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Fund NASA CP Answers

2AC — Links to Politics

Links to politics – funding for the Mars mission was unpopular


Palmer 17 (Coburn; currently An experienced journalist who has written national, state and local news for eight different news outlets, graduated with a bachelors in Journalism from San Francisco University; “Congress Doesn’t Want To Pay For NASA’s Moon Mission”; http://www.inquisitr.com/3995517/congress-doesnt-want-to-pay-for-nasas-moon-mission/; published 2/19/17; accessed 7/21/17) [TG]

Congress has set NASA the goal of a manned Mars mission, but the space agency will need to first practice with a trip to the moon and that costs money the government doesn’t want to pay. During the height of the space race with the former Soviet Union, the United States spent about 4 percent of the national budget on NASA, but now the agency is rationed to a mere 0.5 percent. That kind of funding makes deep space exploration really hard, which is why the House Scientific Committee hosted a committee hearing this week to discuss the agency’s long-term plans. Several experts, including two former Apollo astronauts, told the Congressional committee the space agency needed more money, but lawmakers didn’t want to hear it. NASA has been working on building the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft, both designed for long haul deep space missions, since 2004, but needs additional funding to fly astronauts in the spacecraft. The space agency has no budget to take advantage of the spacecraft once it’s completed, as Tom Stafford, a four-time astronaut who commanded the Apollo 10 told Congress, according to an Ars Technica report. “We certainly need the SLS, but equally we need a space program designed to make good use of it.” That may be one reason NASA’s acting administrator Robert Lightfoot circulated a memo this week asking agency employees to brainstorm ways to put astronauts on the first SLS test flight to lunar orbit, according to Time. “I know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date. That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space.” Many of the problems associated with human space flight center around a proper budget and that’s something NASA has been struggling with since the mid-1970’s. During the Congressional hearing this week Tom Young, a past director of Goddard Spaceflight Center, told representatives that if they continue to fund NASA with mere 0.5 percent of the budget they’d be disappointed with the results, according to Ars Technica.

Specifically for earth science republican congress hates increasing funding – climate skepticism


Berger 16 (Eric; Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to wonky NASA policy. Eric has an astronomy degree from the University of Texas and a master's in journalism from the University of Missouri. He previously worked at the Houston Chronicle for 17 years, where the paper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 for his coverage of Hurricane Ike; “NASA budget proposal widens divide between White House and Congress”; https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/nasa-budget-proposal-widens-divide-between-white-house-and-congress/; published 2/9/16; accessed 7/21/17) [TG]

As they did during the 2016 budget cycle, the White House and Congress will likely clash again over funding for Earth science. The President won that battle last year, ultimately gaining a budget line of $1.92 billion for Earth science research, just $20 million less than his original request. Initial budget proposals from the House and Senate had slashed as much as $500 million from the President's request. Republicans outraged over NASA earth science programs… that Reagan began For the coming fiscal year the President wants even more funding, upping the Earth science budget to $2.03 billion. Much of the increase will go toward development of the Landsat 9 satellite, to expand the country’s Earth-observing capabilities. This won’t sit well with Congress. In his statement, Smith said, “The same time this proposal shrinks space exploration priorities within NASA’s budget, it disproportionately increases Earth Science accounts to more than $2 billion—a 70 percent increase since 2007.” The underlying context here is climate change. The Republican-led Congress wants to see NASA, in addition to other federal agencies, spend significantly less on research that would almost certainly bolster the science that supports the theory of a warming planet. Congress would prefer to see those funds spent on planetary exploration, especially to the ocean worlds of the outer solar system, including Europa, Titan and Enceladus—all high priority targets for scientists. To that end, last year, Congress provided $175 million for NASA to continue formulating a mission to Europa, calling on the agency to launch by 2022 or 2023. In this year’s budget request, however, the White House only asked for $49.6 million to develop the Europa mission, and didn’t anticipate launching before the late 2020s. Congress will undoubtedly have something to say about that.

2AC — Debris Turn

Space debris on the brink – 750,000 pieces and they threaten space travel and current satellites


Knapton 17 (Sarah; Sarah Knapton is a freelance journalist on the Guardian. She also works as a senior court reporter for Central News based at the Old Bailey and moved to London in 2005 from the North East where she was Chief District Reporter of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. Work interests include science, courts and the environment; “750,000 pieces of debris orbiting Earth threaten future of spaceflight, warn experts”; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/04/21/750000-pieces-debris-orbiting-earth-threaten-future-spaceflight/; published 4/21/17; accessed 7/24/17) [TG]

More than 750,000 pieces of dangerous debris are now orbiting Earth and threatening the future of spaceflight, the largest ever conference on space rubbish has heard. The European Space Agency (ESA) appealed to satellite operators and space agencies to clear up their retired crafts, many of which could impact launches, and are in danger of hitting the International Space Station. Only about 60 per cent of the satellites that should be disposed of at the end of their missions under current guidelines are, in fact, properly managed,” Dr Holger Krag, head of ESA’s debris office told the European Conference on Space Debris in Germany. “This means urgently developing the means for actively removing debris, targeting about 10 large defunct satellites from orbit each year, beginning as soon as possible – starting later will not be nearly as effective.” Since 1957, more than 5250 launches have led to more than 23,000 tracked objects in orbit around Earth. But only about 1200 are working satellitesthe rest are debris and no longer serve any useful purpose. Many derelict craft have exploded or broken up, generating an estimated 750,000 pieces larger than 1 cm and a staggering 166 million larger than 1 mm. “In orbit, these objects have tremendous relative velocities, faster than a bullet, and can damage or destroy functioning space infrastructure, like economically vital telecom, weather, navigation, broadcast and climate-monitoring satellites,” added Dr Krag. “Space debris threaten all working satellites, including Europe’s Sentinels and the Galileo navigation constellation, and any loss of space infrastructure would severely affect modern society. Risks from space debris grows as Earth's obit becomes more crowded 01:19 “The sustainable use of space has been persuasively shown to be at risk, and the status quo is obviously no longer acceptable. We must now start removing dead satellites.” The ESA is currently developing a Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme to monitor the debris. But ESA Director General Jan Woerner said space agencies must try to keep Earth’s orbital environment as clean as possible. “In order to enable innovative services for citizens and future developments in space, we must cooperate now to guarantee economically vital spaceflight," he said. "We must sustain the dream of future exploration.” The space debris conference included representatives from the national space agencies of Italy, France, Germany and the UK. “We require a coordinated global solution to what is, after all, a global problem that affects critical satellites delivering services to all of us,” said Brigitte Zypries, German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Space exploration increases space debris – empirics and trends


Poeter 16 (Damon; Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals; “Watch space debris grow exponentially over time”; https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/220431-watch-space-debris-grow-exponentially-over-time; published 1/6/16; accessed 7/26/17) [TG]

***modified for gendered language --- we do not endorse the rhetoric in the evidence***



Mankind has [we have] littered the space around Earth with nearly 20,000 distinct, trackable objects of debris, but it all started with just one. Dr. Stuart Grey, a lecturer at University College London, has created a video and interactive visualization illustrating how we went from just one manmade object circling our planet—Sputnik 1, launched by the USSR on Oct. 4, 1957to such a mess of space clutter posing real dangers to not just astronauts, but also those of us who remain firmly here on Earth. As Grey notes, the amount of space debris we produced grew exponentially from the very beginning. Sputnik was just “a 58.5-centimeter sphere which broadcast radio pulses.” Within months, the Soviets had launched Sputnik 2 and the United States, which placed Explorer 1 in orbit on Feb. 1, 1958, had also entered the nascent space race. “By the time Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight on April 12, 1961, there had been many missions launched by both superpowers, resulting in over 200 objects in orbit,” Grey noted. While many satellites and crewed vehicles placed in orbit over the past several decades have been successfully returned to Earth safely at the conclusion of their missions, many more have been left zipping around the planet at 17,000 miles per hour, where they can collide with other objects to create more space debris or plummet back down to the ground uncontrollably as their orbits degrade. And as Wired noted, the 20,000-some odd bits of space junk making up the debris field in low-Earth orbit and beyond aren’t the only danger. There may also be a whopping 300,000 pieces of debris “[c]loser to Earth, below 2,000 km … made up of rocket motors, paint flakes, frozen coolant, and more.” Specific events have greatly increased the amount of space junk we now have. In 1980 about 5,000 objects were being tracked, and by 2000, the “number of tracked debris objects had stabilized at around 9,000,” per Grey. But China’s missile test in 2007created over 2,000 new pieces of debris” all on its own.” The Feb. 10, 2009 collision of the retired Russian Kosmos 2251 satellite and the American Iridium 33 communications satellite also resulted in 2,000 more bits of space junk. As the film Gravity depicts, all this clutter poses a real threat to the astronauts working on the International Space Station (ISS), China’s Tiangong-1, and future crewed missions taking humans into space. But so far in real life, nothing has occurred that is remotely as catastrophic as the creation of a fictional, deadly cloud of debris as depicted in the film. In fact, here in 2016 we can still cross our fingers and hope that humans themselves don’t become a grisly part of the space junk field anytime soon. While 18 people have died during four separate space exploration missions that ended in catastrophe, none of those disasters left remains out in space.

Increased debris collapses every major economic sector


Ansdell 10 (Megan Ansdell, Graduate Student @ GWU, 2010, “Active Space Debris Removal,” Princeton Publications, http://www.princeton.edu/jpia/past-issues-1/2010/Space-Debris-Removal.pdf)

Although the probability of catastrophic collisions caused by space debris has increased over the years, it remains relatively low and there have been only four known collisions between objects larger than ten centimeters (Wright 2009, 6). Nevertheless, the real concern is the predicted runaway growth of space debris over the coming decades. Such uncontrolled growth would prohibit the ability of satellites to provide their services, many of which are now widely used by the global community. Indeed, in a testimony to Congress for a hearing on “Keeping the Space Environment Safe for Civil and Commercial Uses,” the Director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, Dr. Scott Pace, stated that, …space systems such as satellite communications, environmental monitoring, and global navigation satellite systems are crucial to the productivity of many types of national and international infrastructures such as air, sea, and highway transportation, oil and gas pipelines, financial networks, and global communications (Pace 2009).

Extend: “Debris Turn”

Increase in debris is nearing threatening levels – recent numbers prove


Phys.org 17 (Phys.org™ is a leading web-based science, research and technology news service which covers a full range of topics. These include physics, earth science, medicine, nanotechnology, electronics, space, biology, chemistry, computer sciences, engineering, mathematics and other sciences and technologies. Launched in 2004, Phys.org’s readership has grown steadily to include 1.75 million scientists, researchers, and engineers every month. Phys.org publishes approximately 100 quality articles every day, offering some of the most comprehensive coverage of sci-tech developments world-wide. Quancast 2009 includes Phys.org in its list of the Global Top 2,000 Websites. Phys.org community members enjoy access to many personalized features such as social networking, a personal home page set-up, RSS/XML feeds, article comments and ranking, the ability to save favorite articles, a daily newsletter, and other options; “Space debris problem getting worse, say scientists”; https://phys.org/news/2017-04-space-debris-problem-worse-scientists.html; published 4/18/17; accessed 7/26/17) [TG]

Scientists sounded the alarm Tuesday over the problems posed to space missions from orbital junk—the accumulating debris from mankind's [our] six-decade exploration of the cosmos. In less than a quarter of a century, the number of orbiting fragments large enough to destroy a spacecraft has more than doubled, a conference in Germany heard. And the estimated tally of tiny objects—which can harm or degrade spacecraft in the event of a collision, and are hard to track—is now around 150 million. "We are very much concerned," said Rolf Densing, director of operations at the European Space Agency (ESA), pleading for a worldwide effort to tackle the mess. "This problem can only be solved globally." Travelling at up to 28,000 kilometres (17,500 miles) per hour, even a minute object impacts with enough energy to damage the surface of a satellite or manned spacecraft. In 1993, monitoring by ground-based radar showed there to be around 8,000 manmade objects in orbit that were larger than 10 centimetres (4.5 inches) across, a size big enough to inflict catastrophic damage, said Holger Krag, in charge of ESA's space debris office. "Today, we find in space roughly 5,000 objects with sizes larger than 1 metre (3.25 feet), roughly 20,000 objects with sizes over 10 centimetres... and 750,000 'flying bullets' of around one centimetre (half an inch)," he said. "For objects larger than one millimetre (0.04 inch), 150 million is our model estimate for that." Risks of collision are statistically remote, but rise as litter increases and more satellites are deployed. "The growth in the number of fragments has deviated from the linear trend in the past and has entered into the more feared exponential trend," Krag warned. The conference in Darmstadt, whose opening was broadcast online, is the biggest-ever gathering dedicated to space debris. Experts will spend four days discussing debris and measures to mitigate space litter such as by "de-orbiting" satellites after their working lives. Debris fields Krag pointed to two events that had badly worsened the problem, creating debris fields that may generate further junk as pieces smash into each other. The second was in January 2007, when China tested an anti-satellite weapon on an old Fengyun weather satellite. The other was in February 2009, when an Iridium telecoms satellite and Kosmos-2251, a Russian military satellite, accidentally collided. With enough warning, satellites can shift position to avoid a collision, but this uses fuel and potentially shortens operational life. ESA receives a high-risk collision alert every week on average for its 10 satellites in low-Earth orbit, Krag said. Each has to resort to "one or two" avoidance manoeuvres per year. In a message from the International Space Station, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said the station was shielded for objects up to 1 cm across. The ISS often has to make manoeuvres to avoid debris, but needs 24 hours' warning to do this, using onboard thrusters, he said. If there is less time, "our crew will have to close all the hatches and enter the safe haven which is our Soyuz spacecraft so that we can depart the ISS in the case of a collision," he said. "This has happened four times in the history of the ISS programme."


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