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Originally Posted by beach tribe:
I honestly feel that the vast majority of that money should be used to develop "warp drives", space time bending, worm hole generation, or what ever the hell the most promising theory is for solving the distance vs speed hurdle.
It will eventually be done, and all these rockets that have been sent on the furthermost missions will have been a complete waste because we will be able to get to the destination and back before the original mission even makes it there.
Perhaps most interestingly, $175 million of the budget has been set aside for the Europa Multi-Flyby Mission, a spacecraft that will be sent to Europa in the early 2020s, and the budget dictates that NASA must include a lander for the surface of this icy moon of Jupiter. "This mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept," it reads, reported Ars Technica.
A lander has been touted for the upcoming Europa mission before, but NASA has not been keen to firmly commit to anything yet, as there are many unknowns about undertaking such a landing. It remains to be seen how they'll go forward with this request.
Nonetheless, the large amount of funding essentially allows NASA to meet most of the other goals it has set itself. Crucially, they were given the $1.243 billion of funding for the Commercial Crew program that they have been pushing so hard for. Administrator Charlie Bolden recently told IFLScience that he counted this – getting SpaceX and Boeing’s manned spacecraft up and running – as one of the key goals of his time in office.
Hopefully the mission to send a lander to Europa goes through. We need to send long term stuff to Jupiter's moons. enough of the fly by stuff. There is so much to learn in Jupiter's system. I think there is a decent chance to find life on some of the moons. [Reply]
Originally Posted by beach tribe:
I honestly feel that the vast majority of that money should be used to develop "warp drives", space time bending, worm hole generation, or what ever the hell the most promising theory is for solving the distance vs speed hurdle.
It will eventually be done, and all these rockets that have been sent on the furthermost missions will have been a complete waste because we will be able to get to the destination and back before the original mission even makes it there.
A couple years ago, NASA and DHS unveiled a portable radar unit based on technology used to monitor spacecraft. This radar unit, though, would be used closer to home—to find people burried under rubble. In the first real-world demonstration of its use, the device helped save 4 men trapped under earthquake rubble in Nepal.
After the earthquake hit, rescuers in the village of Chautara got two prototype units of the device called FINDER, or Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response. The core of the device is a system that bounces microwaves around to “see.” Crucially, it can discern faint heartbeats and breaths in people buried under several feet of rubble.
In this case, FINDER was apparently able to detect the heartbeats of two men each in two different collapsed buildings. The men had been trapped for days, under as much as 10 feet of rubble.
The details of the rescues are otherwise scant, so it’s hard to say exactly what would have happened without FINDER. Still, it shows the FINDER works out in the field and not just in controlled test situations. We hear about the potential in new technologies all the time—with FINDER, some of that potential just became reality. [Reply]
