Pretty Pictures From NASA

With the arrival of President Obama's 2013 budget proposal in Congress, all hell is about to break loose. There is an election in November, so no significant changes (program cuts, tax hikes) are going to be enacted this year.

But it does give us an excuse to look at ambitious new projects from NASA. None of these are likely to happen of course because the United States can't do shit anymore, but we can dream!

(Well, OK, we're still hot stuff when it comes to killing brown people with predator drones.)

You remember Stanley Kubrick's great film 2001: A Space Odyssey, right? Well, looking at the calendar, it is 2012, I am almost 59 years old—that feels very, very real—and there is no Moon Base, no big, circular, rotating Space Station and no Mission to Jupiter. (We do have spam in a can a teeny-weensy space station we can't service with the now defunct Space Shuttle. We've got to hitch a ride with the Russians!)

This also gives us an excuse to post ... oh, nevermind. Dream on, NASA, dream on.

NASA’s ambitious next-generation space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

The JWST has become known more for running way over budget than for the exciting and potentially groundbreaking discoveries it could make. But with funding now secured for the 2012 fiscal year, it is time to prove the naysayers wrong, project team members say. JWST has been billed as the successor to the prolific Hubble Space Telescope, but cost overruns have plagued the project, particularly in recent years.

The observatory, which is slated to launch in 2018, is now expected to cost $8.8 billion. But with funding now secure for the current fiscal year, scientists and engineers are moving ahead with the design and construction of the telescope’s components and main science instruments.

“All 18 mirror segments have now completed their testing, which is impressive,” Willoughby said. “It’s taken years to polish them and go through the testing cycle twice.”

The mirrors completed two rounds of cryogenic tests, at temperatures around 200 degrees Celsius, similar to what the telescope would experience as it orbits 1.6 million kilometers from Earth. “One of the main things that we finished this year, technically, was the completion of the mirrors,” Eric Smith said. Smith is JWST deputy program director at NASA headquarters in Washington.

The Orion Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle or MPCV is going to be the new deep space travel vehicle as the retiring now defunct Space Shuttle cannot wasn't able to leave Earth’s lower orbit.

 

Artist's concept of astronauts in an Orion capsule helping direct robotic teleoperations on the moon's farside. (Lockheed Martin)

NASA is pressing forward on assessing the value of a "human-tended waypoint" near the far side of the moon — one that would embrace international partnerships as well as commercial and academic participation, SPACE.com has learned.

According to a Feb. 3 memo from William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, a team is being formed to develop a cohesive plan for exploring a spot in space known as the Earth-moon libration point 2 (EML-2).

Libration points, also known as Lagrangian points, are places in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other out, allowing spacecraft to essentially "park" there.

A pre-memo NASA appraisal of EML-2, which is near the lunar far side, has spotlighted this destination as the "leading option" for a near-term exploration capability.

Lunar surface robotic control from an L-point habitation and operations site. Credit: Dan Lester

A libration-point concept for depoting in support of lunar surface exploration with the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle attached. Credit: NASA and John Frassanito & Associates

Starship Enterprise

Bonus Video — 2001: A Space Odyssey, the original trailer (1968)

 

Comments

[Wanooski]

Hey, you know, people are getting kicked out of their homes and losing their means of income left and right, and the planet's biodiversity is in free fall but hey! Outer Space!

[rumor]

Following that up in line with a picture of the Enterprise, without any other comment, made me laugh out loud. I do enjoy your wicked sense of humour, Dave.

[Jamie]

Dave, I work with this stuff on a daily basis and have watched all the grandiose dreams fall by the wayside. On one hand, this is a sideshow... I mean outside of the space science, no one has been given a good reason to send people to Moon, Mars or anywhere else.. If there was, investors would be lining up to exploit off-planet resources.. I actually think there are worthwhile resources that would be worth going after, but it may be too late.

On the other hand, projects like JWST are used to park engineers waiting to work on black programs so a lot of money is wasted (the same was true with Hubble).. its very ambitious and I am not sure the infrastructure will keep up even if they launch it. After all, we send more on Air-Conditioning for our troops in Afghanistan than we do on the space programs.. as the book/movie says.. "He's (US) is just not all that into you". Even Newt with his grandiose schemes, wants to the cut the budget..

[Dave Cohen]

@Jamie

Thanks for your comments. In the 1980s, I worked for Martin Marietta, now part of Lockheed Martin, and even then they were hiding engineers who were waiting for their super secret clearances to pass muster on white ops projects, like NASA stuff. There was all sorts of waste and fraud. I can hardly imagine what it's like today.

When I was a kid, and even later as a grown-up, I thought exploration of the solar system was totally cool. I figured that even if we can't get anything right on Earth, maybe we could pull off some real technological feats. And we did, but that's all in the past now. I believe it's going to remain in the past. I was totally into the Hubble Telescope, even though we fucked it up the first time around. Hell, we fixed it! In space!

So it doesn't really matter anymore if a project is worthy or not. The government culture is so full of corruption, fraud and waste that nothing can possibly happen. And we really can't afford anything like Orion or the Webb Telescope anymore. That will become more and more obvious as this decade progresses.

What is the word I'm searching for? Ah, clusterfuck, that's it.

best,

-- Dave

[Robert Firth]

I agree with Dave that the US cannot afford Orion. But you don't need to - Orion essentially duplicates the Russian Energiya/Buran design, only 30 years later (and probably at 30 times the cost). If NASA returned to its original purpose of exploring space, rather than being a sugar daddy for aerospace contractors in crucial congressional districts, much would again be possible.

I know: a forlorn hope.