In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc.
Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending.
This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.
Classic trams and modern light rail are different beasts.
Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars and cars were not meaningful competition.
These days cars are affordable, and light rail has to be better than cars to be competitive, and do so well enough to entice a significant portion of the population out of their cars to be affordable. In practice this means dedicated right of way, which is far more expensive to purchase and fit out as a rail line than just laying some rails on an existing street. And of course modern safety, environmental and just plain bureaucratic regulations also inflate the prices of public works considerably compared to the good/bad old days, particularly in the US.
I lived in a Swedish city of a similar size. They had a tram network that was dismantled bit by bit until it was completely shut down in 1973 because it was seen as unmodern. And now 40 years later they're all talking about building trams again since they're so modern...
many places in the US are like this as well. trains used to criss-cross many cities and towns, but those lines have since been paved over for roads or just fallen out of use altogether.
Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now.
I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and economy and I'm sure it does. But work a soup kitchen for a day and you'd realize we have economies of wealth built on the back of despair and hopelessness.
Our society needs to change to be a space faring one. Maybe I'm stupid and a traveling to space would initiate the change we need. I just can't see how.
This letter gets posted time to time. Definitely one of my favorites for explaining the rationale on spending money pushing boundaries when there are plenty of things that money can do to help people in need now.
Whats spent here is peanuts compared to whats spent on the military, the US (and the world) could easily sustain a moon/mars/ganymedes base and feed its poor if it prioritized its people instead of the defense complex.
> But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now
Countries spend all kinds of money showing off their genitals in much worse ways. Think North Korea's nuclear weapons, or any of the Western nations' colonization follies.
How much has been spent on Olympic games in the last couple of decades? Would that be enough to get us to the moon?
Our economies of wealth are not built "on the back" of the people in the soup kitchens.
Those few people who are going to soup kitchens are typically so crippled by their own internal issues (e.g. mental illness, impulsive criminality, addiction, total inability to manage money) that their productivity is extremely low or negative. Nobody's taking anything from them because there's nothing to take.
In fact it's the opposite of what you said. It's the people in the soup kitchens who are living (e.g. eating soup) on the back of the healthy, productive people running the economy. Just ask: Which group would suffer more if the other group disappeared?
And before those full of moral rage jump in here, no, I'm not saying they deserve to suffer, etc. They don't. But nor is the underclass a productive group being forced to hold up the wealthy. It's not the medieval era any more; in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability.
Edit 2
federal court set the value of the moon rocks at $50,800 per gram based on how much it cost the U.S. government to retrieve the samples between 1969 and 1972.
But we ARE talking about retrieving stuff from Mars: the BFS must be returned to Earth to be reused. It's also capable of bringing people back from Mars, and that's supposed to be included in the $200k/person ticket price. Assuming at least 200kg of human plus consumables per person for the trip back, that implies that anything worth at least $1000/kg would be worth sending back.
So I think Musk is actually wrong when he says that he can BOTH send people to Mars super cheap with return tickets AND that there could not possibly be something of enough value on Mars to return to Earth even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?) prepackaged on the surface (gold is $35,000/kg or something).
...not that I expect a vibrant Mars export economy or anything. Musk's basic point about not expecting Mars to fully and profitably pay for itself with physical exports is correct.
There's a lot of interesting things manufacturing-wise you can do in zero gravity which are now pretty impractical financially since it's so hard to get raw materials up the Earth's gravity well. It might be cheaper to get them from elsewhere where the gravity wells are shallower and the lack of air lets you use a mass driver rather than a rocket. Then it's a long slow trip to Earth orbit via ion driver but if it's just a hunk of metal it doesn't care.
I wonder about that idea. I mean, thinking about it there's almost nothing found outside of earth that's worth the cost of the infrastructure needed to bring it inside of Earth's gravity well.
Which is a bummer. The only thoughts I have contra that are that it's only expensive if you count the cost of the infrastructure - given that moving resources from outside of Earth to it isn't super unattractive.
Second it's possible that costs should be viewed not just Earth to outside of Earth but also outside of Earth to outside of Earth. That is to say mining water on the Moon doesn't make sense if the destination is Earth - it the destination on the other hand is another part of the Moon there might be some logic to it. You could in theory be cost competitive with the Earth as you don't have to get it out of Earth's gravity.
I really want to see asteroid mining prioritized, as well as a space station capable of permanent human habitation (either partial or full gravity). A space station is also preferable to another planet for our next big space endeavor IMO because it is easier to get materials to and from it (no extra gravity well to deal with). Also, I feel like a lot of people think "ah, everything has to be done differently because space is a zero-G environment", but I bet it would be easier to adapt a lot of traditional technologies, engineering processes, and biological elements in a rotating station. Once we have the ability to do fabrication and construction in space, everything becomes much cheaper. Lastly, if researchers need to experiment in zero-G, we could construct zero-G modules adjacent to the center of the ring for experimentation.
The primary blocker for a rotating station as far as I know has been the mass requirement. If you have a structure above a certain rotational speed with a radius that is too small, the occupants are likely to become nauseous. From the research I've seen, the minimum size for a viable rotating station would be about 600 tons[1]. Moving that amount of mass into orbit would have been extremely expensive, but Falcon Heavy could launch it for under $1.5B, and the BFR for even less.
There are a lot of answers here about how expensive Apollo was, and about how those expenses haven't really gone away. Those answers are basically right: putting humans on the moon was, and would still be, enormously expensive.
But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months.
None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of.
Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's.
A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations.
And (personal opinion here) society as a whole is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.
They need driverless, conductorless subways/trams in enclosed tubular right of way with passengers entering from one side and exiting from the other, via offset doors.
Think of the days when you had elevators with operators who were paid for pushing the floor number for you - (a carry-over from the cable-pull hole in the wall days when operators were needed.)
These trams were killed by the wages of the operators, in much the same way that modern subways are ruined costwise by the wages of the drivers and conductors who each have hourly wage costs of $50 or more = large ticket costs and avoidance to car use. In effect opportunists grabbed all the $$
In the moon race, NASA is so burdened by legacy wages and other costs AND the fact that Congressional opportunists grab the money that NASA was prevented from that course.
The author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "It's all about the Benjamins".
The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?
Your analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire".
The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways.
Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether.
In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.
National debt is simply national savings. "Paying off" national debt means taking away one of the most popular, liquid, income producing asset from people and corporations.
Apollo cost around 2% of the US federal budget at its peak. In individual terms, if you earn the current US median income of ~$43,000/year, that's less than $1,000/year, or $20/week. How many people spend at least $20/week on "wants"?
The overall federal budget was much smaller then, too. If we take the peak cost of $3 billion/year, adjust it for inflation (about $23 billion/year), and divide it by the current federal budget, it would be 0.6%, or the equivalent of $5/week for someone earning the US median income. How many people spend that on "wants"?
And, it probably wouldn't cost nearly as much if you did it today. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket would only cost $10 billion total, and it would easily be capable of lunar missions. SpaceX tends to miss their time-related goals but hit their cost-related goals, but even if they're off by a factor of 2, it's still way cheaper.
Obviously we don't want to spend even that much, collectively, on doing it, otherwise we'd be doing it. But IMO the "what percentage of your savings would you invest in this?" question just shows why we should. It's utterly insignificant on the scale of national expenditures, and the results would be far better than you'd get from another squadron of F-35s or whatever.
>The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T
That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained.
If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no.
If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter.
However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.
The question is why would we put a man on the moon?
I grew up with Moonbase Alpha (although I am not expecting to be thrown into space by a major explosion) and want this as much as anyone else but is there any reason (mining, strategic, know benefits to research) which justifies the price?
The article answers itself: "NASA’s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors." That quote is speaking largely of the SLS. It's supposed to essentially be the Space Shuttle 2.0, but it's often just referred to as the Senate Launch System for good reason. We've spending billions of dollars on that program and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. This [1] is the Wiki entry from 2011 detailing the program's promises, which have been constantly 'reimagined.' In reality it's mostly a giant pork project.
Ultimately it's being driven by congressmen who only care about getting their kickbacks and it's being developed by ULA, an anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed, who only care about profit. And the companies themselves are also falling apart. This [2] is Lockheed Martin's CEO. One of the largest aerospace companies in the world is headed by a person who has absolutely no background whatsoever in aerospace or related technologies. Until 2015, this [3] was the head of Boeing - same story. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Boeing put an aerospace engineer in charge - they have sharply changed their direction and competitive outlook.
We have an increasingly corrupt government contracting work to companies who are driven only by money. Musk's success and the government's success in the 60s have something very simple in common. They were not driven by greed or short term self interest, but big picture ideology and aspirations. And it seems the whole notion of aspirations, beyond earning lots of money, is something that is somehow fading in society.
> NASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself.
Not a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs...
"NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency."
As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.
On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.
An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.
(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")
"Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..."
But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.
ProTip™️: Copy and paste the headline of the article into Google to get the full article. I really need to write a Chrome extension for this but haven't had the time. :(
I think the real question is why we want to put a man on the moon. Imagine you climbed mount Everest with no climbing equipment and then 30 years later someone asked you why you haven't done it again.
WaitWaitWait... Nasa had its peak funding during those Moon landing years. We've let that equipment dryrot, switched to new versions, run those into the ground, slashed the budget repeatedly (and again over NASA's climate change research), privatized everything possible, let the best engineers retire, underpaid and underutilized their replacements until they left...
And somehow we have the gaul to wonder "why is going to the moon not working?"
Its almost like we're asking for something for nothing. Scientists and Engineers need to eat too. We need to buy new hardware. Train new people. If we wait too long, Musk will buy Cape Canaveral. We've already let Houston get turned into a museum rather than a launch pad.
I dont care how much you're gonna blame bureaucracy for this - this is poor leadership at the helm of our nation to gaslight folks this way.
In order to efficiently place people into space we would need a robotics based economy. Robots would need to build the rockets and fly the rockets. Humans would design the rockets and tell them where to go. Mission control would be replaced with one flight director observing an AI which monitors everything.
This is the one hope I have, with huge amounts of wealth concentrating in a few people's hands we may see pie in the sky stuff like Moon colonies and space tourism start up.
An additional reason is that expertise died out with the end of funding. We had exactly one generation that tackled this problem - there has been no opportunity for them to hand down their experience. We're not starting from scratch, but we're certainly worse-off than we were at the end of the space race - scientists and engineers will have to learn from books and papers, rather than having an expert around to guide them.
> Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods
We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are lower today than they were in the 1960s.
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|8 years ago|reply
In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc.
Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending.
This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.
[+] [-] jpatokal|8 years ago|reply
Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars and cars were not meaningful competition.
These days cars are affordable, and light rail has to be better than cars to be competitive, and do so well enough to entice a significant portion of the population out of their cars to be affordable. In practice this means dedicated right of way, which is far more expensive to purchase and fit out as a rail line than just laying some rails on an existing street. And of course modern safety, environmental and just plain bureaucratic regulations also inflate the prices of public works considerably compared to the good/bad old days, particularly in the US.
[+] [-] kalleboo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fnoord|8 years ago|reply
1) Communities were more local and relevant than today. This also means travel was more local and relevant.
2) Trams didn't have as much competition with other viable, automated means of transport.
[+] [-] raldi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmead|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kraig911|8 years ago|reply
I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and economy and I'm sure it does. But work a soup kitchen for a day and you'd realize we have economies of wealth built on the back of despair and hopelessness.
Our society needs to change to be a space faring one. Maybe I'm stupid and a traveling to space would initiate the change we need. I just can't see how.
[+] [-] chrisatumd|8 years ago|reply
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
[+] [-] downrightmike|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _lbaq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|8 years ago|reply
Countries spend all kinds of money showing off their genitals in much worse ways. Think North Korea's nuclear weapons, or any of the Western nations' colonization follies.
How much has been spent on Olympic games in the last couple of decades? Would that be enough to get us to the moon?
[+] [-] Endy|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Banthum|8 years ago|reply
Those few people who are going to soup kitchens are typically so crippled by their own internal issues (e.g. mental illness, impulsive criminality, addiction, total inability to manage money) that their productivity is extremely low or negative. Nobody's taking anything from them because there's nothing to take.
In fact it's the opposite of what you said. It's the people in the soup kitchens who are living (e.g. eating soup) on the back of the healthy, productive people running the economy. Just ask: Which group would suffer more if the other group disappeared?
And before those full of moral rage jump in here, no, I'm not saying they deserve to suffer, etc. They don't. But nor is the underclass a productive group being forced to hold up the wealthy. It's not the medieval era any more; in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability.
[+] [-] paulus_magnus2|8 years ago|reply
For strategic / military reasons (money no objective) we can achieve much more than if profit is the only motivation.
[1. need a better source?] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/if-the-moon-...
Edit:
Elon Musk: With New SpaceX Tech, Rocket Costs Will Drop By A Factor of 100
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/908254079092002816?ref_s...
Also analysis / spaculatoin for BFR. Keep in mind we're only talking about sending stuff to Mars, not retrieving it. http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3343/1
Edit 2 federal court set the value of the moon rocks at $50,800 per gram based on how much it cost the U.S. government to retrieve the samples between 1969 and 1972.
https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting-apollo17.ht...
[+] [-] Robotbeat|8 years ago|reply
So I think Musk is actually wrong when he says that he can BOTH send people to Mars super cheap with return tickets AND that there could not possibly be something of enough value on Mars to return to Earth even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?) prepackaged on the surface (gold is $35,000/kg or something).
...not that I expect a vibrant Mars export economy or anything. Musk's basic point about not expecting Mars to fully and profitably pay for itself with physical exports is correct.
[+] [-] Symmetry|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackeraccount|8 years ago|reply
Which is a bummer. The only thoughts I have contra that are that it's only expensive if you count the cost of the infrastructure - given that moving resources from outside of Earth to it isn't super unattractive.
Second it's possible that costs should be viewed not just Earth to outside of Earth but also outside of Earth to outside of Earth. That is to say mining water on the Moon doesn't make sense if the destination is Earth - it the destination on the other hand is another part of the Moon there might be some logic to it. You could in theory be cost competitive with the Earth as you don't have to get it out of Earth's gravity.
[+] [-] DennisP|8 years ago|reply
And of course, as Andy Weir has been saying, tourism could be a major economic driver once reusable rockets get cheap enough.
[+] [-] T-A|8 years ago|reply
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin...
---
I think the report in question is "NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Conquering the Challenges of In-Space Manufacturing":
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011108
These may also be interesting:
"NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Overview and Update", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011109
"Additive Manufacturing for Human Space Exploration", https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011644
[+] [-] maccam94|8 years ago|reply
The primary blocker for a rotating station as far as I know has been the mass requirement. If you have a structure above a certain rotational speed with a radius that is too small, the occupants are likely to become nauseous. From the research I've seen, the minimum size for a viable rotating station would be about 600 tons[1]. Moving that amount of mass into orbit would have been extremely expensive, but Falcon Heavy could launch it for under $1.5B, and the BFR for even less.
[1]: http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/GlobusRotationPaper.pdf (page 22)
[+] [-] GlenTheMachine|8 years ago|reply
But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months.
None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of.
Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's.
A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations.
And (personal opinion here) society as a whole is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.
[+] [-] aurizon|8 years ago|reply
In the moon race, NASA is so burdened by legacy wages and other costs AND the fact that Congressional opportunists grab the money that NASA was prevented from that course.
[+] [-] johnminter|8 years ago|reply
The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?
[+] [-] stupidcar|8 years ago|reply
The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways.
Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether.
In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.
[+] [-] baursak|8 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/opinion/deficit-tax-cuts-...
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
The overall federal budget was much smaller then, too. If we take the peak cost of $3 billion/year, adjust it for inflation (about $23 billion/year), and divide it by the current federal budget, it would be 0.6%, or the equivalent of $5/week for someone earning the US median income. How many people spend that on "wants"?
And, it probably wouldn't cost nearly as much if you did it today. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket would only cost $10 billion total, and it would easily be capable of lunar missions. SpaceX tends to miss their time-related goals but hit their cost-related goals, but even if they're off by a factor of 2, it's still way cheaper.
Obviously we don't want to spend even that much, collectively, on doing it, otherwise we'd be doing it. But IMO the "what percentage of your savings would you invest in this?" question just shows why we should. It's utterly insignificant on the scale of national expenditures, and the results would be far better than you'd get from another squadron of F-35s or whatever.
[+] [-] crdoconnor|8 years ago|reply
That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained.
If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no.
If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter.
However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.
[+] [-] neonate|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draugadrotten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|8 years ago|reply
I grew up with Moonbase Alpha (although I am not expecting to be thrown into space by a major explosion) and want this as much as anyone else but is there any reason (mining, strategic, know benefits to research) which justifies the price?
[+] [-] ams6110|8 years ago|reply
The whole reason that NASA stopped innovating after about 1972 was that the costs were unsustainable.
[+] [-] lmm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indubitable|8 years ago|reply
Ultimately it's being driven by congressmen who only care about getting their kickbacks and it's being developed by ULA, an anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed, who only care about profit. And the companies themselves are also falling apart. This [2] is Lockheed Martin's CEO. One of the largest aerospace companies in the world is headed by a person who has absolutely no background whatsoever in aerospace or related technologies. Until 2015, this [3] was the head of Boeing - same story. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Boeing put an aerospace engineer in charge - they have sharply changed their direction and competitive outlook.
We have an increasingly corrupt government contracting work to companies who are driven only by money. Musk's success and the government's success in the 60s have something very simple in common. They were not driven by greed or short term self interest, but big picture ideology and aspirations. And it seems the whole notion of aspirations, beyond earning lots of money, is something that is somehow fading in society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Launch_Syst...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marillyn_Hewson
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anilgulecha|8 years ago|reply
> NASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself.
[+] [-] mcguire|8 years ago|reply
"NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency."
As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.
On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.
An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.
(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")
"Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..."
But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.
[+] [-] dkonofalski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigfcjjyfcg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mezuzi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonmaydie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PatchMonkey|8 years ago|reply
And somehow we have the gaul to wonder "why is going to the moon not working?"
Its almost like we're asking for something for nothing. Scientists and Engineers need to eat too. We need to buy new hardware. Train new people. If we wait too long, Musk will buy Cape Canaveral. We've already let Houston get turned into a museum rather than a launch pad.
I dont care how much you're gonna blame bureaucracy for this - this is poor leadership at the helm of our nation to gaslight folks this way.
[+] [-] steve0210|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxyv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogdoad|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Oppositio...
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are lower today than they were in the 1960s.
[1] http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF-R...