[FPSPACE] One Trillion Dollars
Robert Law
robert_law@yahoo.com
Mon, 12 Jan 2004 05:05:12 -0800 (PST)
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I think Pillingers remarks are an embarisment and it is not the first time he has came out with stupid statements during the coverage on CNNI of the Chinese Flight one of Pillingers team dismised the flight of Shenzou as a nouthing more than a stunt. !
I am sick to the back teeth of the usual english argoance which the scotish press douse not seem to have thankfuly.
Robert
DwayneDay <zirconic1@earthlink.net> wrote:
It is apparent now that those who want to attack the new space initiative are all going to claim that it will cost $1 trillion.
Below are two examples. Senator Joe Lieberman, who is a nominee for the Democratic nomination for president (and not doing well in the polls) was interviewed on CNN by Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer repeated the $1 trillion number and then Lieberman did as well.
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0401/11/le.00.html
First, the host, Wolf Blitzer, said this:
BLITZER: One final question, because the president this week is going to announce a major new space initiative to go back to the Moon, maybe beyond, send a man or woman to Mars.
Some estimating already this could cost a trillion dollars over 20 years. And some saying, you know what, that trillion dollars might be better spent creating jobs here on Earth, rather than going back to the Moon and Mars.
What do you say to those critics who say, spend the money creating jobs, curing cancer, work to promote life on Earth before you think about the Moon and Mars?
LIEBERMAN: You know, I have very mixed feelings about it, but I'll make clear where I end up. Remember, I was attracted into politics by President Kennedy, so the moonshot program thrilled me, and I've always supported the space program.
But if you ask me whether the best use of $1 trillion of American taxpayer money in the coming years is to land a mission on Mars or the moon, I'd say no. We need it right here on Earth to give health care that's affordable to everybody, to improve our education system, and do better on veterans' benefits and homeland security.
And I'll tell you, I've got an idea to create an American center for cures, that will set as the goal something that seems as impossible today as it did when Kennedy said we could go to the moon, and that's to cure chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and forms of cancer and diabetes, et cetera, et cetera.
But if we need -- if we had that kind of money, we could do it right here on Earth. And, frankly, I think that's more important to the American people than that kind of space voyage at this point in our history.
***********
And then there is this diatribe in the British newspaper, the Telegraph. There are a lot of things wrong with this opinion piece, and it is best not to get too upset about it. It does contain the $1 trillion figure again.
The best part, however, is this howler from Colin Pillinger. It would be interesting to know exactly when he said it: "For the price of one of their launches, we could have put seven Beagle 2's on Mars."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F01%2F11%2Fwmars11.xml&sSheet=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F01%2F11%2Fixworld.html
To boringly go where they've gone before
By Robert Matthews
(Filed: 11/01/2004)
The first images of Mars cost £800m to collect and showed a barren, rocky landscape; 28 years on, pictures of Mars have cost a mere £200m - and show a barren, rocky landscape. Robert Matthews asks what America keeps going back for
The moment the black-and-white pictures flashed up on the screens, the celebrations began. Whoops of joy, tears of relief, high-fives: the team of Nasa scientists at mission control in Pasadena, California, were jubilant at their success.
NASA scientists view pictures beamed back from Mars
They had sent a probe 250 million miles to Mars, landed, and were now looking at pictures beamed back from its surface. Later this week, their Mars Rover Explorer will start trundling about on the Red Planet.
Such celebrations were clearly merited for this whole slew of "firsts" - except they were nothing of the sort. Nasa has been visiting the planet since the early 1960s, and has even landed on its surface several times before.
The pictures splashed across the world's front pages last week were indistinguishable from those sent back by Nasa's Viking Landers more than a quarter of a century ago. Not even the plan to put a man on Mars was new: Nasa pulled that one off back in 1997.
None of this appeared to matter to Sean O'Keefe, the Nasa chief. "This is a big night for Nasa," he roared. "We're back - and we're on Mars!"
The hoop-la is partly simple relief: Mars has a fearsome reputation for swallowing up probes from Earth and leaving their makers clueless about their fate. Just getting there is something that has proved beyond two-thirds of Mars missions - the latest being Britain's own Beagle 2 lander led by Prof Colin Pillinger.
But the real reason for the smiles of Nasa officials became clear last Friday. The fact that their £400 million rover mission - £200 million for each vehicle - is one small step for science but one giant leap in the cost of photography is neither here nor there.
This is the agency's first success since the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster a year ago - and it has been recognised by the most important life-form in Nasa's universe: the President of the United States.
Even before last week's touchdown, there were rumours that President Bush was contemplating a dramatic announcement about the future of American space exploration. Last Friday it emerged that he is about to unveil plans to establish a permanent base on the Moon, and send a manned mission to Mars.
Yet just like last week's photographs from Mars, President Bush's plans were old stetson. His plans to commit America to return to the Moon, set up a base there and then fly on to the Red Planet are almost identical to those announced by another President Bush - George senior - in 1989.
His son's warmed-through version prompted essentially the same responses as well. Critics immediately seized on the likely $1 trillion (£542 billion) price tag as something America could not contemplate at a time of soaraway Federal deficit, and said the announcement was a gimmick cooked up for President Bush's re-election campaign.
Others, scenting the possibility of government funding on a scale not seen since the Apollo moon landing programme of the 1960s, hailed the president's cosmic vision.
At Nasa headquarters in Washington, officials were hardly able to contain themselves. "We're not going to pre-empt the president," said a spokesman, "but we're excited about the news of the announcement and what it means for the future of Nasa."
This is a telling use of words, notable for the absence of anything like "mankind's exploration of space", or "sum total of human knowledge". It focuses purely on Nasa and its continued existence - which, as its recent spate of ho-hum missions to Mars shows - has been its prime concern since the end of the Apollo programme.
Even as Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon in July 1969, Nasa's funding was being earmarked for big cuts. Its grand strategy for going beyond the Moon was soon in tatters, with its plans for a manned lunar base rejected and its proposed Earth-orbiting space station put on hold.
It ended up with approval for a fleet of Space Shuttles with nothing much to do apart from carting spy satellites into orbit. With the Soviet Union soundly defeated in the race for the Moon, the US government made clear it had no interest in funding the dreams of Nasa's space cadets. The cutbacks prompted the resignation of many of the agency's most brilliant minds, including the driving force behind the moon missions, the former leader of the Nazis' V-bomb project, Dr Wernher Von Braun.
Ever since, Nasa has been hoping that one day the taps of federal funding would be turned back on again - and wondering how best to survive until then. During the 1970s, it was kept afloat by a slew of genuinely outstanding triumphs produced by missions planned years earlier.
At the start of the decade, it sent the first probes to Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn, which sent back spectacular photographs and a wealth of scientific data that transformed knowledge of the Solar System. In 1975, two Viking Landers became the first to do what Nasa and Prof Pillinger struggle to do even now, landing softly on the Red Planet.
Not content with just sending back some happy snaps, the mission designers put laboratories aboard the two landers, designed to answer the one real question everyone wants answered about Mars: has it ever harboured life? In the event, the results of the experiments proved inconclusive; yet at least Nasa had tried to find the answer.
By the early 1990s, Nasa had run out of inspirational missions. Its Voyager 2 probe had completed its spectacular Grand Tour of the outer planets Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and was heading out into the cold abyss of space. Nasa seemed destined for a similar fate. It had lost seven astronauts in the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of January 1986, and its first mission of the 1990s, the $1,800 million (£1,000 million) orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, turned into a fiasco when its mirror proved to be warped.
President Bush Sr's announcement of a return to the Moon and a manned mission to Mars provided a brief flicker of hope for the beleaguered agency. It was soon snuffed out when the US Congress balked at the colossal costs involved.
Nasa has been busy while hoping for the glory days of manned space exploration to return. Its strategy has been to keep attention focused on the next obvious place to plant the Stars and Stripes: the Red Planet.
It is a strategy that has proved very costly for the US taxpayer. In 1992, it lost its $1,080 million (£600 million) Mars Observer probe just before it arrived at the planet. In 1999, it lost two missions in a matter of weeks: the $144 million (£80 million) Mars Climate Observer, followed by the $180 million (£100 million) Mars Polar Lander.
Such failures have cowed the once-proud space agency, to the point where it breaks open the champagne if one of its probes sends back the same images seen a quarter of a century ago. Nasa may have succeeded where the British team failed, but from a scientific viewpoint, it need hardly have bothered.
Unlike Beagle 2, neither of Nasa's rovers, now about to start exploring Mars, is equipped to test soil samples for signs of life. Instead, they will simply trundle around like robotic geologists, examining bits of rock and reporting back if they find any clues that life-giving water once flowed on the now-arid planet.
While saluting Nasa's success in managing to keep their probe intact, Prof Pillinger could not help but observe ruefully: "For the price of one of their launches, we could have put seven Beagle 2s on Mars."
For now at least, Prof Pillinger's daring strategy of using ingenuity rather than cart-loads of taxpayers' money to solve genuine scientific mysteries has been eclipsed by the colossal vision of a US president seeking re-election. Yet the chances are that this week's announcement about manned missions to Mars will prove to be just another case of history repeating itself, and that Nasa will resume its endless mission to timidly go where it has been all too often before.
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<DIV> I think Pillingers remarks are an embarisment and it is not the first time he has came out with stupid statements during the coverage on CNNI of the Chinese Flight one of Pillingers team dismised the flight of Shenzou as a nouthing more than a stunt. !</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I am sick to the back teeth of the usual english argoance which the scotish press douse not seem to have thankfuly.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Robert<BR><BR><B><I>DwayneDay <zirconic1@earthlink.net></I></B> wrote:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">It is apparent now that those who want to attack the new space initiative are all going to claim that it will cost $1 trillion.<BR><BR>Below are two examples. Senator Joe Lieberman, who is a nominee for the Democratic nomination for president (and not doing well in the polls) was interviewed on CNN by Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer repeated the $1 trillion number and then Lieberman did as well.<BR><BR><BR><BR>http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0401/11/le.00.html<BR><BR>First, the host, Wolf Blitzer, said this:<BR><BR>BLITZER: One final question, because the president this week is going to announce a major new space initiative to go back to the Moon, maybe beyond, send a man or woman to Mars. <BR><BR>Some estimating already this could cost a trillion dollars over 20 years. And some saying, you know what, that trillion dollars might be better spent creating jobs here on Earth, rather than going back
to the Moon and Mars.<BR><BR>What do you say to those critics who say, spend the money creating jobs, curing cancer, work to promote life on Earth before you think about the Moon and Mars?<BR><BR>LIEBERMAN: You know, I have very mixed feelings about it, but I'll make clear where I end up. Remember, I was attracted into politics by President Kennedy, so the moonshot program thrilled me, and I've always supported the space program. <BR><BR>But if you ask me whether the best use of $1 trillion of American taxpayer money in the coming years is to land a mission on Mars or the moon, I'd say no. We need it right here on Earth to give health care that's affordable to everybody, to improve our education system, and do better on veterans' benefits and homeland security. <BR><BR>And I'll tell you, I've got an idea to create an American center for cures, that will set as the goal something that seems as impossible today as it did when Kennedy said we could go to the moon, and that's to cure
chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and forms of cancer and diabetes, et cetera, et cetera.<BR><BR>But if we need -- if we had that kind of money, we could do it right here on Earth. And, frankly, I think that's more important to the American people than that kind of space voyage at this point in our history.<BR><BR>***********<BR><BR>And then there is this diatribe in the British newspaper, the Telegraph. There are a lot of things wrong with this opinion piece, and it is best not to get too upset about it. It does contain the $1 trillion figure again.<BR><BR>The best part, however, is this howler from Colin Pillinger. It would be interesting to know exactly when he said it: "For the price of one of their launches, we could have put seven Beagle 2's on Mars."<BR><BR><BR><BR>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F01%2F11%2Fwmars11.xml&sSheet=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F01%2F11%2Fixworld.html<BR><BR>To boringly go where they've gone before<BR>By Robert
Matthews<BR>(Filed: 11/01/2004) <BR><BR>The first images of Mars cost £800m to collect and showed a barren, rocky landscape; 28 years on, pictures of Mars have cost a mere £200m - and show a barren, rocky landscape. Robert Matthews asks what America keeps going back for<BR><BR>The moment the black-and-white pictures flashed up on the screens, the celebrations began. Whoops of joy, tears of relief, high-fives: the team of Nasa scientists at mission control in Pasadena, California, were jubilant at their success.<BR>NASA scientists view pictures beamed back from Mars<BR><BR>They had sent a probe 250 million miles to Mars, landed, and were now looking at pictures beamed back from its surface. Later this week, their Mars Rover Explorer will start trundling about on the Red Planet.<BR><BR>Such celebrations were clearly merited for this whole slew of "firsts" - except they were nothing of the sort. Nasa has been visiting the planet since the early 1960s, and has even landed on its surface
several times before.<BR><BR>The pictures splashed across the world's front pages last week were indistinguishable from those sent back by Nasa's Viking Landers more than a quarter of a century ago. Not even the plan to put a man on Mars was new: Nasa pulled that one off back in 1997.<BR><BR>None of this appeared to matter to Sean O'Keefe, the Nasa chief. "This is a big night for Nasa," he roared. "We're back - and we're on Mars!"<BR><BR>The hoop-la is partly simple relief: Mars has a fearsome reputation for swallowing up probes from Earth and leaving their makers clueless about their fate. Just getting there is something that has proved beyond two-thirds of Mars missions - the latest being Britain's own Beagle 2 lander led by Prof Colin Pillinger.<BR><BR>But the real reason for the smiles of Nasa officials became clear last Friday. The fact that their £400 million rover mission - £200 million for each vehicle - is one small step for science but one giant leap in the cost of
photography is neither here nor there.<BR><BR>This is the agency's first success since the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster a year ago - and it has been recognised by the most important life-form in Nasa's universe: the President of the United States.<BR><BR>Even before last week's touchdown, there were rumours that President Bush was contemplating a dramatic announcement about the future of American space exploration. Last Friday it emerged that he is about to unveil plans to establish a permanent base on the Moon, and send a manned mission to Mars.<BR><BR>Yet just like last week's photographs from Mars, President Bush's plans were old stetson. His plans to commit America to return to the Moon, set up a base there and then fly on to the Red Planet are almost identical to those announced by another President Bush - George senior - in 1989.<BR><BR>His son's warmed-through version prompted essentially the same responses as well. Critics immediately seized on the likely $1 trillion
(£542 billion) price tag as something America could not contemplate at a time of soaraway Federal deficit, and said the announcement was a gimmick cooked up for President Bush's re-election campaign.<BR><BR>Others, scenting the possibility of government funding on a scale not seen since the Apollo moon landing programme of the 1960s, hailed the president's cosmic vision.<BR><BR>At Nasa headquarters in Washington, officials were hardly able to contain themselves. "We're not going to pre-empt the president," said a spokesman, "but we're excited about the news of the announcement and what it means for the future of Nasa."<BR><BR>This is a telling use of words, notable for the absence of anything like "mankind's exploration of space", or "sum total of human knowledge". It focuses purely on Nasa and its continued existence - which, as its recent spate of ho-hum missions to Mars shows - has been its prime concern since the end of the Apollo programme.<BR><BR>Even as Neil Armstrong stepped
on to the Moon in July 1969, Nasa's funding was being earmarked for big cuts. Its grand strategy for going beyond the Moon was soon in tatters, with its plans for a manned lunar base rejected and its proposed Earth-orbiting space station put on hold.<BR><BR>It ended up with approval for a fleet of Space Shuttles with nothing much to do apart from carting spy satellites into orbit. With the Soviet Union soundly defeated in the race for the Moon, the US government made clear it had no interest in funding the dreams of Nasa's space cadets. The cutbacks prompted the resignation of many of the agency's most brilliant minds, including the driving force behind the moon missions, the former leader of the Nazis' V-bomb project, Dr Wernher Von Braun.<BR><BR>Ever since, Nasa has been hoping that one day the taps of federal funding would be turned back on again - and wondering how best to survive until then. During the 1970s, it was kept afloat by a slew of genuinely outstanding triumphs
produced by missions planned years earlier.<BR><BR>At the start of the decade, it sent the first probes to Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn, which sent back spectacular photographs and a wealth of scientific data that transformed knowledge of the Solar System. In 1975, two Viking Landers became the first to do what Nasa and Prof Pillinger struggle to do even now, landing softly on the Red Planet.<BR><BR>Not content with just sending back some happy snaps, the mission designers put laboratories aboard the two landers, designed to answer the one real question everyone wants answered about Mars: has it ever harboured life? In the event, the results of the experiments proved inconclusive; yet at least Nasa had tried to find the answer.<BR><BR>By the early 1990s, Nasa had run out of inspirational missions. Its Voyager 2 probe had completed its spectacular Grand Tour of the outer planets Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and was heading out into the cold abyss of space. Nasa seemed destined for a
similar fate. It had lost seven astronauts in the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of January 1986, and its first mission of the 1990s, the $1,800 million (£1,000 million) orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, turned into a fiasco when its mirror proved to be warped.<BR><BR>President Bush Sr's announcement of a return to the Moon and a manned mission to Mars provided a brief flicker of hope for the beleaguered agency. It was soon snuffed out when the US Congress balked at the colossal costs involved.<BR><BR>Nasa has been busy while hoping for the glory days of manned space exploration to return. Its strategy has been to keep attention focused on the next obvious place to plant the Stars and Stripes: the Red Planet.<BR><BR>It is a strategy that has proved very costly for the US taxpayer. In 1992, it lost its $1,080 million (£600 million) Mars Observer probe just before it arrived at the planet. In 1999, it lost two missions in a matter of weeks: the $144 million (£80 million) Mars
Climate Observer, followed by the $180 million (£100 million) Mars Polar Lander.<BR><BR>Such failures have cowed the once-proud space agency, to the point where it breaks open the champagne if one of its probes sends back the same images seen a quarter of a century ago. Nasa may have succeeded where the British team failed, but from a scientific viewpoint, it need hardly have bothered.<BR><BR>Unlike Beagle 2, neither of Nasa's rovers, now about to start exploring Mars, is equipped to test soil samples for signs of life. Instead, they will simply trundle around like robotic geologists, examining bits of rock and reporting back if they find any clues that life-giving water once flowed on the now-arid planet.<BR><BR>While saluting Nasa's success in managing to keep their probe intact, Prof Pillinger could not help but observe ruefully: "For the price of one of their launches, we could have put seven Beagle 2s on Mars."<BR><BR>For now at least, Prof Pillinger's daring strategy of using
ingenuity rather than cart-loads of taxpayers' money to solve genuine scientific mysteries has been eclipsed by the colossal vision of a US president seeking re-election. Yet the chances are that this week's announcement about manned missions to Mars will prove to be just another case of history repeating itself, and that Nasa will resume its endless mission to timidly go where it has been all too often before.<BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>FPSPACE mailing list<BR>FPSPACE@friends-partners.org<BR>http://www.friends-partners.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/fpspace</BLOCKQUOTE><p><hr SIZE=1>
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