I actually get the feeling that he's going to do something about pollution and climate change, but on his terms. Probably by suggesting something outrageous off the bat, then winding back to something better than we'd currently expect.
[clarifying: not a trump supporter - just a guy from the UK]
Well, only if someone in his entourage wants to do something about pollution and climate change. And then he will propose $50 millions to do it, while investing billions on other things that pollute and accelerate climate change...
Otherwise, forget it, he hasn't done a single thing, good or bad, in almost a year.
Look on the bright side!
No race riots like we had in St. Louis and Baltimore.
Record low unemployment.
Record high stock market.
Record low illegal border crossings.
There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. There's always something good to find.
> There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. There's always something good to find.
With the right optics, maybe. I see white supremacist riots, inexcusable wealth concentration, income inequality, stagnating wages, and high labor drop-out. Overall, it's feeling a lot like the 1920s. The stock market? I hope you time it right, Black Tuesday is coming up.
Low border crossings reflect our underlying economic problem - illegals have been declining for over a decade due to automation, job exports, and declining middle-class jobs... rats abandoning a sinking ship.
> There is bipartisan support for further space exploration but parties disagree over the timeline and budget.
Ironically enough, it's always the anti-government-spending Republicans who veto such efforts. Now that a Republican President is supporting this, they might finally get behind this as well. It's really a clever form of blackmail when you think about it. "Put our guy in the Oval Office, or we'll veto anything and everything in Congress."
Congress is about to pass a tax cut which adds 1 Trillion + to the deficit. Anyone who thinks we'll be sending manned missions to the moon or anywhere else in the solar system is going to have to reconcile that with a 30 Trillion debt crisis looming on the horizon.
Exactly. A common adage in the aerospace world is that it's not aerodynamics that makes airplanes fly, it's money.
Same thing here. The only way NASA is going anywhere outside LEO is with a commitment by congress to spend gobs and gobs of money every year over many years.
Clearly we need one because North Korea or terrorists or sharks or whatever.
It's so expensive to put all that metal into space, they'll get interested in asteroid mining before long. And once there's a market for orbital-velocity asteroid metal... profit!
President Obama said he scrapped the plan to go back to the moon because he saw it as just recapitulating 60s technology development. He said he wanted "game-changing" new technologies instead. That made sense to me at the time, but maybe you need to fund rebuilding a project from the 60s, and then the game changing ideas will appear along the way.
I am unclear if President Trump's order calls for bringing back the program Obama cancelled or if it's more of a general statement of direction.
"With this directive, Mr Trump abandons plans set by his predecessor Barack Obama, to send humans to an asteroid near earth."
Isn't this the problem? Every President gives Nasa a new set of priorities, which they work on for a while until the next President comes along and changes things again. Back in 2004, George W Bush was also announcing a return to the Moon:
"Our third goal is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond. Beginning no later than 2008, we will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration. Using the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015, with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods. "
Am I the only one who sees a clear pattern here: each and every action of the current US president undos something that predecessor Barack Obama has accomplished.
There are the obvious things, like health insurance, immigration policy and the like. Whenever I cannot at all understand a certain action of the PotUS, like, for example, the scaling down (or closing) of two National Parks in Utah (Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante), I'll do a little research and find: the action is undoing some former act of Barack Obama.
Each day I get more and more convinced, that Mr Trumps only motivation is the extinction of the traces of his predecessor. As cited: it is not about Moon or Mars, it is about "abandoning plans set by his predecessor Barack Obama, to send humans to an asteroid near earth". Therefore it is absolutely unimportant, if the program gets funded or executed. The directive has fulfilled its purpse by rescinding an Obama act.
I am into archaeology and history. Extinguishing the traces of the predecessor is a very common pattern in history, you know, like chiseling away the former pharao's name from the temple walls. Alarmingly archaic, primitive and despotic.
Even the most absurd actions of the US president become completely reasonable, when seen in this context.
> WASHINGTON, July 20— President Bush proposed today that the United States establish a base on the Moon, send an expedition to Mars and begin ''the permanent settlement of space.''
> In a speech celebrating the 20th anniversary of man's landing on the Moon, Mr. Bush made the first major commitment by a President to these ambitious goals and set the stage for the first full-scale debate in years on the nation's troubled space program.
> ... Mr. Bush pledged to commit the United States in the 1990's to the earth-orbiting space station as the ''critical next step in all our space endeavors.''
''And next, for the new century, back to the Moon, back to the future, and this time back to stay,'' Mr. Bush told the select audience, which included nearly half the American astronauts who flew in space. ''And then, a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars.''
Yes. It makes me wonder if anyone believes these anymore. I don't know how they did it in the 60s. They had just barely gone 100 miles up, and they came up with a plan to send people 200,000 miles, land two of them on a gravity well, and get them back. It's insane. I don't understand how President Kennedy said something absurd, and it came true, yet now we say we want to do it again decades later, and it's all talk.
Do it for commerce. Enrol the likes of Elon Musk to build a space hotel. to do that you need space mining, smelting and construction industry. to do that you need fifo space miners.
one thing will lead to another and next thing you know The US (or whoever does it first) will be the biggest active population space community.
Instead of focusing our budget on resolving climate issues and pollution on our own planet, we somehow try to blow our money into space exploration. I get that it's a good thing to do in the long run, but until we fix the issues that are present around us, there won't be a long run.
Nasa's yearly budget is less than $20bn. Compare this with the ~$600bn on the military, the ~$1.2tn on social secure, the ~$1tn on Medicare, etc. Space exploration is a drop in the ocean. Yet people troll that it's some huge, wasteful money sink, even when the US government is spending $1.5tn on the T35 fighter jet alone.
Moreover, Nasa's scientific work does help with tackling climate change and pollution. They are the ones launching satellites to monitor the Earth's biosphere, and doing work like National Climate Review[1], even as the current administration is removing all reference to climate change from the output of other Federal Agencies.
Yeah, exactly. And it will be certainly much easier to terraform Mars into a habitable environment, populate it and use it as a starting platform to reach new, fresh, habitable planets in deep space, lightyears away – than to agree upon an earthly effort to limit a temperature rise to 1,5 to 2 degrees Celsius by means of some modifications to industrial production and eliminating bad habits.
Maybe earth becomes a better place, when the people who think so, have all left for new unearthly frontiers! The sooner the better. I am all in for the new space program!
https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-mars/ read up something on this topic. It's nice to imagine that we will soon be able to colonize Mars, but we are far from doing so and making the planet habitable for humans would take much more effort than to fix the one we already have, if the presents issues can be fixed we could lower defense spending and spending in other areas and then we could focus all that money into space exploration, but as things currently stand by multi-tasking we aren't exactly moving forward a whole lot.
Sorry English isn't my native tongue so I misinterpreted the second part, although it could be just because I'm a little slow on the pick up :v either was it's totally my fault.
No worries. No money will get spent. Since Bush it's part of a new President's first year ritual to announce an incoherent manned space program and ideally scrap the previous one. That's just standard procedure.
That's an interesting take on it. Is there anything that makes you think that they would spend it on climate issues and pollution if it wasn't spent on space exploration?
Considering that they already spend about 700B$ on the defense budget it would probably not happen and they would find something else to spend the money on which isn't nearly as reasonable as combating present issues. Anyhow I'm neither a communist nor a advocate for the poor, it's just that these are the type of problems that could end as all, not just the poor nor the middle class, thus people should voice their opinion more about it. But it seems to me that from the moment the election has been decided/won no one get's a say in the matter aside from the people that got elected, now don't get me wrong as winners they should have every right to make the final decisions, but sometimes asking the general public on what issues the government needs to tackle next is more reasonable then the old "I don't care about your opinion, you lost the elections, now wait 4 years and try again!".
Without any details on whether this means funding SLS for another $4 billion/year to accomplish nothing vs. fund some real innovation like Blue Origin or SpaceX, it's kind of "Meh" as announcements go.
This is the real issue here. Trump can say all he wants, if the Congress doesn't allow more budget, nothing will happen.