Slashdot Mirror
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."
develop new type of nuclear warhead ... ... ...
wage war on iraq
extend your efforts in war on terrorism
etc etc. I'd rather pour money into this *dead end* project then sponsor arms race.
2c
p
I hope NASA will stop wasting money in earth orbit getting no research done with expensive meatbots. They should save the big bucks and human beings for the real deals, the Moon, Mars and beyond!
NASA claims that the ISS is paving the way for long-term space flight but Mir had already done that. Paying to help the Russians to keep Mir going would have been much cheaper but was not politically acceptable which is a real shame.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
is that the actual amount spent on it or is that including inflation? I am not sure what the rate of inflation has been since 1984 but I am guessing that it would be moderatly higher. Also you have to take into account that the technology back then was far more expensive than it is today so that can also drasticly add to the costs of the project.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
I have mixed emotions about the ISS. On one hand, it is a boondoggle of epic proportions; huge amounts of money shot into space for results that could mostly be obtained from unmanned satellites.
On the other, keeping people in space is important if we want to expand our horizons for manned missions to other planets. And, of course, space travel is neat. Is "neat" worth $40 Billion?
1. Tell Congress to give us the money and stay the fuck away until it's time for us to ask for more money.
2. Put two Soyuz capsules up there so two people can do science while another three do maintenance. A sixth person can be any random rich person paying oodles of cash for the opportunity to scrub toilets IN SPAAAAAAAACE.
3. Let the Russians handle station operations. If that's disagreeable then hire as many Russians away from Russia as needed. They know how to handle space stations, we don't.
[o]_O
organizations that capitalize on the intellectual assets and fervor of their members, rather than throwing money at problems and overengineering them.
If NASA has the attitude that having a space station that was 99% safe, instead of 99.99% safe, and relied on the skill of the residents astronauts to fix any problems, we'd have the dual torus in 2001, instead of a little tin can. Good luck getting that in today's wiffle world.
Any history buff can tell you just how far a few, determined, idealistic men can go in changing history. Someday I may tell you how 13 men took on an Empire, and altared history (for the better), forever, 2000 years ago.
A. Rightmann
Let's face it... The money would have gone to the military. If you are thinking education, poverty, medicare, you are dreaming.
Of course, for this $40B US there was probably some re-investment back into hi-tech, science, research grants, and areospace.
I don't think its been wasted, its just hard to gauge the return on investment.
Tournament Management Online &
Dear Sir,
Could you please express the amount of money in a currency we slashdotters could understand? We prefer either metric assloads or libraries of congress.
Thank you,
slashdot
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
Huh? The US national debt is at $6.3Trillion dollars. $40Billion wouldn't do squat.
Michael Loves Me!
Why dont' people count how many space stations one could build at a cost of, for example, the most recent tax cut ? 10 ? 20 ? .. hell, I'd send back my $300 refund to have a few bigger space stations and an outpost on Mars. Would you ?
$40 Billion. You're 3 magnitudes of order low.
I think the space station is a useless waste of money. But we have probably wasted many times that on weapons systems we don't need, that don't work, and that even the military doesn't want.
Billion so it was more like $2 billion a year. Does that make you blink? Personally, $1 billion a year is enough to make me care about how we're spending it.
They had an astronaut on the morning show I listen to today talking some of the benefits of the Space Station. One was the ability to grow human tissue in 3D - in gravity, the tissue gets flattened when grown in a petri dish - which is helping them in researching tissue-type diseases like cancer (I'm sure this was much simplified for not-quite-awake listeners :) ).
I think that if a cure for cancer comes out of the ISS, then the price was worth it.
On the flip side, we would probably have to start living in outer space due to overcrowding caused by everyone living alot longer. :D
Support bacteria! It's the only culture most people seem to get.
Allthough $40 billion is quit a lot you should consider the project has been of value too.
- Scientist have been able to do research otherwise impossible.
- The program has provided jobs to a lot of people on the floor
It is often forgotten science and research are valuable investments. And also on the bright side. This money isn't spent on warfare, defense etc. At least they tried to spend with good intentions
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
I realize that the space station *could* provide a great resourse for doing scietific experiments for the entire world. But, with the current budget situation and the chances of it being mothballed, I seriously think we could have spent that money in a much better way. I can't imagne that a manned mission to Mars would have cost much more than 40 BILLION, if it would even have been that much. Then at least we would have had something to show for the money. Honestly, I would be better pleased to have seen us allocated a large part of that 40 billion to building some more probes to get information on planets and moons of our solar system. Heck, even exploring the moon more in depth, and looking into lunar mining wouldn't have cost this much. Of course, since we now have George Jr. to contend with we all might as well just continue reading our SciFi books for the next few years.
Think of how many farscape episodes this could have produced!
The tone of this article is that the money was spent badly. I have no doubt that it could be managed better, but it's not like the project is a write-off. I'd respond to the "What could you do with $40 billion" except I don't want to take validity away from the ISS.
I feel very strongly that we, as a species, need to have a presence in space. Right now, we are one asteroid impact away from extinction. The ISS is a very important step to ensuring that man-kind can survive a disaster like that. We need to get to Mars. We need to leave the solar system. We need to colonize other planets.
The real question is: Is $40 billion too much to spend to start us down the path of being truely, and I mean truely independent?
I sure hope China gets their Taikonauts up in space soon! If they put a space station up and start heading for the Moon, it should light a fire under NASA's @$$.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Whatever the cost, they would be building a ship destined to Alpha Centauri. :-)
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Big deal. Things cost money. It's estimated that building new WTC towers will be about $12 billion. And that's on Earth! We are talking about a Space Station ("That's no moon...That's a space station!" ), not some shed out in someone's backyard. It's not like you can just rent a truck from Home Depot to deliver the supplies you need. Not to mention that astronauts have a little bit more training, and are higher paid than carpenters.
But on the other hand, we probably don't have to worry about terrorists flying airplanes into it.
I don't have a sig...Do you??
You know, every time I read this argument, I think the same thing:
Why *only* work on the big-name problems? Are we so limited in our abilities that we can only work on one problem at a time? There are tons of people working on a cure for cancer, aids, etc. Do we really need to fling *everyone* at it? (And has no one read "The Mythical Man Month"?)
To answer my own questions: No. We *are* working on the big problems. We are *also* working on the cool stuff. The idea that we should only work on one thing at a time always seems...short-sighted.
The real question that should be asked is 'is the space station justified at all', not merely whether it could be done slightly cheaper. The project would still be overpriced at $5 billion.
Consider that the SSC would have provided far more science for $10 billion. Or for that matter consider how much science we could get by sending up a duplicate of Hubble - many of the parts exist already as test pieces for the orbitting Hubble, the test mirror made by Kodak was actually done right.
Or consider what a boost to the economy we could get by giving the same money to rich corporate campaign contributors. $40 billion is more than the retrospective tax handouts that Bush wanted to give Enron.
Or even (gasp) think what could be done if the same amount had gone into other research areas such as biotech or the Internet. There is a reason the Web was born at CERN, they had the resources to do that type of work.
The economist had a good article recently where they speculat that NASA asked Nixon for funding for a mars mission and got rejected, so they split the mission into three parts, first a reusable space shuttle, then a space station, finally a mars mission.
Since then the obvious conclusion to draw from the success of the unmanned missions is that they are cheaper and result in more science.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The entire U.S. space program in the 1960's and 1970's cost roughly the same amount of money that U.S. consumers spent on cosmetics in the same period of time. The real cost of the space programs, even counting wasted money (it is still a lot of experimentation) is pretty low, depending on what you compare it to.
And what they're doing, at least to me, is pretty important.
Whoa.....$40Bil. How about giving 2.5% of that to cure blindness? We could start off with some of the easier forms of blindness like some types of retinitis pigmentosa with gene therapy as has been shown in Briard dogs, move on to diabetic retinopathy, wet and dry macular degeneration, and finally create an artificial retina both bionically and biologically. Perhaps 1 billion over ten years should do it, and think of all the technology that could be generated for NASA, DARPA, etc..etc..etc...
$40 billion..........Damn.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Let's see, put $40B in Slashdot terms... It's enough money that every man, woman, and child in China could watch Lord of the Ring around 4 times!
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Of course you don't take into account the myriads of scientific and technical discoveries that have come from the space program.
Many of them apply directly to medicine or something for the homeless. We get more out of the space program than nifty pictures of earth from way up high.
Whether we got 40 billion worth is debatable.
--
BTW, you cant write a 40 Billion dollar check to someone and jot down 'for curing AIDS' or 'to end homelessness' in the memo section. It doesnt work like that.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Why, you ask? Because it costs too much to launch from Earth every time (And a colony WILL require a lot of launches at first). Ideally, what we want is a dry dock in space where we can build any space craft. Simply send materials up and have them built in space. Then launch the completed ship from there.
Furthermore, a orbital habitat would give us a place to become acclimated to the environment of space.
The ultimate plan should be to build a space station, and put people up there in a more permanent manner in order to get some people acclimated. After a simple space station is completed, a dry dock should be built. From that dry dock, a ship should be built. That ship would be sent to the Moon, where a colony and a similar space station/dry dock would be built. Once we have a staging point around the Moon, then we would be able to colonize Mars.
I really don't care about putting people on Mars for a few days and then having them come back. Anything they could do on a two day mission, a probe can probably do the same thing. The only reason I want a person on Mars is to start a colony and a LOT of preparation must be made in order to feasibly do that.
Human beings are not able to manage big projects. (This is true everwhere, in every country, both in private and public sectors, etc...).
So the initial hypothesis ("if better managed") is simply false.
Do we hate NASA today or love them? Or hate NASA and love space? Or hate space and love other things to spend money on? My 2 cents is that money spent on space is always recouped by space-related technologies making their way into everyday use.
$45 per U Colocation Special
A billion here, a billion there...
It soon starts to add up to real money!
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
"sending people to space is cool and all, but why not use the resources to find a cure for cancer or aids or do something for the homeless?"
Because an aerospace degree doesn't automatically make you eligible to cure cancer?
1) Low-cost housing for low-wage Americans to eleviate the national homelessness problem.
2) Government training programs and day-care centers to get people off of welfare and out working.
3) Funding of federal free lunch programs and food stamp supplements to insure that no American child goes to bed hungry.
Scientific endeavor is noble and inspiring. But let's fix the problems here on Earth first.
Let's face it--in an organization so badly mismanaged as NASA, almost any money spent is money down a rathole. After working two years with the NASA HQ global change group (the Earth Observing System, at the time, the 2d biggest office), I concluded that while DoD wastes more money, they cannot waste as great a percentage of their budget as NASA does. Those PhDs spend their days shoveling out money to their good buddies at various universities and NASA centers, barely looking at what comes back. Ergo my subject line: NASA is simply welfare for scientists.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
...if we force the trend-setters to stop wearing makeup, so "fashionable" people stop buying it, we could afford a second space station.
:-)
Looks like the old Geek vs. Jock perceptual rifts in high school values...
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Goddamnit people, can't anyone use the phrase "begging the question" correctly anymore?
Educate yourself regarding idioms.
$40 billion is a lot for one person, chump change for a nation.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
No, it does NOT "beg the question". It may "raise the question", but "begging the question" is something completely different.
e g1.htm)
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.
Let's hope O'Keefe can put in reliable accounting. Fudged numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. If we can get good accounting data, we can see just what is working and not working in all of NASA's endeavors. Solid accounting might also promote honesty in the field. One frequent complaint about NASA made by former workers is the amount of lies they were told. Add to that abuse and exploitation and you have the formula for driving people from the field.
We've seen too much throwing good money after bad. It's not only wrong to waste the taxpayers' money, it also diverts people from projects that might work. Too many failures also cause people who might enter space work to choose different careers -- ones where they might actually accomplish something. I mentioned to one friend that young people aren't going into aerospace any more. She commented that's because many people -- especially the technically oriented -- view aerospace as a dead end.
In retrospect, it would have been wiser to spend the money on work to lower the cost of getting things into orbit. The United States could have funded multiple, diverse research projects rather than this centralized, mismanaged failure. Lower cost to orbit would have paid off across the board -- for satellites, probes to distant planets, human work in space and much more.
Instead we got a project that put three people into a station that requires at least 2.5 people to just maintain it. And which might be mothballed any day because of problems with Russian participation.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
Maybe it's just me, but I'd find it incredibly ironic if with another 40 billion in funding we'd be able to cure Alzheimers....
Take that, Reagan!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Thats kind of like saying: "WalMart is a huge company, my taking [stealing] this tiny whatever is nothing to them." It all adds up--just need to find several more $40M projects to cancel...
Where do you think that $40 billion went? Did it just disappear? Nope. It went back into our economy. It's just $40 billion we spent on ourselves. Granted, I'd rather have a tax break and spend it myself, but it's not like we destroyed $40 billion.
No, that would be probably $1B since it's on VCD for very cheap (illegal of course). Another way to think of it: $40B is an iPod for each US household.
sulli
RTFJ.
For $40,000,000,000 we could have built a B Arc and got rid of the useless third of our population.
$40 is nothing. My phone bill is that high.
You are misusing the term "begging the question". It means to use circular reasoning. You mean, "raises the question".
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Or WorldCom, Tyco etc etc etc
What can be done with $40bn by a large US Corporation.... well pretty impressive fraud by all accounts.
This is not to say that NASA should not be more effective or efficient it is to say that the "free market" is not always the best way to deliver power to homes, so it won't be certain to be the best to deliver a space station.
Private companies run railways in the UK, the goverment do it in France. I'd much prefer the French Goverment running the UK system than the companies currently doing it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
yeah... 40 million is not much except it is 40 BILLION. Still I think that the goal of a space station is worth while. I just wish I was sure they were not pissing it away. It seems to be going so slow and cost so much with so little progress. The BIG number in the article is 100 BILLION and another 7 billion to finish. I thought we should have been much further into space now and it is pathetic that we have not touched down on Mars yet let alone a space station! My view though is that if it could have been done for a 1/4 the cost, I still won't complain- we need to do more in space.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Hmm, recent observations:
Education: Finish REBUILDING playgrounds with FOAM this time, instead of woodchips. Apparently wood chips just aren't soft enough. Next year, rebuild with Charmin.
Poverty: Yeah, right. Like the bum down the road needs another 40, and we should pay for housing for families with up to 12 kids.
Medicare: Here's a potential good. But how about using government money for public medical research and licensing the results to companies for production, instead of just paying for the result of the research those companies are doing? ROI. Live it. Learn it. Love it.
Just my .02.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
It begs the question of what else could have been done with the same money and far superior management."
Well, with a corrupt investment manager from MSDW, Charles Schwab or Fidelity Investments, and considering the present state of the economy, I'd estimate that the $40 billion investment today would be worth, uh, about $3.50 (pronounced tree-fiddy). Maybe the space station was the best investment. At least we have the option to turn it into the solar system's most expensive Mariott and make some of that money back.
Will Taco Bell have their big banner out in the ocean, and will they actually give everyone in the US a free taco if parts of the ISS hit it? :P
:D
A more likely situation was the 02 World Series - they had that banner out in SF Bay. Free tacos for all if anybody hit a homer over the wall and hit it!
Hmm. On that note, I'd like to see $40 billion worth of tacos.
Nope, not the same people. I for one think NASA should take more risks. That goes hand in hand with not loading school teachers and senators on manned missions. NASA is moribund and their inability to take risks is what keeps us from worthy projects like manned Mars missions. Heck now they're afraid to take risks with frikin robots because of possible negative publicity. How can a nation go from sacrificing thousands on the beaches of Normandy to being piss scared they might lose one soul reaching Mars in a truly historical accomplishment. Men die scaling Mount Everest each year, just because it is there. It has been done before but individuals still take that risk for the experience. NASA won't risk squat getting to Mars, but they'll spend billions floating what is in essence a giant unsophisticated tin can, in orbit, most of those billions getting blown on overly redundant safety systems and conservative approaches to design.
We could have built a ballistic missle defense system to stop the missles that everyone and their brother would have because of all the unemployed former Soviet rocket scientists who exported their knowledge all around the world since there was no ISS make work program to keep them employed.
... this post started out being sarcastic, but now that I think about it the BMD option would have had plenty of side benifits to it. Especially if the final architecture of it could deflect near Earth asteroids.
Hmmm... Now that I think about it, we could have employed the former Soviet rocket scientists building the BMD system. Ironically building the BMD system that way would reduce the missle threat even if we just threw the hardware away. Of course the need to put thousands and thousands of small interceptors into space would have required better nanosat technology and a different style of launch system for getting lots of small sats up very cheaply... maybe an SSTO. And the Phase 2 BMD Lasers would be very handy for beamed propulsion systems.
But with the Space Station make work program, you learn how to build big structures in space, that will come in handy if we ever make Solar Power Sats...
It begs the question of what else could have been done with the same money and far superior management.
I'd like to know where this source of "far superior management" is, and how I can get some. Hindsight is 20/20; it isn't fair to assume that all the correct management decisions could have been made. Unless dice and darts were involved, I'm sure people thought they were making good decisions at the time.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
It begs the question of what else could have been done with the same money and far superior management.
Just a moment. Your statemnet implies that bad managment has resulted in a bad cost vs gain scenario.
I want to stop you right there, because I do not see why it would be assumed that bad MANAGMENT of the money (obviously by NASA) is to blame here. Maybe the cost vs gain inequality here had to do with a bad set of OBJECTIVES? or maybe, the problem had to do with an EXTERNAL situation?
Had the goal "build a spacestation REALLY cheap" been the goal, things might have been different... but "REALLY cheap" sometimes ends up requiring some other things, like exposure to additional risk (like.. people going boom in the shuttle launch kinda risk). Now, Im not saying "all risk is bad" (in fact, i would argue that MORE physical risk is acceptable in ventures like these (exploration is a human nature)). FURTHER, maybe Plutocratic PORK BARRALING has built in some costs here - like requiring NASA spread its $ joy round many states unnecessarily. Instead of being forced to only use US suppliers (in some cases (for fantasy 'security risk' scenarios). US suppliers wouldnt have been used had COST-ONLY methodology been used... isnt this free market wonderfull? Free when you can internalize gain (kickbacks as 'campaign contributions), not so Free-A-Market when you can make costs public..(big fat NASA budgets)
What im gettin at is this -- ALL major endevours have an element of mismanagment, ALL major endevours are handled by large organizations.. in this case NASA.
This poster has revealed a true misconception (bigotry/paranoia) that is VERY distinctly American: That the GUMMINT is inefficient and wastefull. This is NOT TRUE. The Government (NASA), like any other LARGE body is a very difficult thing to organize -- and keep efficient (hence the cost vs. gain 'problem' mentioned above). Anyone who works in a large-ish organization can attest to absurd waste and absolute chaos*... THOSE NATURAL elements of organizations bread inefficiency either in the Government or Private worlds.
FUTHER, this post reveals the author's ignorance, it replaces a false meme and is flatly misleading. Being based on false assumptions, it is too biased a basis for a valid discussion.
So, on this topic, I would say that 40Billion was well spent, and the ISS cost exactly that - as it should have... now, if you want to say, should we have build an ISS, that I believe, is the real question... not this venting of Anti-Gummint McCarthy-ispired idiocy. This is really an example of a Plutocratic and corrupt government using NASA as a slush-organization to reap some personal rewards...
*I work at a "Fortune 5" (not 500, but 5) companie... and I see tens of thousands literally flushed daily.. so dont try and tell me about private enterprise being inherently efficient.... its utter bollocks.
NASA could have invested in flooz.com, pets.com, or just taken $40 billion in $1 bills, shovelled them into an incinerator, and used the heat thrown off by the withering of the bills in the flames to power a small generating station.
Any of which would have provided a better science return than the ISS ever will.
As I've said before, the best thing NASA could do for the long-term future space exploration would be to deorbit the ISS, and preferably into the Shuttle fleet while it's standing on the ground. (Maybe Taco Bell can paint a big logo on the side of the Shuttle assembly building... :)
The destruction of the two most expensive white elephants in human history would force NASA's hand - they'd have to fire the dead wood, allowing the remaining engineers to build a cheap heavy-lift vehicles while developing next-generation propulsion systems (e.g. nuclear rockets and ion engines for deep space probes.)
(Hmm, anyone know the energy content of a dollar bill? Maybe the dollar-bill-fired power station would have been enough to keep a team of 50-100 engineers comfortable for a year or two while working on said next-generation launch systems :-)
I got modded down for saying this last time (and linking to Libertarian "propaganda"), but why does everyone continue to belive that the government can do a better job at space exploration than the private sector? What the hell, I've got karma to burn, so I'll rant.
$40 billion. The space station isn't even done. Humans haven't left Earth's orbit since the '70's. $40 billion. It sickens me.
I suppose the argument goes something like, "Private companies won't fund altruistic space flight, so the gov't has to foot the bill." "Companies are too nearsighted; they wouldn't appreciate the impact of expensive space based R&D."
Well, I could care less about argument #1. If you want a "feel good" space mission, fund it with Space Tourism. I think Lance Bass has some seed money for ya.
As far as agument #2 goes: I read an interesting proposal by Harry Browne (LP candidate for U.S. President in '00): Instead of direcly funding a space agency, the government could hold a "competition". Set aside $X billion, and offer it as a "reward" for the company or companies that meet the stated goal. Hell, this concept should be considered for lots of "expensive" R&D things: Offer a few billion to the first auto company to break our dependancy on oil, for example.
I truly belive that if 50% of that government spending had been set aside as an incentive for the private sector to go to space, we would have seen an appreciable return by now. There has to be people that would love to figure how how to mine asteroids, efficently harness energy from the sun, etc. Instead we can't even launch a Backdoor Boy into space. I mean, aside from the occasional tourist, has there been any appreciable return from that $40 billion yet? Not that I'm, aware of.
So, I'll say it again, and I'll link to it again, and you'll mod me down again: Privatize NASA.
Also to be truthful, I prefer seeing them without cosmetics. Cosmetics get in the way... of the truth.
Besides, forget a second space station, I'd just like to see a hab and a rescue vehicle so we could put more than a sub-minimum crew up there. The space station has been politically engineered into a no-win configuration.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
According to this the US spent almost $300B on defense in just 2001. So, if you're spending $40B from 1984 to 2002, that's nothing. Would you rather be killing people, or exploring space?
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
wage war on iraq ...
Not for $40 billion: best guesses by the administration put the tab around 200 billion - and do you think the administration is going to over-estimate the cost?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Cost accounting is one of the most misused tools...
40 billion over 19 years is something like two billion a year. Chicken feed.
The management at NASA is one of the finest and most frugal in the world. They have performed freaking miracles on a shoestring budget.
We spend hundreds of billions a year on armed forces with no real enemy in sight. The "war on terror" is a police action, requiring police resources. Any misuse of it, such as conquering oil fields, has nothing to do with defense.
How much have we spent on our military in the last 19 years? Trillions. That's thousands of billions.
How much have we spent financing the debt we ran up proving supply side economics works (for wealthy people)? We spend 17 percent of every federal tax dollar we pay, each year, to finance that debt. That's HUNDREDS of billions of dollars a YEAR paid to the holders of our debt.
How much have we spent in 19 years to finance the supply side miracle? Let's assume 200 billion a year.
200,000,000,000 x 19 = 3,800,000,000,000. Three trillion, eight hundred billion freaking dollars over nineteen years, to the biggest money redistribution government program in history. Where the hell is all this mew wealth coming from? 3.8 trillion in reinvested wealth in the hands of millions of rich people.
And now, since it's "war" time, we are back to deficit spending, raising the debt limit to 6.5 trillion to finance tax cuts for the same wealthy people getting the debt welfare from the previous accumulated debt.
THAT is where we are bleeding to dead. We are paying enormous treasure out to the wealthy to finance tax cuts for the same wealthy.
And two billion a year is a problem? JEEEZUS.
The space station, like everything else in the space program, was starved to death not only on yearly funding, but on the funding of something to actually DO with the damned thing. You can't get anything done with a damned basically military-run tin can complex that isn't part of a greater purpose. It's doomed. Mars? Forget it, no money, we're spending it on debt financing and military conquest of oil fields.
In my opinion as the oldest and most avid space nut I know, the space station was a waste of time, along with the superspaceplane. A transport vehicle to a station which does nothing, except keep Lockheed Martin in contracts.
Mars would have been even worse. It's the Apollo syndrome all over again: exploration for "science" alone is worthless. You have to send people, civilians and private contrators, up on cheap reusable vehicles to do real things.
Like what? Setting up the who Gerry O'Neill/Princeton space industrialization project, to enable USE of it all. Metals, powersats, colonies, all self-supporting after a long time of expensive investment. It would give us a huge frontier with no moral qualms about killing people already living there, and ultimately enable powersats that would save our collective asses in the century to come.
But we have no collective imagination to do such things. It's too outre. So NASA limps along with one leg and '70's castoff furniture in rusting buildings to save money while we borrow money for other things, like tax cuts for rich people and the future pacification of the world in our interests by military and other means.
Ad astra, someday. not today.
A very large portion of this expense was caused by congress dithering over the budget, and NASA doing a very poor job of handling congress.
When the project started, EVERY year, congress would budget it out and say "you get X small amount this year, you will get Y larger amount next year and following years". Then next year they would revise the Y amount down, and direct NASA to redesign so as to reduce the over all cost.
NASA spent BILLIONS on redesigns, and wasted BILLIONS because Y budget wasn't there to take advantage (or even maintain) things they built and/or started using the X budget.
Congress created a plan, then revised it every year through the entire project. NASA believed everything congress told them, and planned on congress sticking to it's promisses.
This did not work out well.
plus-good, double-plus-good
It begs the question of what else could have been done with the same money and far superior management."
.
A moon sized space station capabable of destroying rebel bases.
Assuming, of course, there isn't some OSHA regulation against telepathically strangling incompetant middle-level management
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Reality check... yes, 40 billion is a huge amount, but it's being spent on something CONSTRUCTIVE. How 'bout we shave 40B off our military budget and reinvest it in the space program? Then we WILL have our dual-torus artificial gravity stepping-stone-to-the-stars hotel in space in no time.
I'm in no way anti-military, but there's a reason the budget category is called "defense" and inventing hugely expensive toys to lob at people not in our political favor (who should be just left to rot in their own little happy medieval society for all I care... and strangely, it's because we won't do just that that they claim to attack us... but I digress) just doesn't seem very defensive to me at this time.
But back to the topic... mmmm... space stations...
This is not a zero-sum game. We could have had the space station, the superconducting collider, a Mars mission, space colonization, powersats, and free food for every kid in the world for a fraction of what we spend on financing our debt.
And the debt was run up financing tax cuts for the richest. the same people eating us alive in interest charges on the debt previously run up.
Again, we could have it all. There doesn't need to be a choice. Who said we can't have all both a SC collider and a station? We're freaking rich!
We are spending all our money on clever people who are draining our veins to the tune of hundreds of billions in interest each year, with no principle payoff. The same people complain about government spending on poor NASA, which has been gutted yearly for decades.
NASA has been heroic. They have launched shuttles with a ball of used gum and a paper clip for over ten years.
It is not a zero-sum game. It's just presented that way.
Besides, the money is going to a good place. I'd rather see my tax dollars go to science and engineering regardless of the outcome. It's not like $40B has been launched into space, never to return. It went back into the economy where it belongs.
My biggest fear is that, someday, some group of nuts will succeed in getting a manned mission to Mars... and the manned space programs will die because there are no dreams left but their Mars mission was symbolic, not the capping demonstration of some important new technology.
Before we start thinking about Mars, we need to get trips to LEO about as difficult as a long flight on earth. No months of training, no exhaustive tests, just pay your fare (within an order of magnitude of first-class fare between London and Sydney, say), pass your CIH questions and board a regularly scheduled flight. (Another way of looking at it - a honeymoon in orbit should provoke some jealosy, but not shock.) Getting to one of the lunar bases should be about as difficult as getting to the South Pole station today.
Then we can talk about manned missions to Mars. It will still be difficult, but most of the technology will be mature and it can be reused to support mining expeditions to the asteroid belt. Within a generation there should be manned stations in the asteroid belt and/or near Mars.
In contrast, we're barely able to operate a single space station today, and there's no realistic expectation of an operational lunar base for a generation.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Why does a project with huge cost overruns and questionable scientific merit (ISS) get funding while another project with demonstrable research value (SSC) get cut - mid stride?
Simple. ISS contract largesse is spread over all 50 states; something like the Superconducting SuperCollider has to be built in one place - and the pols don't care about the science, they care about the largesse.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
The Russians aren't as risk adverse as NASA. (Hell, they're less risk adverse than I am!)
..." is to split your man rated (99.99% reliable) boosters from your cargo haulers (99% (95%?) reliable). Exactly NOT what NASA did when they designed the space camel, err... shuttle.
As described in LEO on the Cheap, the Russians do have a more realistic and economical approach to spaceflight. That is, they build their rockets with shipyard-level technology, not ballistic missile-level technology. Big, heavy, tough and dumb vs light, high-performance and expensive.
On point made in "LEO
And for God's sake, have a plan with a definate goal, not "lets get everybody together and put on a show"!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Right now, it's more like "Maybe we should um, do something else in space, maybe." Imagine you're working on a project at work that has lost all upper management support, it wouldn't go anywhere. Until "management" gets behind it again, NASA can't be as great as it was in the 60's and 70's.
"Many of them apply directly to medicine or something for the homeless..."
Exactly! Just imagine where we'll be able to send the homeless once we invent an FTL drive!
First, its $40B.
Second, a good chunk of that money trickles down into peoples pockets. Everyone from the scientists and engineers down to the girl in the NASA cafeteria.
It's all fine and good to talk about the government cancelling everything the government spends money on, firing everyone non-essential, then we can have a nice balanced budget on paper, and we can pay down the debt. Won't that feel great?
Except noone will have a job, and there would be absolutely no government aid for our new impoverished nation.
There are countries that do exactly what you'd like. They're all in the third world.
A good chunk of the population works for the government, directly or indirectly. If this 40B accomplished nothing else, it at least puts people to work.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Why, I believe at the current exchange rate you could've bought a few 3G UMTS licences in UK or Germany! And fat lot of good that's doing to the corps who got suckered. And everyone in tech industry.
It's sad to think how many people still believe pouring billions into a hole in the ground to answer a question that affects exactly nobody is a worthwhile use of that money.
Clear, Dark Skies
Well, almost. I think that once Boston is finally finish EVERYONE will want their own federally funded underground freeway. Remember, for one a bit more than half the cost of a space station, you too can have one!
Lasers Controlled Games!
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?!
That's the point of a tax cut - the spending of more of your money is your choice. Donate it to NASA, invest in a promising aerospace company, hide it under the mattress, buy some beer - up to you. Money doesn't have to be taken with the IRS looming over you to benefit programs you approve of.
There was an article (maybe an editorial) on space.com that gave a reasonable explanation for the current state of NASA.
Back in the 1970's, at the end of the Apollo program, NASA was looking at what the next mission would. They thought it was a trip to Mars. In order to make that happen they needed a space station. This would allow the construction of the vehicle needed to get to Mars. This is because once you are out the gravity well of Earth getting to other places is much easier.
In order to build the station it made sense to create a reusable vehicle to ferry people and material to build the station on the Mars vehicle.
Now, back in the 1970's when Apollo was winding down NASA's budget only allowed them to do only of these things at a time and it had to be justified on its own merits and not in the context of getting to Mars. So the hidden agenda was really to get to Mars even though they asked for a space shuttle and a space station separately.
Consequently, each was designed, planned, and built for missions it really shouldn't have been. The shuttle could have been made to be more efficient, ie. don't need to be able to house a bunch of astronauts for 14 days instead of just getting them and their payload into orbit.
Of course, all of the re-designs, delays, and shuffling that happened in the 1980's didn't help either. Heck, with a fraction of the Star Wars/SDI/BMDO money they could have had the station up and running in the 1990's.
An orginization that has a yearly budget of 14,400,000,000 USD is not a "shoestring budget"
"Except noone will have a job, and there would be absolutely no government aid for our new impoverished nation."
Sorry but our economy is NOT completely dependent on the gov't (thank God). There is something called 'the private sector'. Spending less money on gov't frees up capital for the private sector. Of course there is an appropriate role for the gov't but don't make it sound like they completely drive the economy. The last time I checked the gov't was about 30% of our annual GDP (too big for my taste but that still leaves a good chunk for the private sector).
--Now, that's not to say that there isn't a possibility that there is a more constructive way for the government to spend its tax revenue, but it's not like the money vanishes
So, you're saying that if government were to spend half the GDP paying people to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up again, it's not a waste of resources?
On the contrary - unless you can point to specific benefits of this spending it is like the money vanishes. The cost of paying those employees isn't their salaries, it's that they didn't do anything else productive with their time because they were too busy digging holes (or firing things into space). All those man-years of labor are something you can only use once, and we wasted it. The cost of government is what it spends, not what it takes from us in taxes - and spending money without any offsetting benefit is always a bad thing.
I play Nerd-Folk!
281 million.
I hate to split hairs, but it is a significant difference.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh come on, ...
...
Ok, on one hand, you have an effort that benefits mankind as a whole and defines us: exploring and reaching out to new frontiers. I would certainly want to be around when man lands on Mars, or heck goes back to the moon for that matter...
What would be done with that money? I hope that you don't think that the administration would use it to e.g. diminish debt, build a half a decent health care system or help the disadvantaged in society?
If this were the case, one could consider scrapping the space flights or at lease reducing them in order to get the domestic situation better.
No, I would think they are going to bomb another country, manipulate politics threathen half the world,
As the situation is as it is, I don't think there is a better goal to use the money for... Even if it sometimes means sending a national idiot to space every ten years, burning billions of euros of research money to do some *cough* important *cough* tests...
I can think of _much_ better uses for that money, but the real question is, would politicians do the same thing? Isn't there some proverb about the Eye of the Beholder?
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
$507.37 per person, for the richest 50% of taxpayers. I doubt most of them would notice.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The main problem is we're lacking the stiff competition that the Russians used to provide to us, so we're just moping along at our own pace. We're not worried about some damn communists beating us into space anymore. NASA should create a rogue nation for the explicit purpose of competiting with us to get to Mars. We'd get there lickity split! (Hell, GM did it to themselves by creating Saturn, why can't NASA?)
As much as I like the idea of space travel, I bet using the $40 billion to finance technical education over the same time period would have paid off already in better engineers and better technology. We'd be on the way to Mars instead of putzing around in Earth orbit.
But that would mean giving somebody something for nothing (bad). Big contracts for aerospace firms, good.
Hah!
You bottom-line, industrial types scoff at the bad NASA decision-making, do you?
I challenge you to:
- Replace your Corporate Board of Directors with a Congress full of politicians that dole out your budget and tell you what's cool and what's boring.
- Try to hire good C-level managers without stock option incentives and give them salaries more appropriate for good mid-level industrial managers.
Then, tell me that NASA management has performed poorly."Provided by the management for your protection."
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
Lets look at return on investment for the space program as a whole. Over the course of the space program probably 2-300 Billion dollars have been invested in R&D and Space based activities. The market for GPS related productsis predicted to be $45 billion a year in the year 2006. At that rate, the initial investment for the entire space program will be paid back to the economy in 6 years. The market for satellite communications is also in the tens of billions a year category. Look at the market for satellite TV, Satellite radio. The launch industry alone is a 10 billion dollar a year industry, and the majority of those launches are commercial ones. It took 30 years to get to this point. Can you think of any VC companies that invest several hundred billion dollars on something that is going to have a return 20-30 years out? Yes, the space station may seem like a giant boondoggle now, but whats it going to be 20-30 years out? How many private commercial space stations will there be out there? Think im joking? if you were around in 1957 did you ever think that there would be companies based exclusively on owning satellites? Probably not.
To put this into perspective, the annual US defence budget is over 300 billion dollars. Who gives a shit about 40 billion over a decade or longer?
Considering that the invasion of Iraq is estimated to cost $200 billion, I'd say $50 billion over a few decades is a bargain. You never know what good will come of research. People were screaming (and still are) bloody murder about AIDS research. Now it looks like a cure for parkinson's will use the HIV virus as a delivery mechanism for gene therapy.
You don't know what you'll find if you don't go.
Cat
"It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross... But it's not for the timid." -- Q
Since those times, people have gotten more cautious. People/businesses won't take a chance unless there is almost assured success. Unless you take an educated chance, you won't know whats possible. If a company's R&D won't research a possible solution that has a chance of failing, the scope of solutions is limited.
His final words were something along the lines of "Don't take the safe route everytime, you'll never see anything new". Unfortunately, CEOs and PR people will vehemently object to the possibility of failure, so we won't see that kind of thinking.
As I understand it (and I don't know orbital mechanics so I could be wrong) the ISS is useless as a waystation for a Mars mission because the orbit is too tilted.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
NASA management may have been able to be better, but the real factor that would have helped streamline the project would have been a consistent position from Congress.
Every year that the ISS has been on the books it has had to fight for at least part of itself, and often for it's entire existence.
Most years, Congress has voted to trim the budget in some way or another, often causing some form of redesign. In truth, the cost of all of the redesigns has brought the true cost of the ISS up to what it would have been if they would have left it alone (and the result of leaving it alone would have been a much better space platform).
My family got stuck in some of the mess. My father was transferred from Wichita, KS to Huntsville, AL as part of BOEING's space station work. Before he had even been on site for 3 months his part of the station got chopped. He got moved into teaching ADA to other ISS programmers. A year later he changed positions again. 2 years later -that- part got chopped and my family (minus me this time) got transferred to Oklahoma City for another project at BOEING (which has been fairly stable since and has nothing to do with the ISS).
All of the morphing the project has gone through has far more to do with big, fluid government than it does NASA politics. I'm not saying I don't appreciate living in a republic/democracy/yadda, but it does have it's consequences.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
What is you're idea of a shoe string budget?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
(be) invaded?"
By Canada? Mexico? I think the National Gaurd could handle the mighty Mexican Army pretty well while we bribe the Canadians with real beer. In fact, I would say we could probably even defend Alaska and Hiwaii just fine with ~%5 military budget, esp. if we spent the other %12 building a dominant presense in space.
From where we could always drop big rocks on anyone who bothers us.
Well, we talk about "Costs" as if someone took
$100 billion dollars, put it in a shuttle, and launched it into orbit.
That's NOT what happened to the money.
It paid for r&d infrastucture, it paid for development of materials and processes, and it paid salaries. It also paid for raw materials, and, yes, it probably built more than a couple of summer houses for a few politicians.
We talk about the "Costs" of the program apparently without realizing that we PAID ourselves. Jobs were created, University programs were funded, and the only real problem here is that the "taxpayers" are now unhappy about it and wishing they could have it to do over again and spend that money on something else.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I took a course in college on International Relations and I did a paper on the ISS as a tool in international relations. One of the big uses for the ISS budget was an opportunity for the U.S. government to help prop up the new Russia government by giving it cash.
We were supposedly giving it for their parts of the space station, but most people in the community largely agreed that there was never a strong expectation that the Russians would build their components for the costs we thought. There is a lot of supporting evidence that backs this up.
Yes, I realize that Reagan first proposed the idea for the ISS in 1984, before the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, it was another peice in Reagan's plan to win the Cold War by out-spending the Soviet Union. After the Communist collapse, the purpose basically changed 180 degrees - but it still was not to build an actual space station. That was largely incidental to the two purposes.
The interesting thing would be to see how much of the money was given to Russia for their components.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Like I said... 5,000 troops. They wouldn't have been even a speed bump.
The Marine Corps is also not a self-sustaining unit. They can't be; being self-sustaining requires carrying around so many supplies that it would destroy the Corps' utility as a rapid-reaction force. The Corps can get anywhere in the world in just a few hours, and they can hold that position against even the forces of hell... but burning through expendables which they cannot replace on their own. Within days of first contact, the expendables are gone and they're stuck throwing rocks at the bad guys to make them stop.
This isn't a slam against the Corps, by the by. It's just an acknowledgment that it is not the Corps' job to hold the line. That's the Army's job. It's the Corps' job to be the "kick the door down" reaction force. They get in, they hit like hell, and then they'd better be relieved by Army troops or else the Marines are going to be in a whole lot of trouble.
It sickens me that in the space program (and indeed, in many things) we don't take a chance with human lives anymore. "Oh no! There's a 0.02% chance that someone could get hurt. Even though this could be a huge breakthrough, we can't risk it!" That's not the attitude we had about getting to the moon - we took the gambles, and at times paid for it with human lives.
I got two words for that: INTERNATIONAL MEDIA.
Yes, welcome to the international media age, where blame crosses the globe at the speed of light. You just can't take risks anymore. You will end up on the Daily Show with a funny punch line. You can't lose men in a space program without the rest of the "world's space experts" calling you morons in minutes. Hell-O Senate inquiry. It will be a full on busybody alert.
Besides, the way things are going NOW, the three remaining members of the Al-Qaeda network will get a doctored tape out with some Star Trek bridge sounds and will be claiming that they attacked the space vessel in high orbit with Kalashnikovs and dealth a "blow of TERRIBLE DEATH" to all crusaders that think they can occupy the "HOLY SKY." See it on Al-JazeeraNN tonight! With special DEATH IN THE SKY GRAPHICS!
Sound funny? YES. But strangely truthful. Even funnier and more truthful? The Middle Easterners will FREAKING believe it. Pure comedy.
After all, if you haven't noticed, nobody cares about space anymore. There is no profit in promoting humanity. And honestly people... no money, no Lance Bass getting blown out the airlock sci-fi style. Where has all the fun in space gone without dead celebrities in space? I say nowhere my friend. I WANT WASHED UP BOY BAND LOSERS IN SPACE. I NEED DEAD WASHED UP BOY BAND LOSERS IN SPACE, with "Lance Bass Still Dead" underscreen crawls UPDATED EVERY FIVE MINUTES ON CNN-Jazeera. That is where I want my tax money to go.
After all, if you haven't noticed, the freakin' busybodies run the show now. I would say be thankful that we haven't seen NASA scientists hanging out in front of the Wal-Mart ringing a freakin' bell this holiday season.
In the meantime, the Russians simply used pencils.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Why? Because we can.
We have to pursue advancement. It isn't in the human nature to sit back and be idle- People who don't go out and explore their world end up with lethargic bodies, minds, or both. Putting a space station up doesn't have a huge likelihood of destroying society, or even a measureable likelihood, and we can do it, thus we should, for the sake of the experience. How many of you have gone out and done something, that had no tangible benefit for anyone, and felt it was absolutely worth every cent and second you put into it? I bet most of you have. And the space program has produced tangible benefits on earth in many fields, so... Since we can, we should.
That's like saying that if there were no criminals, then the police would be unneeded. True, but irrelevent to the world we currently live in.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yes, that's right they hate him. It's unlikely they would find a safe haven there. It's interesting to note that the kurds are friendly with al Qaeda according to our own CIA, which by the way does not consider Iraq a threat.
You mention nuclear weapons. That's interesting because it is often repeated by the administration and by the media that Iraq could produce nukes in 6 months if they had plutonium or uranium. Well here's a flash; so could I or any other modern day, halfway intellegent person. The hard part isn't making the nuke it's getting the fissionable material.
Keep believing the propaganda.
Cat
Don't account your chickens before they hatch. `Could save' and `does save' are not synonymous.
That said, I believe that Fred could have got this far for a small fraction of the cost, but even at $40G is almost certainly worthwhile. If you could account for the value of all of the tech spinoffs, they alone would probably pay for it.
The other question is: would we have been better of spending a trillion (ie 25x as much) and whacking together an L5 colony? Certainly, the $200G earmarked for razing Iraq after the S&M experts have finished playing with it would be better directed towards such an enterprise. There are much cheaper, more permanent and more effective ways of defanging Iraq, none of them involving explosives, poisons or bioweapons.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Since I got it I drive my cars less than once/week instead of every day.
A co-worker has an electric scooter from EVDeals, which is also very fun to ride, nice cruising along at 20mph with the wind in your face and making almost no noise or smog.
If you need more speed, the Voloci electric motorbike is also very kewl. We can all stick it a little bit to Saddam and the Quaeda funding Saudis by going electric.
In fact I would say that folks who go electric should be applauded as patriots while the 12mpg SUVs with their "God Bless America" flags seem just a bit oxymoronic, if you know what I mean...
This does not include the cost of rebuilding these places, or even address things like the thousands and thousands of civilian lives taken or ruined. Everyone from your workmate to your neighbour's baby. Even so, we're well on our way to a trillion spondoolies. A Terabuck.
A trillion dollars spent on Energia-style launches and equipment to launch with them would have bought the USA a real space presence, an L5 or similar colony, and the ability to drop rocks on anyone who annoys them. So even from an aggressive, miltaristic PoV, the USA has really gone about this the wrong way.
A mere $10G - one measley percent - spent right now on a space elevator would yield even better returns. Instead of murdering more Iraqi citizens, how about offering them a seat on it? If they're rich, and their wealth is firmly tied to the West, they'll deal with the terrorists themselves to protect that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Or like saying that harsher penalties for crimes or more police don't reduce the number of crimes.Hay wait a second that is what most criminologists are saying.
Yes, that's what a lot of idiots say. But they are trivially proven wrong.
If you reduce the number of policeman to 1 in Los Angeles, you will have more crime. Therefore, more police reduces crime.
If you make the penalty for parking in a red zone death, you will have a dramatic drop in red zone violations. Therefore, penalties matter.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm just imagining the crew of the ISS watching the earth being destroyed below them and then turning to the nearest female crew-member and saying "Do you think we could ever be more than friends? For the survival of the human-race, of-course..."
Does this make my brain look big?
$4e10/(200e6 avg. # taxpayers)/(19 years)/(365 days a year) ~= $0.03 per taxpayer per day.
The entire Apollo moon program was carried out for a nickle a day per US citizen.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Roosevelt....
Sometimes it actually works.
Oh yeah, I guess they're cheaper now...Hmmmm, maybe we could have bought 40 of them!
I strongly suspect the unit price (per pound) for B-2 bombers would be vastly superior to that of the space station, and am outraged that Congress and the President could have squandered 40-billion of MY tax dollars on such a foolish enterprise! Just how much does the space station weigh anyway, huh? How stupid do they think we are!? I mean, I'm on a budget, and when I go to the grocery store I don't buy the 9-ounce TV dinner for $3.99; I buy the bargain brand 9-ounce TV dinner for $2.89 because it's the economical way to go. So I don't see why the government shouldn't have to balance its checkbook just like I do.
You oversimplify. $40 Billion in pieces of paper does not cause _anything_ to happen. Think of money as a placeholder for purchase of products or services. Yes, that money kept people at NASA employed and tricked down to all sorts of other businesses. Had that money not been spent on NASA, but on some other government program it would have also benefitied many people, directly or indirectly.
Had that money not been collected by the government in taxes, it would have been spent by citizens and benefited people all over the country. The notion (though commonly held) that large amounts of money spent by government, no matter how pointless the expenditure, somehow becomes valuable by a trickle down process, could be used to justify all sorts of nonsensical projects.
By your reasoning, the government should take all of our paychecks, build a skyscraper 100 miles high, and while they're at it 100 miles deep. It will keep many people employed for years. Of course their paychecks will have to be confiscated to support the project too. Hopefully some funds somewhere will be left over for farmers to grow food for all of us working on "The Project".
And hopefully, people will get it through their heads that money spent on useless projects does not take _money_ away from other efforts, but does take _manpower_ away from other efforts. Where we focus our attention _does_ make a difference, money is just a placeholder.
As far as the space program goes, I think parts of it are quite usefull. Manned programs are more showmanship than research though. More research could be done by unmanned vehicles for far fewer dollars, which means that either more roads could be built, or more unmanned satelites could be launched, or I'd have more money to spend at Starbucks. It's all about priorities.
Our population doubles every 30 years or so. No matter how well you parcel up the land, people will cover inch of the planet in a few hundred years. Exponential growth is a bitch. No matter how smart a cancer cell is, infinite growth is not an option.
To get everyone on earth into an efficient supercity would require an impossible dictatorship.
Population growth will cause war and disasters long before actual physical crowding occurs. People will fight for optimum land. And they will have numbers to back them up. In a sense, our population growth is spurring us, for instance, to take over Iraq for the optimal oil reserves under its land.
The current terrorism problem is a mere taste of what the angry poor masses of the world are going to be up to in the next hundred years. This is a war of too many people growing too fast against those they are jealous of. No hydroponics will beat Maslow's hierarchy -- the majority of the earth's numbers are poor, hyper-religious, half-educated, and are developing excuses to attack those with better resources. Welcome to Malthus' world... Asimov was so depressed as he grew older, because what is happening was inevitable.
Wait, $40 billion? That's what we spend each year on the War on Drugs.
You mean we could get all that done every year if we'd just end the War on Drugs and give the money to NASA instead? And we'd stop killing innocent people and reduce the crime rate too?!?
Well, what are we waiting for?
"I believe Mass Drivers are illegal according to the Geneva Convention."
I believe you're wrong, but we could always earmark the first rock for Geneva, if it came down to that...
-- Terry
OK, we put the money into training programs.
All the homeless people now have their MCSE certificate to hang on the inside of their cardboard boxes to prove that they can write MS Word Macro Viruses in VBScript.
Uh, then what?
-- Terry
Yeah, but just think of all the people the rich will be able to hire with that money...
What, you don't think they take it home and bury it under the gazebo, right?
-- Terry
Whereas the US doesn't want to be part of any international organisation that it can not dominate, many other western countries have no objection. This is why the EU works. Hell, there are some major rows there, but it is better that they take place in Brussels/Strasbourg than the Somme.
The orginal principle of NATO is all for one meaning that no country needs to be able to defend itself because it's partners will help. This significantly reduces military spending and allows money to be blown on other more useful things than killing people.
Differentiate "peacetime expendables" from "wartime expendables", please. :) The Marine Corps might be able to go a month in the field for peacetime operations without serious resupply. In combat conditions, they might well need resupply in a matter of hours, depending on how frenetic the tempo is.
In Afghanistan, many Marine Corps bases were (still are, in some cases) getting supplies flown to them 600 miles by carrier aviation and helicopter, resupplied from Navy replenishment vessels in the Indian Ocean. These resupply flights were, are, daily occurrences. If the Corps could take care of itself for a solid month at a full combat tempo without the need for resupply, I doubt they'd make dangerous daily resupply runs.
(And yeah, daily resupply is really dangerous. You never know when some Taliban with a Stinger is going to be lying in wait for the helo or plane to come in.)
Defence Budget for 2k3
um... we are going to spend almost 10x that next year in defence alone. We could create a beowulf clusters of space stations instead!!
The U.S. not ignoring the Geneva Conventsion; they prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay are not prisoners of war, since war has not been declared by a state (either Afghanistan, proper, or the U.S. -- a U.S. Declaration of War requires a passing vote of Atricles of War by the U.S. Congress, followed by a non-veto signature by the President of the United States). They are merely members of a terrorist organization.
The holding in Cuba, rather than the U.S. proper is to ensure that they do not claim civil rights under the U.S. Constitution (forget for the moment that the constitution merely recognizes these rights as existing, it does not grant them, since they are inalienable from the individual). This is also the reason the Coast Guard attempts to prevent economic refugees from Haiti from landing on U.S. shores: if they land, they gain access to a long, expensive, and drawn out deportation process, rather than merely being refused entry.
The alternative would be to hold them in the area where they were captured, which could lead to an attempted rescue, with additional loss of life on both sides. Better to remove the temptation, but not complicate the legal situation.
-- Terry
Spending money on exploration of the unknown is always a good investment.
-- $G
Even with the terrible management and the useless scientific experiments making it into the mission plans it sure looks cool. The least they could do is perform a wider variety of science instead of the never ending effects of weightlessness experiments.
Our population doubles every 30 years or so.
historically, yes. but who is to say that we will continue this growth. the 'western' world does not contribute nearly as much to this growth as china or india does. i reserve hope that these trends of rapid growth in certain parts of the world will not continue. china, for example is moving towards (or already?) a capitalist society heavily influenced by 'western' culture which no longer has such large families. mmmm, capitalism...
who knows. i'm talking about things i don't really know about... it's slashdot, what's new?
fear is the mind killer
I don't think NASA ever spent millions to hire rock bands to play for a launch party.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That could have funded US defence needs for over a whole month. And if you think I'm joking, you need to spend some more time investigating what your taxes are actually being spent on.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Well, having worked as an engineer with security clearance at both GD Electric Boat (maybe having helped design your sub), and having done some shuttle-specific work for BPW, I can assure that I probably have pretty good qualifications to judge.
I can also tell you that the shuttle, as I said before, is WAY overengineered, even when compared to the scariest nuclear beasts of the USN. If we required the same level of BS with our sub programs as we do with the shuttle program, we probably wouldn't allow our subs to dive more than 50 feet, and we certainly wouldn't have exotic, risky things like vertical launch platforms. We take WAY more risk with our sailors than with our astronauts, and you know it, bub.
Everyone that volunteers (yes, you must have) for military service adopts a certain level of risk in the name of duty and adventure. Astronauts do not take on the same level of risk that even the boatswain's mate on a nuke sub take on every day. Anyway, I made a serious effort to point out, too, that it's not the component manufacturing that's problematic, it's the process behind it. I never said subs or other military equipement were overengineered, and you damn well better believe I'm qualified to judge.
Say, have you ever read Kings of the High Frontier?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Does that mean that this is an homage?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You're assuming that each of those 450 parts, if it individually fails, will cause a disaster. I really don't think there are that many "mission-critical" pieces. That's why we have backups, folks.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Bullshit. The Laffer Curve takes effect at tax rates of eighty or ninety percent, not twenty or thirty as we have here. There are good reasons to drop taxes (for actual people, not just keiretsus and Enron flunkies), but the Laffer Curve ain't one of 'em.
(The Laffer Curve says that when taxation reaches a certain level, increasing taxes will actually decrease tax revenue, because people will not be motivated to work if they can't keep any of their money.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
[Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
--Simpsons [3F20], "Much Apu About Nothing"
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is the "there's a job for everyone" fallacy.
Why is it when you mention any problem, people always think that you can educate the problem away, that it's an inequity in educatrional level that causes people to be out of work?
The truth is that there are more people than we need to have to produce everything that we consume.
Eventually, we will get to the point where one guy named "Bob", living in New Jersey, can produce everything every man, woman, and child on the planet needs.
And then we will get the the point where we don't need Bob.
PS: The reason everyone always things "IT training" when people talk about skill retraining is because that's the area that, according to popular perception, has all the money.
-- Terry
Why is it when you mention any problem, people always think that you can educate the problem away, that it's an inequity in educatrional level that causes people to be out of work?
Because it's true, probably. The problem isn't that there aren't enough jobs. The problem is that there aren't enough jobs for unskilled labor. There are only two solutions to the problem:
1) Artificially create job demand for ditch-diggers.
2) Train your unskilled workforce so that they can be productive in skilled and semi-skilled professions.
The truth is that there are more people than we need to have to produce everything that we consume.
Brilliant. So I guess we just keep our fingers crossed for world war, a meteor strike, a supervolcano, or a plague. Good plan. Unless of course, you want to get "proactive"...
PS: The reason everyone always things "IT training" when people talk about skill retraining is because that's the area that, according to popular perception, has all the money.
There's the real fallacy.