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purplecthulhu at 02:23pm on 17/01/2004
purplecthulhu at 02:23pm on 17/01/2004[Originally written as a comment, which then got out of hand!]
I largely see Bush's space plan as pork for his friends in the areosopace industry and an effort to get some positive press attention. There'll be lots of new hardware to design and build, and a lot of old hardware to be thrown away and replaced before its been properly used. Aerospace contractors and NASA administrators have been generally hostile to things in orbit that 'just keep on running' like HST and IUE (the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which ran successfully for 14 or more years and was producing useful data right up to the time it was turned off to 'save money').
Indeed Salon has an article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/01/16/halliburton/index_np.html
suggesting that Haliburton (the corporate arm of the current US administration, or is the current administration the government arm of Haliburton?) has long had plans to make money out of Mars exploration.
The one sliver lining in the US military getting more involved with space is that their operational requirements will make it more likely that actual working hardware will get built. After all, they want to bomb people with real bombs, while design studies for NASA can quite happily stay on paper and be shelved as failures - see the X-33 for just one example. There is thus a possibility that the military side of this will lead to actual low cost launch vehicles being built and operated, and its low cost access to space that we really need at the moment.
The military has, in a sense, always called the tune for space development. When the military were developing one shot ICBMs, the space programmes followed with disposable launch vehicles. When NASA wanted something reusable, the DoD (primarily the airforce) wanted it to have wings so that there would be cross range performace that might have been handy for them. I also seem to recall that the cargo bay size for shuttle was determined by the need to launch KH11 spy satellites. If the US military want to put lots more mass into space, and to have frequent easy manned access, then this may be something that the rest of us end up benefitting from as well.
Whether any science will be left after all this, of course, is unclear. At least we'll still have dear old ESA on this (that - since I'm in Canada right now) side of the pond, and that's dedicated to commercial and scientific missions only.
I largely see Bush's space plan as pork for his friends in the areosopace industry and an effort to get some positive press attention. There'll be lots of new hardware to design and build, and a lot of old hardware to be thrown away and replaced before its been properly used. Aerospace contractors and NASA administrators have been generally hostile to things in orbit that 'just keep on running' like HST and IUE (the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which ran successfully for 14 or more years and was producing useful data right up to the time it was turned off to 'save money').
Indeed Salon has an article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/01/16/halliburton/index_np.html
suggesting that Haliburton (the corporate arm of the current US administration, or is the current administration the government arm of Haliburton?) has long had plans to make money out of Mars exploration.
The one sliver lining in the US military getting more involved with space is that their operational requirements will make it more likely that actual working hardware will get built. After all, they want to bomb people with real bombs, while design studies for NASA can quite happily stay on paper and be shelved as failures - see the X-33 for just one example. There is thus a possibility that the military side of this will lead to actual low cost launch vehicles being built and operated, and its low cost access to space that we really need at the moment.
The military has, in a sense, always called the tune for space development. When the military were developing one shot ICBMs, the space programmes followed with disposable launch vehicles. When NASA wanted something reusable, the DoD (primarily the airforce) wanted it to have wings so that there would be cross range performace that might have been handy for them. I also seem to recall that the cargo bay size for shuttle was determined by the need to launch KH11 spy satellites. If the US military want to put lots more mass into space, and to have frequent easy manned access, then this may be something that the rest of us end up benefitting from as well.
Whether any science will be left after all this, of course, is unclear. At least we'll still have dear old ESA on this (that - since I'm in Canada right now) side of the pond, and that's dedicated to commercial and scientific missions only.