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Election 2020

Space Mentioned At The Mount Rushmore Rally

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 3, 2020

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

38 responses to “Space Mentioned At The Mount Rushmore Rally”

  1. BeanCounterFromDownUnder says:
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    Yeah right. Excuse the cynicism but really? On Mars? Soon? The Artemis Program is already well behind schedule. No landers other than Starship has hardware actually in test. And the program hasn’t yet been fully funded. For heaven’s sake the elements keep changing just about daily. First SLS/Orion,now increasing commercial involvement.
    I’ll call bs on the whole box and dice and even go so far as as to call it ‘fake news’. 2024 a pipe dream for the Moon. Mars is just somewhere out there.
    Cheers
    Neil

    • robert_law says:
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      US astronauts where scheduled to land on the moon in 2020 . its not President Trump’s fault that SLS is behind schedule when the previous President and Congress cancelled Constellation and at one point proposed delaying SLS for 5 years and then canceld Orion only to see it being reinstated. and its not President Trump’s fault that a Hurricane damaged the factory and added a year on to the schedule and Nor is Covid -19 his fault either. There might be a lot of bad political points about Trump but space is not one of them . SLS is at stenis and unlike starship it has not blown up yet. I have being watching Space for over 50 years and there has never been a space program goverment or Comercial which has came in in time , Apollo was delayed because of the fire and later lunar module problems, the shuttle was delayed by not being properly funded and problems with the tps and engines first flight was supposed to be 1978 not 1981 and Falcon 9 took years to develop. and just look at the delay to commercial space flight which should have happened under the obama administration .

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        The actual course of events was somewhat different. Constellation was cancelled because Ares I (designed to use a Shuttle SRB) had such poor performance it was unable to launch the Orion, which was overweight. The system was (and unfortunately still is) extremely expensive to operate due to the high operaitonal cost of using large segmented SRBs. Mr. Obama recognized that Constellation was not affordable and proposed cancelling it and essentially using the money for the Commercial Crew program, which has been very successful. Unfortunately in every year of the Obama Administration Congress greatly reduced the administration funding request for Commercial Crew, delaying it by several years.

  2. SouthwestExGOP says:
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    I like America as much as anyone – but when does the mission to Mars launch? Who will be the crew? What is your definition of “very soon”?

    We should greatly worry about an over dependence on US-only projects and an over emphasis on nationalistic projects. I have said it before but the Space Shuttle was a success in great part to the valuable international partners we incorporated from the first. Canada contributed the robot arm, Europe contributed Spacelab, and we had many many crew members from Europe, Canada, and Japan. Then we have the ISS where our international partners again brought innovation, ideas, and resources.

    We should remember that America did not win WWI or WWII by ourselves, many people were a part of the team. Where was Bob Hope born, again? Etc.

    • fcrary says:
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      I think it’s fair to say the Space Shuttle was almost entirely an American effort. In the same way, I would call robotics spacecraft like Rosetta and the planned JUICE mission European (or ESA) missions, despite the United States making some contributions. So I’m willing to let the Trump exaggeration about the Shuttle and the Saturn V slip.

      But if we’re going to ask about where Bob Hope was born, let’s go a bit further and ask where people like Alexander Hamilton, John Paul Jones and Thomas Paine were born. Or, for that matter, Elon Musk. In practice, the United States is a nation of immigrants (whether or not Mr. Trump cares to admit that), and some of the most accomplished Americans were not born in the United States. But the US does deserve credit for being the place they lived and the place where they did the things which made them famous.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        I know I am going to regret this, but President Trump isn’t against immigrants, after all he is married to one. If you actually listen to his speeches he is only against undocumented immigrants who jump the waiting line by sneaking into the United States. Huge Difference!

        My wife is a immigrant from the Philippines who waited many years to come here and become a citizen legally. My brother-in-law also waited years to come here legally earning citizenship for himself and his family while serving in the U.S. Army. Again, he earned it legally, along with his retirement as a disabled veteran. His oldest son is an officer and his next oldest just joined the Army as a private. Needless to say all of them, all immigrants, oppose those who jump the line to enter the U.S. illegally.

        BTW all of those individuals you mention, and others like Thomas Edison, William Shanter, etc., entered the U.S. under the immigration laws at the time. The problem with uncontrolled immigration is not going to be solved by just letting them jump the line, but by changing the long outdated immigration laws.

        And before anyone starts that nonsense of me being for President Trump be it known I voted for VP Biden in the primaries. But I like to look at political issues logically based on my knowledge of history and economics instead of going with the flow. I have also lived on the border for most of the last 40 years and have a first hand knowledge of the problems from uncontrolled immigration.

        • tutiger87 says:
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          She wasn’t an immigrant.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            That is incorrect, she was born in the former Yugoslavia and immigrated to the U. S. before she met him. She only became a citizen in 2006

          • fcrary says:
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            I wasn’t sure about that so I checked. Mrs. Trump was in the US as a permanent resident at the time she married out current President (although not a citizen until a year after the marriage.) I’ll except that as being an immigrant. I’d thought she was here on a work visa at the time, which wouldn’t have technically been an immigrant and was why I checked. But I will note that she may have worked as a model before getting resident status and while here on a visitor visa (which would not be legal.) Also, the process for her parents getting here was one her husband has criticized in other contexts. I suspect others, in the same circumstances but with less influential friends, would have a harder time under the administration’s current policies.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            My understanding is that an immigrant is someone who was born and held citizenship in a country other than the United States who then decides to be a citizen of the United States. There are different legal paths to doing so but I see them all as being immigrants if the intent is to become an citizen of the United States.

        • Todd Austin says:
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          If he doesn’t oppose immigrants (when it’s convenient for him), then why the shenanigans with work visas, that have thrown important members of the US work force out of their jobs? Of what possible benefit is that? It actively damages the interests of the country in the name of scoring a few cheap political points with his base at the expense of the individual lives of those who have lost their jobs and the rest of us who can no longer benefit from their work.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            One reason many students don’t go into STEM fields is a lack of jobs because Corporations hire H1B Visa foreigners who work for far less. If you want more students to study STEM, especially minorities, you need to give them first crack at the jobs. BTW, in theory, H1B visas are only to fill in when there is lack of American STEM workers, but many corporations, especially in Silicon Valley, game the system because they work for less and don’t complain about the working conditions for fear they will lose their jobs. You are not going to help minorities move up the ladder if you don’t have jobs for them.

      • SouthwestExGOP says:
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        Here again we run into the MANY difficulties of having a valid conversation via any sort of exchange back and forth messages. Sigh.

        You appear to be a planetary scientist at UC Boulder (am I right?) and so have significant experience. But I was deep in the Shuttle from Jan 1985 until it retired and our international partners contributed to almost every part. We can talk about S RMS, Spacelab, many experiments, international crews. I worked with international contributors every day in the MCC, I interacted with them every day testing Spacelab at KSC. There is NO way that you could describe Shuttle as almost entirely an American effort. It was as international as ISS is.

        • mfwright says:
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          An interesting mention about Shuttle, Vehicle itself was USA but there was many international partners. We see ISS where most of the hardware is USA, most of the big pieces launched by Shuttle. For the WWII history what defeated the axis powers was Soviet blood, British intelligence, and American industry plus many others contributing to the cause. Seems to me another way to think of it as USA be a leader among equals, but if USA goes at it alone it will not work (space station never went anywhere until it became ISS).

          But wait, we now have the commercial model of SpaceX being the leader among sub contractors throughout the world.

      • SouthwestExGOP says:
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        Your second paragraph adds tremendous support to my reply to Cessna Driver – he claims that “we” did all these things but immigrants and allies were essential to all of those things. George Washington and John Adams and many Founding Fathers were born in North America but critical people like Thomas Paine were born in England. He mentioned Bob Hope so I mentioned him, and I had not bothered to add that Irving Berlin was born in Russia. Many Americans gained success due to things that they did here – but all of them that I can think of also did a lot of their careers in Europe and Asia and other places. If we had depended only on people born in North America we would be in trouble today! And we cannot start to think that “we” did all of this stuff that the world depends on now. Let’s NOT tell Tim Berners-Lee that this marvelous way of communicating was just an offshoot of the ARPA Net.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          Berners-Lee made the address system easier across networks but I had email in 1983 before he created the WWW. He was just one of many who made today’s digital global network possible.

          As for America claiming the credit, do you seriously think Andy Grove, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison or the rest would have accomplished anything If they hadn’t come America? Part of the success of the USA is the entrepreneurial tradition from the corporations who founded the first colonies to New Space that have shaped the America economy, from VCs, to the ease of starting a business, to the willingness to support new ideas.

          • SouthwestExGOP says:
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            Again, this is an awkward (at best) way to discuss complex topics. At least I have you beat on email, I sent email in 1979 via the World Wide Military Command and Control System (WMMCS) from the Cheyenne Mountain Complex to our remote radar stations (Clear AFS, Ak and Thule AB, Greenland) among others. And email is NOT the same as the WWW by the way, there were lots of email systems at one time but they were not interconnected – I recall when AOL was first allowed to send and receive Internet email.

            But your main argument appears to be that only people who come to the US accomplish anything and we could point out MANY people who developed neat stuff in many countries around the world.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            No, the main argument is that it’s easier for them to accomplish things in the United States because of an economic system and environment that allows experimentation and innovation. For example, it was impossible for private individuals in the U.K. to work on rockets because of the explosive laws. So the type of early work that Robert Goddard in the 1920’s and 1930’s and the JPL did in the 1930’s would have been illegal. That is why the British Interplanetary Society only published a magazine that discussed the value of rockets and spaceflight instead of doing anything.

          • fcrary says:
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            I’m trying to reconcile your remarks with the Pakistani student mentioned in a BBC story today. He’s looking at either dropping out of Harvard or being sent home. Harvard has gone to all virtual classes for the Fall term over COVID-19 concerns, and the recently announced ICE policy is that people with student visas have to attend in person classes (transferring to a different university if that’s what it take) or go home.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Actually that policy is not new, it was created after 9/11 for fear terrorists would use student visas as a way to enter the USA. I know because it’s something faculty at my university are always reminded about when advising foreign students and putting together course schedules. It is just new to those elite universities like Harvard and MIT who the lack of experience doing classes online because they stuck to the old way of input based instruction.

            But those universities could easily fix the problem themselves by just creating a special hybrid class with one or two meetings a semester for the foreign students to take which would satisfy the law. Those meeting sessions could be done with proper safeguards to prevent virus transmission. Of course it would require more work by the faculty… No, those universities are either ignorant of how the law works or are just trying to make a political statement by throwing students like him under the bus as pawns to grandstand. Shameful…

  3. kcowing says:
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    The West was already “settled” and had been for thousands of years. We just went in and killed all of the original inhabitants. This list is not totally “proud”.

    • DJE51 says:
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      And the US did not “win two world wars”! My goodness, revisionist history. The USA helped, for sure. Canada went into WW1 in 1914 (with England), and suffered grievous casualties (for its population), but also had some significant victories. USA came in in 1917. Canada entered WW2 in 1939 (with England), again punching way above its weight in the grand scheme of things, establishing the Atlantic corridor to supply the allies in Britain with massive amounts of goods and materiel, and fighting the battle of the North Atlantic together with England. By the end of the war, Canada had the third largest naval force in the world. The USA entered in 1941, and only after being attacked by Japan. The USA did not declare war on Nazi Germany until Hitler declared war on America.

      In both wars though, the USA was certainly welcomed with open arms and a huge help, helping tip the balance of power from what was essentially stalemates in both cases. I am not trying to minimize that in any way. But Trump saying the USA won two world wars just hit a nerve I guess!

      • fcrary says:
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        That’s also a bit revisionist. The real answer is that it’s complicated.

        In the case of the First World War, all the combatant nations were more-or-less at or past their breaking point when the US entered the war. The Russian army was obviously already pasts its. The French Army “mutinies” (which weren’t exactly that) are another example. It can and has been reasonably argued that having a new, major nation, with an army which wasn’t worn out by three years of war, enter the war, was decisive to the outcome. So saying the US didn’t make a big difference because it didn’t enter until the war was almost over is a bit misleading.

        In the case of the Second World War, the war in the Pacific was largely an American war. ANZAC, the war in Burma, the Australian-led war in New Guinea, and other things were important but not clearly critical or decisive. When it comes to the war in Europe, it’s worth noting that Churchill was far from optimistic about winning the war (despite his public optimism) until the US entered. Before that, he’d said that the most certain way to win was to get the US to enter the war. And, all around, supplies and hardware from the US were definitely critical.

        So saying that the US “won” those wars is certainly not true. But saying the US just “helped” or only “tip the balance of power from what was essentially stalemates” is also a serious understatement. As I said, it was complicated. Mr. Trump was claiming 100% American credit for may things which were definitely not 100% American achievements, and that isn’t correct. But reality lies somewhere between 100% and just “helped”.

        Getting back to something space-related, that Saturn V wasn’t 100% built by Yankee ingenuity. A number of Germans were pretty critical to developing the Saturn V. As well as some Canadians, although that’s far less often mentioned.

        • DJE51 says:
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          I think we are kind of saying the same thing. Without a doubt, the US, with its manufacturing capability and large population, made a huge difference.

        • spacegaucho says:
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          And of course the Germans when asked technical questions about rocketry during Paperclip frequently replied, why don’t you ask Goddard!

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Yes, reading about Goddard’s work (which was as advanced technically as von Braun) it is inexcusable that he was ignored.

      • robert_law says:
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        England ! excuse me The United Kingdom thank you very much 1000s of Scottish soldiers , airmen and sailors gave there life’s in the War .

        • DJE51 says:
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          Yes, my mistake, I meant the UK.

        • fcrary says:
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          And the Commonwealth. It’s not like Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Indians, South Africans, etc. all stayed at home. And it’s also worth mentioning some Poles and French who very definitely didn’t stay at home…

  4. mfwright says:
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    A continued focus on Mars will derail Artemis program like it did with VSE. (my usual gripe )

    Apollo program continued on even though many had their doubts shortly after Kennedy’s announcement as a means to demonstrate to the world that American system is better than the Soviet system. But reason why it is so hard if not impossible to put a human on the moon is because this is not the same country it was back in days.

    Also a well maintained Ford F150 will run economically sustainably for years if not decades. Saturn V was more like a Formula One racer, it did the job well but it was never meant to be a work horse. SLS is like the Saturn V as we drilled into this so many times.

    Question can SpaceX vehicles ever get to be that F150 status? I think more of a airliner like 737 or A320. Expensive, thin profit margins, any major crisis like covid-19 will disrupt the business model. Obviously airliners have become a sustainable business but get government infrastructure support i.e. ATC, govt contracts for military hardware from same companies.

    • sunman42 says:
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      But also, an F150 never had to drive out out of a gravity well as deep as the various Saturn stages did.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        However a Tesla was able to drive out of the gravity well with some augmentation from a Falcon Heavy.

    • Bill Housley says:
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      The Falcon 9 launch cadence doesn’t appear to be all that disrupted by the pandemic. Starship development doesn’t either.

      I started furlough this week for eight weeks in large part because the airlines got knocked on their ear from covid.

      Oh, and my Tesla stock is going through the roof…partly because they don’t seem all that impacted and because Cyber Truck seems like it will beat the e-Ford 150 to market. 😉

  5. PsiSquared says:
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    The talent of those artists gave the world their gifts. They are just 6 of many artists, comedians, singers, and poets/authors among many greats around the world.

    A country claiming credit for Ella Fitzgerald is a curious thing to do given current events.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      It’s showboating – the equivalent of his ludicrous tweet from the previous campaign where he posed with a taco salad to show that he really wasn’t against the Hispanics whom he had labeled as murderers and rapists.

  6. Ben Russell-Gough says:
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    Purely FWIW, I think that the Ford F150 compares better with the Titan family. Numerous and widely-utilised in a wide range of roles.

  7. james w barnard says:
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    Well, maybe if the Perserverence probe or the previous ones have had American flags on them, then we already have “planted” flags on Mars. I don’t think Trump actually said American astronauts would do it “soon”. To throw some gasoline on the fire, we Earthlings are NOT going to send crewed missions to Mars successfully until we know a lot more about the long-term effects of REDUCED gravity on the human body, male and female, and we figure out better shielding from cosmic radiation! The Moon first, whenever and by whomever!

    • fcrary says:
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      A flag on Perseverance hardly counts. In 1976, we landed the Viking spacecraft on Mars and _they_ had an American flag on them. The scientists used it as a color calibration target for the camera, but it was, technically an US flag landed on Mars. If that qualifies, we should just drop the whole idea of human landings on Mars. But I do not agree with that idea.