Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Poor NASA: it's got a president who doesn't like its climate research and wants it to pay more attention to putting humans on the Moon and Mars – but its launch vehicle for that kind of mission is costing too much.
That vehicle is the Space Launch System, a rocket hoped to be capable of one day hauling loads up to 130,000kg and reaching Mars.
In a Request For Information (RFI) that hit Federal Business Opportunities late last week, the agency revealed wants to trim the costs to build, operate and maintain the SLS, Orion, and Exploration Ground System (EGS) projects.
As the RFI notes: "Given NASA's assumption of flat funding levels, minimising POM [production, operations and maintenance – The Register] costs for SLS, Orion, and EGS is critical to free resources for re-investment".
The money it hopes to free up would make it easier to fund space walks, docking systems, Mars exploration and safety efforts.
The RFI opens up pretty much the gamut of SLS and Orion activities, including whether or not there's a commercial user base for the lifters.
At the end of last week, NASA announced that the SLS's propulsion system is in the Marshall test stand, ready for the first test of its Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Saturday November 26 2016, @08:46AM
Let's be frank: NASA needs to die. It was an incredibly efficient organisation in the 1960s. Since then, well, 50 years of cruft have grown and strangled the underlying organization. It has become yet another government bureaucracy, with a very few people buried somewhere who still believe in the dream. Probably the only solution is to close the organization, and start over.
The other problem we have, applied to modern society in general: risk aversion. One single failure sets a program back by months, or even years. A single death, and OMG, you are likely to just end the affected program. Think of the aftermath of the Challenger accident. Activities at the limits of our capabilities are risky; people sometimes die - but this is no longer acceptable to our society, so we mire programs like this in lightyears of red-tape and regulations.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @08:55AM
And witch hunting, don't forget the witch hunting pin the blame on some poor sap game.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @03:41PM
Let's be frank: NASA needs to die.
Second.
Besides from government agency alleged "Earth from space" pictures, there is zero proof that the Earth is a spinning ball, lost in the vastness of endless space: in fact, observations show a stationary and flat (as far as instrument and eye can see) plane.
NASA and the rest of the space agencies cannot, in the end of the year 2016, produce an uninterrupted, continuous 24/7 high-definition feed from space: my thesis is that they cannot because this will make obvious to everybody that there is no curve.
They have been at for decades: they flied up, saw, and decided to lie to the rest of us about it.