Nibb31

International regulations. Companies that don't comply with mandatory guidelines get blacklisted. The EU publishes a list of airlines that are banned from operating in the EU: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/air/safety/air-ban/index_en.htm Also, when you purchase an airliner, you get a certain level of support from the manufacturer. It's hard to keep airworthiness without that support. If you don't follow the maintenance guidelines or the safety bulletins, you lose airworthiness and of course, insurance coverage. Without all the paperwork, you don't get all the administrative support that you need to fly a plane (atc, ground support, catering, airport access, flight plan filing, etc...).

That's because the media doesn't cover most of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Aviation_accidents_and_incidents_in_2014 Look at the same page for 2013 and 2011, and you'll see that 2014 had less crashes.

There's nothing to declassify. If there was a super-secret spy plane called Aurora, you wouldn't know about it.

Again "better" is meaningless. Better in what sense? They were both designed to do a job with their own requirements and successfully did it. Mercury had a launch escape tower and the astronauts had flight suits too. I wouldn't call that a superior design. High altitude ejection is risky business. And the risk of parachute failure still exists.

First, we know very little about Venus and its atmosphere. Much less than Mars even. We are pretty good at landing on a hard surface, but the atmosphere of Venus is far more difficult to predict because we simply don't have enough data. Before sending people there, we would need several campaigns of unmanned probes with modern sensors. If you want Venus science to catch up with Mars science, this would take decades. Second, deploying balloons from a high-speed, high altitude reentry vehicle is far from a trivial problem, and so is relaunching from a balloon. I don't think we even have the technology to do it on Earth, let alone on an alien planet with unpredictable atmospheric conditions. These techniques would require a lot of development and testing, including several campaigns of unmanned precursor missions to validate the deployment and return techniques before we could commit to send people there. The idea that we could go to Venus before we go to Mars is delusional. It would take much more time to develop the techniques and the knowledge to do it confidently.

I wouldn't call it a failure with 73 successful launches under its belt, and over 100 GTO payloads deployed. It has been pretty much leading the GTO launch market since 1996. Launching 2 payloads on each flight brings the cost down significantly, hence it is more efficient. That efficiency comes at the price of flexibility, a delay on one payload affects the other, and you need at least two payloads to be ready at the same time, which causes some customers to have to wait for a slot.

Mercury-Atlas was a pretty good demonstration of how small you could make a single-seat orbital spacecraft. The Atlas rocket was pretty small and nearly SSTO.

That's not how the Government works. The US Government didn't buy Saturn. It funded NASA to go to the Moon for Cold War propaganda and NASA built the Saturn 1B and Saturn V for that purpose. Military space goals were assigned to the USAF on separate funds.

NASA had the civilian space program, with peaceful goals. USAF had the military program. It was essential for Cold War propaganda that the two were kept separate. NASA paid for Saturn as part of the Apollo program. The USAF had no part in it and paid for Titan and Gemini B and MOL. The Lunex and Horizon project were *paper studies* that were never funded. Just because the reports exist doesn't mean that there was any interest from high-ranking officials. These projects were dead and buried by 1963.

Saturn was NASA's rocket. It was fully funded, developed, and built by NASA contractors in NASA factories (including NASA Michoud in Louisiana) and launched from NASA launch pads. The USAF had Titan, with its own supply chain and launch facilities. If Saturn had any military purpose, it would have been joint-funded by the USAF like the Shuttle was. The idea of lunar warfare was abandoned way before the 1970's. The Lunex or Horizon projects that you quoted was a USAF project that really didn't get far and was cancelled well before Apollo got rolling or the Saturn 1B even flew. By that time, the USAF was concentrating on LEO projects, including Blue Gemini, Gemini B and MOL. The USAF had no interest in the Moon. Apollo was a civilian project that had nothing to do with the USAF. Its specific purpose was to demonstrate American supremacy *peacefully* in the context of the Cold War. Attaching military goals to it would have been counter-productive, which is why NASA was created in the first place.

No it isn't. But have you are so determined to put words in my mouth that you might as well have it your way if that's what you really want.

People vote for jobs, taxes, guns, healthcare, education, security, and all sorts of down-to-earth things. Whether a congressperson chooses to fund Mars, Venus, the Moon, or ARM as a destination for NASA is way down in the list of things that people vote for. Especially when most representatives don't have any particular view on the subject and are more interested in trashing their opponent and following the party line. Does your representative publicize his stance on NASA policy in his programme? Typically, only representatives who have NASA centers or space industry in their constituency have any interest in space policy. That handful of representatives defines the party line, the others follow. The vote of the general public is pretty much irrelevant at that level.

That's the point. Nobody said "let's build the biggest city of Antiquity". Rome evolved incrementally over centuries to suit the gradual demands of an increasing population. That's what the proverb means.

The foreseeable future is something like the next 20 or 30 years. Not 20000. There is no point in discussing stuff that might or might not happen beyond 20 or 30 years, because we have no idea what sort of world we will be living in by then. You're just being obtuse here.

Your point is moot because we are not sending sentient AI probes to evolve freely throughout the galaxy anytime in this century.

No, it's like saying you won't go to the gym until you learn to walk. We can barely crawl. And who is talking about postponing anything? I'm talking about using the best learning tools we can afford today within the budgets that we have available today.

Who talked about "giving up the rest of the universe" ? You are using strawman arguments again. The "universe" is a big place, and it's not going anywhere, so there is no hurry. What difference does it make if we go interstellar in 200, 2000, or 20000 years? You and I won't be around to see it either way, and civilization itself will be very different by then. The point is, we are not ready yet. Humanity will get there if we need to and when the time comes. Concretely, when talking about the universe, you are talking about intergalactic travel, which is something that is unimaginable when we are barely capable of sending unmanned interplanetary probes and interstellar travel is pretty much out of reach. If we still exist as a recognizable human species in 2000 years, then maybe we will want to spread out into our galaxy, but seriously, at this stage, it's pure fantasy. May I remind you that this thread is about NASA's 2015 budget, not human colonization of Fomalhaut and Alpha Centauri, or Star Trek.

The sexiest airliner on the market IMO, the first A350 was delivered yesterday:

I like the common core design. A great way to keep costs down. With modern construction techniques, part standardization, lower infrastructure costs and low workforce costs, they have a chance of remaining competitive against the other players.

Most kids learn pretty early in life that they cannot get everything they want. To want something doesn't mean you will get it. Just wanting something more doesn't provide justification for other people to pay for it. There are a lot of things that I want, but for which I can't formulate a rational justification, therefore I'm not getting them. That's life, and it sucks, but I can get over it. The flags and footprints expression was colloquial. However, cloud colonies or space hotels simply aren't realistically possible today. Nobody is seriously planning them (and yes, I am aware of Elon Musk's twitter feed). So let's focus on what is possible and the decisions that we need to make today: sustainable infrastructure, semi permanent outposts, science stations, and exploration.

No. NASA's budget is voted by Congress. Congress votes NASA's budget based on how many jobs it will create/maintain in their state. The PR is secondary, as an attempt to prove to the public after the fact that the money was well spent, but that has very little impact on where the money gets assigned by congress. Proof is SLS and Orion: These programs are supported by Congress because they create jobs in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, and a couple of other states. Congress doesn't care where these rockets are going or what they are going to launch. All they are interested in is that the money that the Government gives NASA trickles down into their states. NASA is currently doing a lot of PR about Mars or the ARM to justify SLS/Orion, but none of those missions are funded because Congress only cares about the jobs. The public opinion has very little bearing on NASA spending. If anything, the public is uneducated and either doesn't care or wants the Government to spend less on NASA. Just read the comments on Youtube or Google+. Also, NASA doesn't get to decide where it spends the money. Congress assigns budgets to various programs. Which is why NASA gets so much more money for SLS/Orion than it does for Commercial Crew, although the Commercial Crew program is much more urgent because the ISS is ending in 2024.

You don't get it, do you? I want flags and footprints and space hotels on Europa as much as anybody else in this forum. The problem is that what any of us "wants" is irrelevant. The point is that there is no rational justification for manned exploration in the foreseeable future. And I have no interest in discussing manned travel to Alpha Centauri, Mars colonies, or stuff that might happen in 2 or 300 years. The world, and even humanity, was completely different 200 years ago. Speculations about the future are going to be as laughable then as Flash Gordon and Meliès's Man in the Moon are to us now. We can't even start to comprehend what humanity's aspirations, dreams or motivations will be in 200 years, so making assumptions is pointless.

NASA is not an entertainment company. The PR is secondary, and you can put PR spin on any kind of mission. NASA's job is to advance space science and technology. "Getting the public interested" is not part of its mandate. It needs money, but the money comes from Congress, not the public. Members of Congress are not elected on their space policy, they are elected on their political label and the electoral promises. People are not more "inspired" by Mars or Venus than by the Moon. They are inspired by jobs, taxes, JayZ and Rihanna, and the latest smartphone. Most of them don't know that the ISS exists and think that NASA sucks up 25% of the US budget. Space exploration is way down on the average public's list, and swapping destinations between the Moon, Mars or an asteroid hardly even registers. The best way to advance space science and technology is to select goals that are achievable, and achieve them. It isn't to distill PR spin on Mars and Venus when everybody knows that those goals are out of reach.

You're the one constructing strawman silliness about artificial sentient beings. I'm merely talking about reducing the communication loop by using space probes that are slightly smarter than the ones we have. For example, instead of beaming back terabytes of data, analyse the data on-site to detect and extract specific patterns and transmit that particular data at a higher resolution or with a higher priority. Or instead of micromanaging each wheel motor from mission control, just input a set of coordinates and let the rover figure out how to get there. That's hardly creating a master race of robot overlords.

Another strawman. Robots and probes are not "them". They are "us". They are the tools that we use to explore places where we can't go and to see stuff that we can't see, because we have biological limits. We have always used tools to improve our limited capabilities. A space probe is no different. We use robots regularly to repair deep-sea pipelines, to inspect nuclear reactors, or to fly over enemy territory. Do you suggest that we should send people to those places too, just because it's more adventurous?