Unified Front - Unify to suceed

Ranger_2833 · 2003-07-03 20:20:54

I have noticed in my browsing of articles that relate to the debate on manned (and womanned :;): ) exploration of space that much of what has been said against the pro arguement is largely due to lack of knowledge of the costs and benefits (Clark started a debate on that main subject under the Civilization section). For example, one Senator has claimed that spending $1 trillion dollars on a manned mission to mars would be proposterous. In fact the most expensive plan ever proposed to NASA has been for $500 billion, the average coming to about $75 billion. Many Americans in polls have agreed that missions such as a permanent (and in a few polls merely short term) expeditions to the Moon are beyond our current technological and economic ability.

I see two main problems that are contributing to this problem. First, NASA is not active enough bringing its science to the modern generations. They need to have a much more active P.R. campaign, especially focused on school children. This is the purpose of the Space Grant Consortiums, who have yet to make much of an impact (I graduated from High School less than 4 years ago and remember a lack of serious space education). Second, the subject that I wish to discuss on this board, is the lack of a truely unified front by the various space focused groups (Mars Society, Planetary Society, National Space Society, etc.).

While I have noticed occasional activism from most of the major societies, they tend to be limited to the members of that particular organization. This, I feel, only displays to our Congress (and more importantly the constituents who, if in large enough numbers, the represenatives oblige themselves to listen to) that Space Activism is a minority of their constituency.

I propose that our goals may come to better fruitition by "strength in numbers". We need to lobby Congress as the entire population of space enthusiests, not as parts of the whole. Combining our numbers will if nothing else provide the image of increased interest (read focused effort). Congressional interns may not always read the letters sent in, they do however count the incoming mail.

Fortune Magazine, in a poll of Congress members, their staff, and White House officials, found that their are four main successful tactics of lobbyists:

1. Delivering the straight facts to lawmakers;
2. Having active allies in a Congressman's district;
3. Mobilizing grassroots action, such as phone calls and letters;
4. Getting along well with politicians and their staffs.

Pay particular attention to #3. I propose, and would like to debate the nessecity and/or implemention plans for, that we gather the collective effort of the entire space enthusiest community. We should petition as a whole on basic policies that cover on a broad scale our individual groups goals (i.e. petition Congress to develop and enforce a strategic plan for colonization of the inner solar system or the development of new technologies a la Promethues, etc). And when our brethren wish to propose a petition related to goals outside, but related, to our own, we support them.

By joining togther,en masse, we will be able to leave a bigger foot print in the halls of government. No sesible polititian will ignore an issue if a large number of constituents are pressuring them.

To paraphrase the Marxists, "Space Enthusiests of the World, Unite!"

I look forward to reading your suggestions/critiques.

Free Spirit · 2003-07-03 23:41:17

I'm not sure right now is really the best time to start pushing for a manned Mars mission considering all of the environmental and energy problems we're having. I'd rather just invade the planet with a barrage of robotic vehicles and do R&D on better robotics and AI or maybe wait until non-government organizations (or another country) can cough up the cash for their own mission. Might have to wait until the year 2200 but patience is a virtue.

prometheusunbound · 2003-07-04 07:43:27

We are always going to have enviromental problems. If we let things like that hold us back, we (as a human race) will never make it into mars orbit. (or anywhere for that matter)The spinoffs of a program to mars could provide some sort of enviromental benefit, too.

Ranger_2833 · 2003-07-04 08:45:10

A Mars mission is only an example. I mean we should be pushing for NASA to develop a plan, and apply it, for manned exploration beyond LEO. I.E. Lagrangian space stations, Lunar Exploration, Mars, etc. I think we need to work as a whole to get America (and the world) a space program.

Sorry for any confusion

Palomar · 2003-07-04 10:19:30

I'm not sure right now is really the best time to start pushing for a manned Mars mission considering all of the environmental and energy problems we're having. I'd rather just invade the planet with a barrage of robotic vehicles and do R&D on better robotics and AI or maybe wait until non-government organizations (or another country) can cough up the cash for their own mission. Might have to wait until the year 2200 but patience is a virtue.

*Until the year 2200?? No way! If we have to wait until 2020, that's still too long.

Environmental and energy considerations probably won't factor in as much as the soaring unemployment rate in the U.S. (100,000 jobs lost in May alone). The economy and increased joblessness are proving the biggest obstacles right now, IMO. And to be really honest, given all the people who are losing jobs or have been out of a job for weeks if not months now, I feel a bit uncomfortable pushing law makers hard on the issue just right now. Especially when I think of the former Boeing employee and father of 5 who is having to drive 80 miles to find work rennovating old farm houses...on a PART-TIME basis; it is all he can find.

My M.O. is to keep the issue *before* the law makers, but as things currently stand in the U.S., I'd feel like a totally insensitive heel to push, push, PUSH for space exploration when tens of thousands of people are getting pink slipped PER MONTH.

Push hard when the economy improves and those hundreds of thousands of unemployed (over the past 5 months particularly) are punching time clocks again.

--Cindy

Bill White · 2003-07-04 10:54:06

I believe clark's efforts on that other thread are critical to this issue. We keep preaching to the choir, to convince ourselves that "someone" should pay for humans to Mars. Someone else that is.

Yet no one can articulate a coherent argument that any of the beltway bandits might find the least bit persuasive.

I am remined of Janis Joplin: "Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz!"

Why space? Phrased in a way that convinces your average US Senator. That is what we need.

SpaceNut · 2015-07-16 20:41:22

The New Horizons Pluto Mission Proves We Need to Invest More in Space Exploration

NASA spacecraft New Horizons flew past Pluto after a nine-and-a-half-year journey through the blackness of space. It's the closest humankind has come to our solar system's farthest and smallest neighbor.
A room full of excited astrophysicists, researchers and scientists had been waiting for the fly-by for the 13-odd years since NASA first approved the New Horizons mission, and at that moment they erupted in applause.
Pluto may be billions of miles from Earth, and the likelihood of anyone stepping foot on it in our lifetime, or being able to gain any sort of tangible benefit from the chilly little dwarf, is extremely slim. But scholars and scientists think this mission could lead to some of the most important discoveries in current space exploration.
The New Horizons mission is just the beginning — or it will be, if we can afford to keep going. NASA's history is full of funding struggles. Despite all the technologies for which we have NASA to thank, like satellite TV, solar power and artificial limbs, the percentage of the United States' budget dedicated to NASA spending has been in a constant state of decline since the 1960s. Here's why that needs to change.
"New Horizons shows how a medium-sized budget can be turned into science that changes entire textbook chapters."
1. New Horizons can bring us exceptional findings.
"The instruments aboard the New Horizons spacecraft will 'reveal' Pluto and Charon's surfaces and map their make-up and atmospheres with detail orders of magnitude greater than our current data sets," said New Horizons' co-investigator and deputy project scientist Kimberly Ennico of NASA's Ames Research Center, according to Phys.org. "We will also get unique data sets of the smaller moons — Nix, Kerberos, Styx, Hydra — that cannot be obtained from our existing telescopes on and around Earth."
During the mission update Tuesday morning, Alan Stern, the New Horizons mission manager and principal investigator, said data from the fly-by should be published Tuesday night, depending on how the spacecraft fares around Pluto's atmosphere, with a "16-month waterfall" of data and photographs to keep science bloggers busy for a while.
2. It will inspire young scientists like Clyde Tombaugh
The New Horizons took with it a passenger: the remains of Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet in 1930, when he was 24 years old.
Venetia Burney, the woman who named Pluto when she was just 11 years old, didn't live to see the fly-by. She died in 2009, three years after Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet.
3. We're actually exploring new worlds. Just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson.
As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said during an event at the American Museum of Natural History, the exploration of Pluto is momentous, because something like this hasn't happened in a very long time.
"To see a distant object for the first time is some of the oldest emotions humans have ever had ever since we left the cave," he told the audience at the museum's "Breakfast at Pluto" event.
"It's not every day where we get to see something for the first time that has never been seen by another human being." — Neil deGrasse Tyson
"In those days, not everyone actually had that experience. It had to be communicated in some way, and then you would imagine it. Whereas here ... the Web has given all of us sort of equal access ... to vicariously be the explorers ourselves. And given how much we have explored, it's not every day where we get to see something for the first time that has never been seen by another human being."
4. New Horizons has already taught us so much about Pluto.
As New Horizons closes in on its destination, we've already learned much more about the dwarf planet. First, we now have visual evidence that Pluto is red — or reddish brown — instead of a grayish blue. We have new information about the actual size of the planet. And we now know it has a massive, 1,200-mile-wide "heart" creeping up from the southern hemisphere.
Astronomer Mike Brown, the man credited as the "Pluto killer" for downgrading Pluto to a dwarf planet in 2006, even posted his commentary on Twitter.
5. Scientists think New Horizons is huge.
"By studying Pluto, we gain better insight into the formation of our solar system, into the types of geology that exist on distant worlds and ultimately a view into the incredible variety of rocky objects that can exist orbiting a star," Kevin Hainline, an astrophysicist from Dartmouth College, told Mic.
"The best view of Pluto, up until the last few weeks, was a blurry, low-resolution image from the Hubble Space Telescope, one of our greatest space-based eyepieces," Hainline said. "In the next few days and weeks we will be able to look at the dwarf planet in a way no human has ever had a chance to, rewriting textbooks and our view of what can exist on the edge of the solar system."
The Kuiper Belt could show us not only where we came from, but where we're going.
As Alan Stern said during the update, being able to accurately map Pluto also means being able to see how it got its topography. The Kuiper Belt, where Pluto is located, is, according to NASA, the source of cometary impactors — comets that hit planets — on Earth, maybe even like the one responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. The New Horizons data shows not only the history of these impacts on the surface, but evidence that it probably snows there, too.
6. We don't (yet) know what comes after Pluto.
It makes sense for the New Horizons team to caveat the possible extension of the mission on not just funding, but the spacecraft's safe passage by Pluto's atmosphere without getting celestially shot at by Kuiper Belt comets. Most of the time, you just have to cross your fingers there aren't any unknown variables lurking in the darkness.
An extended mission would involve a deeper dive into the Kuiper Belt to examine other targets, like a 37-mile wide body named 2014 MT69 and another, farther, brighter and larger body called 2014 MT70.
"We can only go to one of these, so we have to make the decision," Simon Porter, and astronomer on the New Horizons team, told Discovery. "MT69 is the front-runner because it's lower Delta-v (change in velocity). Engineers love that. On the other hand, they kind of hate that it's dimmer, because on approach we might end up using more fuel for final (course) corrections."
But all the mysterious, could-be planetary discoveries in the solar system don't change one important fact:
It all costs money.
We're staring the future as we know it right in the eye. But first we're going to need better glasses.
Finding funding: The current New Horizons mission, including the spacecraft and instruments, launch, operations, research and outreach, cost $700 million — and that doesn't include the extension to the Kuiper Belt. When the New Horizons team gets confirmation that its wayward craft made it through the fray, then it can ask for the extra cash. But it's a visit that wouldn't happen until 2019. And if the first near-decade trip cost $700 million, tacking on four more years of mission operations won't come cheap.
NASA's had bad luck with budget cuts since the '90s. The U.S. House of Representatives wanted to cut funding to NASA's Earth sciences budget to put more money on the books for space-flight programs, which doesn't bode well for an already lean program that needs serious cash to fuel its endeavors.
If we're going to get a better sense of what the Kuiper Belt means for not only where we came from, but where we're going, we need to continue to support it.
"New Horizons shows how a medium-sized budget can be turned into science that changes entire textbook chapters," Hainline told Mic. "While New Horizons science has been fascinating, it's been great to see the variety of activities that educators can use at all age levels to help bring Pluto science to their classrooms and to the public."
New Horizons is just the first of NASA's hopefully extensive New Frontiers missions, which involve a lot of specific, robotically spearheaded exploratory quests. Other missions on the bill include an in-depth study of Jupiter and a sample-retrieval trip to a near-Earth asteroid chock full of the life-sustaining molecule carbon. These are the kinds of missions that tell us where we came from. And they're the missions that tell us how to extend our reach into the universe.
We're staring the future as we know it right in the eye. But first we're going to need better glasses.

And yet while the turn out to see the incoming images show we are interested we seem to forget quickly as it does not impact our everday life... but thou it has none at the moment it will somewhere down that future timeline.....

SpaceNut · 2015-07-16 20:47:40

Another topic that continues on with how do we get momentum to get humans into space... but are we really said to be US public opposed to spending money on human Mars missions

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#1 2003-07-03 20:20:54

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#2 2003-07-03 23:41:17

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#3 2003-07-04 07:43:27

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#4 2003-07-04 08:45:10

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#5 2003-07-04 10:19:30

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#6 2003-07-04 10:54:06

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#7 2015-07-16 20:41:22

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

#8 2015-07-16 20:47:40

Re: Unified Front - Unify to suceed

Board footer