has always held Amtrak hostage to political football.

There's a lot of scientific motion in NASA's traditional space physics forté (such as the newly detected gravity waves, the bizarre new Solar System layout with its 9th/10th/12th planet depending on how we count), tests to be made with CERN's faster-than-speed-of-light claims, et al). There are cases where 0 G may be useful in a variety of medical / biological / nanotech / genetics / next-gen agro experiments, though many of these have been overhyped over the years. There's the engineering effort by which we sustain laboratories in space and improve our reach to other planets, focusing technologies on practical transportation, communication & survivability improvements. And there are the probes and satellite telescopes themselves, which both provide valuable new information as our scientific savvy grows, and need to be steadily redesigned in light of our stepped up pace in understanding and approach (big & small data analytics, battery tech, autonomous vehicles, wireless transmission, IoT/M2M, water recycling, solar efficiency, drones, small bore rotary & propulsion, artificial intelligence/machine learning and so on).

Or perhaps we need less of a "mission", that kind of Big Science that's always sucked up all the oxygen, when there are 1000 tasks to order and prioritize for a massive movement forward in generalized and practical science.

In any case, NASA needs a message to sustain both public interest and funding. What's the plan, Stan? Dave, let's do that Dave....

dagblog - Comments for "How Will NASA Fare Under a Trump or Clinton Presidency?"

NASA needs money like Mars

Peracles this is well thought

It's partly about NASA