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from the escape-from-the-return-to-the-moon dept.
The Washington Post reports that NASA "has canceled its only lunar rover currently in development," Resource Prospector. From Wikipedia:
Resource Prospector is a cancelled mission concept by NASA of a rover that would have performed a survey expedition on a polar region of the Moon. The rover was to attempt to detect and map the location of volatiles such as hydrogen, oxygen and lunar water which could foster more affordable and sustainable human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other Solar System bodies.
The mission concept was still in its pre-formulation stage, when it was scrapped in April 2018. The Resource Prospector mission was proposed to be launched in 2022.
takyon: Meanwhile, NASA is "pushing hard on deep space exploration" with the Moon as its goal.
Also at Space.com, The Verge, and Fortune.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday April 30 2018, @07:56AM (5 children)
Yes, they are. Pushing hard to burn billions with on-again/off-again projects. Spending 10x to 100x what things ought to cost. All part of their real mission: to distribute pork to as many Congressional districts as possible. Pournelle's Iron Law in spade.
Can the US please just close NASA and start over?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @02:24PM (2 children)
If you just close it, then all the people who worked for NASA will be disperse and settle, corrupting other space operations wherever they go.
No, the ultimate solution is to identify and round up all of the current NASA employees and put them in a camp of some sort, where they will not be a threat to America's space exploration.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 30 2018, @07:57PM (1 child)
The problem isn't the scientists and engineers, it's the managers. The former would be an asset to any country's space program; the latter should be blacklisted, and any country dumb enough to hire them (I really mean the higher-up managers here, the low-level managers are probably fine, and have no control over this political BS) deserves whatever happens to them.
(Score: 1) by suburbanitemediocrity on Tuesday May 01 2018, @02:13AM
The problem is that they don't have a mission everyone can agree on like "Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth".
Space Shuttle, ISS, Venus colony, silly putty in space experiments, Mars colony, unmanned exploration, mars rover, Pluto probe, manned missions, Europa sub marine, solar probes, etc all compete for special project funding.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday April 30 2018, @04:06PM
I thought they did, and it's called SpaceX :-)
But seriously, somebody needs to do the boring years long biology/agriculture/psychology experiments for space exploration (need to close that ecosystem so only vitamins and medicines need to be imported).
Mind you, those type of experiments are probably orders of magnitude cheaper than building a huge SLS rocket. Give the scientists a good wage, and hire tens of thousands of them (selected to have the patience of a Gregor Mendel), and give them all the laboratory equipment they'd need (fake regolith, water, crustose lichen etc. etc.) and it's still cheaper than an SLS launch.
Let's see: US$ 35 000 000 000 / ( 10 years * 100 000 / scientist ) = 35 000 scientists. Take off a huge wad of money for laboratoria and materials and it's US$ 500 million, and 34 500 scientists, for 10 years. That should give it a boost.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday April 30 2018, @07:15PM
I believe you're correct, but I don't believe this is NASA's fault. If you were an agency that was forced to bend to every half-assed whim of whatever dumbass happened to control your purse strings, how effective would YOU be?
US politicians control what missions NASA has to focus on, not NASA.
And I'm honestly not surprised NASA problems cost 10+ times what they really ought to. Working for NASA is probably such an incredibly demoralizing thing, that they have to pay premium to everyone just to make it worth it to stay on board. I know if I was working there, I'd be demanding exactly that or I'd jump ship first opportunity I got.