Bill Nye Dumps on Old Astronauts

I wonder if he would like "science guys of a certain mental capacity."

Could this be part of the "manned spaceflight" vs "robotic missions" mentality? It seems the group most interested in long duration robotic missions are more inclined to agree with a manned flight shutdown while those more centered with humans in space are outraged by the shutdown.

Not a scientific observation on my part. Just something I've noticed.

BTW, is Bill Nye coming off as a bit cranky these days? Again, just another casual observation on my part.

Even if Nye did not overstep his bounds in his argument, it is very difficult for anyone, except other former astronauts of pinnacle status, to debate guys like Armstrong who will forever be the top of the pyramid. Nye could have made some great arguments but the words are still coming out of some guys mouth who isn't a national hero. That's why it was helpful for other astronauts on the other side of the debate to stand up and be heard.

It reminds me of one of the best debates that I ever heard was when Chuck Yeager and Buzz Alrdin were guests on CNN during John Glenn's return to flight shuttle launch. It was an unscripted moment and the two of them are making great opposing points about the future of spacecraft. Yeager was advocating for a spaceplane design and Buzz was all rockets. I think Miles Obrien and/or Cronkite tried to mediate. It was great TV.

But, is this the best way to go about choosing a space policy? And if and when NASA does something amazing that puts a human where no human has been before, it must choose that man or women very very carefully, cause they will have the biggest soapbox ever made. They choose very well in Armstrong. Up until this past year, he was never publicly vocal about much. Still has plenty of heroic capital to spend...

What Bill Nye said is not a stretch. The old guys he's talking about are proponents of a philosophy that has failed to produce the results that they themselves want.

Yes gentlemen, failure is the right word. 30 years of NASA and Shuttle and ISS failing to do what they were supposed to. In the time they were supposed to. For the price it was supposed to cost. That's failure.

It's the philosophy of "money and motivation are unlimited." A rich country's cold war philosophy. Check how much of that sentence applies today.

The fact that he contributed thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign may show he is a little bit biased against those that spoke out against and helped stop much of ObamaSpace.

A cursory glance (and it is that, so please limit the head biting to a minimum) lists Armstrong's most recent active involvement in space policy development (prior to being called as witnesses during the Senate & House hearings) as the Challenger Accident Board.

Is there something else he has done in the last 10-20 years?

Editor's note: your ignorance is showing. Armstrong served on the NASA Advisory Council for several years under Mike Griffin.

Keith:

Your comments are right on the mark. It's truly insulting to denigrate anyone because of their age young or old. Take on the argument with your best logical case if you believe you are right. Bill Nye only lowers his standing with the rest of us by doing this.

Actually, yes - seeing how Armstrong interpreted Obama's space plan according to Griffin's motives shows exactly how out of touch he is, and Keith's note about him serving on the NASA Advisory Council under Griffin just re-makes that point.

My hat's off for Armstrong for flying Apollo to the moon, and anyone who can play "lunar lander" for real with a vehicle he's never flown before is one hell of a pilot, but that doesn't give his opinion more credit than Nye's (whose style I personally really don't like, but that's a different story)

Are the ad hominem attacks on both sides really necessary? I'd think that former astronauts, and the executive director of the Planetary Society, all have the right to opine, and there's nothing in this blog post (or the stories it links to) that substantiates accusations of ignorance or lack of research.

OK first off this wasn't a written statement but a casual interview and I think he was reaching for words.

Second. I liked the idea of NASA not owning a rocket and working on developing a program based around existing rockets. It would save lots of money and leverage rockets that already exist where the design was paid for.

Armstong does have a valid point because he did land on the moon and he advocates a similar program. The problem is political. If the money was available for NASA we could do it. But even in this age of hundreds of billions of dollars for bank bailouts 5 Billion more per year for some reason can't be found.

Bill Nye's comment was not stated very effectively, and perhaps not fairly, but the point that Armstrong brings contemporary expertise to space policy because of his membership on the NASA Advisory Committee is not a good one. The NAC is a group formed by the Administrator and tasked to advise him. Mike Griffin chose Neal Armstrong because he represented heroism in precisely what Mike Griffin wanted to do, which was a return to the Moon. Unless you can show me particular wisdom that Mr. Armstrong brought to that committee (I am not aware of any), we have to assume that his appointment was largely symbolic. He was there representing humans on the Moon, and not representing wisdom in space policy.

The NAC meets every few months for a day or so. It's not as if this service was a big part of Neal Armstrong's life in the last decade.

I admire Neal Armstrong very much for what he did forty years ago.

I wouldnt call 134 flights a failure. if the Shuttle was a failure it is because you expected too much of the worlds first Shuttle. It works, not as inexpensively as it was supposed to but you cannot get it all right on the first try. And yes, NASA mismanagement was to blame for the Shuttle failing to meet cost goals. he moment it was to be operated out of LC-39 you can toss "Inexpensive" Out the door.
ANYTHING which operates out of LC-39 will not be cheap. The cost of the Crawler alone is greater than the operating budget for smaller rockets.

Old farts wanting to re live past glories. You will NEVER make ANY routine flights using exendable rockets and disposable spam cans.

NASA's return to the Moon is desirable but it faces great differences to what used to be 50 years ago. It has happened before. R Reagan tried to put an american space station in orbit. To make it real, it had to be an International Space Station. Bush tried to put back NASA on the Moon and go to Mars. It is possible that it should be done along with international partners and that needs negotiations and coordinated efforts. I recall Carl Sagan's words: "I would like to see American capabilities, talents and technology involved with other nations in a grand long term exploratory effort to culminate in making the huamn species a multiplanetary species." And thinking about asteroids and the risk they pose on human survival seems to be essential to keep evolving.

Keith: I entirely agree. I doubt that Nye really wanted to offend anyone, but he probably would like to think that they are out of touch because they do not hang out with the "in" crowd of the moment on Air Force One.

Interesting side note that Nye, himself, did unsuccessfully apply over and over for the NASA astronaut program. No doubt, he once had hopes to be a "Rocket Hero" like Buzz, but destiny chose to instead turn him into a "science is fun" national hero to children.

That's hilarious; you forgot to say "re live past glories" and "spam can" so you posted again to meet your quota.

Regardless, Nye definitely overstepped even if he was right. Were there not equally old Apollo 'nauts coming out in favor of the Obama plan?

@Skarka

"Could this be part of the 'manned spaceflight' vs 'robotic missions' mentality?"

It's a nonsensical debate.

People who are demanding manned spaceflights just to do them are, unfortunately, just playing star trek unless their efforts have real development effort.

Robotic missions can be effective ways to learn things, but again, if there's no development effort than it's just gathering trivia.

It can be argued that the trivia we learn from Mars is far more valuable than from Mercury - and as Bill Nye argues, some missions return information of real value, not just trivia.

But if you cut it down to only the valuable information, you'd toss things like the MESSENGER mission and Cassini.

I see here -three- sides to this debate.

There is the manned spaceflight adventure side who wants to see people go to Mars, because. Some might support Mars colonization, but I don't see anything about colonizing Mars in VSE or Constellation.

There is the explorers, who want to learn and see what's around, and that is done a lot with robots (but people have made the case that humans can do useful work on-site.)

Then there are the developers, people like Dennis Wingo who want to see us make use of the Moon, tap the resources and economically develop the place.

I feel like that 3rd group is best represented by both the Vision for Space Exploration and "Obamaspace", and if the latter is scaled back quite a bit from the VSE to focus on LEO, I think that's mainly because we've actually lost capability and we need to get a handle on that before more ambitious plans are even on the table.

I'm glad I didn't renew my Planetary Society membership this year (after having been continuously a member since 1990, oh well). Bill Nye, self proclaimed as 'The Science Guy', can go on doing his stuff without my $35 membership.

From what I have read, in Armstrong's day astronauts were directly exposed to nearly every aspect of the development of their launch vehicles and spacecraft. This means that Armstrong, Lovell and Cernan would have had a big picture of the process that probably not a lot of other people had during that time. They watched first hand as this process successfully landed a man on the Moon just eight years after it was announced. One of the biggest reasons for that success was that the method for getting to the Moon was decided on early and not meddled with later by politicians (and yes it was funded), and it could thus be executed without major delays due to design change (other than of course the issues with the CM).

In the ensuing decades these astronauts have witnessed what unfolded next, an endless cycle of hand-wringing and constantly shifting strategies which has left us where we are today - with no clear plan or direction. And after we shoot off the last of our three remaining rockets we will have no way of even getting into space and no firm plans on doing so.

So it is understandable that from their perspective some of them have a tendency to lean toward methods that worked in their day, and they may be more skeptical of strategies that have so far failed. And by the way they don't live in a cave, they are just as capable of keeping up with what is going on as anyone else, perhaps more so considering their experience and industry contacts. That doesn't mean that they are right, but it sure doesn't hurt to at least listen to what they have to say.

I've been a member of the Planetary Society since the late 70's and I too am going to let my membership lapse after this year.

If Neil Armstrong can't disagree with the party line without taking cheap shots, then I certainly have no chance to make my views heard.

The Planetary Society has seriously gone off the rails.

I would like to point out to left-leaning space enthusiasts, that the number of people in the United States that are interested in space exploration have always been a small minority. Making a distinct effort to drive off half that small constituency is going to bite all the space advocacy on the ass some day soon.

"I would like to point out to left-leaning space enthusiasts ... Making a distinct effort to drive off half that small constituency"

Right, and nobody's ever said anything aggressive to supporters of "Obamaspace", those anti-space bastards on the left with their wild, socialist privatization schemes. Yes, his slightly mean tone is totally out of nowhere and unmatched by anything.

I think your comments are balanced Keith (including your own self identiification!)

Bernie:

You Said:

"you expected too much of the worlds first Shuttle...".

It's not the Shuttle I consider a failure. It's the failure to utilize it's unique combination of large payload capacity teamed up with live crew as a springboard to beyond earth orbit human space flight. BEO missions to the Moon could have been accomplished with a few Shuttle missions the fly, assemble and fuel a long duration crewed lunar orbiter. An Apollo capsule with a simple "re-entry service module" could have been carried in the Shuttles payload bay. The other necessary hardware; transfer/insertion engine, life support and lab could all be self contained in a single unit launched separately . Like the ISS modules the space craft could have been launched "dry" and then outfitted and fueled in orbit. We could have had the jump on the Soviets (at that time) by leveraging the Shuttle and lessons learned from Apollo to build reusable BEO spacecraft while they were stuck in orbit with their Salyut stations.

Endless possibilities existed... no will!

Yes, America stood on the high ground for three decades but didn't press their advantage.

Shame.

tinker

Remind me - which side of the political equation all but accused Obama of trying to destroy human spaceflight? Or accused supporters of the 2011 Budget of trying to destroy human spaceflight?

I am sorry, but you have no footing to stand here, and lecture to left-leaning supporters of HSF about trying to split the space advocacy community.

There is no point in arguing, debating, silent treatment, nagging, yelling, screaming, name calling, Jerry Springer style, etc. unless you need some emotional release to deal with day-to-day stress because there will be no winners in the end when people not even remotely involved in these performances set out to explore beyond low earth orbit.

You can't make a rational decision that benefits everyone involved with common goals when there is all of this bickering and yelling and screaming. This goes for you too, Bill. This can only end up alienating the people needed to make things happen and meet high level goals.

Since it is simple human nature that yellers and screamers are going to continue their charade, the successful people involved in high level decision making are going to divorce themselves as far away from yellers and screamers as they can because only successful people know it is not safe to calmly and rationally discuss anything near them. This action turns them into simple noise makers and spoiled whiners that are shown not to get their way and over time they inevitably grow up just like what spoiled brats commonly do.

It all comes down to finding common ground that makes both the rocket manufacturing companies and the future explorers both happy in a safe in a trusting and rational discussion environment.

When they light the candle, it will drown out all off this wasted bickering by people having no real say about who, what, when, where, why, and how people go to space.

You're the one that's confused. Both this person and I have the right to disagree with Bill Nye and discontinue our membership of the Planetary Society. Next year he'll just have to do without our $37 dues (and, most likely, that of many other Planetary Society members).

I've already discussed my concerns with L. Friedman (co-founder). It has been a civilized discussion by e-mail, and I am grateful for his time and effort in trying to convince me otherwise, but our differences remain.

Also, what the other poster was trying to say is that Bill Nye and others have made a huge mistake in taking for granted the support of a not insignificant portion of the space community.

Lowly Contractor - you and the previous commentor can disagree and argue with Bill Nye to your hearts content. And feel free to join/not join society as you see fit.

The issue is that the commenter wasn't talking about about Nye, or the Planetary society - he was talking about leftists in general. And, as a member of that community, its insulting. Particularly after the crap that got thrown at us this past year. We had multiple Congress people accuse a president we support of trying to destroy human spaceflight. Go listen to Jim Sensenbrenner, during the final debate over the Senate Bill. He accused the Obama administration of trying to destroy human spaceflight. And he wasn't the only one.

I've seen comments multiple place that basically say he can't possibly believe what Obama & Garver & Bolden & Holdren are trying to do is good for human spaceflight, and are really trying to set it up to fail, so they can raid the money for welfare/global warming/other things. I've seen people take that position, and attribute it to any and all left-leaning space supporters - that they MUST be out to destroy human spaceflight.

If people wanna debate architecture merits, thats fine by me - we can do so till the cows come home. If people wanna discuss destination vs capability, lets have at it. If we wanna talk ITAR reform, or any other policy decisions, no prob. All of that is great stuff to discuss, and worth discussing. And yes, people can have differing viewpoints (I'll still maintain that if they don't agree with me, they are the wrong viewpoints or plans, but thats nothing new).

What I can't stand is the argument that the left, in general, is poisoning the discussion by driving away the right. Not when you have comments like Sensenbrenner's comments, or various posters who quite frequently accuse Obama of lying to get rid of HSF, or of the Augustine committee's results being pre-ordained, or of agreeing with the general ideas of Obama's proposal, but refusing to endorse them or work with them, because they disagree on other policy issues (and this doesn't even begin to open the discussion about how the right has traditionally played with the notion that the left is out to raid the NASA budget for welfare, or something like that, which goes back years, if not decades).