What I find quite funny about that is that for America, it will take 25 years to get to the Mars. In the meanwhile, my home town has been building a new subway line for the last 25 years and it's still far from being operational.

You are Hungarian, right? ;)

I think the asteroid landing plan is a smart one over the Mars goal. I think we're more obsessed with Mars than is due -- asteroids offer a wealth of potential resources without the immense cost of dropping into and climbing out of a planetary gravity well. Even a landing on one of Mars' fake-moons would be a better choice than Mars itself. Assuming we don't inadvertently open up the gates to hell or something like that...

Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.

Yeah, gravity sucks, but I find a trip to Mars far more interesting than one to an asteroid, E.g. the geology, water resources, valles marineris, the potential for life, colonization. Why not be obsessed?

What’s great about those asteroid landings is that they are relatively easy and nevertheless exciting enough. Much more exciting than the ISS or anything happening in low earth orbit. I think that’s the most important purpose of manned spaceflight. Robots will be able to tell you pretty much everything about geology, water and the potential of life on Mars.

A robot cannot stand on the tallest volcano of the solar system and tell you how it felt.

Robots can tell a lot, but not everything. Exploring is not only knowing what's there, but actually experiencing it in human terms. The richness of the reports from astronauts on the Moon cannot be approached by what a robot can tell you. Also, a robot can only answer the questions it was designed to answer and, thus, it embodies, in its own construction, a series of assumptions about its target environment that may be completely off.

Humans are an extremely valuable resource.

I agree. The right strategy is to put humans on Mars. The right tactic is to now focus on achievable goals.

The goal is to put humans on Mars (and every other place). We must focus on what we need to learn to make that happen. Asteroids and the Moon seem good steps in that direction.

>Fake moons? Phobos and Deimos? Not sure how they are fake.

Clearly, they were just photoshopped in.

NASA has shown itself incapable of meeting deadlines or staying within budget on many projects, and Obama is right to turn access to Low Earth Orbit over to commercial companies (on fixed price contracts, not the normal cost plus contracts). We've been building the same boring "get us to orbit" rocket since the 1960s. Wouldn't NASA's leadership (doing science and developing technologies that private companies cannot afford) be better spent on LEO and out? The moon, asteroids, Mars, Phobos, etc.

This is a great plan. It's a Good Thing for the aerospace economy in the long run even if there's going to be some displacement in the meantime.

It also opens the door for entrepreneurial companies - building rockets, engines, payload integrators, whatever - to make money in a way previously not possible. It's impossible to make money when the government is competing with you. This is a great thing for entrepreneurs, scientists, researchers, and people everywhere. There's a better chance your kid will be struck by lightning than be a NASA astronaut, but now the door has opened and we'll see private astronaut corps pop up from a few different sources.

Get behind this plan, folks. It's a Good Thing and great for other entrepreneurs, even if we're not building web software. :)

I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone with nothing to fall back on in a crappy economy. This speech was meant to be encouraging to a broad constituency of a state Obama and the Democrats need for future elections.

As far as science goes, the better-faster-cheaper ethos NASA had with the Mars Rovers should be revived. Robots are a terrific way to get actual science done. That said, the lessons learned from building and working on the ISS would be a good starting point for creating a vehicle to take people to Mars - a place we can eventually make habitable (http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mfogg/zubrin.htm).

> I live in the Central Florida/Space Coast area, and there is a palpable fear that soon all these aerospace jobs will be gone

Those aren't jobs - they're welfare checks, taken from working Americans in return for very very very little of value.

I hope that the folks on the Space Coast are right. They can all go get real jobs (even if it's at Target), and the free market space industry can deliver for several orders of magnitude less.

I would much rather hand a "welfare" check to an aerospace engineer than an average Joe.

Also, if the free market space industry does pan out in our lifetimes, I think they would love to have these aerospace guys working for them even if they have such "little of value."

You know, I'm as hopeful about free market space flight as anyone, but as of now, there categorically isn't a free market space industry.

So you want faster-better-cheaper using COTS technologies but also want to keep the 1000s of pork-barrel in my state Nasa jobs ?

I don't see where tgerhard claimed that was a desirable outcome. I only see tgerhard reporting on the opinion others have from a position of knowledge.

I live in Michigan, half my family works for car companies one way or another, and I was and am still against the auto bailouts. Locally healthy for me, perhaps, but in my opinion still bad policy for the country. (My point not being that I want to debate that point, but that location does not have to dictate opinion.)

Sorry, wasn't meant personally - but you get the point. Q; How many states DON'T have a Nasa facility?

After 50+ years of pork barrel? I would bet on "none".

Perhaps saving planet earth and kick starting clean alternative energy will be what excites the current or near future generation. After that, outer space exploration will still beckon. I can only hope I'm around to watch.

It sure would be nice to have something to get our younger people excited about science. When my parents were kids it was the Apollo mission and astronauts, when I was a kid it was computers and the Internet. My younger sister doesn't get excited about either of those things anymore: why would she? She's been able to sit in front of a computer and video-chat with people across the country and world since she was able to walk.

Obama's plan seems to say "Your newborns might have the space program to be excited about ... when they're 18 years old."

There's a new space race going on right now. It's being done by private enterprise on budgets from $1M to $100M. Check out:

Armadillo Aerospace

XCOR Aerospace

Masten Space Systems

Unreasonable Rocket

Scaled Composites

SpaceX

Blue Origin

If you want to talk to rocketeers who are actually building hardware, today, check out the arocket mailing list.

We don't need another space race to a destination. We need to build space infrastructure.

It's the difference between trying to get from the east coast of the US to the west with one wagon train, versus building railways and towns. That first wagon might just make it, but it doesn't help the next wagon.

This new space race might as well be a soap box derby in comparison to our military's space budget. While 100M might seem like a lot of space bucks, our Air Force has a roughly $12 billion dollar space budget which dwarfs what we spend on NASA or any of these private space ventures.

I wouldn't worry about space spending, or space infrastructure when our AF is spending oodles to put weapons and craft into space.

I'm not so interested in the funding. I'm interested in results.

There are too many people in the space industry who can write a nice paper showing what they could do if only you gave them a billion dollars.

Obviously private space (beyond GEO) is going to be huge at some point. The problem is bootstrapping.

When you have a chicken and egg problem, the solution is to build some small cheap thing that works to demonstrate your competence and attract larger opportunities.

John Carmack's started his own space program on about $5M of his own money and 10 years of effort. How many people in the US buy homes for more than $5M? How many shitty web apps get more funding than that?

It's reusable - something the government hasn't been able to produce. There are a lot of applications - vertical takeoff and landing testbed, acceleration of Technology Readiness Levels, microgravity research, upper atmospheric research, heliophysic observation, etc. It's not a "space program," but vehicles like ours and John's have a very real market.

Actually, that's all you need to do all kinds of interesting sub-orbital work. They've been flying to much higher altitudes, recently.

There are a lot of subtleties in liquid-fuel rocket engines.

Simply getting them to ignite reliably and to re-start were seen as a Big Deal, only a few years ago.

After seeing how some Gov't contracts play out, I can see a private space project getting much further on far less money.

I work for Masten Space Systems. What we've done on $2M could not be done for less than $50-100M by the government. It's unfortunate but they have ridiculous amounts of overhead that companies our size just don't have.

Do you know any concise resource comparing current private space transportation businesses? I'd prefer reading one run-down article over investigating each company individually.

I've never understood why it's so important for humans to go to mars. We live on a planet where many people still endure tremendous suffering due to starvation, disease and war. In the next 50 years we will very likely have to begin large scale geo-engineering in order to mitigate climate change and ocean acidification. Prestige "science" like sending people to the moon and mars is a luxury.

I can't believe how insensitive you are. Do you know how many kids that computer you're using could feed? Sell that computer and buy orphan food. Right now. Otherwise you're Hitler.

Where do you stop? I spent 5 bucks on lunch today. Should I have not eaten because people are hungry? What about the computer and internet you typed this on? Should we have not invested in those and spent all the money on curing disease?

that would be great

cmon fellas, this is economics. maybe if you can mount a convincing hoax that Al Qaeda is trying to infiltrate Mars, we'll dump a few billion into it. Or maybe, more plausibly, if China decided to do increasingly elaborate manned-space flights, it might push us to follow suit.

Because what we all really want from our politicians is a focus on short-term bullshit that they can run the next campaign on.

You want to do anything in the long term, you have to do something in the short term first.

Such as prepare and set goals?

He's the President of the United States, not 'Dude'.

Lots of people gave their lives for people to be free to call their democratically elected leader "dude". Unless you're interacting with the president in a professional context, it shouldn't matter at all what you call him (barring certain epithets and "Hitler").

Obviously we shouldn't prosecute people who call the President Dude, but I do think that a level of respect is called for with all our Presidents.

It's a pet peeve of mine when people call President Bush 'King George' or other epithets, even if I do disagree with his policies.

How about "Your Dudeness" or "El Duderino", if you're not into the whole brevity thing? Petty namecalling is stupid, but "dude" is a sign of (modest) respect.

Seriously, as a foreigner I reckon that the office of the President of the United States needs to be taken down a few notches. I mean, I accept that the dude needs a private jet, but does it really have to be a 747 and called Air Force One? I accept that the dude needs a limo instead of driving himself around, but does it really need to be a custom-built limo? I accept that the guy can have a nice executive mansion, but does he really need his own seal, his own theme tune and a standing ovation every time he shows up to talk to Congress?

There's a difference between the need for more civil discourse and the need to address people by their titles. Uncivil discourse is unproductive, but I don't think "dude" is particularly uncivil. "King George" is.

Go over to Digg with drivel like this. You obviously dislike his policies but even when I disliked President Bush I still was respectful. Hacker News is a place for intelligent discussion and part of that is civilized discourse.

Your second sentence shows the depths of your ignorance of American politics. "this lame duck president" just passed a bill that liberals have been trying to pass for 30 years. Not exactly "in office but not in power". If you want to see what that looks like, see 2006-2008 of the Bush administration and their inability to pass ANYTHING.

I thought it was funny.