Humans To Mars Summit
Keith’s note: The Humans to Mars Summit is underway this week in Washington DC. You can watch sessions live at https://livestream.com/viewnow/HumansToMars2017. The Twitter hashtag is #HumansToMars
Hopefully there will be some substantive discussion, but what history tells us about these events is not promising. Too often the questions asked are soft-balls or techno-babble, or if difficult, easily deflected with a long meandering word-salad of an answer. (The leadership is where they are because they are good at giving those long meaningless answers).
I suppose I should have seen these fluffy events coming. As conference attendance went into decline years ago people immediately blamed travel restrictions or industry consolidation, but I think more is going on. I remember too often the NASA directors, program managers or company VPs getting the “no paper no podium” rule waived, or submitting a short paper that was just fluff or pasted figures about the great stuff they were doing. Then they’d present first in the session, leaving right after, because they were too busy to listen to everyone else (everyone else having so much time on their hands after all). Events catering and dedicated to this crowd were inevitable. Travel restrictions? Convenient, for silencing the street crowd.
If what we’ve seen before holds true expect a lot of relatively harmless, insubstantial executive blurbs with everyone mostly avoiding the elephants in the room, exploration plans (if they can be called that) with SLS and Orion that are unsustainable, with timelines so far off as to be meaningless, in mindsets oblivious to budget realities and any need to reform.
Lokking at the video I cannot find any serious discussion of cost or funding sources.
Looking at the video I didn’t really hear anything new – even ‘serious’. Same old thing, and with some missing players as well.