Infomercial Update on NASA's Journey To Nowhere
This Week at NASA: Mid-Year at NASA (video), NASA
“2017 is shaping up to be another year of unprecedented exploration, amazing discoveries, technological advances and progress in development of future missions – and we’re just six months into the year. Here are some of our top stories of 2017, so far – Mid-Year at NASA.”
The Journey to Mars seems to be pretty much dead, Ars Technica
“The other planet not mentioned in the video is Earth, which NASA’s charter in 1958 specifically calls upon the new federal agency to study. NASA has made some significant discoveries about Earth this year, from clouds and ice to the radiation belts that surround the planet.”
Keith’s 4:37 pm EDT note: This video is suddenly offline. The older one used to be here. First Eric writes his article and tweets it. I tweet a reply and post a link here at 12:26 pm EDT. Then a few hours later NASA just takes the video offline. FWIW we posted a link to it on SpaceRef last Saturday – and no one at NASA had a problem with it prior to that. Oops.
Oh but wait: they posted a revised version here. They removed the old SLS footage were it talks about “commercial” rockets and replaced it with a Falcon 9 launching followed by Orion orbiting the Moon. Meanwhile, the NASA infomercial narrator guy says “future crews will launch on American-made commercial spacecraft and will carry out exploration missions that will take humans farther out into space than ever before.” One small problem: Orion is not “commercial”. And its service module is made in Europe. If they re-edited the video to change the SLS clip to show a Falcon 9 (commercial launch vehicle) then why did they not include a Dragon or Starliner as well – unless, who cares?
my favorite moment in the video is when they refer to SLS as a commercial vehicle.
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) June 20, 2017
It’s hard to say #Journey2Mars is dead when it was never really alive to begin with. It was just a bunch of slogans and an outline draped over a time-filling mission to human-test the Orion capsule and SLS.
EDIT: Keith, I’m surprised you didn’t do one of your cool header pictures when you write a post like this.
Personally, I hope this Journey to Mars business is dead. I wouldn’t complain about a real one, but, as you point out this one lacked any real substance. It was, in fact, simply “Big Lie” propaganda. If you keep repeating the same fact-free catch phrase, and get others to repeat it as well, then people start to believe it, despite a complete absence of supporting facts. The lie becomes “common knowledge” and something “everyone knows.” Given the horrors this sort of propaganda caused in the twentieth century, I am appalled that an agency of a democratic government was indulging in this sort of rhetoric.
As things stand, US Astronauts are more and more likely to travel beyond LEO aboard wholly commercial US vehicles – so perhaps somebody at NASA let something slip in the video…
Orion is commercial in the same sense that the Apollo CSM was commercial :-/
In the sense of free advertising for Tang?
After watching the video it was clear that they weren’t saying SLS/Orion were commercial, although the first version was a little misleading.
“future crews will launch on American-made commercial spacecraft and will carry out exploration missions that will take humans farther out into space than ever before.”
There is a clear differentiation in that quote between commercial spacecraft (F9, Dragon, etc.) and exploration missions (to be conducted by SLS/Orion).
In the first version of the video the SLS footage comes on when “commercial spacecraft” is spoken. I’m glad they replaced the SLS footage with F9. Makes things much clearer. The footage of Orion comes on when “exploration missions” are mentioned so I think there is nothing misleading there.
Then why did they not show a Dragon or CST-100? They re-edited it and did not change any of that.
For the Aeronautics and robot exploration…. (?)
I am older and am therefore even more frustrated.
Perhaps you will learn that other people’s money eventually runs out.
SpaceX will carry the flag to Mars. NASA will not.
I highly doubt SpaceX will land people on Mars without any NASA involvement.
It isn’t a competition between NASA and SpaceX, despite so many people wanting it to be. It is a partnership.
Well, I doubt SpaceX will build their own antennas, when NASA would let them use (or rent?) the Deep Space Network. Nor would they be adverse to selling tickets to NASA field geologists.
This may be like what another regular contributor to this site says about China’s plans for manned, lunar mission. It isn’t a race, and they aren’t competing against us. They plan to go there, and what the United States does or doesn’t do is, at most, a tangential issue. Mr. Musk may feel the same way about NASA and Mars. If NASA wants to send people to Mars, that’s fine. If they don’t, well he intends to do so regardless.
Rose Colored Glasses me thinks….
Interesting, since someone posted a comment about how uninspiring NASA is these days, and someone else replied that this is worse for younger people (by implication, because NASA has been a bit uninspiring for their entire lives.)
I just got back from a planetary science conference, and a number of the graduate students there were definitely thinking of “new space.” I don’t recall any specific statement, but there seemed to be an underlying assumption in several conversations. That a fair number of these young scientists, born after 1990, think it is obvious that NASA will be over taken by private efforts.
That is a very good question, and if this reality proves so despondent, frustrating and hollow for anyone born in the last century, think about just how all our enthusiasm will die in the short-term. How then will anyone younger, especially in mass, truly become motivated and inspired to do anything relating to the advancement of humans off Earth. Science fiction can only do so much. š Again, that is why I wrote this: http://www.sciencedirect.co…
Imagine how those of us working here feel sometimes…
It’s easy to make intemperate remarks sometimes about policy, remarks that should always include a disclaimer: that the remarks are about policy, not the people working at NASA, families depending on paychecks, and careers people are building in chosen professions, people wanting to do a good/ great job.
Military: in the Constitution. Civilian space: not so much.
I think civilian space funding falls under promoting the general welfare of the United States, which is mentioned in the Constitution.
Also using your logic we would have to get rid of intelligence gathering agencies such as the CIA and NSA since they are civilian, not military.
Also the military has benefited immensely from the civilian space program, both in terms of technology and the ability to maintain its communications and knowledge of what’s going in the world.
Today because of SpaceX the military will be able to launch its sats for much lower prices. SpaceX wouldn’t exist without NASA though.
The general welfare clause is a preamble to the rest of the text which gives specifics. If what you said was true, there would be no limits on the federal government.
Almost. Article One, Section Eight does give Congress the power to tax in order to promote general welfare. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean tax and spend. Personally, I’m not convinced. The people who wrote the Constitution we’re very familiar with the idea of using taxes, in and of themselves, to produce a desired result. Modern examples include import tariffs (to encourage people to buy American products), and sales taxes on things like gas and tobacco (to discourage consumption of those products.) I also agree with you about the modern interpretation being a blank check, and all of the debate over drafting and ratifying the Constitution strongly implies that federal powers were intended to be finite and limited. So I have doubts about constitutional interpretations which essentially let Congress do whatever they like. But neither of us are Supreme Court justices, so our opinions on the subject don’t carry much weight.
“Article One, Section Eight does give Congress the power to tax in order to promote general welfare.”
It does not. You are taking the preamble out of context with the list (the rest of the Section/Enumerated Powers) of what they can tax for in the text.
There are already no limits on federal spending. That is why we have a deficit every year. What’s needed is a balanced budget amendment.
Also Thomas Jefferson and Congress spent money on scientific discovery expeditions (including civilian expeditions). Since they knew the Constitution better than anyone I think their judgement that government funding can be used for exploration purposes is sound.
Most of the video seems OK, but perhaps they could start providing the distance to other stars in light-years rather than trillions of miles….
Trillions makes a lot more sense. A lightyear is just somebody’s last name to many people. (That would be Buzzā¦)
A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Maybe parsecs rather than light years. Trillions doesn’t convey much, even to scientists. You just get lost counting the zeros. It’s quite common for scientists to pick unusual or relative units to make the numbers in the 0.01 to 100 range. Solar masses for stars, the astronomical unit instead of 149.5 billion meters, Europa orbits 10 Jovian radii from Jupiter, not 714,000 km.