For the first time in my life I am proud to be an American,quote from
Hussain’s wife.

Does anyone at all understand that millions died who were proud
to fight in order to give her the right to say this?

NASA is not your local welfare office,nor your free doctors office,
nor will it lower its standards for minorities. NASA is a tribute to Americas finest.Literally.

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. The U.S. government, industry, and academia all produce statements of vision, and none of those that I’ve ever seen are an engineering architecture. Your “vision” might be an airplane, but that doesn’t mean anything at all. The airplane could be to bomb the hell out of a country, or to airlift people to safety and ensure peace. It also could be to make money moving cargo. So visions of airplanes can go off in wildly different directions. Saying, “Oh yeah, all of those and more!” makes for a pretty boggled vision.

Much has been made of Eisenhower and his federal highway system. His vision wasn’t ribbons of concrete. It was a vision of mobility for the American public. The implementation of that vision was ribbons of concrete. I guess that wasn’t the only way Eisenhower could have ensured mobility for the nation, but that’s what he chose to do.

“A vision is anything that enables a different future from the present.”

Huh? Nope. The vision is the different future, not the thing that enables it.

“a “vision” isn’t a piece of equipment” sure it is. Maybe it is because I test airplanes for a living, but “things” are vision. Yesterday we moved some oak and pecan tress “starters” that we got from the San Jacinto Memorial…where my Great Grandfathers Father had fought to the Chicken coup here…(did this many years ago for the house in Clear Lake)…as they were being planted I wondered a great deal what the world would be like in 20 years and what the people who were doing the “planting” would look like then.

A vision is anything that enables a different future from the present.

A house for a family is a vision, a base at the south pole is a vision…the space shuttle could have been a vision, ISS still can…and yes I will say a base on the moon could be a vision…

but the shuttle didnt become a vision and a base on the Moon done as NASA is stuttering along doing it…wont be …because they do not enable anything different from the present.

Obama has a chance, and I suspect that things are moving in this direction to make, at the very least the space station an enabler of commercial access to space in The Republic. There are so many ironies here…and if CAS happens it alone will be an enormous vision, but what comes from that will be even more.

What is lacking in human spaceflight in this country is the feedback to our economic system. It just is not there, and in a country where free enterprise is (still) the calling card…unless free enterprise is involved up to its kaneck then there will never be any feedback.

There is no vision of a 41 billion dollar 15 year effort to replace the shuttle….or another 60 billion and another 10 year effort to get NASA astronauts back to the moon to do nothing.

all that does is cement the relationship that NASA is a welfare organization

Robert G. Oler

As I said originally, what is that “vision” going to look like when Obama presents it? What’s the smell test for whether it will do what it is supposed to do?

BTW, I really don’t care whether the VSE came out of Bush’s brain. Almost certainly it didn’t.

Visions are all about creating “potential” that did not exist before the project was started. Ike had no idea (nor the GOP right wingers who oppossed it) that his interstate highway system was going to enable stores like Walmart or Home Deport or whatever by making it cheap to ship goods by truck anywhere. A child is a vision (sorry quite atune to that right now) you have no idea while raising them what they are going to turn out to be, and what that is is ultimatly up to them…but without good parents they almost have no chance.

“we still don’t quite know what it’s for” (ISS) yeap that part Clinton and Gore and PSycho Dan had to leave for “someone else” to make …they could put us on the path to build it, they could do the correct planning…and yet once the thing is built…well it is u p to the people who are “in power” then to make something useful of it.

to use the Biblical example…Moses could get the folks to the promise land but it was “them” who had to make the vision come true.

Everything that Bush said about going back to the Moon, was said about ISS (and incidentally was said about shuttle and even Apollo) and far more eloquently (grin)…

the difference between Apollo and Shuttle and Bush’s vision and what Clinton pulled together under ISS, is that Clinton actually made it happen… He put a short term reason in place that at least had the ability to appeal to the American people…(although its reality was rather dubious…but it didnt hurt anyone) and now it is up to us to make something of what is there.

The irony of it is that the Russians, Europeans and now the Japanese seem to within their own economies and business models are pursuing that. We are stumbling into it nicely however and it will be ironic if President Obama (the “socialist” according to nuts like Glenn Beck) are the one to crank up the capitalistic engine to take advantage of ISS.

I’ve oppossed “the vision” for a long time…and a lot of the reasons stem from Mike Griffin’s effort on MTP where he tried to explain it. It was clear to me then (and time has borne me out) that all we had was another Republican giveaway to their favorite corporations.

Bush may have used words you like, (but they were not his, probably Frums’) and he had not a clue what they meant.

that is why years later Ares is well 9 billion down and accomplished little
…dont feel bad he did the same thing to the neocons in Iraq.

Robert G. Oler

We were never told why we were building station, except in that it had something to do with this “space exploration is great” stuff. At various points we were promised that it would be the assembly hub for future spacecraft (which it never has been), all about science (which it surely has never been), and some kind of a gateway our of LEO (which it never has been).

With all due respect to ISS as a tremendous engineering feat, we still don’t quite know what it’s for. You want me to thank Bill Clinton for that? He may have had precise execution, but he sure didn’t have the good words telling us why we were doing it, and now we’re considering dumping it because we still don’t know.

Seems to me you’re saying that Clinton’s vision was to complete ISS. Well, if we put it in the drink in 2015, that vision didn’t have any legs at all.

But given how the Mars people just had to schedule their news conference at a time, noon pacific, so the moon scientists had to cut their news conference short shows what NASA thinks of the moon. Nothing more then a place to caliber instruments on before going else for “real” science. That is why I really don’t care if Obama cuts NASA’s budget to zero and pours it into education. The money spent on NASA isn’t doing anything to open the space frontier anyway. Maybe if spent on education it will at least produce a few more engineers for new space.

No water on the moon isn’t a game changer because NASA hasn’t changed its long focus on Mars.

What does Mr. Murphy’s post have to do with mine? I’m calculating whether a particular resource is useful, and Ken is reacting to Mr. Foust’s original statement about policy justification. The former has nothing to do with the latter.

And where did I “naysay”? I either provided cold, hard calculations showing that this resource is useless today, or I stated that it might point towards more useful deposits elsewhere on the Moon or could become useful with some unanticipated revolutionary technology. Dealing with the facts as we know them or trying to find some future positive is not “naysaying”

“suggesting that modern mining equipment wouldn’t be economically feasible for extracting H2O and HO from lunar soil,”

Hydroxyl is labeled “OH”, not “HO”. If you don’t understand the basic chemistry involved, please don’t post on the topic here. Poorly informed opinions are a waste of your time and ours.

And it’s not a suggestion. Processing 2,000 tons of regolith just to avoid sending 2 tons of fuel to the Moon’s surface — and spending billions of dollars developing, transporting, and operating the lunar-qualified equipment necessary to do all that processing on the Moon just to avoid spending the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to transport that fuel over multiple missions from Earth – isn’t economically feasible in the least.

“then slyly add that maybe something like nanobots would do the trick. Duh. Even under the most optimistic time frame, nano technology materials processing will likely be mature indeed when it is needed for large scale lunar mining.”

This last sentence is barely intelligible. Will likely be mature “indeed”?

And it’s “timeframe”, not “time frame”.

And it’s “nanotechnology”, not “nano technology”.

Is English even your first language?

And do you really think nanobots capable of safely processing thousands of tons of material in an alien environment are going to be ready to support a human lunar return in the next 10 to 30 years? Do you have any real science or engineering background, or did all your technical learning come from B-grade science fiction movies?

“In any case, the proper response to this new discovery is not to shrug shoulders and claim it doesn’t matter.”

No one did that in this thread. Although the resource is currently useless, several of us, myself included, pointed out that it may portend more concentrated and useful deposits elsewhere on the Moon or may one day become useful with a technological breakthrough.

“The proper response is to recognize the opportunity presented and take it.

What “opportunity”? How do you take advantage of a resource that’s currently useless and going to be useless for the foreseeable future?

“Being lectured to about reality by Robert Oler is sort of like being lectured to about chastity by Bill Clinton.”

Why do you have to insult posters by comparing them to philanderers?

No one had insulted you in this thread prior to your posts.

Either grow up and learn to engage in a conversation as an adult, or don’t post here.

“It seems to me that this caused for a human return to the Moon as soon as possible,”

Again, this sentence is barely intelligible. “… this caused for a human return…” Please take an English class and learn the difference between nouns and verbs before you post here again.

“Interesting as the discovery of gold in California or oil in Texas.”

Those were highly concentrated deposits on or near the Earth’s surface that could be accessed with a pan in a stream or simple drill. No one had to move thousands of tons of regolith in a vacuum to recover those resources. They’re not comparable in the least to the transient lunar surface H20 and OH.

Ugh…