NASA is currently spinning its wheels, spending much while accomplishing little. If I got to divvy up NASA's 14.2 billion dollar annual budget (2001) (which is about 2/3 of 1% of the total annual U.S. budget), here's what I'd do: (I'd be thrilled to see any two of the top three) #1) 3 bil: Initiate a manned mission to Mars. This money would have to be allocated for over a decade. First launch in 2007, landings in 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. Mars would put the thrill back into NASA, and allow us to search for life there, as well as scout for eventual human occupation (water, etc.). #2) 1 bil: Start actual R&D with tethers. I'd love to put a small one around Earth (say, 700 KG), then launch a 700KG tether to the Moon, then they could start playing catch with a 30KG "ball". We'd learn a ton from a year's worth of experiments like this. After playing catch for a while, we could even practice soft-landing the 30KG ball on the Moon & picking it up again. The round-trip time for the ball would be about a week (I think... I haven't done the math on this one yet) - so the two tethers could even exchange multiple balls in a cosmic juggle! We would also need to practice tossing a payload from the end of the tether to the central tether mass. More poop #3) 500 mil: Run a human artificial-gravity experiment on the ISS. Hey, this would actually result in something useful coming from the ISS! We talk about how easy it would be - on paper - to generate artificial gravity by spinning something. I'd like to see it tried in practice. Send up a hab module and a equal counterweight (or maybe 2 habs), separate them with 170 meters of rope, and set them spinning about their C.M. at 2 RPM. This will generate an acceleration in the hab module roughly equal to 1 Mars gravity. How well does the human body tolerate this? Is this sufficient to prevent some of the zero-g bone-density loss we see? What does extended exposure to this g do to the body? Is 2RPM too high? Should we use a longer tether / slower rotation? Knowing the theory is one thing, getting some Actual Hands-On Experience is quite another. If there are problems, best to find out here, rather than on Mars! #4: Continue Cassini, the probe to Mercury, and the Pluto Express. #5: Whatever is left over: Anything! If we were actually doing the first three things mentioned above, I'd have no cause for complaint. Continue some existing programs, probe missions, etc. Keep Hubble, and keep the NGT. Give the ISS as a gift to the rest of the world & focus on Solar System exploration. Scrap the shuttle, and post a prize for shuttle ability: Let it be known that NASA will pay 70 mil for a flight to LEO, up to 20 times a year. Any number of companies would jump at that, and it would be a bargain for NASA as well. (update 5/3/02) And - unfortunately, NASA is still intent on pissing money away on SLI, the space launch initiative. Check www.space.com for more info. The problem is that NASA should not be in the loop for the design... they should just make the market. They could say something like "We'll contract to pay 70 mil for each of 10 - 20 launches to LEO of 50 tonne capacity - and stand back and let private industry do its job. NASA should be involved only as a safety audit of the result, and they should pay after a successful trip. Now, the DoD reps from the major aerospace firms (and, more importantly, their lobbyists in Washington) wouldn't want that to happen... so maybe if we started with a tiny mission, one beneath their notice - say, 10 to 20 million USD - it could be a good first step. (update 7/27/02) Another thing we should start focusing on is asteroid detection and deflection. We're not bad on the detection side; it would be extremely unlikely for anything 1/2 km in diameter or larger to get close without our knowing it. But even a half-kilometer rock hitting in the "right" place (unlikely, but possible) could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people. And, it would be nice to detect them well in advance of them hitting us... you know that hunk of rock that we recently thought could hit us in 2019? Turns out it'll miss, but even if we found it would hit, we have the time to do something about it. The real concern is finding one that'll hit in, say, 3 weeks. All we could try to do is evacuate the impact area. So - we need to experiment with deflection techniques. It would be nice to find an asteroid that can't hit Earth for (say) 1000 years, and can't be perturbed into an orbit that can hit Earth via our experiment. Send a mission to the asteroid, paint the asteroid white, and put a couple of nuclear bombs on the surface. Now, we could watch it for a few months to ensure the changed albedo subtly changes the orbit the way we think it should, then we could detonate the bombs, and again, see if practice matches theory. The remainder of this page consists of various notes in a similar vein as the above, from the first rough draft of these ideas. I kept them here because... I haven't deleted them yet! If I were king, we would stop pISSing money away on the International Space Station. Let me rephrase this: If I were king, we would have never started pISSing money away on the ISS. Now that we have already pISSed away a fair amount, it is harder to say what should be done. Building the ISS is the logical equivalent of building a truck stop before trucks were invented. It will serve very little useful purpose (LEO refueling? Shaa! Zero-gee effects on humans? Been there, done that. In-space spacecraft assembly? Completely useless.), but it will suck up time, resources, and public attention away from doing things that would really matter. 13.6 billion (NASA's annual budget) really isn't all that much...we need to focus on things that have an impact. In fact, we need to focus on space exploration. You would think this would be NASA's primary goal, but sadly, it isn't. See, that's the whole problem with the ISS... we spend tens of billions of dollars to build a worthless truck stop, and then we spend tens of billions more to *go* there, and all the while we're ignoring the rest of the universe. Let's return to the Moon! Let's send a 2-man trip to an Earth-crossing asteroid! Let's go to Mars! And, for those of you who think I'm too much of a manned-mission bigot (which I am), ok, let's fling some probes out there. Send a balloon to Mars, send a probe to Europa, send another to Pluto, put a probe in orbit around Mercury [these latter two, we appear to actually be doing]. The first goal is to explore, deciding on what flavor of exploration (manned vs. unmanned) is just a detail.   If I were king, here is what NASA would be working on, in this order: 1) Rocket technology. It's 2001 as I type this, and we're still farting around (methane is involved, anyway) with the same rocket technology that got us to the Moon in the '60s. Actually, that's not true, we don't have the capability today to get as much mass up to (say) low-Earth orbit as we did with the Saturn V in the '60s. This is pathetic. This is the reason that Cassini needs 3 inner-solar-system gravitational boosts (Venus once and Earth twice) and 4 additional years to get to Saturn, rather than just going there like a Real Probe. We're still playing with chemical rocket propellants (not far from Estes rockets) rather than trying to push the state of the art. Why? Two reasons spring immediately to mind: We don't have a clear need to advance rocket technology due to our stagnating exploration policy. Second, the public is so scared of the word "nuclear" it makes me want to throw up. Did you know that in the early '60s we had designed, tested, and demonstrated a viable nuclear rocket that was twice as powerful (as measured by Isp) as anything we have had since? Check out NERVA - do you suppose that with '90s technology we could do better today? The "new" Ion Drive that Nasa is currently testing is promising, especially since the word "nuclear" is not used to describe it. Although, even with this technology, we would still lift off from Earth with a chemical rocket. My new transportation favorite is tethers. Tethers are low-tech, (almost) rocket and propellant-free, and allow movement around the inner solar system at least as quickly as rockets could, for far less cost and infrastructure. It's a beautiful solution to the energy-transfer problem, using the orbital kinetic energy of the Earth to launch payloads. Tethers can be incrementally built, incrementally deployed, tested repeatedly prior to actual use, and allow scalable exploration of the inner solar system. The Earth tether can even throw the Moon tether to the Moon, or the Mars tether to Mars. 2) Manned exploration of Mars. This should really be #1, but for the fact that we're so behind on rocket technology. It surprises many to learn that we could send a manned mission to Mars with today's technology, safely and relativly cheaply. No, we don't need advances in rocket technology to do it, but if they happened, a Mars Mission could certainly take advantage of them. The best place to start is Robert Zubrin's compelling book The Case For Mars. NASA could initiate manned exploration of Mars if it committed about 20% of its current annual budget for 10-15 years. I'd actually settle for manned exploration of just about anything, instead of piddling around in low-Earth orbit. How far up is LEO... like a few hundred miles? This means that for almost 30 years (as I type this), no human has even been 1000 miles away from Earth. 3) Continued probe exploration of the Solar System. Is there life on Europa? Titan? Does Pluto actually have an atmosphere during part of its orbit? 4) Asteroid mining. It is not as futuristic as you might think. I'd like to start by crash-landing a small iron asteroid on the Moon.