SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
For the first time in more than six years, both chambers of Congress passed a bill that approves funding for NASA and gives the space agency new mandates [Ed: Link not AdBlock friendly].
The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017 is a bill that the Senate and House collaborated on for months, and it appropriates $19.5 billion to the agency. (NASA received $19.3 billion in 2016, or 0.5% of the total federal budget.)
When the Senate brought the bill before the House of Representatives for a vote on March 7, "no members spoke against the bill" and it passed, according to Jeff Foust at Space News.
The document asks NASA to create a roadmap for getting humans "near or on the surface of Mars in the 2030s." It also calls on the space agency to continue developing the Space Launch System (SLS) — a behemoth rocket — and the Orion space capsule in order to eventually go to the moon, Mars, and beyond.
It also cancels a mission to capture an asteroid, and calls on the space agency to search for aliens.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday March 11 2017, @03:55AM (1 child)
Well, first thing - the robots won't get it right. People will have to make it right, no matter how much work the robots do in advance.
Interesting? Any new land is interesting. If you don't have an interest in Mars, then you can wait for the first ship to Europa. But - be warned. The first ship to Europa will be as likely to depart from Mars, as it is to depart from Earth. The really adventurous types will already be on Mars, and Timid Timmy will be calling the shots on Earth.
As I mentioned in another post - it isn't all about science. Adventure and drama fuel the human soul. Science is cool, in that it enables adventure and science. Aside from that, science has little real use.
NASA funding . . . Well, I'm no real fan of NASA. They lost their vision long ago, when they built a space plane, instead of pushing out into the solar system. Yeah, the space shuttle was kinda cool, but it ate up to much time, money, energy, and vision.
Today, we have private corporations working on important stuff that NASA should have figured out 30 years ago, like reusable rockets.
Let's go to Mars, and worry about solving problems when we get there. That's how Europeans got to America, after all. That's how Africans got to Asia, and Europe, and eventually North America, and then South America. (I don't think anyone knows how people got to Oz - there was probably a wizard involved.)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday March 13 2017, @06:28PM
Reusable rockets were part of the original plan for the space shuttle. As far as I can remember, they dropped the reusability of the rockets for budget reasons. A pity. It might well have saved them more over the years than it would have cost.