SPACE.com -- NASA Begins Hunt for New Astronauts
With the manned space program ramping up yet again after an extended slowdown, with money flowing to return to the moon and beyond, with bizarre love triangles and cross-country diaper drives, NASA wants YOU. OK, probably not you. It's always a game of long odds, and a lot of very talented people will sacrifice everything for the chance to go into space.
I've seriously considered it and have an excellent background. One of my old college professors is now a NASA Mission Specialist. But I finally decided it's not for me. Astronauts are talented, dedicated people, yes, very much so. They're also rigorously trained technicians who practice the same tasks over and over and over for up to two years before a mission. It's exciting in the end, if they manage to score a flight, but it's not the way I want to spend my career. I'll have a better chance to go into space by making money and waiting for the tourism in a decade or two.
I like manned spaceflight and think we should have a manned presence in space.
What of the ranting? Oh, yeah.
SPACE.com -- Nobel Laureate Disses NASA's Manned Spaceflight
I've met Weinberg. He was a physics professor at Texas while I was an astronomy graduate student there. We both went to the weekly "Astrophysics Lunch" semi-regularly (my buddy swiped his doodle-covered napkin once as a souvenir) and we shared an elevator a few times (once with two young co-eds prattling on about how physics was easy but calculus was hard).
And I agree with him here. Totally. The current situation is messed up and hurting science. The spin of the linked article is dissing the manned space program, but read carefully Weinberg's statements. The real problem is that NASA is asked to do both space science and manned space programs, given a budget increase of say 5%, and then mandated to increase spending on the manned program by much more than 5%.
The effect is that the current administration/Congress making up and approving budgets is cutting space science for astronauts. Why? Because they all got lumped together at some point. I don't think Weinberg is any more against humans in space than I am, but he is if it takes away from space science. And under the current funding system, it is.
And in the interest of full disclosure, the majority of my funding comes from NASA's office of space science, and it funds my Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. The program that funds me, specifically, is the Long-Term Space Astrophysics (LTSA) program, which has highly desirable five-year grants and permits serious sustained effort on big questions. Back when I was awarded mine, proposals were solicited and awarded every year. The year after I got mine, things changed. It's now a year-to-year thing, and most years the program is not funded. Because we're going back to the moon, and beyond. Maybe.