Armstrong to NASA: You're Embarrassing

The Final Frontier

Originally posted by liejunkie01
The space program is fine..........The problem(my own opinion here) seems to be that every president changes the agenda and cancelations are made after billions have been spent.......The director of Nasa has a hard time adjusting to the constant changes in the agenda..........Which programs to cancel and which to cut back......

As directed by the current sitting President, NASA's agenda is Muslim outreach.

That speaks for itself.

Someone forgot to tell Neil Armstrong about the NWO.
NASA Is going right along with it and the Spaceport America commercial space business.Free market enterprise to travel to space and come up with less expensive space travel. New World Order in full effect.

Originally posted by AGWskeptic
NASA has become bloated and very political.

It needs to be shut down or completely reorganized.

When 30 guys at an old desert airstrip can do what NASA does for pennies on the dollar and with a perfect safety record, you have a problem.

Like all government agencies once they reach a certain size they exist only to serve themselves.

Best thing i've read all year. Big ups to your comment mate.

Originally posted by buddha
They have had there day.
now Stop wasting money.
and let the privet companies do it.
for to much is spent on sciences.
look at the giant high speed rides!
Cern. only atoms get to ride it

yes they comp up with some weird stuff.
but the money would be better spend making the word work NOW.
Not in 50 years or more.
if they stopped wasting so much money on
War, space, science and other stuff.
we would have 80% less money spent. just a guess!
what is the point of having future technology.
when you have a society that is getting nothing Wright?
ever thing is rush't in far to quickly.
and ends up doing damage.
trillions are still being spent on space.
but its black ops now.
so the people get No benefits from it.

never mind, I see you suggest private companies. Well, that seems to be what POTUS is wanting, private companies pay the cost, so he can spend taxpayer dollars on health insurance and electronic health records. Yep that sounds about right.

Private companies already have all the high tech contracts and its been like that for decades. The USA government rather than doing the work itself, like the soviets and chineese did with various bureaus, outsourced everything to companies that specialise in black op programs.

That is were the trillions went. I guess I wouldn't have a problem with this if we had more transparency from everyone, but using tax payer dollars to accomplish dubious(and perhaps evil) goals scares me. I imagine it scares others too.

In america (and now everywhere) its all about profit, which is the opposite of socialism-to share resources.

What about the America`s `National Reconnaissance office`? Anyone ever heard of it? The US government secret space program.

reply to post by Maxmars


Is Armstrong selling a book?

Because while I'm sure he was a real good astronaut, he doesnt seem to know much about the budget issues at NASA, or much of the science they used to shoot him up to the moon.

Originally posted by JibbyJedi

"We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Armstrong told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

If that's true, what about this from last year?

NASA Signs New $335 Million Deal to Fly Astronauts on Russian Spaceships
www.space.com...

NASA has signed a new $335 million contract with Russia to buy six extra seats on Soyuz spacecraft to launch ?American and partner astronauts into space after the space shuttle fleet is retired, the space agency announced Tuesday.

The new deal allows NASA to pay the Russian Federal Space Agency for six round-trip rides to and from the International Space Station in 2013 and 2014. That averages to about $55.8 million per trip ? a slight increase from the $50 million NASA paid for seats on the Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft through 2012.

Umm, yeah. This is "Americans purchasing tickets on Russian Access" as opposed to "American Access" it seems to me.

Great now NASA is outsourcing. I hope they pay those cosmopolitans we send up with them more money.Russia doesnt have the best track record for their stuff obtaining successful orbit.

Private companies have been doing it-- Apollo, the Shuttle, the ISS. No one company has the ability or will to do it all-- but through NASA it has been done.

As for the "30 guys at a desert airstrip." That is a toy. As for SpaceX, it is not competing with NASA, it is contracting with NASA.

Gene Cernan's comments (at the same hearing as Neil Armstrong) were far more harsh-- and, I think, telling. From another article...

[Cernan] also characterized NASA's involvement with developing a heavy-lift launch system that could both enable exploration beyond Earth orbit and continue to service the ISS as "deceptive, inadequate, and to date non-productive."

The "deceptive, inadequate, and to date non-productive," is enigmatic to me.

Starting with Armstrong's "embarrassment" comment, then this...

Referring to 2010 NASA Authorization Act's approval for the development of a heavy-lift system, [Cernan] said: "Until this past week, NASA had continued to disregard, ignore, and flaunt the law and the mandate of the Congress while continuing to pursue its own agenda of disabling our nation's space program."

My read of it is as follows:

At the same time that they are both appalled that the Shuttle had not been extended, I thing Armstrong and Cernan are fuming about NASA’s stubborn attachment to Shuttle Derived booster technology.

Have I got the correct NASA position-- that driving NASA behavior is the Shuttle Derived technology, perhaps to save jobs by those experienced with it, or maybe an understandable cronyism on behalf of Shuttle contractors with whom they had good relations?

It appears that the recent announcement made by NASA that a design had been chosen for the SLS, had been more or less by threat of Senate members.

I'm thinking NASA was stalling on the decision to see if they could do better, budget wise, with the next Administration.

I am not sure what fixes this.

What is certain is that science and exploration is lucrative in the long term; but private company owners and shareholders do not invest in long terms gains-- especially if the gains are not their own (e.g., is SpaceX paying royalties to the private companies who went before them and did the initial rocket and capsule designs? No. So no one is going to pay SpaceX a generation from now, for any innovation they create).

So what gets launched, is only that with an immediate profit, UNLESS what gets launched is directed by NASA and funded, in large part, by taxpayers.

Putting stuff into orbit can be profitable, but what (and who) gets put into orbit and for what reason cannot be based on a profit margin-- and if we privatize-- it will be based only on that.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

Space race? With who? I thought that ended when the Soviet Union collapsed? And with Japan it doesn't seem to be a race, they are sending probes to the moon, that race to the moon is long over.

I meant in overall competition,the US surely will not stop,give up and allow every other country to hold any exclusivity or dominance for long I'd imagine.
I am one who believes that we have gone a lot further than just the moon though.

I know secret technology exists in black programs, but I don't know what it is, and neither do you, unless you are involved in it in which case you couldn't admit even if you did know.

Exactly,wish I did.

Originally posted by 2PLUS2IS22

 

 

I didn't write it, but was that post really "off-topic?" I took it to be making a point addressed before.

...President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

So someone translated an on-topic post into Arabic. It made me chuckle-- and I think I took it for what was intended.

With the recent problems related to the Russian launch there is a very real possibility that the crew of the ISS may have to abandon the station. If that happens the odds it will ever be used, or even still functional, again become slim.

It's a very sad state of affairs.

Originally posted by DiiTrOn
Great now NASA is outsourcing. I hope they pay those cosmopolitans we send up with them more money.Russia doesnt have the best track record for their stuff obtaining successful orbit.

NASA has always done outsourcing from the very beginning. ... ex Nazis, military fighter pilots, rockets and lunar landers, all outsourced. NASA assembles the parts.

They outsourced the recovery of space capsules to the US NAVY.

There is a big difference between NASA utilising private subcontractors for some jobs and COTS-like programs where the role of NASA is basically reduced just to pay a fixed sum of money for a completed service, without even owning the system. In the second case, bureaucracy, political bickering and cost overruns so typical for NASA are largely eliminated. The results are evident:

www.floridatoday.com...

I would like to thank everyone for their comments. I was interested in the different takes on the commentary provided in the article.

As one poster noted, Mr. Armstrong never said "You are an embarrassing." He said the position NASA finds ourselves in is.

I have to wonder how best to approach this topic because of the various positions stated herein. I suppose it's only fair that I begin with the more 'in your face' aspects of this....

A) "We never landed on the moon."

Frankly, I disagree. I think we did land on the moon. As to whether what was publicly disseminated was the complete "proof" is another matter.

I am not saying that the coverage we were shown was an accurate archive of the event; or that it conceals and or obfuscates nothing. Perhaps we did see a sanitized production to avoid inadvertent disclosure of information the cold-war mindset imposed upon the actors in the scenario. As far as I see there are legitimate indications that there is some level of secrecy remaining to this day over the events that transpired surrounding the program.

But I think it is clear that we did go. Why the theater? Because by the 1960's the military industrial complex was deep in monopolizing the technical capabilities of the government; and this trip represented potentially unforeseen opportunities that they had no intention of sharing; let alone owning up to.

As a result, it may be said that the seed of this "embarrassing" situation was sewn when secrecy became more important than fact. This may explain the upsurge in the agency operations' 'public' information control efforts.

B - "Let the private companies do it...." "They can do it more cheaply...." "They can do it better...."

With the shift towards corporate sponsored activity, any undesired information leakage can be controlled as the 'private property' of the company involved.... sort of as in situations with BP's Gulf oil spill, and TEPCOs Fukushima reactor crisis.... That should be enough to prompt any student of the conspiratorial to pause.for thought.

But more importantly, I would like to call attention to the ruling paradigm in government contracts (at least the time, if not now). The idea became first, that the most qualified and least expensive bidder got the contracts for these projects. In many cases the technology was wholly owned by a company that had no competition, so the prices were jacked up. Then it became the 'safest' technology available... which was another excuse to slap a "safety" label on things you sell to NASA indemnifying your firm, and as a result of the ostensible 'extra resources used to ensure safety' the price tags went up again. Now it is more akin to you pay whatever they want you too... as usual in these arguments we talk about things being 'cheaper' when in fact it is not 'cheaper' ... it's just priced better for a private company than it would for a government contract. Sort of like solar power cells... the price depends on the customer.... If its for the manufacturer's owners' home it's true cost is an order of magnitude lower than if you sell it for a government program.

In the end the cost is a construct used to influence who gets the work.

As far as them doing it better... that's all marketing. They will continue to say that until someone dies... and then they will simply excuse the tragedy as a 'cost of doing business.'

Thanks again everyone.

PS - As far as I can tell, Mr. Armstrong is not hawking any book or making any move to ignite a 'celebrity' status that he has always seemed to shun.

I will say, that if I had risked my life on untried and hastily developed technology to go to the moon (which was said to be simply "impossible" by some) I would have expected the agency that made it possible to have earned a place on the list of our national projects in perpetuity, barring some catastrophic mismanagement.... but in this case there has been no 'catastrophic' mismanagement... only what appears in my opinion to be the final stages of a plan to remove the public from anything having to do with space exploration... and leaving it instead to the new "first class" citizen of the USA... the corporate citizen.

reply to post by Maxmars


Excellent summary Maxmars. In my view there is *something up there* on the Moon. The national security apparattus and military industrial complex have been involved with this *something* for 50 years.

The Keepout Zones, the new Race to the Moon, ex-Major General Charles Bolden taking the helm of NASA...
These actions all coincide with the large fleet of foreign satellites scheduled to be launched toward the moon in the immediate near future, in the next months and years.

This fleet of foreign satellites represents a grave threat to US national security.... there is *something up there* which is so important that it needs to be protected and hidden from public view. The question I have is :
what is it?