The question is then: why doesn't some private company do it? The answer, of course, is that there is no obvious profit in it.

And I ask, again, to all the "private industry could do it better and cheaper" types, how does this jive with the fact that the much of the work done in the space program now is contracted out to private industry, which sees fit to deliver over-priced products that often do not meet the promised specs.?

Oh well, I guess it is just a lot of fun to rail against government programs.

"Dad, I need another hundred dollars for this water purifier."

"YHour projects are costing us a whole lot… we dont need a water purifier… we have city water."

"But dad, if I can't get that money for the purifier, how will I ever make enough for the funeral for Sparky?"

"What?"

Just because NASA has been right on time in the past, it does not mean they can ride that achievement and bankrupt the future of space exploration. What they need up there is someone busting chops with a chop busting stick. Maybe if they'd ever FIRE anyone…

Do you have any idea how many government employees there are worikng for NASA or some government contractor that do ABSOLUTELY Nothing? You have any idea how many people are paid by that organization to come in to work every day and spin on their thumbs up their rear ends?

Come on… its not like its taking some kind of rocket scientist to figure out where the money is going. NASA doesn't fire ANYONE… How many useless engineers are working there? How many physicists work there who actually believe that NASA would fail without them, and how many of them do less work in a day than, oh I don't know, say… a really lazy factory employee who's job is guaranteed by a union who has their company over a barrel that is relying on the US government to keep them in business?

Fire them all.

Its not like NASA wouldn't have their pick of the brightest minds in the world to work for them. But before you can heal, you have to cut away the gangrene.

Somebody somewhere needs to grow some balls.

Some estimates suggest that $3 billion could put a man on Mars (using a private company), of course to NASA this would be more like $30 to $300 billion.

Bloated Administration, Bloated World.

That one shining spot is inevitability what certain types of people think should be done away with. Overly-ambitious space travel? Where? I'm an old coot that remembers the Soviet Sputnik like it was yesterday.

The space exploration plans in the 1960's – 70's was 1) A base on the Moon by the late 70's. 2) Manned landings on Mars by the Mid 80's. 3) Manned exploration of the Moons of the giant planets by the late 80's, into the 90's. And 4) tourism by 'regular' people by at least the year 2,000.

Now *that* might be said to be 'overly-ambitious', but the point is, we haven't even come *close* to keeping to that schedule.

Why? Too tough for us? NO! We landed on the Moon several times, even though there are those fools who would deny it. We did it with computers that, compared to those today, were dinosaurs. We did it with machines and technology that literally had to be built from the ground up, and with test pilot astronauts that had "The Right Stuff."

What's going on today in NASA is the same thing going on in this sorry society – greed ,corruption, ineptness, not an overly-ambitious space program, but a space program that is not ambitious enough. It's a failure of nerve.

I guess it's much more fun to blow things up than to "Boldy go where no Man has gone before." I have a hunch, at least as far as this country goes, the "Columbus stay home" crowd is going to win. And if they do, I will say congratulations to the Asians, because the Solar System will be theirs, while we crawl around on this mud-ball, eternally trying to "fix" our problems.

Let the Asians waste money and lives? Are we really so arrogant as to think someone else couldn't do it better? Let them! Let the Chinese Moon shine down on what was once a great country called The United States…

Point taken, it would be difficult to fetch pebble afterwards amongst the several similar looking pebbles. But there's usually bigger objects, that you can use as a coarse waypoints. The trick is to drive the second rover to the first rover's track, after that you follow the track and keep comparing navigational images. For a map, I was more thinking about this: (hopefully link works…) http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasaNAS~4~4~10405~112348:Rover-Tracks-Seen-from-Orbit You can see rover's track, other hw and several craters for guidance. I approached this as an orienteering problem, as one of my summertime hobbies is orienteering.

But (a big but) landing within reasonable driving distance of the previous tracks would be a really really great challenge…. And because of that I think, there's no point using MSL to assist possible later sample return missions.

Therefore, let's scrap the prestige-seeking, politically motivated Orion program right now. What is a "deathtrap" is not the shuttle in particular, but all overly-ambitious space travel in general. The Asians will surpass us? Let them waste untold lives and money on a race back to our hostile, desert moon (talk about a death trap). We can no longer afford the fairy-tale lifestyle, based on the unsustainable affluence, of forty years ago. Time for all of us to come back down to Earth for a while.

All right, assume that only 1 in 3 pay taxes. Sure, I'll spend that $20 dollars over a 10 year period.

Cost of the Iraq war per month?

This isn't to say projects should not be run properly and costs controlled, but lets get some perspective here, folks!

So while still in 2008, 2009, 2010 … NASA should meet the requirements of a global crisis. NASA is not a sheik of Abu Dhabi, one who will survive this period even without noticing.

Nasa has to build everything from scratch, ground zero – trial and error and sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. If we had never built the shuttle program we would probably still be contemplating it and building it in the future.

As far as cost/budget overruns – id say thats less of a nasa problem and more a fact of space exploration. Comparing budget & costs today to 40 years ago is comparing apples to oranges. The money is less, the demand is more and the risk is ever increasing as we push the boundaries.

I'm proud of Nasa. I'm not a big fan of commoditizing space for profits but maybe one day i'll be proven wrong.

After all, it was the initial commoditizing of nasa launches that led to the shuttle disasters in the first place. If it wasn't a shuttle it would have been whatever launch vehicle was in place at that point in time.

He is just as guilty about the overbudgeting of MSL as anyone else, because Stern hoped to make an even bigger name for himself now that his precious New Horizons is off to Pluto and won't do anything newsworthy (meaning get Stern's name in the public spotlight) until 2015.

Stern is an egoboy just like Sagan was. Now we get to hear him snipe from the sidelines in an effort to stay in the limelight.

When NASA's budget is cut and MSL stays in a warehouse on Earth, be sure to include Stern's name in the list of people who will essentially hand space over to Asia.

As a long time subcontractor employee of NASA programs, we all had a "good laugh" when it was declaired that we could go back to the moon on budget. Of course it meant building a new rocket (oh, boy, oh, boy — new toy), even though a we have SpaceX hard at work on building a private fleet of rockets, two powerful unmanned rockets that were not seriously studied for manned capability for Constellation (and the US has a history of upgrading rockets for manned flight (Mercury and Gemini programs for example), and a stack based on the current Shuttle configuration called Direct Launcher. In fact, to show how arrogance overshadows common sense, NASA just completed another study of Direct Launcher, claiming it was unsuitable for launch — but wait, we've been using the basic configuration for close to 30 years…

The tumor of this whole mess is Mike Griffin. He and the "lame turkey" in the White House announced in 2004 that they were ending the careers of around 6400 Americans with the retirement of Shuttle. Most people out of loyality to the program are choosing to stay. However instead of cheering on the folks who stay out of love and pride in space flight, Griffin keeping referring to the vehicle as a deathtrap. Way to keep the troops motivated and to fly out the rest of the program!!! Will somebody please remove this turmor?

A great deal of research leads nowhere. The more speculative the research, the less likely it is ever to get anywhere. The easy option is to can any project that seems unlikely to succeed. However, if you see the fraction of medical research that actually ends in a marketed drug, you might can the lot of it on that basis. The art is to prune projects hard and early – find out where the major uncertainties lie, and how cheaply can the uncertainty be reduced. In the case of the bag on the rover, unless you have some plan to go and collect the thing, then it will have no use. If there was a case for it, then there should also have been practical plans to recover it. But to have gone and made the thing without having made the case for it is definitely not right.

This is not to say you always have to have a full case. Managing research requires agile thinking. If it was some new sort of instrument that might be able to be used in all sorts of ways, then there might be a case for making one anyway and seeing how it goes. But a bag? Is there a high frontier for curring edge bag science?

Get well soon NASA. If the banks haven't got it all, that is.

I didn't see Stern come up with any brilliant ways to improve a change management systsem which would have helped. If he did this and would have killed just one program in the final phases due to overrun (and put up with a couple of congressmen chewing his ear off), he probably would have had scientists fall back in line.
For him to sit back and be publicly critical when he has/had no solutions is rediculous… and displays a total lack of credibility.

Anyone who wants to send something to space must follow the STD NASA Bible.

Imagine the savings!!!

But, what happens to you know…… the "The Better Mouse Trap" idea????

Okay, here is the map:

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/hirise-extra-findbig.jpg

I guess, an "X" here will mark the place of a pebble as would a lighthouse mark a pebble on the beach of France.

Let's make a selftest:

Find a place around where the ground is covered with pebbles.
Select on of the pebbles.
Take a photo of the location of that pebble.
Go home.
Come back.
Try to find the pebble again.

You can't? Do you think that the sensors of a return vehicle will do a better job?

Well, Scheich Mansour bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi offered a transfer fee of € 75 million for the goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon and a guaranteed yearly income of € 15 million for five years, while human race suffered a loss of $ 35 trillion due to the financial crisis. And in particular, the damage to public transportation in town is € 13 million each year (looks like this:

http://www.fotos-berlin24.de/data/media/17/Berlin-randale1.jpg

the "white powder on the ground once was glass)

That is one of the primary redeeming factors in private enterprise. If you do not deliver, you are finished and the space is then available for another group to succeed.

But in government, no one ever fails completely, only the funding gets ramped up and a "good" manager knows how to dodge the reality of their mistakes.

The solution? Take a leaf out of The National Science Foundation's way of doing things and break down all input into much smaller operations where each part has to be justified and managed.

Micheal Griffiths was supposed to have taken command. He has very clearly not taken command. No competent senior manager would ever be seen with this sort of thing going on under their "leadership".

But now, things are going to get much worse. The funding for anything within the US government is going to get much worse as the full reality of the credit crunch delivers reality. So perhaps the credit crunch will prove the best thing for NASA and it will be forced into receivership and a new way forward can be found where real, professional management can deliver……

Taking the storage box off of the MSL was not a bad thing – after all, it did show a modicum of cost cutting. I'll take any step in that direction, no matter how small.

To those who think that we should explore space "at any price", you must realize that this government (or more accurately, its people) do not have infinite resources to throw at it.

Failing to manage these funds will, in the long run, do more damage to NASA than holding the line. Eventually, the Congress will be the ones to "take the bull by the horns" and tighten the budget. I'd rather leave those decisions to the folks at NASA. If they want to keep that responsibility, then they should do a better job of managing what they have.

hm … good question. Next question?