If you do, now is when you should do something about it. The Planetary Society is asking for Americans to contact their Senators, RIGHT NOW.
It's time to make phone calls to support space exploration. We're sending the following letter to all our members today, and urge everyone reading this to pick up the phone and take action. I've already made my phone calls.The NASA budget is coming to a critical vote tomorrow, July 15, by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. This is the Committee that authorizes the NASA program. The planned authorization bill has some good features: fully funding the President's request for an increased budget for NASA, strong space and Earth science programs, and redirecting human space flight towards exploration into the solar system. It also increases support for the deep-space rocket and spacecraft necessary to take astronauts there.
But it has two big drawbacks:
1. It stops the rapid development of commercial rockets for Earth orbit crew transportation, while authorizing no new government program to replace the shuttle.
2. It cuts out most of the technology development (90%!) and robotic precursor missions related to the future of exploration, two of the brightest lights in the new exploration strategy.Two amendments are being introduced tomorrow to correct these problems: one by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and the other by Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Together they will restore much of the technology program (increasing it by $356 million) and permit commercial launch vehicles to be developed to allow astronaut flights to the International Space Station sooner.
We urge you to call your Senators today and ask them to support the Warner and Boxer NASA Authorization Amendments, especially if one of your Senators is on the Senate Committee. A phone call is necessary; there's no time for a written letter (these amendments just were announced late yesterday). These are the Committee members:
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Yes, I support it. No, I'm not American. Ah, well.
I stongly support space exploration but we have to get out of the perceptual box we've built around the approaches we are using. Our historic use of ballistic missiles originally designed to deliver war heads and designed to be integrated into the NORAD "trident" configuration of defense strategies (air sea and land based system) has lost its relevance to the current capacity, knowledge and needs. We need to lower the costs dramatically and and the best way of doing this will be by going to a much larger scale with the economies of scale that are concomitant upon that expansion which are required. Industry, in contrast to academia and NASA and the DoD, is the best suited (I applaud Obama for working towards this very wise perspective) and will be the agent by which we reach that new plateau.
Imagine NASA attempting to create a transcontinental railroad and you might imagine a lightweight titanium train on a gossamer thread sipping exotic purified fuels and carrying probes that were as expensive and intricate as swiss chronometers, all in the quest to understand the landscape. Nice idea but the tremendous rewards of the continent's resources, which I admit should have been managed better, were the result of large scale heavy industrial approaches to the problem. The same super abundance of energy and materials await us out there in the oxidation-free vacuum of gravity-free space bathed in the high intensity energy from the sun 24/7/365/endlessly (in practical senses). Interesting to note that if the US hadn't already had ICBMs functioning as defense weapons we might have had to develope the large scale, reusable, durable and energy efficient launch system designs as proposed by the original early recognized leaders in the field such as Von Braun and Truax. Alas we already had explosive, dangerous and barely efficient (but effective targetting devides) rocket. They could be used to launch people if they were throttled back a bit and after huge amounts of testing to insure they were 'man rated'...and then the shuttle.. a billion a trip...aye yi yi...suching all the funding out of the room...we need to be looking at appropriately scaled ideas for launching heavy masses that don't need man-rating now expecially with the current approach of commercial space taxis that is anticipated to eliminate the need for man rated giants.
There are great rewards in both the scientific and industrial realms but we have to un-hook the idea that NASA, long the puppet of DoD through which it, as the NSF, recieve significant funding, should continue to operate as it has and instead realise that we must enter into a new phase now that we have learned how to navigate.
Go large, go to stay. It's raining soup.