{"id":13264,"date":"2012-01-27T09:30:51","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T14:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13264"},"modified":"2012-01-27T09:31:05","modified_gmt":"2012-01-27T14:31:05","slug":"nasa-moonbase-by-2020-not-likely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/27\/nasa-moonbase-by-2020-not-likely\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Moonbase by 2020: not likely"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m just as eager to see more manned exploration of the solar system as the next person, but Newt Gingrich’s announcement the other day is just so much moonshine<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The basic idea is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds. NASA in 2006 announced plans to set up a colony on the south pole of the moon, in around 2020, as a base for further manned exploration of the solar system.<\/p>\n

The problem for Gingrich, a space enthusiast with ideas dating back decades for zero-gravity honeymoons and lunar greenhouses, is that the 2008 financial crisis came along and turned feasible projects into pipe dreams.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lunar base by 2020 is a total fantasy,\u201d John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, told AFP.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got to the moon in the 1960s by spending over 4% of the federal budget on Apollo. NASA\u2019s now at one-tenth of that level.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The initial problem is both financial and organizational: for all the money being poured into NASA, each dollar is producing much less in the way of science and technology because of the calcified bureaucracy. NASA achieved great things during the Apollo program, but the bureausclerosis was setting in even before the first shuttle flew. To get the kind of results that the “old” NASA achieved, you’d have to blow it up and start from scratch — or better yet, privatize the whole shebang and get the bureaucracy out of the way of the entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

As Robert Zubrin pointed out in the February issue of Reason<\/em> magazine<\/a>, NASA has become far too concerned about safety — less out of genuine concern about the astronauts and other employees, but more because of the negative effects of bad PR on the next year’s budget. Under the current NASA management, none of the pre-shuttle launches would have been allowed because they were too dangerous (and we know how dangerous the shuttle was, in hindsight).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m just as eager to see more manned exploration of the solar system as the next person, but Newt Gingrich’s announcement the other day is just so much moonshine: The basic idea is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds. NASA in 2006 announced plans to set up a colony on the south pole of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16,44,15,13],"tags":[697,188,69,394],"class_list":["post-13264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-science","category-space-science","category-technology","category-usa","tag-budget","tag-electionwatch","tag-nasa","tag-privatization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3rW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13264"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13267,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13264\/revisions\/13267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}