Curiosity rover to land on Mars today

[Spideristic]

Originally Posted by boondocksaint

NASA is a waste of money.The Billions of dollars they spent on this mission they could have used for better things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl07UfRkPas

[lord odin]

This is what NASA should do get public donations set up something like a Paypal account.
Any country can get public donations or charge a pay per view type of thing for say color pictures and streaming video.
We will always have people on both sides of the fence saying NASA is a waste of money or that NASA is the best thing since cold beer.
Let's try to get along until the aliens we poked with our billion dollar stick comes to earth and wipes us all out either with weapons or disease or bacteria.

[Tetragrammaton]

That's a good point. We should be putting money aside to give to our alien master overlords once they arrive.

[boondocksaint]

how do we benefit from space travel. why would i care if there is water on mars.

[boondocksaint]

Originally Posted by Spideristic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl07UfRkPas

YAWN!!!

[CessnaDriver]

Originally Posted by boondocksaint

how do we benefit from space travel. why would i care if there is water on mars.

I didn't see a response to my question to you about your thoughts on the links I posted.

Here is the text.
Where is he wrong?

Or are you closed to a meaningful discussion?


Let us start out by asking what is NASA to us as a nation?
What is NASA?
If I had a nickel for every time someone said why are we spending money up there
when we have problems down here...

And I think about if your only looking down, one day the asteroids coming... you know,
but I'm just looking down here, I'm fine. here comes....

At some point you gotta look up.

In the current plan, it promotes the commercial access to low eerth orbit,
couple of hundred miles up where the space station and space shuttle goes.

Low earth orbit is no longer a space frontier. The orignal space act from 1958
says NASA needs to advance a space frontier.
Low earth orbit is to boldy go where hundreds have gone before. It's not a frontier
anymore.

Move NASA to the next step.

What does the program allow? It says were not going to the moon anymore.
Maybe we'll go to Mars one day, I don't know when,
but let's work on some technology that might enable that someday.
That worries me, because without a plan to go somewhere outside of low
earth orbit we've go not force operating on the education pipeline of America.
NASA as best as I can judge is a force of nature like none other.

I have never seen, with all due respect to other federal agencies, I have never
seen eighth graders sit up in there chair and say when I grow up I want to
be an NSF researcher or an NIH researcher. With all due respect to those agencies,
they do important scientific work, but they are unknown and invisible at the
age where people choose what they want to be when they grow up.

And so what worries me is if you take away the manned program, a program which if
you advance frontiers you make.. heroes are made. OK?
There's a force operating on the educational pipeline that will stimulate the formation
of scientists, engineers, mathemeticians and technlogists... the STEM research fields.
You birth these people into society, there the ones that make tomorrow come.

The foundations of economies in this the 21st century will issue forth from investments
we make in science and technolgy.. THAT we've known since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
We have known that those nations that embrace those investments are those that lead the world.

America is fading right now... fading.
By the way, how much does NASA cost? It's a half a penny on a dollar.

Did you know that!?

That people that say, "why are we spending money up here...?" I asked them how much
do you think we're spending? They say five cents, ten cents on a dollar.
It's a half a penny!... a half a penny.
That buys the space station, the space shuttles, all the NASA centers, the rovers, the Hubble
telescope, all the astronauts... all of that.

Nobody's dreaming about tomorrow anymore.
*NASA* knows how to dream about tomorrow.
If the funding can accomdate it, if the funding can empower it, if the funding can enable it.
Yeah you need good teachers, no doubt about it. But teachers come and go. Because I go to the next grade.
Teachers can help light a flame, but I need something to keep the flame fanned.
It's about the *effect* of NASA on who and what we are as a nation.
What we have been as a nation, perhaps for a while there took it for granted.

I see that the most powerful partical accellerators are in some other country, the fastest
trains are built by Germany and are running in China right now. I see our infrastructure collapsing.
No one dreaming about tomorrow, and everybody thinks they can put a band-aid on one problem or another.

The most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to
be doing and that's making dreams come true... and at a half a penny on a dollar...


How much would you pay for the universe?

[CessnaDriver]

Originally Posted by boondocksaint

how do we benefit from space travel. why would i care if there is water on mars.

And his testimony to congress.
Where is he wrong?


If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

— Antoine St. Exupery

Currently, NASA’s Mars science exploration budget is being decimated, we are not going back to the Moon, and plans for astronauts to visit Mars are delayed until the 2030s—on funding not yet allocated, overseen by a congress and president to be named later.

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, every few weeks an article, cover story, or headline would extol the “city of tomorrow,” the “home of tomorrow,” the “transportation of tomorrow.” Despite such optimism, that period was one of the gloomiest in U.S. history, with a level of unrest not seen since the Civil War. The Cold War threatened total annihilation, a hot war killed a hundred servicemen each week, the civil rights movement played out in daily confrontations, and multiple assassinations and urban riots poisoned the landscape.

The only people doing much dreaming back then were scientists, engineers, and technologists. Their visions of tomorrow derive from their formal training as discoverers. And what inspired them was America’s bold and visible investment on the space frontier.

Exploration of the unknown might not strike everyone as a priority. Yet audacious visions have the power to alter mind-states—to change assumptions of what is possible. When a nation permits itself to dream big, those dreams pervade its citizens’ ambitions. They energize the electorate. During the Apollo era, you didn’t need government programs to convince people that doing science and engineering was good for the country. It was self-evident. And even those not formally trained in technical fields embraced what those fields meant for the collective national future.

For a while there, the United States led the world in nearly every metric of economic strength that mattered. Scientific and technological innovation is the engine of economic growth—a pattern that has been especially true since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That’s the climate out of which the New York World’s Fair emerged, with its iconic Unisphere—displaying three rings—evoking the three orbits of John Glenn in his Friendship 7 capsule.

During this age of space exploration, any jobs that went overseas were the kind nobody wanted anyway. Those that stayed in this country were the consequence of persistent streams of innovation that could not be outsourced, because other nations could not compete at our level. In fact, most of the world’s nations stood awestruck by our accomplishments.

Let’s be honest with one another. We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us.

But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.

As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.

All these piecemeal symptoms that we see and feel—the nation is going broke, it’s mired in debt, we don’t have as many scientists, jobs are going overseas—are not isolated problems. They’re part of the absence of ambition that consumes you when you stop having dreams. Space is a multidimensional enterprise that taps the frontiers of many disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics, geology, atmospherics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. These classic subjects are the foundation of the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—and they are all represented in the NASA portfolio.

Epic space adventures plant seeds of economic growth, because doing what’s never been done before is intellectually seductive (whether deemed practical or not), and innovation follows, just as day follows night. When you innovate, you lead the world, you keep your jobs, and concerns over tariffs and trade imbalances evaporate. The call for this adventure would echo loudly across society and down the educational pipeline.

At what cost? The spending portfolio of the United States currently allocates fifty times as much money to social programs and education than it does to NASA. The 2008 bank bailout of $750 billion was greater than all the money NASA had received in its half-century history; two years’ U.S. military spending exceeds it as well. Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.

How much would you pay to “launch” our economy?

How much would you pay for the universe?

[boondocksaint]

Cant wait till Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong die and they confess on their death beds that it was all a hoax.

[CessnaDriver]

Originally Posted by boondocksaint

Cant wait till Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong die and they confess on their death beds that it was all a hoax.

[Spideristic]

"NASA is a colossal waste of time and money. Along with Russia, US would be wasting so much money on space research and on sending satellites into orbit"

Imagine someone suggesting the above and space research NEVER moving forward since the late 50s. Where would digital communication and rapid exchange of data be without satellites? Of course US and Russia were competing with each other and nobody would even realize the chain reaction of benefits space research and satellites would provide for the next several decades, they would be killing it before it evolved into bigger things.

Now let's pull back things little more further. What if sea explorers decided that they have too many problems and issues in their town/country and that they would rather wait until all those issues are taken care of? All those issues would have never been fully resolved and they would have missed out on better opportunities for generations to come. Where would the present America be without the ocean explorers?

We as human species are meant to explore. We explored the oceans centuries ago, it's time we start expanding our exploration to other planets. Even before we reach planets, other technological breakthroughs will take place in space research while making manned mission to mars possible.

Originally Posted by boondocksaint

how do we benefit from space travel. why would i care if there is water on mars.

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/.../benefits.html
Here are few examples.

http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2011/...ure_11_web.pdf
Also download this file which lists out more various ways NASA is benefiting society.