Posted on 11/25/2018 3:05:13 PM PST by DFG
If you study the history of NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, one thing you come to realize is that the tight timetable to reach the moon by the end of the decade meant that NASA didn’t have time to ossify into a bureaucracy, and they did things (i.e., took risks) in those days that would never be permitted today.
But you knew NASA had slipped into the maw of the administrative state when President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden in 2010 that “Muslim outreach” should be a primary mission for the space agency.
Well now it appears NASA doesn’t even want to go to Mars even if it could go to Mars. Gizmodo offers an account of recent panel discussion about Mars hosted by Lucianne Walkowicz, the NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, and you have to read this, not to believe it, because of course the real problem with going to Mars is that it would represents “colonialism.” No, seriously, that’s what the thinking is:
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
That. We already can't have the US flag planted on the moon in the latest Hollyweird flop.
Muslim outreach, what utter horseshit. That obama was a terrible president.
I agree with you one hundred percent, even so way too many still think that he was the second coming of something or another, along with some of the other rotten compatriots of his. All I can say is “May the powers to be help some of the screwed up public to wake up and see the light” If they don’t this country has had it.
This is a demonstration of an extreme anti-colonial mindset where the fear is a phantom of a prejudiced mindset. Yet, apparently, she has a voice in these decisions??? Cleaning this depth of swamp will take far more than DJT’s max 2 terms!
It began right after the moon landing.
NASA lost prestige and went over to PR crap after termination of the Apollo program back in the Ford or Carter years. They went from a scary bunch of extremely smart mainly geeky white guys with matching outfits and ugly horn-rimmed glasses, to an all-inclusive (except whites) touchy feely social ladder for downtrodden minorities.
When I first saw Space Station Freedom turn into ISS, I kind of knew we weren’t moving towards permanent moon bases or onto Mars at that point.
Innovation and human exploration stopped. Robots took over, and NASA got into activism.
When I was a kid in the 80s, just seeing the NASA logo would fire my imagination. Now I’m not sure if they can even survive as a parking spot for STEM SJWs.
Agreed! Let private companies go to the moon and Mars, but our defense is critically dependent on satellites. SPACE FORCE
When they declined to evolve the Saturn V in favor of the space shuttle.
That was when they gave up on space in favor of pretend accomplishments.
Like most bureaucracies, the longer it existe, the more constipated and risk-averse it becomes. Add in being used as a political tool............
Lucianne Walkowizc is a loon. I came across some of her rantings via Instapundit. What the heck she's doing at NASA is beyond me.
This moron doesn’t know the difference between colonization and colonialism.
When did NASA go to pot: the space shuttle. Starting in the late 1970s, NASAs mission of pushing the human experience further and further from earth ended. We entered into a 30 year period of flying nice predictable orbits around good ‘ol mother earth. Science experiments and deployment / repair of satellites, all good things. But the original manned exploration mission that made it stretch the boundaries of what men can dream of ended. And NASA was diminished. In my opinion.
I was colonized Tuesday and everything is ok.
NASA lost the edge when they scrapped the last moon landing (everything had been procured) because the down side out weighted the upside (we had already done this - what were we trying to prove?).
From that moment on, risk to precedent over adventure.
From April of this year:
Months after President Trump signed a directive ordering NASA to return astronauts to the moon, the space agency has canceled its only lunar rover currently in development.
The Resource Prospector mission, which was in the concept formulation stage for potential launch in the 2020s, would have surveyed one of the moon’s poles in search of volatile compounds such as hydrogen, oxygen and water that could be mined to support future human explorers.
It would have been the first mission to mine another world and was seen as a stepping stone toward long-term crewed missions beyond Earth.
From: NASA’s Only Moon Rover Mission Was Just Unexpectedly Cancelled
THE WASHINGTON POST
30 APR 2018
(Sciencealert’s pretty good but they tend to have a Lefty slant on their stories—any alternatives?)
NACA/NASA used to be primarily made up of engineers and support folks
Inhabitable or uninhabitable?
How Barack Obama ruined NASA space exploration
I hate to tell you but NASA was a bureaucracy even in the 1960’s.
In the 1960’s, the USAF needed a weather satellite program and couldn’t get NASA to deliver it, so they built the then classified DMSP satellite program.
DMSP worked well until about 1974 when NASA was brought in due to political pressure. The satellite went from a mere 1 cubic meter box weighing a few hundred pounds to one that was over 20 feet long and weighed several tons. The program went behind schedule to the point that the Iranian hostage crisis suffered because we only had one satellite due to NASA’s bungling the management of the program.
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