News Barack Obama: America will take the giant leap to Mars

[Urwumpe]

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/11/o...ke-giant-leap-to-mars-barack-obama/index.html

Make Mars Great Again!

 

[fred18]

This feels to me like "let me say this now, so if someone do it by chance, they will talk about me as they talk about jfk for the moon"...

 

[Urwumpe]

This feels to me like "let me say this now, so if someone do it by chance, they will talk about me as they talk about jfk for the moon"...

Well, honestly you have to say that private spaceflight was really his pet project in the past 8 years. He pushed a lot towards it, way more than previous presidents.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

He's also promoting a paradigm for the continued existence for NASA, one where it is the incubator of cutting edge technologies that then get passed on to private commercial enterprises. Before NASA was expected to build rockets and lead missions, and along the way it spun out some commercial products like Tang, Velcro, and other stuff by happenstance. Now the model is that private industry will lead commercial ventures into space, assisted by NASA for technology development and backing for high-risk prototype missions, similar to CRS.

 

[Pipcard]

Tang and Velcro were not NASA spinoffs.

 

[Kyle]

Too bad his administration has exhibited nothing but apathy towards the space program over the last 8 years.

 

[Urwumpe]

Tang and Velcro were not NASA spinoffs.

Sure. But NASA was expected to produce exactly that. Spin-Offs along the way.

 

[hutchison66]

He spent time cutting NASA's budget while promoting private industry thus getting the credit for nothing he can say anything without making any decisions but if private company or NASA gets there he can go back and said it was his insight that motivated it Bush and Obama cut the heart out of NASA and now its left going back 50 years to play catch up building a white elephant that may go somewhere but probably won't and Manned missions will then be dead with NASA

 

[Urwumpe]

He spent time cutting NASA's budget

Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C_1958-2015

 

[C3PO]

Tang and Velcro were not NASA spinoffs.

I once heard that STS was a spinoff from Velcro. :lol: Judging from the shuttle interior, that isn't far off. It's basically used for wallpaper. :rofl:

PS: I hadn't noticed the recent increase to NASA's budget. I wonder how long it will last.

 

[ADSWNJ]

Here's a first draft of Obama's statement sometime in the next 10 years, when Elon lands the first humans on Mars:

Congrats Elon, but don't forget your success was down to somebody along the line giving you some help. Y'know, there was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. That SpaceX you yours – you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

He spent time cutting NASA's budget while promoting private industry thus getting the credit for nothing he can say anything without making any decisions but if private company or NASA gets there he can go back and said it was his insight that motivated it Bush and Obama cut the heart out of NASA and now its left going back 50 years to play catch up building a white elephant that may go somewhere but probably won't and Manned missions will then be dead with NASA

Good grief! Try a period or a comma once in a while! I almost fainted trying to read all of that in one go

NASA's future is to take a similar role relative to the aerospace industry as the Department of Energy does to the energy industry. The DOE is not in the business of building power plants outside of those used to research and demonstrate certain technologies. The DOE collaborates with industry partners to do research and industry needs this collaboration to get more advanced technologies commercialized and produced. Like in aerospace, many power-related technologies are too high-risk for industry to attempt without this government support.

NASA's days of building big rockets is nearly over, and they are probably happy to see that end, Apollo/Saturn nostalgia notwithstanding. SLS might actually fly, but it might be irrelevant before it makes it to the pad. They'd love to see SpaceX or someone else beat them to produce the next very heavy lift booster. They really do want to promote commercialization of space and want to get into the stable business of doing cutting edge aerospace R&D and flying science missions.