This Just In From The NYT
Nobody seems to quite agree on where the space program is going. The NYT has this article going through the various parties' objections to the current plan as it stands.
Advocates of the plan praise the recent choice of Dr. Griffin as head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, saying he has the knowledge, drive and experience to make big things happen. A physicist and an engineer with wide experience in academia, industry and the federal government (as well as six advanced college degrees), he joined the agency in April with a mandate to re-energize exploration plans.
"He's outstanding," said Louis D. Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a group in Pasadena, Calif., that advocates space exploration. "He's got a serious intent to do it and do it right."
Backers also say Dr. Griffin is seeking to achieve the exploration goal within a level space agency budget, at least initially. His goal is to squeeze the shuttle to pay for developing new rockets and exploration vehicles. That, the supporters say, helps make the overall aim achievable, at least in theory, despite tightening budgets.
"From my own experience, the administration is very serious," said Douglas O. Stanley, an aerospace expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology who led the NASA exploration study. But Mr. Stanley added a significant caution, noting that the plan still faced votes in Congress.
Skeptics see a huge spending gap. Even if Congress blesses the effort, they say, no real bill will come due until Mr. Bush is long out of office.
"Stick the next administration with an impossibly expensive and pointless program and let them take the blame for ending human space exploration," said Robert L. Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland and an official at the American Physical Society, which has opposed many piloted space programs as scientifically unproductive. "This is a poison pill."
Dr. Park noted that in 1961 Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out" and that the nation did so in eight years. By contrast, he said, Mr. Bush's goal is to redo the same accomplishment in 14 years, nearly twice as long.
"We went to Moon because of the cold war and won hands down," he said. "Now there's no political reason to do it."
Dr. Park noted that the first President Bush in 1989 proposed a space program with the same exploratory goals but failed to make any progress. Some political analysts say Mr. Bush consciously or unconsciously seeks to avoid his father's mistakes on Iraq, taxes, conservatism and other issues.
Rightly, the sceptics are looking at the plan as being incrdibly retrograde in its vector. The worst outcome would be if the program produces a destination for the embattled shuttle to go to.
OTOH it seems it's time to seriously think about the Sky Needle.
While we're on the topic, I found this article where the main gist is that any space program is not worth contemplating.
Since the 1980's, the U.S. space program seems to have no real goal or mission (other than to waste taxpayer money). We have spent enormous sums to build a fleet of space shuttles, which do nothing but orbit the earth and launch satellites.
We can launch satellites much quicker and cheaper with the use of rockets. This method also removes the risk of the loss of life. Considering the fact that each shuttle launch costs $600 million, the use of rockets seems an obvious answer. In fact, every scrubbed launch costs over $600,000 in labor and fuel costs.
Of course, the argument over whether or not the space program is a complete waste of money has been raging for decades. Truthfully, the American taxpayer sees very little or no return on their yearly donations to NASA. Private industry however, has reaped the largest rewards.
Here is a short but rather amusing list of some of the discoveries or 'side-benefits' of the taxpayer-funded space program:
-scratch resistant lenses
-golf ball aerodynamics
-athletic shoes
-sports bras
-fogless ski goggles
-cordless power tools
Presidents Clinton and Bush as well as the Republican-led Congress have all supported the expensive Mars Rover Project. Billions of dollars were spent to retrieve a few rocks and photos from the Red Planet. Besides pleasing lots of techno-nerds--the benefits of the project are tough to find.
How much impact does the discovery of an obscure mineral really have on the lives of most Americans?
President Bush has spent more on social programs than any other president (Republican or Democrat). Our supposedly conservative leader has never seen a spending bill he didn't like, or like to increase. Bush has never vetoed one bill. He recently signed a shameful pork-laden $286 billion highway bill. There seems to be no end to his generosity with our money.
It is obvious that we cannot rely on our current president to bring any measure of sanity to Congress' spending habits. We must find a leader who is a true conservative, both socially as well as fiscally. At this point, most of us would settle for one or the other.
There will come a time in the near future when we will be forced to cut back (and not just cuts in the increases!) on federal spending. The current space program is both wasteful and redundant. It must go!
Of course this sort of thing wouldn't get said if the current space program actually looked like it was doing something better than toss shuttles in the air and hope they come back down safely. The thing is, it could be so much better.
Idiot Watch
More on Creationists trying to convince science it ain't true.
Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
Similar efforts are under way or planned around the country as science museums and other institutions struggle to contend with challenges to the theory of evolution that they say are growing common and sometimes aggressive.
One company, called B.C. Tours "because we are biblically correct," even offers escorted visits to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Participants hear creationists' explanations for the exhibitions.
So officials like Judy Diamond, curator of public programs at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln, are trying to meet such challenges head-on.
Dr. Diamond is working on evolution exhibitions financed by the National Science Foundation that will go on long-term display at six museums of natural history from Minnesota to Texas. The program includes training for docents and staff members.
"The goal is to understand the controversies, so that people are better able to handle them as they come up," she said. "Museums, as a field, have recognized we need to take a more proactive role in evolution education."
Dr. Allmon, who directs the Paleontological Research Institution, an affiliate of Cornell University, began the training session here in September with statistics from Gallup Polls: 54 percent of Americans do not believe that human beings evolved from earlier species, and although almost half believe that Darwin has been proved right, slightly more disagree.
"Just telling them they are wrong is not going to be effective," he said.
It should be enough, though.
There is seemingly no end to religious idiocy. No End.
No comments:
Post a Comment