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Actual Costs for the Space Station
Cujo writes "This article in space.com discusses what the actual costs of the space station have been since it was first proposed by President Reagan in 1984. Depending on how you account for the cost of shuttle launches, the number is well over $40 billion in the U.S. alone. It begs the question of what else could have been done with the same money and far superior management."
Goddamnit people, can't anyone use the phrase "begging the question" correctly anymore?
Educate yourself regarding idioms.
No, it does NOT "beg the question". It may "raise the question", but "begging the question" is something completely different.
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Begging the question is "a logical fallacy, of taking for granted or assuming the thing that you are setting out to prove. To take an example, you might say that lying is wrong because we ought always to tell the truth. That's a circular argument and makes no sense. Another instance is to argue that democracy must be the best form of government because the majority is always right. The fallacy was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as petitio principii and then into English in 1581 as beg the question."
(http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-b
If you're going to use phrases, at least make sure you're using them correctly.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Note to people still using the English Standard system:
It takes 2.71 Standard assloads to make a metric assload. (those English are tightasses)
The word from the NASA engineers was this: in order to save the space station from getting axed by Congress, work was spread across many NASA sites nationwide. Why? reps wouldn't likely cut a program that provided jobs in their own backyard. Unfortunately, this created a management nightmare that naturally led to cost overruns.
Sure, the project could have been centralized more and run more efficiently... but then funding whould have likely been cut.
Doncha just love this country?!
We're talking about 23 years of expenditures. The first station design by Reagan was in '84, the 6.6 billion budget addition from GW Bush is slated to go until 2007. Even if the totals run closer to the highly overestimated answer of 100 Billion (by the GAO), that's still only about 4 billion per year for a technological marvel that was supposed to be supported by 3/4 of the world's space programs but is ultimately built primarily by the US.
The Russians have been useless in getting any part of it done, so in order to maintain our own timetable and keep expenditures reasonable, we've had to either help them or replace their efforts, so that cadres of NASA employees weren't being bankrolled to sit on their hands waiting for the Russians.
If the ISS weren't so stifled by a lack of support from countries who previously voiced their desire to be involved, then it'd not only have cost us less but have been bigger and more capable of sustaining a maintenance crew AND a scientific staff. Instead, they're limited to a maintenance crew who dabble in science, so the returns have been limited.
Given that we spent almost 1 billion to blow up the dirt in Afghanistan for a month, I think 4 billion a year in space development is only fair.
The only question that remains is could the 4 billion (or for that matter, the 1 billion from the DoD as well) be spent on more important domestic issues, like the economy, healthcare, education, and building Krispy Kreme's in Boston, Mass...
The answer is of course, a resounding yes. I'm sure every teacher in America would like a 100% pay increase. Our kids would be the smartest around and in 15 years, they'd come up with fiscal savings plans to outdo even the tightest of Swiss banks. But the likelihood that something so radical would occur is miniscule, so instead of worrying about where 40 billion dollars over 20 years could have gone, worry about how to get American AIDS victims to give Bill Gates an 8 ft condom instead of the Indians AIDS victims. Get money that doesn't have to funnel through the government into the hands of those causes you find justify their cost. NASA will keep getting top dollar projects along with the DoD for the forseeable future. The short-term goal must lie in monies garnered from someone else's pockets.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
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Just not true. See the post below about component-level versus system-level reliability. The shuttle track record puts the individual parts well above the five-9 mark, probably overengineered.
The worst part about the program, though, is the overengineered nature of the design process as a whole. Too much testing, too much debate, too much bureacracy, too many signatures on a design change. These over-efficiencies add up to way more expense than the component manufacturing.
There's another comment below that discusses the need to preserve lives for altruistic as well as political reasons. I would note that every worthwhile exploration in the history of man cost many lives and suffering before the fruits of exploration could be reaped. We need to allow privatized, courageous explorers to risk untimely death if we're going to achieve the kinds of leaps we all write about here.
Actually, I think they would. If their Adjusted Gross Income was more than the unbelievable sum of $26,415 last year, they are in the top 50% (for the US anyway). More