Papa

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• Commented on News Embargo Inconsistencies

  TPF is indeed aimed at isolating the planet light from the star light and doing spectroscopy on it to find atmospheric biosignatures. TPF is not dead yet, but it's no longer charging ahead with $50 M/yr or so either. It's...

• Commented on Bolden's ISS Update

  Your version bears little resemblance to history. The STS phase-out in 2010 was part of the VSE in 2004, and in that plan, the first human-carrying launches after that would be in 2014 -- a 4 year gap. The whole...

• Commented on DARPA's 100 Year Starship

  The real challenge of envisioning the *organization* that enables a 100 year program is how to get multiple contributors to want to contribute, steadily, through multiple generations of managers. I don't think anyone has illusions about the difficulty of fostering...

• Commented on James Hansen Arrested For Yelling

  Bernardo, these are two more desperate rifle shots at climate change science, proposing mechanisms for affecting climate by means other than CO2. At present, they don't prove anything, they mostly sow confusion and doubt by tossing in yet another red...

• Commented on DARPA's 100 Year Starship

  Keep in mind this is a program to develop an *organization* that develops the technology, not a program to develop the technology. http://www.100yss.org/ The key challenge is how to keep a variety of contributors -- companies, governments, investors, benefactors/foundations --...

• Commented on James Hansen Arrested For Yelling

  First of all, the question of human effect on CO2 levels is settled. http://tinyurl.com/r5pau In fact, the amount we know we have contributed to the atmosphere from fossil fuels and deforestation is more than enough to explain the measured rise....

• Commented on NASA Money Sponge Update

  Your numbers are way off. The cost of the Hubble is $4-8B depending on what you count. The science harvest of JWST will easily match that of Hubble. Smaller missions cannot do what JWST is designed to do, because the...

• Commented on James Hansen Arrested For Yelling

  Polite scientific debate over the data, the models, the assumptions, and the conclusions has occurred and is occurring in the journals every day. It does not occur in the blogosphere, including NASA Watch. The only thing that occurs in the...

• Commented on Another Earth?

  Because the star is small enough and the orbit close enough to approach the conditions for tidal locking, the authors treated tidal locking as a free parameter. This is a useful way to handle it when there's no data to...

• Commented on Robbing Human Space Flight To Bail Out Webb

  Closing down CxP has been hard on the people that were on the program. But it does not mean the end of HSF in the US or the world. There's a reasonable probability that commercial will succeed and pick up...

• Commented on Progress Failure Prompts Call To Increase Commercial Space Spending

  Marcel, please provide evidence for your assertion that the President has played *-any-* role in NASA's responses to Congress's little SLS fiasco. Surely NASA is trying to figure out the requirements for SLS, as an essential prerequisite for costing and...

• Commented on Mary Lynne Dittmar Asks - Where are we, and how did we get here?

  J Nobles, what's missing from your explanation is a customer. The private sector does have huge resources, but not a blank check. No commercial organization can find money to spend on its own trip to the moon without a business...

• Commented on Pushing for Solids, SSME etc. for SLS

  Folks, there's a new rocket engineering firm in Washington... HRCHR Associates....

• Commented on Mary Lynne Dittmar Asks - Where are we, and how did we get here?

  Dennis, J Nobles, OK, fine, OUT with faith-based NASA politics. Now what? Just do it. How? -- The money comes from Washington. Nobody else has enough. -- It will only get spent on NASA if someone clearly articulates an idea...

• Commented on WATCH LIVE: Bolden Speaks at NASA Future Forum

  And servicing the ISS by private companies is not 'free enterprise'. That's a $3 billion a year big government program, money that NASA should be using for SLS development and manned beyond LEO missions. Marcel, Gosh, you're absolutely right. We...

• Commented on One Last Photo Op

  How would that work? I think only Dryden and KSC have a rig for removing STS from the SCA. So for every other center, the closest you could come is walking around the SCA, seeing STS from 64 ft below....

• Commented on Mary Lynne Dittmar Asks - Where are we, and how did we get here?

  Man, I hope you're wrong, and I think that's also Dittmar's point. The hope is that a President will come along and be able both to articulate a compelling vision of our future in space, and to defend the corresponding...

• Commented on Mary Lynne Dittmar Asks - Where are we, and how did we get here?

  You're right, I kinda did the same thing. I have written about possible futures in recent postings and so I didn't mention it here. You're exactly right, we MUST define a space program with specific goals and benefits for the...

• Commented on Mary Lynne Dittmar Asks - Where are we, and how did we get here?

  BrianM, embedded in your comments is a backward-looking perspective, as though NASA's reason for existing can only be found in what it has been doing until now. That is, whatever we've been doing is the ideal of what NASA should...

• Commented on A Sad Photo Essay on Human Space Flight (Optimistic Update)

  JonathanN, there's one particular thing you assert here that is just unrealistic wishful thinking: that Congress's SLS direction is executable, and only NASA's stubborn management stands in the way of fulfilling it. But the technical details that Congress inserted, the...

• Commented on More Climate Change Arm Waving

  Sigh. The question isn't whether climate change is occurring for real (if you're over 40, haven't you been feeling like you've had someone else's weather for the last decade?) or whether humans have contributed substantially to it (the carbon in...

• Commented on Jon Morse Is Leaving NASA

  Now what's Weiler going to do? With SMD in rough waters, who's at the helm?...

• Commented on Russia Has Decided To Throw the ISS Away in 2020 (Update)

  Steve, you're heading the way I would -- if anyone else is able to occupy and maintain ISS in a safe configuration and orbit, then Russia SHOULD just walk away when they're done, and leave the remaining occupants there. However,...

• Commented on Video: The Future of NASA with Neil deGrasse Tyson

  It's interesting that everyone drew a different conclusion from this. I think you'd be mistaken to say one President needed to and didn't make "space" (vague term) or HSF a priority, and that's why we're in this pickle. In fact...

• Commented on Video: The Future of NASA with Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Bingo. This is the message we can all pass along to our friends and our elected officials: "Congress, 0.5% is not enough to do what NASA can uniquely do... inspire. When times are hard, when the American spirit is sagging,...

• Commented on Being Clear As To Who Actually Cancelled The Shuttle

  there was ample opportunity for Obama, Bolden and Garver to make other decisions. False. Total fiction. Obama inherited an STS program with a limited number of tanks & SRBs, budget only to 2010, no easy way to restart production,...

• Commented on Looking Back, Looking Forward, and Pointing Fingers

  Perry blames Obama for ending STS, but it was Bush and a Republican Congress who set that in motion and maintained it in subsequent budgets. By the time Obama took office, STS couldn't have been restarted except at an exorbitant...

• Commented on Space Program Cutbacks - One View

  No such thing, sftommy. If JWST gets "canceled" for more than a couple weeks, program personnel will leave, and they'll keep leaving after it comes back. After a year, everyone who knows how to finish the telescope would be gone...

• Commented on Webb: Just Send Money

  JWST science will be every bit as valuable as HST's, i.e. incalculable and groundbreaking. That science cannot be done without a similar size aperture and temperature. If you throw JWST in the trash and start over, you could go back...

• Commented on Save Webb Campaign Begins (Update)

  The science from JWST can't really be done another way, not even as a series of missions. The cancellation of JWST would gravely damage space astronomy in the US and overseas for decades, because of international politics, dispersal of experienced...