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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said on Thursday he has sent recommendations from his review of more than two dozen national monuments to President Donald Trump, indicating that some could be scaled back to allow for more hunting and fishing and economic development.
The recommendations follow a 120-day study of 27 national monuments across the country, created by presidents since 1996, that Trump ordered in April as part of his broader effort to increase development on federal lands.
The review has cheered energy, mining, ranching and timber advocates but has drawn widespread criticism and threats of lawsuits from conservation groups and the outdoor recreation industry.
There were fears that Zinke would recommend the outright elimination of some of the monuments on the list, but on Thursday, speaking to the Associated Press in Billings, Montana, he said he will not recommend eliminating any.
Zinke said in a statement that the recommendations would "provide a much needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands for hunting and fishing, economic development, traditional uses, and recreation." He did not specify which monuments he plans to recommend be scaled back.
The Associated Press reported that Zinke said he would recommend changing the boundaries for a "handful" of sites.
If you're taking millions of acres off the table for one site, you fail at knowing the definition of a monument.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-interior-monuments-idUSKCN1B41YA
Also at RT, CNN, The Washington Post and The Hill.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday September 02 2017, @03:21PM (3 children)
LEO is space.
The #1 domestic terrorist organization in the US is ICE
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 02 2017, @05:02PM (2 children)
The result of 60 years of manned space flight and several hundred billion dollars (in today's money) of spending is that we have six people in LEO indefinitely (yes, it is in space, but just barely) and vague, flimsy plans for doing something beyond that.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:20PM (1 child)
You forget the Mars rovers and all the probes that we've sent out there. One is set to crash on Saturn this month. And the benefits of space travel has brought all sorts of advances, from medicine to technology.
Oh, and the ISS orbits at 4.2 times as high as the edge of space, 254 miles up. Hardly "barely".
The #1 domestic terrorist organization in the US is ICE
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 04 2017, @09:20AM
No, I haven't. Those aren't manned.
There has been a deceptive practice here of labeling everything tainted by NASA funding as being a spinoff, when the majority of this is merely stuff that would have been done anyway, but is more profitable to have Uncle Sam pay for it. The rest is as I mentioned before, an exercise in technology demonstration, showing one can fly or land vehicles up to a VW Bug in size in various exotic outer space environments.
Why bother? 4.2 times as high as the edge of space versus, for example, the Moon, which is three orders of magnitude further away? Or Mars which is almost an additional three orders of magnitude further away than the Moon is. 4.2 times the edge of space is barely in space compared to all the other places we could be. This is particularly true since the ISS couldn't be much closer to Earth than it is and still maintain its orbit in space without considerable propellant use.
mcgrew, here's how I look at it. From 1958 to 1969, NASA went from barely able to put anything in space to landing people on the Moon - a feat which it hasn't rivaled in the 45 years since it last did so. By 1975 less than twenty years later, it had its first space station. Since, despite spending somewhere around three times more money on its space program in current dollars than was spent on Apollo and Skylab, NASA has managed to build a way overpriced launch system, the Space Shuttle and a way overpriced space station, the International Space Station with only the space station currently operational. That's the consequence of six decades of manned space exploration and development. So right there, we see the hibernation. Going from an active program that explored the Moon to a moribund one with token efforts at manned activity in space.
On the unmanned side, we see a similar slowdown though not quite as bad except for the Moon. In the same decade of Apollo, NASA sent over 20 probes to the Moon. From 1975 till 1994, NASA sent no probes at all to the Moon. An almost twenty year period in which the Moon wasn't important enough to study! Since 1994, NASA sent 8 probes, 5 of which were launched since 2010! So NASA went from dozens of probes launched in the first 20 years of NASA's existence to 8 probes in the last 40 years of NASA's existence, 5 launched since 2010. That's a pretty long coma there for one of the most important bodies in the Solar System.
As I noted earlier, the rest of the unmanned program fared better, but it's still exploration at a snail's pace. For example, the infamous "labeled release" experiment (with ambiguous, possible detection of life) of the Viking program has never been replicated in forty years. It is rare to see multiple missions active at the same time around a given planet outside of Earth with Mars being the only one with multiple missions consistently active at the same time. And once again, we see the slowing of mission tempo in the wake of Apollo. For example, there were 5 successful missions to Venus, but only one was launched after 1980! 9 missions to the outer planets, but only 5 launched after 1980!
We have since around 1975, decade after decade of lost opportunity and the most remarkable sloth. Even now, NASA is spending vast amounts on maintaining its single space station and developing a launch system it can't afford to use on its current budget (which has been fairly constant over the past forty years - there's no reason to expect the budget to massively increase in the absence of an external kick in the pants).
There are other problems during the last 40 years such as NASA's obstruction of an orbital launch market (from 1975 to 1984, NASA had a monopoly on commercial payloads to orbit, and maintained afterward a launch cartel with every launcher having their little monopoly niche till the Department of Defense broke that up with its Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicle [wikipedia.org] program, forcing competition among the orbital launch providers).
I heard a story back in 2005 or so. When SpaceX was hiring its design staff, they had this winning hiring pitch. Sure, you will work hard and SpaceX might fold in the long run, but you'll make something that will fly in your lifetime. It's easy in today's more optimistic world to forget just how bad things had gotten in the 1990s and 2000s where working for a crazy dotcom billionaire was preferable to a lifetime of stagnation, no matter how comfortable that might be.