President put the brakes on the Moon/Mars adventure -Good- I see Al got his DSCOVR Satellite tho...

[bigtree]

The long and winding story of DSCOVR, the satellite proposed in 1998 by then-Vice President Al Gore and killed by the George W. Bush Administration, has taken a new turn. This week, President Barack Obama proposed launching the controversial satellite, which would send a craft a million miles away to sit between the sun and Earth.

The news that Obama wants to launch the craft was announced as part of the rollout of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) budget, though it received scant attention at the time.

DSCOVR sits in storage at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. While the Bush Administration officially terminated plans to launch the satellite in 2006, congressional appropriators instructed the agency to spend $14 million in 2009 and 2010 refurbishing the satellite.

NOAA says it wants to use the satellite to monitor space weather from the sun, which can disrupt electronics on Earth. It puts the cost to prepare the satellite and its instruments at $9.5 million for this year and a total of $65 million once the satellite is launched.

read more: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/02/noaa-wants-al-g.html

sounds ok

[Deep13]

1. More actual exploration and less yah-hoo. nt

[bigtree]

3. yep

I like this project. Sunspots have been more than a pain recently.

[Speck Tater]

2. My prediction: The human race will never again walk on the moon.

The space age is over, and by the time the desire to go into space returns, the resources won't be there to do it.

We are witnessing not just another collapsing civilization like the Roman Enpire, but the collapse of civilization itself.

[bigtree]

4. depends I think

. . . on whether the explorers want to put up their own money to pay for it (most of it). Most of the projects are either commercial or defense. I'm sure NASA can devise some bridge projects to leave the necessary infrastructure in place and viable until then.