Slashdot Mirror
Debunking the Trillion-Dollar Space Myth
jfoust writes "When the President and NASA announced the agency's new space initiative, including sending humans back to the Moon and on to Mars, many news reports claimed that the plan could cost as much as $1 trillion. According to this Space Review article, that trillion-dollar price tag is a myth: it was based on erroneous data and analysis, in large part by a single Associated Press reporter, and propagated by many other reporters too busy -- or too lazy -- to check on the facts. Could this kill the plan before it has a chance to start?"
A reporter not checking facts? I'm shocked I tell you!
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that someone on slashdot did the same thing!
On a first order approximation, I'd take what the original moon landing program cost and then adjust for inflation. Its gotta be several hundreds of billions anyway. I mean, a trillion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about some real money.
If we send our unemployed people to Mars, then we have less here on Earth.
I'm all for spending 1 trillion dollars if I have a shot at being that lucky guy on Mars. Well, if it comes from the right place...
if you give me 1 trillion dollars
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
What this will do is add to the already-building public distrust of the media.
which is a good thing, if you ask me....
waiting around for this world to become uninhabitable because of a nuclear war, or a strike from some rouge asteriod!
CBS
free ipod and free gmail!
Let's just say it MIGHT cost $1 trillion. I have always wondered, where/how exactly is all that money spent? Why does it cost so much?
"Humor writer Dave Barry, however, may have summarized the situation the best. "The Bush administration says the Mars mission can be accomplished for only 143.8 zillion dollars," Barry wrote. "But critics claim that the true cost is likely to be much more like 687 fillion dillion dollars. (These numbers are imaginary, but trust me, they're as accurate as any other cost estimates you see about the Mars mission.)""
I only hope it can kill the "plan". Just a way to funnel more of our dollars to GWB's defense contractor buddies and to distract from the misery his economic and polical policies are inficting on the american people.
The Pentagon will pay over $500 for a screw, so why not a trillion for a trip to the moon? Why would they care how much it costs -- after all its not their money?
yes
I mean, how the hell are we going to put a man on Mars for 1 trillion dollars when it takes one hundred billion dollars alone to keep a laser on the moon from destroying Earth?
Really people, think it through.
- sm
Crap, it's already slashdotted. Did anyone get the article text before the server went belly-up?
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
It could easily cost at least one trillion dollars over the next 20+ years to get humans to Mars. Look at how much the U.S. thought it would cost originally to get to the Moon, $10-20 billion. And you know they spent way more than that actually doing it. $20+ billion to get the Moon 30+ years ago can easily translate to $1+ trillion to get to Mars in the next 20 years.
You also must consider all of the technologies that were gained and/or improved during the race to the Moon. Computers, communications and fuel cells is just the very short list. What do you think one trillion dollars can get us this time around? Perhaps IPv6 deployment.
It seems like more and more that people are just printing/reporting what ever "facts" they come across to forward their own agenda.
A good example is that story that ran last week where they almost banned styrofoam cups because they read on some kid's website about the dangers of "di-hydrogen monoxide" (Water) or whatever the scientific name is.
Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
Well, the president's plan only calls for an additional $500m/year of NASA funding (2/3 the cost of the current unmanned probes), so who's kidding who?
With M$ new pricing policy and sco's take no prisoners attitude the Bush administration will have enough capital to finance the project. The only thing is that the NASA logo would be replaced by "Microsoft, opening the windows to the skys" and sco on the spokes of the landing gears. Multi-corps will probably be financing space exploration in the futre.
"It's probably a misplaced decimal point....I always screw up some mundane detail like that"
WTF? Over?
No matter which way you cut it, this is going to be very, very expensive. I won't claim to know how much, but I'll personally wager its upwards of a Trillion USD.
It's kinda sad. One of the few inititiaves I approve of from the current Bush administration, and it is stillborn due to reporter bias and misinformation.
Reporting is supposed to give facts, not 'plausible assumptions'.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Relax. Don't worry. Have a home brew.
Rather than "kill the plan before it has a chance to start", it might just give the plan a bigger bust when it is published, with a headline saying "for only so-and-so billions". That figure might have been scary, but compared to a trillion, it's peanuts...
- Tal Cohen
I hope the manned mission funding is stopped as they will rob other more valuable programs of funding.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
1) Bush does not really care if it is funded or not. The speech and goals are just political mumbo-jumbo, like his AIDS research promises...
2) NASA is more than adept at killing projects themselves. Money is tight here now (I work at NASA and am embroiled in the CEV start-up operations) and NASA is terrible at managing a tight-budget program like this would have to be.
Beuracracy will kill this program before any "reporter", trust me.
--rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Sounds like damage control to me. They probably issued some number then the reporter, knowing good and well that government estimates are never accurate (remember that surplus?), probably made an educated estimate of what it would really cost taxpayers.
Can I bum a sig?
Look at the reality though - ISS, Shuttle etc. Name one of these programs that has not overrun its budget by a substantial margin.
A lot of that figure comes from early estimates from George Bush Sr.'s big spcae announcement back in 1989. That plan was a lot more ambitious, however, as it entailed the construction of a massive, futuristic-like space station in addition to the International Space Station, among other costly items. I believe our current president's plan will be significantly more financially sound.
Whispers in the echo chamber Why the media says the space plan costs a trillion dollars by Dwayne A. Day Monday, March 22, 2004 There is an old children's game that teachers occasionally inflict upon their students as a morality play. A group of children are placed in a circle and then one of them is told a story that they are to whisper to the person to their right. That child is supposed to whisper it to the person on their right and so on until they reach the originator, by which time it no longer resembles the original story. Distortions are introduced by miscommunication or deliberate fraud. The lesson is that you should not believe everything you hear. We saw the modern media version of this game recently when rumors emerged that President Bush was about to unveil a new space policy that called for a return to the Moon and an eventual human mission to Mars. Media reports quickly declared that this plan would cost a trillion dollars or even more. That number was widely repeated within the modern media echo chamber, often by supposedly reputable sources. It may have already done substantial damage to the Bush space policy, creating public opposition to what is perceived as a massively expensive program and scaring away any possible supporters. The $1 trillion cost estimate is wrong. It is based upon a completely inaccurate reading of historical data and deeply flawed mathematics. But the problems are worse than this. Not only was an inaccurate number repeated endlessly by the media without confirmation, but the flawed calculations were repeated again and again by various people with their own agendas. Reporters also appear to have ignored or evaded obvious weaknesses with the original source of the information, preferring to repeat an inaccurate number that they saw repeated endlessly rather than seek out better information. The story of the $1 trillion cost estimate raises some troubling questions about how modern journalism is conducted. The birth of a number There was no secret that the Bush administration was formulating a new space policy in the fall of 2003. However, the details of the policy were shrouded in secrecy until a January 7 article carried by wire service United Press International. That article reported that President Bush would unveil his new space plan the following week and provided a few details, some of which were later proven false. The story contained some budgetary figures indicating that large increases in the NASA budget would not occur, but did not provide an overall budget figure for the plan. It also made clear that a return to the Moon, not a human mission to Mars, was the primary emphasis of the new plan. On January 8 Paul Recer of the Associated Press reported on the new space plan. In his article, Recer stated: "No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a Moon colony, again, would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface." Note that according to Recer, the trillion-dollar figure is only for a single Mars expedition, not for both the Moon and Mars, which the UPI story stated were part of the new plan. Outside observers could naturally assume that a plan for both Moon and Mars missions would be more expensive than a Mars mission alone. I was able to contact Recer on March 4 and ask him where he had gotten the $1 trillion cost estimate for a human mission to Mars. Recer stated that he had gotten the information from "industry sources and people I talked to." He said that none of the information was provided by government sources. He said that his sources told him that in 1989 Congress--not NASA--had produced an estimate of $400-$500 billion for a mission to Mars as proposed by President George H.W. Bush. Recer had adjusted for inflation, which would have produced a range of $640-$800 billion. He had then rounded up by at least $200 billion to produce the estimate of "nearly $1 trillion." There were major problems with these
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Never mind, someone did it while I was posting the comment.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
mi = 1
bi = 2
tri = 3
llion = f(x)
Find f(x) such that:
f(mi) = 1,000,000
f(bi) = 1,000,000,000
f(tri) = 1,000,000,000,000
Solution:
f(x) = 1000^(x+1)
So there is a shift (x+1) in the meaning of the prefixes "mi", "bi", "tri". Why?
Heck, I'll even kick back in a hefty campaign contribution.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Before cleaning up the messes made from wars.
...with out unemployed people who would be left to post on slashdot??
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!
Why we need to lob tin cans at Mars when people still go to bed hungry in this world is beyond me. It's all ego when you stop to think about it.
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
-- W.C. Fields
A Mars program is not going to protect you from environmental concerns or war, which will probably impact you in the next fifty years. There is nowhere remotely inhabitable anywhere near us we could have any hope of colonizing in a sustainable way in the time frame.
$1 Trillion!? Good thing that is a Myth. Someone would have to be getting on the ball with some Open-Source stuff for these guys... =P Not even Microsoft has that kind of money.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
Bah, damn HTML formating ... (and lack of preview use)
Whispers in the echo chamber
Why the media says the space plan costs a trillion dollars
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, March 22, 2004
There is an old children's game that teachers occasionally inflict upon their students as a morality play. A group of children are placed in a circle and then one of them is told a story that they are to whisper to the person to their right. That child is supposed to whisper it to the person on their right and so on until they reach the originator, by which time it no longer resembles the original story. Distortions are introduced by miscommunication or deliberate fraud. The lesson is that you should not believe everything you hear.
We saw the modern media version of this game recently when rumors emerged that President Bush was about to unveil a new space policy that called for a return to the Moon and an eventual human mission to Mars. Media reports quickly declared that this plan would cost a trillion dollars or even more. That number was widely repeated within the modern media echo chamber, often by supposedly reputable sources. It may have already done substantial damage to the Bush space policy, creating public opposition to what is perceived as a massively expensive program and scaring away any possible supporters.
The $1 trillion cost estimate is wrong. It is based upon a completely inaccurate reading of historical data and deeply flawed mathematics. But the problems are worse than this. Not only was an inaccurate number repeated endlessly by the media without confirmation, but the flawed calculations were repeated again and again by various people with their own agendas. Reporters also appear to have ignored or evaded obvious weaknesses with the original source of the information, preferring to repeat an inaccurate number that they saw repeated endlessly rather than seek out better information. The story of the $1 trillion cost estimate raises some troubling questions about how modern journalism is conducted.
The birth of a number
There was no secret that the Bush administration was formulating a new space policy in the fall of 2003. However, the details of the policy were shrouded in secrecy until a January 7 article carried by wire service United Press International. That article reported that President Bush would unveil his new space plan the following week and provided a few details, some of which were later proven false. The story contained some budgetary figures indicating that large increases in the NASA budget would not occur, but did not provide an overall budget figure for the plan. It also made clear that a return to the Moon, not a human mission to Mars, was the primary emphasis of the new plan.
On January 8 Paul Recer of the Associated Press reported on the new space plan. In his article, Recer stated: "No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a Moon colony, again, would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface." Note that according to Recer, the trillion-dollar figure is only for a single Mars expedition, not for both the Moon and Mars, which the UPI story stated were part of the new plan. Outside observers could naturally assume that a plan for both Moon and Mars missions would be more expensive than a Mars mission alone.
I was able to contact Recer on March 4 and ask him where he had gotten the $1 trillion cost estimate for a human mission to Mars. Recer stated that he had gotten the information from "industry sources and people I talked to." He said that none of the information was provided by government sources. He said that his sources told him that in 1989 Congress--not NASA--had produced an estimate of $400-$500 billion for a mission to Mars as proposed by President George H.W. Bush. Recer had adjusted for inflation, which would have produced a range of $640-$800 billion.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
What are they projecting the actual cost of this mission to be?
Go Gusties
says to the head of NASA: You are FIRED!!!!!!
...a trillion dollars was just a myth. In reality, it will cost us One Million Dollars
/me puts pinky up to lip
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
Whispers in the echo chamber
Why the media says the space plan costs a trillion dollars
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, March 22, 2004
There is an old children's game that teachers occasionally inflict upon their students as a morality play. A group of children are placed in a circle and then one of them is told a story that they are to whisper to the person to their right. That child is supposed to whisper it to the person on their right and so on until they reach the originator, by which time it no longer resembles the original story. Distortions are introduced by miscommunication or deliberate fraud. The lesson is that you should not believe everything you hear.
We saw the modern media version of this game recently when rumors emerged that President Bush was about to unveil a new space policy that called for a return to the Moon and an eventual human mission to Mars. Media reports quickly declared that this plan would cost a trillion dollars or even more. That number was widely repeated within the modern media echo chamber, often by supposedly reputable sources. It may have already done substantial damage to the Bush space policy, creating public opposition to what is perceived as a massively expensive program and scaring away any possible supporters.
The $1 trillion cost estimate is wrong. It is based upon a completely inaccurate reading of historical data and deeply flawed mathematics. But the problems are worse than this. Not only was an inaccurate number repeated endlessly by the media without confirmation, but the flawed calculations were repeated again and again by various people with their own agendas. Reporters also appear to have ignored or evaded obvious weaknesses with the original source of the information, preferring to repeat an inaccurate number that they saw repeated endlessly rather than seek out better information. The story of the $1 trillion cost estimate raises some troubling questions about how modern journalism is conducted.
The birth of a number
There was no secret that the Bush administration was formulating a new space policy in the fall of 2003. However, the details of the policy were shrouded in secrecy until a January 7 article carried by wire service United Press International. That article reported that President Bush would unveil his new space plan the following week and provided a few details, some of which were later proven false. The story contained some budgetary figures indicating that large increases in the NASA budget would not occur, but did not provide an overall budget figure for the plan. It also made clear that a return to the Moon, not a human mission to Mars, was the primary emphasis of the new plan. Not only was an inaccurate number repeated endlessly by the media without confirmation, but the flawed calculations were repeated again and again by various people with their own agendas.
On January 8 Paul Recer of the Associated Press reported on the new space plan. In his article, Recer stated: "No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a Moon colony, again, would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface." Note that according to Recer, the trillion-dollar figure is only for a single Mars expedition, not for both the Moon and Mars, which the UPI story stated were part of the new plan. Outside observers could naturally assume that a plan for both Moon and Mars missions would be more expensive than a Mars mission alone.
I was able to contact Recer on March 4 and ask him where he had gotten the $1 trillion cost estimate for a human mission to Mars. Recer stated that he had gotten the information from "industry sources and people I talked to." He said that none of the information was provided by government sources. He said that his sources told him that in 1989 Congress--not NASA--had produced an estimate of $400-$500 billion for a mission to Mars as proposed by President George
one has nothing to do with the other. in fact, a mars mission would create a lot of new jobs.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Everyone seems to think that the entire plan proposed by Bush is abount reclaiming our place on the moon and thus on mars solely for the benefit of our country. Have any of us known any politician to put forth any effort to actually just push the human race (or this country for that matter) ahead just for the sake of it (without political/power motives)? I certainly can't. The only reason we landed on the moon in the first place was for defense. If the Russians got their first, how would that make america look militarily wise? It's very unlikely any of this is being done for the sake of humanity when really its purely about politics and the United State's current contingency plan for the future. It has nothing to do with progression and a lot to do with controlling the rest of the world.
And no, i'm not wearing a pointy tin hat. Nor do I hate Bush or the United States (I am an American) but I am always skeptical of politicians and their politics, as should everyone else.
If it is anywhere near as hard to keep a man off Mars by making it a political issue as it is to keep a Bush-hater from using every single Bush-related story they see to start a political debate, then I would say we will have a man on Mars in about a week.
Thank you Mr Papazian.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
After further investigation, the budget breakdown is as follows:
Space craft - $500 Million
Mission control &
Support crew - $2 Million
Fuel - $800 Thousand
Diebold navigation system - $20 Million
SCO license for onboard CPU's - $699 * 500
Anti Virus software to ensure Windows
based fire suppression system
isn't infected before liftoff - $200
Man hunt for someone smart enough
to operate the spacecraft yet dumb
enough to ride it to Mars - $1 Trillion
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
3,000 people, mostly children will starve to death this year in the US. Do we really need to go to Mars right now? Can't it wait a few years til things are running smoothly down here?
I'm all for boosting our space program, but I think it's a luxary at this point in our history, not a necessity.
"One could easily find a cure for aids,"
Really? You're saying the *only* reason we don't have a cure for HIV is because a lack of money?
Oh.
Is the same true for cancer too? I mean, we've probably spent close to a trillion dollars on cancer research, and we still are like cavemen. But AIDS must be easier, all will take is a few bucks.
"switch to a hydrogen-economy etc etc."
All for just a few billion? Really? Wow. That's like $1/every person on earth. Wow. You mean, the government will replace my BMW for just $1? AND it will run on hydrogen?
Good grief, that's money well spent.
You're a genius. Nobody thought of spending a few billion to save the planet before. Wow. And I can see you don't have a lack of perspective, or understand that you can solve all the world's problems for just a billion dollars. Hell, that's like 2 B2 bombers, and if we gave up 4 B2 bombers we would cure AIDS, and change the world's economy to hydrogen (breaking the laws of thermodynamics, but hell this is a BILLION dollars we're talking about...
You are one smart cookie. Thanks. I'll pass this along to the president and UN, and we'll have AIDS and world energy solved for just 2 Billion TOTAL.
Wow.
Could this kill the plan before it has a chance to start? No, what will kill the plan is when NASA's responsibility is massively increased, but their funding only increases a few percent....
(The cynic in me noted the timing of W's announcement... "War? Death? um... Hey, Lookit the Moon! Lookit Mars! Perty, eh y'all?")
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Well, Steven Weinberg comes up with the same number, plus or minus a couple of hundred million. And he's no slouch.
I'd like to see someone try at getting a total cost/benefits analysis out of programs like this. The technology spinoffs are huge, needless to say, and one could consider the benefits of things like international partnerships.
Economics isn't very good at whole-cost accounting, so it would be tough.
Obviously it wouldn't be able to include things like black-box military uses in such an analysis, but some decent estimates (lies, damn lies, and statistics notwithstanding) would be useful fodder.
Damn those pesky terrorists
- The world needs to stop having unprotected anal sex.
feed the world,- The world needs to get a job and stop taking its welfare money out of my goddam pocket.
switch to a hydrogen-economy etcStop whining, beyatch.
So no longer just a rumor; now it's been confirmed by a Slashdotter. Will you be holding a press conference?
Amortized over a decade or more of work, $1 trillion doesn't seem so bad. Especially considering $100bn/year is a fraction of what we spend on our military.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Whatever cost they are projecting it will be too much because they are sending humans. There isnt any reason to send humans other than politics as we could send a hundred robotic machines for the same price and get more science done. If we really need to send humans they should be sent with the understanding that they arent coming back. No not your ex's, but volunteers who would camp until they run out of supplies and then go to "sleep".
Adjusted for government, it'll turn out to be more like 5 trillion.
Seriously. Why do we need to send space jocks to other planets when robots do the job so much better. Whats the objective of sending people? "Touch the pole and then come back"? Thats stupid. If I want pictures of men on mars, Ill just open photoshop.
People are heavy, delicate idiots that cant run on nuclear power.
The echo chamber
The January 8 Recer article in the Associated Press proved to have a major impact on later press reporting. Recer's story was widely distributed, appearing in dozens of newspapers across the country, such as the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. Over the next several weeks, numerous articles by other reporters quoted the $1 trillion figure, usually for a human mission to Mars. Some of them attributed the number to the Associated Press and some did not, but nearly all had clearly gotten the number from Recer's article. Many of them stated that a single Mars expedition alone would cost $1 trillion, whereas others later stated that this was the overall cost estimate for the entire space exploration plan.
But something else often happened. One of the problems that alert reporters should have noticed with Recer's original article was that he never named his source, so there was no way for other reporters to call that source and confirm the information themselves. This did not prove much of an impediment for reporters or editors, however. Because the $1 trillion cost estimate was repeated so often, even if they were uncomfortable taking the number from Recer's piece, reporters could often quote somebody who had merely repeated the number they had read in the newspaper, therefore avoiding the problem of determining its validity. Furthermore, in at least one case it appears that sloppy editing allowed someone to invent a source for the number.
On January 9 another article by Associated Press writer Scott Lindlaw included the exact same paragraph as in the Recer article, although the rest of Lindlaw's article was completely different. Lindlaw's article appeared in many places, such as the website of the liberal British newspaper The Guardian. One unusual aspect of the Lindlaw article was that in addition to the paragraph that was borrowed from the earlier story by Recer, Lindlaw also mentioned "When the first President Bush proposed such a project, the estimated price tag was $400 billion to $500 billion." Although this was accurate, it omitted the important caveat that the "project" was also only one approach to achieving the president's goals. It also omitted the fact that there had been other, much lower cost estimates.
Lindlaw's article also stated that former astronaut and senator John Glenn had commented on completing the International Space Station and setting exploration timetables. Glenn was never quoted directly in the article and Lindlaw did not quote Glenn concerning the cost of the exploration plan. The reference to Glenn occurred nine paragraphs after the mention of a $1 trillion cost estimate and two paragraphs after the reference to the $400-$500 billion estimate for the 1989 plan.
The association between John Glenn and the trillion-dollar figure also became part of the mythos.
By January 15, a short Associated Press article without a byline appeared on numerous websites. It stated "The first American to orbit the globe, retired Senator John Glenn, said it could cost $1 trillion." There was only one problem with this statement--Glenn apparently never said it. The AP article appears to have been a heavily condensed version of the Scott Lindlaw article of January 9 that never attributed the cost estimate to Glenn. In the course of editing it, someone claimed that Glenn had said something he had never said.
This new AP article was extremely short and appears to have been used primarily by radio and television stations rather than the print media. It is common for radio and television stations to repeat stories that they first see in newspapers or on the news wires, usually condensed to only a few sentences. This new, shorter AP story appeared on the websites of WJAC TV in central Pennsylvania, and WCAX TV in Burlington, Vermont. On January 15 the local Washington DC Fox News affiliate, WTTG, ran a story about the Bush proposal. News anchor Allison Seymour introduced the story by saying that the Bush plan "could cost trillions." Not "a trillion," but "trillio
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Hmm, a reporter writing a story for a liberal news outlet (AP) inflating the cost of a conservative administration's plan for space exploration, with other reporters gleefully carrying and amplifying the story for their news outlets. Nope, no liberal media bias here folks! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The new space vision
On January 14 President Bush announced his space plan at NASA Headquarters and indicated that he was advocating spending a total of $12 billion over five years on the plan, only $1 billion of it additional money. Many newspaper articles reported that this was not a lot of money, and in fact would come primarily from within NASA's existing budget. But despite this new information, some reporters refused to abandon the $1 trillion number, while at the same time failing to check its origins. Others erroneously reported that the primary emphasis of the new program was placing a human on Mars. For instance, a January 26 Time magazine cover contained the headline "Mission to Mars." This was the same issue that carried Easterbrook's essay on the costs.
Some large newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post never mentioned the $1 trillion figure. They did, however, mention that the Bush plan would undoubtedly cost more than was in the proposed budget figures.
The combination of the widely-reported $1 trillion figure and the newly-released NASA figures created an ironic situation: some reporters and commentators assumed that NASA and White House officials must be lying (or worse) because the numbers were so completely different. Some reporters later wrote about the story as if the Bush figures had no validity at all, because other estimates had been much higher--$1 trillion.
At the time of the Bush speech NASA released a confusing budget chart that indicated how much money the agency would spend on various projects over the next 20 years. If one carefully separated out the exploration part of the chart from the rest, it was possible to determine that NASA planned to spend approximately $170 billion on various aspects of space exploration over this period, including robotic probes to Mars and Jupiter. Lunar exploration would be only one part of this figure and human Mars exploration was not part of it at all. But in the press coverage that followed the announcement, just about the only part of this that reporters acknowledged was a 20-year timeframe. On January 19 Paul Recer wrote another article about the space plan. Despite the fact that in the intervening 11 days the new Bush plan had been released and did not contain anywhere near $1 trillion in new spending, Recer repeated in its entirety his original paragraph on the costs of the mission.
More whispers
Not everyone in the media automatically repeated the trillion dollar figure, but most of the cost estimates were extremely high. The Delmarva Daily Times, a small regional newspaper in Maryland, stated that the Bush plan "has been estimated to cost up to $500 billion." The Denver Post ran an editorial stating that a Mars mission "may cost a half-trillion dollars." A left-wing website, AlterNet.org, stated that the plan would cost "hundreds of billions." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a generally supportive column that stated that "the cost of going to Mars has been estimated at somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion." On January 18 the New York Times cited John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, as claiming that the cost of establishing a base on the Moon by 2020 could be $150 billion. The article also inaccurately reported that the 1989 cost estimate for a mission to Mars was "around $400 billion."
Few reporters were skeptical of the high cost estimates that were being endlessly repeated by their colleagues. Florida Today writers John Kelly and Todd Halvorson, both knowledgeable space journalists, wrote on January 14 that "Critics pounced on the price tag given the nation's other needs, some citing erroneous estimates that ranged as high at $1 trillion." But there do not appear to be any other examples of reporters directly questioning the high numbers.
On January 20, the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an article on the Bush plan by John Iwasaki that in many ways represented the high water mark for sloppy reporting on the space plan. Iwasaki stated: "Whether Congr
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
It won't cost $1trillion. It'll cost $999,999,999,999.
This sig no verb.
There's a simple solution - I bet we can outsource it to India. They can probably send a guy there for a hundred bucks or so.
Whether or not he arrives in one piece, however, was a minor omission in the requirements document, much to his later dismay.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
if you want to goto mars, start a nonprofit or something. stop taking money out of my pockets! too many tens (of not hundreds) of billions of dollars have already been wasted on the space station and silly space shuttle experiments. the enormous burden of supporting space exploration should not be forced upon everyone. can you name ONE good thing that came out of the space program, that couldn't have been created without, and for less money?
the plan could cost as much as $1 trillion
Yea, but what the reporter failed to mention was that this is Canadian dollars.
The whole mission will actually only cost $9.99. With a few subsidies...
"The boneheaded support of Israel was the reason for 9/11,"
I didn't realize Spain supported Israel.
Or could it be the people who belong and support Al Queda are filthy vermin that we should exterminate.
No, they're simply *misunderstood* people.
making the world a better place so we don't need nuclear weapons
How are you going to do this with all the humans that live here?
No matter how nice it gets, you can't make the world a nice enough place to keep groups of people from wanting to kill each other, it is our nature...
(I am not saying that we shouldn't try...)
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
If Haliburton gets the contract.
You have to factor in cost overruns and inflation.
Oh! Wait! We can build all our spacecraft in India! Yeah!
Then the Indians will Nuke Pakistan! Due to the advanced tecnical knowhow they gain from good Ol USA outsourcing.
The same way the we (USA) taught the Japanesse how to mass produce for the Korean war.
I'm going to get modded down as a troll but,
Since when is Bush Bashing ever modded troll?
The new space vision
On January 14 President Bush announced his space plan at NASA Headquarters and indicated that he was advocating spending a total of $12 billion over five years on the plan, only $1 billion of it additional money. Many newspaper articles reported that this was not a lot of money, and in fact would come primarily from within NASA's existing budget. But despite this new information, some reporters refused to abandon the $1 trillion number, while at the same time failing to check its origins. Others erroneously reported that the primary emphasis of the new program was placing a human on Mars. For instance, a January 26 Time magazine cover contained the headline "Mission to Mars." This was the same issue that carried Easterbrook's essay on the costs.
Some large newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post never mentioned the $1 trillion figure. They did, however, mention that the Bush plan would undoubtedly cost more than was in the proposed budget figures.
The combination of the widely-reported $1 trillion figure and the newly-released NASA figures created an ironic situation: some reporters and commentators assumed that NASA and White House officials must be lying (or worse) because the numbers were so completely different. Some reporters later wrote about the story as if the Bush figures had no validity at all, because other estimates had been much higher--$1 trillion.
Some reporters later wrote about the story as if the Bush figures had no validity at all, because other estimates had been much higher--$1 trillion.
At the time of the Bush speech NASA released a confusing budget chart that indicated how much money the agency would spend on various projects over the next 20 years. If one carefully separated out the exploration part of the chart from the rest, it was possible to determine that NASA planned to spend approximately $170 billion on various aspects of space exploration over this period, including robotic probes to Mars and Jupiter. Lunar exploration would be only one part of this figure and human Mars exploration was not part of it at all. But in the press coverage that followed the announcement, just about the only part of this that reporters acknowledged was a 20-year timeframe. On January 19 Paul Recer wrote another article about the space plan. Despite the fact that in the intervening 11 days the new Bush plan had been released and did not contain anywhere near $1 trillion in new spending, Recer repeated in its entirety his original paragraph on the costs of the mission.
More whispers
Not everyone in the media automatically repeated the trillion dollar figure, but most of the cost estimates were extremely high. The Delmarva Daily Times, a small regional newspaper in Maryland, stated that the Bush plan "has been estimated to cost up to $500 billion." The Denver Post ran an editorial stating that a Mars mission "may cost a half-trillion dollars." A left-wing website, AlterNet.org, stated that the plan would cost "hundreds of billions." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a generally supportive column that stated that "the cost of going to Mars has been estimated at somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion." On January 18 the New York Times cited John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, as claiming that the cost of establishing a base on the Moon by 2020 could be $150 billion. The article also inaccurately reported that the 1989 cost estimate for a mission to Mars was "around $400 billion."
Few reporters were skeptical of the high cost estimates that were being endlessly repeated by their colleagues. Florida Today writers John Kelly and Todd Halvorson, both knowledgeable space journalists, wrote on January 14 that "Critics pounced on the price tag given the nation's other needs, some citing erroneous estimates that ranged as high at $1 trillion." But there do not appear to be any other examples of reporters directly questioning the high numbers.
On January 20, the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an article o
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
As this simple calculation shows:
Distance to the moon: 385,000kms = 240,625 miles
Distance to Mars: 78,300,000km = 48,937,500 miles
Total distance to be travelled: 49178125 miles * 2 (to and fro)= 98,356,250 miles
Assuming the average miles per gallon (my car does about 30 mpg on highways) of 25mpg:
Total number of gallons required = 39,34,250 gallons
Assuming the average price per gallon (regular, unleaded) in the US at $1.75 per gallon:
Grand Total = $6,884,937.50 or about Six million US dollars.
Clearly, nowhere near the $1 trillion mark. Bill Gates could afford this with his pocket change.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Yeah, the US has such high unemployment. I mean gosh, its way up around 1/2 that of Germany and France. And we dont have a 70% income tax to boot!!! (at least not yet....KERRY IN 04 right?)
A good escort will set you back $150-200 per hour on average. I'm sure the top brass spend that much or more on a screw...
Oh, you're talking about hardware? Well, that's a different matter altogether...never mind...
They lied to us through "facts" [note the quotes].
Simply astounding..... Next you'll tell me Linux isn't a complete operating system, Germany wasn't annexed in the 60s and Bush is a war criminal!
I mean... shit I need some sleep...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This article in Spacedaily does a good job of explaining why Bush's costs are both too much and too little to do what he wants. I love the quote:
If $3B can manage to pay off consultants to think deep thoughts about a project and an artist to draw up a rendering then $1T isn't really that much in the world of gov't finance, high payed consultants and contractors used to dealing with the military where any price goes. It would be interesting to see what an X-Prize sized budget passed 100km orbit would look like.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
I will pay my 1 trillion dollar bill ( mostly for porno rentals on pay per view, 1-900 calls made on the hotel phone, and little bottles of vodka ) with my 1 trillion dollar bill.
So suppose it's "only" $100 billion. Why, exactly, is it justified? We can do the science far more cheaply with robots, and if a robot burns up on entry, no one has to attend any funerals. The typical arguments I see on slashdot boil down to:
Yeah, and so are lots of things. Doesn't mean we should spend government money on it.
True, in billions of years the sun will swallow up the inner planets. More realistically, if we keep trashing the environment life will eventually be very uncomfortable for us. But space technology right now can send up a handful of astronauts at a time. We're not about to migrate overcrowded populations to the moon. (Human migrations in the past have all been much cheaper, even in relative terms.) The solutions to our problems on Earth should involve fixing our behavior on Earth, not giving up on it and fancifully migrating elsewhere.
Give me a break. If we want to sponsor scientific or technological research, we can do that much more efficiently by giving grants directly. Space research really hasn't produced much anyway, per dollar, compared to defence spending. It was the military, and not the space program, that drove the development of the microchip. The space program has given us... Tang. The "science experiments" done on the Shuttle nowadays are mostly nonsense anyway; the real ones could be done far more cheaply by robots anyway.
I support unmanned space exploration designed to further the pursuit of science. But manned space flight is incredibly expensive in comparison, doesn't really do much for us, and sucks resources away from real science.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Depending on the definition of "screw", a sales rep or exec trying to close a sale would call a $500 screw a business expense- and get away with it in most cases...
Was anyone gullible enough to believe that Shrubs 'plan' to get back in space was anything but a cheap attempt to buy votes in the upcoming election? He's run the deficit up so far we'll all be lucky if the government can affort to keep printing money. Let's be real here. The only way we're going to get back into space is dumb luck - The government isn't going to do anything big money doesn't pay them to do.
They should have had Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair reporting this one...
Similarly under scrutiny is the Bush Administration claim that an extended mission into space could be paid for with a fifty dollar Sears gift certificate and another round of tax cuts. The administration has asserted that the devil is in no way involved in this particular figure, but has not ruled out the future involvement of the Prince of Darkness.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Oh well, no fact-checking required then. Since he proposed it, it must be wrong, corrupt, or stupid somehow...
If I had mind filters I'd filter out every person that ever used the phrase "liberal media" forever. It would save on having to filter out all the concepts as bullshit afterward.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The rest of your pie-in-the-sky ideas are just as stoopid. go protest in the street or something.
and all this time I thought a myth was a young female moth...
Let's face it, space exploration belongs to the Bots. They don't need to eat or breath, they don't mind extremes of heat and cold, they don't lose structural strength from not being in a strong gravity field, and most importantly, you don't need to bring them back.
Of course, the Mars project was never about exploration, it is about creating another welfare program for defense contractors (aka loyal supporters) and letting Bush show that he is the equal of John Kennedy in the "vision" thing. I didn't know John Kennedy, but I can sure tell that George W. Bush is no John Kennedy.
Why go to Mars? The weather is miserable. You can't get the red stains out of your knees if you fall down. The views are great but the all you can eat buffet are over rated and the shows are lame...Vegas is Cheaper!
We need some journalism regulation!
We need that Reporters be banned from using un-named sources. They should also be strictly limited on how they use previouse reporters work.
We need an Federal Agency that would fine inaccurate reporting. That would make the reporters aleast check their basic facts!
We need reports to be required to report the "absolute truth."
Russian Space Web, for example, has an article that details several technical weaknesses with Bush's plan. For example the rocket thrust required to orbit the planned space capsules far exceeds that currently available with Saturn-V boosters. Also, Bush's plan to mine resources from the Lunar surface to fuel the trip to Mars would require A) substanially more fuel just to lift off the lunar surface than would be necessary for spacecraft assembled in Earth orbit, and B) some sort of industrial/mining infrastructure on the moon, which itself would require massive fuel just to get off earth.
Had NASA been allowed to sell and license its patents like a normal company on just 4 of the things it improved on during the 70's, microprocessors, cryogenics, medical telemetry and systems analysis software, it would have made 450% profit between the start of the Mercury project and the end of Apollo. Instead, we got the spinoffs which are fine for improved quality of life, and the companies that bought the patents made some money which is fine for some peoples' living standards, but the program itself suffered.
Want to get to Mars? Fund an aerospace skunkworks with NASA level funding and let them keep the profits from the inventions. And keep the damn adminimonsters out of it; let the engineers run it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Remember, that is what they said about Iraq too
Table-ized A.I.
Well, no, because:
that trillion-dollar price tag is a myth: it was based on erroneous data and analysis
We didn't need small computers until we went to the Moon the first time. Many watches today have more computing power than the entire LEM but the computer that went to the Moon was the start of the real push to get things miniaturized and lightweight. Going to the Moon again just to go there and make sure the flags are still standing up would be a waste IMO but going there to stay and/or going to Mars would end up inventing new ideas and refining existing ideas to the point where we'd get a good return on them. The Shuttle and ISS don't return much because they aren't doing anything new, but a long-term space habitation like a (semi-)permanent Moon base or a 2-3 year Mars mission would likely yield dividends we could use to make life better on earth.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
$100bn is still a shitload. If I recall correctly, the military budget is about $400bn. 25% of that is a sizable amount and more than I'm even willing to spend on NASA and I'm a space nut.
I suggest everyone check out Mars Direct. It's a plan estimated by its creator to cost around $20bn to start up and $2bn per mission. Even NASA's version is only $60bn when they ran their numbers.
One last thing. The 90-day report figure of $400 bn back in the early ninties was based on the Werner Von-Bruan plan of Mars exploration. It was impractacle and is now widely accepted to be the wrong way to do it.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Over here we count every homeless, every hobo, every goddamn junkie as an unemployed. Not so on your side of the Atlantic.
You might wanna check the grandparent's mod score, AC: not only did he get modded Troll, but he even got a Flamebait, which is cool.
Bush and his cronies have been trying to dismantle the hubble, the space station, and the aging space shuttle fleet for some time now. Their plan to go to the moon is nothing more than a means to stop work on the existing projects.
They have no intention of going to the moon, and besides, what are we going to learn on the moon or on Mars? They are pretty much dead rocks, which is what we learned the last time we went there. Hubble on the other hand is giving us new discoveries all the time! It will be a shame to see it go.
Hi, USians, Europe speaking.
"Let's just say it MIGHT cost $1 trillion. I have always wondered, where/how exactly is all that money spent?"
Easy. All you have to do is award a no-bid contract to Halliburton....
But seriously.. wait, I take that back.. Still being serious, $1 trillion sounds about right. If it cost around $100 billion for all the tech/infracstructure that led to the short hops (and no extended stay) to the moon, that's a trickle compared to manning and supplying a manned Mars station.
Mars is a much stickier problem than the moon. And it's a long time getting them back.
A little history on this is in order. Imagine wavy vertical lines transporting you back to the past.
The year is 1989 and I'm growing out a mullet. The first president Bush makes an attempt to rejuvenate NASA by setting Mars as a goal. Since he's a politician and not a scientist, he delegates the details to a group to give him a plan and price tag. What he got was the infamous 90-day report. The 90-day report amounted to implementing a Mars exploration plan that included every pet project that NASA had. It involved building giant craft in orbit, sending them to lumbering to Mars, have a crew land for 2 weeks and then go back to Earth. The estimated cost was an insane $450 billion which they comically expected to get. At the time, I was too concerned with getting my hands on a Sega Genesis to care or understand.
NASA had lost their minds and took the presidential initiative to mean that they were getting a blank check for everything they ever wanted to fund. King George the First saw the price and turned them down flat. He wasn't aware that there were any other ways to do it so it was slated to happen in "the future". Since then, there have been several different plans developed to get to Mars on a tight budget and stay there long enough to do some real science and establish a permanent presence.
Wavy lines back to the present.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Please don't vote for Bush. Consider your other options at the very least. Lives depend on the outcome of this election...
No you dufus, it'll be killed by the fact Bush's 'visionary' space program is just
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
I think a permanent solution to the energy crisis that leaves the US with no need for a Middle East political presence that costs a few hundred billion and creates millions of jobs can be sold to the American people.
I do not think that the American people either can or should be sold on a program which will mainly bring back some cool video of people wandering around collecting Mars rocks and the rocks themselves.
If we build a space industrial infrastructure, we will know how to get to Mars cheaply, comfortably, and safely.
We need space as a place to put industry. If we get industry up there, doing science up there will be cheap... it's a lot cheaper to send science grad students up if there's lab and housing space up there for them.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Dat's da joke
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Liberal media is a myth for the most part. Some reporters are liberal-leaning on social issues since they're highly educated, but since they make far more than the average family, they tend to lean further to the conservative on financial matters.
Read "What Liberal Media" for a good overview.
A none-too-complimentary view of "Bias" can be found at http://www.fair.org/articles/bias-op-ed.html.
Jayson Blair? The reporter who got sacked for making up news? The one that gave the NYT a credibility problem that it still hasn't fully overcome? If anything, he would be a data point in favor of the idea that the media has some interest in reporting the news in a factual manner.
Who released this study? How substantiative was it? Did it get any peer review? Maybe, just maybe, the study didn't get much play because there are more important things than acting as a megaphone for some right-wing think tank with bad science. I can't pass judgment on a study I haven't seen, but you haven't provided compelling evidence that it deserved to get attention.
It may also be that the major news outlets are giving us the news we're interested: The war in Iraq, not global warming. Global warming hasn't been in the headlines much since the furor over the Kyoto Treaty died down. Finally, whether you side with the pro-war or the anti-war side, it's pointless to call all the Iraqi guerillas attacking an invading army on their home soil "terrorists." They have their own political agenda, and they are using force to move it forward, just like we are.
Let's reserve the term "terrorists" for those who target non-combatants.
Finally, you can't think of the number of terrorists as a zero sum game. We can't say, "Okay, there are 100,000 terrorists inside Iraq, so if we kill 60,000 terrorists, we've reduced the threat by sixty percent." More terrorists are created and eliminated by political maneuvers than the U.S. could ever hope to take out with bullets and missile strikes.
Just look at the recent killing of Shiek Ahmed Yassin--a Hamas leader--by Israel. Did he coordinate suicide bombings? Probably. Did he deserve to die? Probably. Can Israel scratch one terrorist off the scorecard? Nope. The public reaction to the killing will probably increase the number and willpower of the Palestinian militants.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You need to recalibrate your budgetary intuition
according to the navy, a bare-bones aircraft carrier costs $4.5 Billion-- and you think you can build the craft that will go to Mars for $10 Billion????
We might as well go back to wearing simple robes, stop using all this high-falutin' technocrap and go back to being 'mindless' peasants serving our Glorious Lord!
Shut your pie hole, you hack.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
is nowhere remotely inhabitable anywhere near us we could have any hope of colonizing in a sustainable way in the time frame.
I agree with you that spending money on space for the "purpose" of colonization and lebensraum is useless. However I think there is somewhere we could expand human living space: under the oceans. We have hundreds of thousands of hectares of submerged, convenient continental shelf floor waiting for exploration and colonization.
I find it absurd that we have spent so much mapping Mars in exquisite detail but spent so little that most of our own planet's deep ocean floor remains unmapped with any precision.
Da Blog
... to put on record my prediction:
If this Man-On-Mars program ever gets started, it'll cost more than $1 trillion dollars, and, even after having paid that much, it will be dropped before anybody goes to Mars.
cygnuhchur
Whispers in the echo chamber
Why the media says the space plan costs a trillion dollars
by Dwayne A. Day
--
There is an old children's game that teachers occasionally inflict upon their students as a morality play. A group of children are placed in a circle and then one of them is told a story that they are to whisper to the person to their right. That child is supposed to whisper it to the person on their right and so on until they reach the originator, by which time it no longer resembles the original story. Distortions are introduced by miscommunication or deliberate fraud. The lesson is that you should not believe everything you hear.
We saw the modern media version of this game recently when rumors emerged that President Bush was about to unveil a new space policy that called for a return to the Moon and an eventual human mission to Mars. Media reports quickly declared that this plan would cost a trillion dollars or even more. That number was widely repeated within the modern media echo chamber, often by supposedly reputable sources. It may have already done substantial damage to the Bush space policy, creating public opposition to what is perceived as a massively expensive program and scaring away any possible supporters.
The $1 trillion cost estimate is wrong. It is based upon a completely inaccurate reading of historical data and deeply flawed mathematics. But the problems are worse than this. Not only was an inaccurate number repeated endlessly by the media without confirmation, but the flawed calculations were repeated again and again by various people with their own agendas. Reporters also appear to have ignored or evaded obvious weaknesses with the original source of the information, preferring to repeat an inaccurate number that they saw repeated endlessly rather than seek out better information. The story of the $1 trillion cost estimate raises some troubling questions about how modern journalism is conducted.
There was no secret that the Bush administration was formulating a new space policy in the fall of 2003. However, the details of the policy were shrouded in secrecy until a January 7 article carried by wire service United Press International. That article reported that President Bush would unveil his new space plan the following week and provided a few details, some of which were later proven false. The story contained some budgetary figures indicating that large increases in the NASA budget would not occur, but did not provide an overall budget figure for the plan. It also made clear that a return to the Moon, not a human mission to Mars, was the primary emphasis of the new plan.
On January 8 Paul Recer of the Associated Press reported on the new space plan. In his article, Recer stated: "No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a Moon colony, again, would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface." Note that according to Recer, the trillion-dollar figure is only for a single Mars expedition, not for both the Moon and Mars, which the UPI story stated were part of the new plan. Outside observers could naturally assume that a plan for both Moon and Mars missions would be more expensive than a Mars mission alone.
I was able to contact Recer on March 4 and ask him where he had gotten the $1 trillion cost estimate for a human mission to Mars. Recer stated that he had gotten the information from "industry sources and people I talked to." He said that none of the information was provided by government sources. He said that his sources told him that in 1989 Congress--not NASA--had produced an estimate of $400-$500 billion for a mission to Mars as proposed by President George H.W. Bush. Recer had adjusted for inflation, which would have produced a range of $640-$800 billion. He had then rounded up by at least $200 billion to produce the estimate of "nearly $1 trillion."
That's it in a nutshell. Nevermind the miserable one-sided political reporting, all news media have become sloppy and highly partisan. Even we Canmucks are seeing the erosion of news in favour of infotainment.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
He is canceing the shuttle this way. And later presidents will cancel the Mars project, and WaLa! No more Nasa. Great move for the texas president.
Feeding the hungary is not a money problem or a resource problem it is a political problem. Ziare used to be the breadbasket of central Africa, they not only produced enough food to feed themselves they exported it to Europe and other areas in Africa. The problems arise when politcal leaders use food or land as leverage over their citizens. They give it to their cronies or to the poor or other groups who are not the best users of the land (likely the people they stole it from).
There are a ton of things that we in the first world should be doing to improve the lot of everyone globally, but spending more on food shipment programs is not the best use of our money. Oddly enough the Economist's most recent cover story talks about this very subject, and we happen to agree that establishing a rule of law in those poor countries would be a great way to improve the lot of almost every citizen in the world (without pesky frictional losses that other developmental programs have). That has been a historic driver of economic growth across the globe (in the West over the last 1000 years) in Asia over the last 100, but it hasn't happened in most of Africa or Latin America.
Oh and a hydrogen economy will take hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars of investment (rebuilding all the transportation infastructure) and we will still use fossil fuels to obtain the lion's share of the hydrogen.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The April '04 edition of Popular Science has an interesting article about the top seven or so engineering projects/dream-projects today. One of them was the in/famous space elevator. What was particularly interesting was that the estimated cost was only $10 billion. (that's 1/10 of what the US has already spent in Iraq, for those counting)
Now I've always thought that the reason we aren't already building space elevators is because we haven't got anything strong enough for the cables. But according to the guy the $10 billion figure came from, all we need is a little more nanotube development and we're there.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Actually this political football is hardly a program at all. The quick summary ($500+ billion for an trip to Mars with all the preparation, rounded up to $800 billion for inflation, then adjust to $1 trillion so it's easier to say) is a pretty accurate rendition of the media story targeted by the article as I read it.
Of course the author of the article blew it too, when he said $1 trillion is 60% more than $800 billion.... Is that because of the silly 1 trillion = 1280x1280x1280 arithmetic thingie? Or because he was doing the same thing he is criticising (talk about inflation so we think he is considering it, then, without saying he doesn't believe in inflation, just discard that adjustment and point out that $1 trillion is 60% more than the original (low) estimate to put an unmanned probe on Mars before 2019). BTW, we did that, ahead of schedule, and under budget, I think.
Debunking is not a word I would have used for that article, though. Rant might be more accurate.
-- Ancient (IBM 1620 and Atari 400) Programmer
I think there are people out there who still believe that nasa spend millions / billions of dollars to develop a pen that would work in outerspace. http://www.spacepen.com/usa/index2.htm
p en.asp
According to this site
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/space
there was a pen developed by Fisher, and sold 400 to nasa in the late 60s at a cost of $2.95 a piece. Also according to the site, over one million was spent by Fisher for development.
Now... i've heard references over the years regarding this pen, mostly jokes how the former Soviet Union's space program saved money by using pencils, and even as an illistration for NASAs over spending. The figure seems to range between 1 million all way to 12 billion in some cases. But regardless of whether Nasa actually spent money to develop this technology or not, it is still perceived by many to be a fact and not just an urban legend.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Human Exploration is legitimate science. This is the claim of the Bush administration. In fact, with the plan that they've put forward, programs relating to human exploration of space will the only thing that the government will be funding.
Space telescopes? Look what's happened to Hubble. It's too dangerous to risk a Shuttle flight to service it, yet the only reason the Shuttle won't be decommissioned until 2010 is becasue it'll be used to put up pieces of the International Space Station, which the U.S. will stop using before 2015. Sure there's the James Webb telescope coming along, bigger and better than Hubble. But the only thing that could put it into orbit, the Space Shuttle, will have been decommisioned by then.
This is a bit of a rant, I know. However ther are University space science programs unrelated to exploration that have already been shut down given that no funding will be available from here on out.
Human exploration is an important aspect of our space program, but one must remember everything has an opportunity cost. Before blindly shouting, "YAY! More astronauts!", we should look carefully at what we'll be giving up too. And we'll be giving up quite a lot.
Congress asked NASA to compute how much money they'd need. Unfortunately, one of their scientists mistakenly converted dollar amounts to pesos early in the calculation, and the amount was never converted back.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Sooo two trillion then?
When everything is said and done, it will likely end up being much more than people can project now. This is the government yes? And a long term project?
Do you think eisenhower would have/could have had the feds take on the Interstate project if they knew how much it costs today to build and maintain them?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Oh, but this is /. Home of Bush haters, not so anonymous. Forget facts, we just got to bash bush.
Face it, we hold Republican Presidents to higher standards. Maybe because we can. Maybe because they have them.
Halliburton who will be given the entire project as a no-bid contract.
Come on, we are looking at the same ppl who reported that the space shuttle columbia was travelling at 9 times the speed of light when it cracked up. It was on CNN so it must be true...
At my college, journalism is an easy major - aka. you'd have to be retarded to get less than a 4.0 in it, the average journalism student is more interested in the college lifestyle (drinking your way through college so that at the end of it you wonder where the time went cause you don't remember the last four years, having more than sex than a trailer trash hoe), and if you had a cent for every iq point, the entire sum of their iqs together wouldn't get you a hamburger at MickeyD's. Then when they get out, its all about who you know, not what you know. In other words they get a rich uncle to get them on the air. Is anyone at all suprised to learn that the media is now as dumb as posts?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
A majority of the kids thought of manned space travel as an escape from a disposable used up world.
I always thought the best way of figuring out how to do deep space travel, would be to (1) Find out ways of making existing travel completely self-contained (ie. cruise liners), and (2) find a way of building such systems up in space.
After watching the space shuttle experiment to measure the electric current running along a 100 metre length of copper cable, I've always wondered whether it would be possible to use the existing electric field to drive an electromagnetic accelerator in space.
Unless you're a close friend and he's told you he doesn't care, quit being a freaking conspiracy theorist. Idiot!
sun-side is going to be hotter than the side in shadow.
this produces uneven expansion of materials.
this produces mechanical strains.
these cause material fatigue.
that makes things (the walls) break.
that would be bad.
one of the things that makes those "expensive composites" so expensive is all of the stuff (work, and materials) that goes into them to try to achieve as small a value of thermal expansion coefficient as possable (or to balance it, somehow).
It really doesn't matter. Sending a man to Mars is just a distraction for Bush. His opion polls are back to pre 9/11 levels, and he needs a distraction. He couldn't start another war, so he proposed to send a woman to Mars. Now, the public either claps their hands and says "Whoopie!", or "What a waste of money!". In the meanwhile fewer people notice that all the jobs are leaving the country, and that the "moral right" is imposing their own closed-minded views upon the rest of the free thinking world. (And no, that wasn't a US = World statement).
Does he talk about how he's streamlined the government and cut costs, thus restoring fiscal responsibility? Okay, let me rephrase that: does anyone keep a straight face when he talks of his fiscal responsibility? The closest he comes to a "small-government" image are his "faith-based" initiatives and tax-cuts, neither of which are about cutting costs. Well, that and occasionally gutting regulatory agencies, but he tends to brag about the "Healthy Forest Initiative" instead.
That said, if he gets a second term, he might have to abandon Mars anyway, because eventually someone has to start to pay the piper, no matter how much they believe in "borrow and spend" government.
Erik
YOU ARE SAYING IMPUDENCE TO ME! THAT IS IMPUDENCE!
Sure, they do a lot of good stuff. The Canadarm program alone makes them the shizzle bombizzle. But ultimately, our "manned space program" is a courtesy given to us by NASA, and our satellite launches are limited.
I think Canada should have our OWN launch capability, even if it's only one pad, and we have to buy boosters from Russia or the EU to do it. But realistically, I know that's a rather romantic notion which probably isn't cost-effective...
I at least hope we are willing, when the time comes, to invest heavily in a PRACTICAL manned Mars program (as opposed to a pork-driven one which lands three people on Mars for 20 days, and costs $700bn).
Freedom: "I won't!"
uhm... small problem, there: thermal expansion.
Actually, that's not the purpose of the expensive composites. The purpose of those composites is weight. Given the cost of shuttle launches, they had to use as light of materials as possible for the space station and the shuttle. Thermal protection is usually handled by deploying a solar panel as a sun shield.
Take Skylab as an example. It was simply an empty third stage of a Saturn V rocket. Very little in the way of materials technology went into it. One of the solar panels was damaged during liftoff, causing the research lab to start cooking. It went through dozens of thermal cycles before the crew arrived and repaired it.
What I'm proposing is pretty much several "Skylabs" linked together into a larger station where actual work can get done. My estimates of 100-200 metric tons per module is significantly larger than Skylab, which weighed a mere 75 tons.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Of course we are going to continue basic research - this is the best thing we can do for future generations. I am glad people in 1900 didn't try to get to the moon - its better that they just built the Wright flyer. That was the best thing they could do for the future. For us, going to Mars is pointless. Better to just continue research and hope the future can make use of it to build and adapt superior technology.
> If I recall correctly, the military budget is about $400bn.
That is without the supplemental fundings (each roughly $60bn for each fiscal year).
Fun with figures: $521 billion is the projection of the deficit fot the FY 2004. In the year 2003 the U.S. spent $318 billion on interests. NASA: $15 Billion, Education: $61 Billion
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Might buy you a breakfast. Maybe even a dinner.
Just extrapolating exponentials...
Hehe, fuckin' Liberals.
Believe 1% of what you read, .1% of what you see on TV, .001% of /.
The whole point is that your one trillion dollars figure is wrong. There's no use trying to justify it.
"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up"...
Start with Bush Sr's initial project proposal for $400 to $500 billion. Adjust for today's inflation (x1.6) = $640 to $800. Then the reporter adjusted it to $1 trillion for no reason at all. When confronted, his reponse was "Oh well". The initial project proposal was for a combined moon base + mars base project, over a life cycle of 30 years. And it was based on a different deployment method; replace the original proposal rockets with modern Delta 2s at 1/4th the cost. So, you have one reporter fabricating a number, and dozens of major "news" sources reproduced the faulty figures.
Yes, our society will discover great things in the process of developing our extraterrestrial bases... I for one am looking forward to it.
This article is very well written; it reminds me of the book by John Stossel that I am currently reading, "Give Me a Break." He points out how reporters have no problems with drawing illogical conclusions or making things up if 'big business' is being pilloried, but if one points out the ineffectiveness and stupidity of government programs, he is proclaimed by the fruit-n-granola crowd to be 'a shill of big business.'
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
what can a human do on Mars that a robot cannot do - cheaper and faster?
Using PTFE for bearings for satellites were the first non-top-secret uses. So the space program gets the credit for something that really came out of the Manhattan Project.
The technology to refine germanium and later silicon to the levels of purity needed for semiconductors also came out of the Manhattan project.
The first electronic computer, Colossus, was developed to break German codes during WW2. ENIAC predated NASA by around 15 years.
Oh, and one last thing, Arpanet, the origin of the Internet was NOT a NASA program, it was a different government program. Nice try though.
Sure, we may not agree on the cost, yet. But I have yet to hear arguments for the benefit. Thus cost/benefit can never be determined, so why bother?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
But reporters are employees of, generally, big media organizations... which tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. People point to Rupert Murdoch, but he's an exception that points to the rule. Ted Turner, founder of CNN and TBS, and former president of Time Warner, was married to Jane Fonda, for instance. Michael Eisner, head of Disney, and by association ABC and ESPN, is a huge Democrat supporter.
In fact, I'm betting with that kind of money programs could be put in place to feed quite a few people across the world. Or retool an out-of-date workforce in the US and abroad. Or even both.
Some blue-collar guy would probably say "How does this give me a job?" and it's true, it will create some jobs. But we couldn't we get a better bang for our buck than building a space rocket? We may discover some great things on Mars but do we really seem like a nation, or world for that matter, with our priorities inline?
//Fine, mod me down, but will you be able to sleep at night?//
Most people don't realize that a lot of federal spending funds states' discretionary spending. This was maybe the biggest problem with the Bush tax cuts; to the extent that the government cut spending to match them, it cut it from aid to local governments, which dramatically worsened the impact of the bad economy and just generally rendered everything FUBAR.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
look at the environmental impact of humans living on land - do you really think having them live under water is a good idea?
I share your concerns regarding pollution, but I do see that with more lebesraum, especially compared with the increasingly crowded surface, we get to distribute the carrying capacity a bit more.
I think the issue with pressure is serious, but can be solved with engineering and sub-sea floor enclosures. The solution of this is left as an exercise for the reader.
I think the issue with replacement/recycling is a function of our limited knowledge of how to manage the oceans responsibly, rather than the primitive slash/burn hunter-gatherer approach of modern fishing. We have evolved many continuous, renewable ways to farm the surface that do not involve industrialized monoculture and we could evolve similar techniques for ocean farming.
Da Blog
Let's consider the cost of a single launch of the Space Shuttle into LEO: $500 million according to a recent issue of Popular Science.
Now let's take into account that the longest Shuttle mission to date was just shy of 17 days.
A Mars mission will last up to three years and will be immeasurably more complex than the week long 1969 Moon landing mission. The article goes on to say that future propulsion technologies promise to halve or third the travel time to Mars, but a mission of even one year in length presents huge technological challenges.
So in order to get to Mars, a transport vechicle for the one to three year mission still must be designed, tested and built. For the first five years of this effort, Predident Bush has ear-marked $12 billion - $2.4 billion / yr or the equivalent of four Shuttle launches. IMHO, it does not sound like a serious proposal.
How much money would it take? Given the track record of NASA and all their various contractors, I doubt $1 trillion is all that far off the mark at all. If it were to take 20 years to get to the point of an actual launch, that would work out to a <sarcasm>mere<\sarcasm> $50 billion / year.
In the British Empire, there were schillings, pence and guineas as well as pounds.
You may have Dollars and cents, but it hasn't always been that way...
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
A big part of the point is that we don't know what we'll learn. Having someone else - even the ESA - spend the money would probably halve (or better) the costs and risks of the mission.
Better still, spend the trillion and another couple of them getting a decent space industry up and running. Then we'll all be richer, and we'll be seeing the arrival of basic products for doing exciting high-tech stuff like building houses and bridges, running our lights and hospitals etc for considerably less cost in terms of outright dollars and in terms of pollution and landscape defacement.
As a bonus, side-trips to anywhere in the Solar System would be a small fraction of their current price.
Speaking in generalities: It takes approximately as much energy to go from low earth orbit (LEO) to escape velocity as it takes to go from the launch pad to LEO. In other words you must lift as much additional fuel to LEO as it took to get the object to LEO. The Space Shuttle is one of the most efficient lift systems (but the Russians and US have done quite well with big dumb rockets--it just takes a lot more fuel). It takes approximately 3 million pounds of fuel to lift the very efficient 200,000 pound Shuttle into orbit. That is a fuel/payload ratio of about 15 to 1. To accelerate the Shuttle to escape velocity it would take another 3 million pounds of fuel, but it would take 45 million pounds of fuel to lift that 3 million pound to LEO. In other words, it would 15 SHUTTLE BOOSTER launches to get that escape fuel into orbit (assuming you lifted only the escape fuel and did not use the Shuttle ). Different design and fuel arrangements can reduce the fuel requirements a little, but this gives you an idea of why it took such a huge rocket to go to the moon. The Apollo Saturn 5 was the most powerful machine ever built. During launch, the Saturn 5 generated as much power per second as all the powerplants in America at that time! If you are planning a return trip, then you must also lift to Earth LEO and Earth escape velocity: 1) fuel for deceleration to orbit around the other world, 2) fuel to decelerate to the surface of the other world, 3) fuel to lift from the other world to low orbit, 4) fuel for escape velocity from the other world for the transit ferry , 5) fuel for deceleration upon return to Earth, either in one stage or two, that is to LEO and then to Earth. If you do it in two stages you can lift the landing fuel and vehicle to LEO without carrying it all the way to Mars, i.e., use the shuttle or a Russian lander to bring the Martianauts home from Earth orbit. Either way the return vehicle is going to be going 30,000 to 60,000 mph when it reaches Earth after falling 30-40 million miles into the solar gravity well. In other words, it is going to take more fuel per unit vehicle mass to slow the vehicle back down to Earth orbit velocity than it did to to escape from Earth going out! 6) and maneuvering fuel going and coming. That is why some are proposing to manufacture the return fuel on the Moon or Mars, so you don't have to lift the off-world return fuel all the way from Earth to Mars and then back. Of course it would take huge amounts of fuel to get the manufacturing equipment to Mars or the Moon to begin with. You can use modules and reduce the amount of fuel for each step: small Mars lander, small return vehicle to Mars low orbit, but I'll bet the Earth-Mars transit ferry will have to be at least 200,000 pounds. You can't expect the astronauts to sit in a telephone booth for four to six months. There are other design proposals to reduce the amount of fuel needed: ion drives, solar sails, aero-braking for Mars, etc., but IT IS GOING TO TAKE A SATURN 5-CLASS PROPULSION SYSTEM PARKED IN EARTH LOW ORBIT TO GET THE CREW TO MARS AND BACK. You save a lot of fuel with a nuke powered Earth-Mars transit vehicle, but it is no magic bullet. Nuke engines are heavy and only double the specific impulse over the the Shuttle LHLO. The limiting factor is the temperature tolerance of your propulsion system materials, not the energy contained in a fission reaction. It is still going to take huge amounts of fuel. But then, I'm no rocket scientist. Do I think the U.S. ought to do it. Dern right!
"...while history is usually explicable it is often irrational" --Roger Spiller
sure, let's just land a couple on the sun. Heh...Heheh.... Does 1 trillion cover the costs of making Mars enhabitable? Creating an ecosystem suitable for humans? I don't think I can live out my life in a building. :p
On second thought Pinkey, let's try Venus...
People discover the meaning of life between getting piss drunk and the following hangover.
Just out of wondering, has anybody totted up the cost of desktop computers, to the business sector alone?
The document that used to take a secretary 5 minutes to type and 1 minute to correct with white-out, now takes 25 minutes (bootup, multiple printings to make sure it's attractive, distraction of Solitaire, Network administrator's time, etc) or more.
That's just the letter.
Now consider all the time wasted by people surfing the net for useful sites like slashdot. Or blogs. Or checking email. Or logging on to the modem, for that matter. Or clearing spam.
My goodness -- how much time do we waste each day, just clearing spam? That wasn't a part of our lives before.
I think that if you tott up the cost to business of having desktop computers available, you will find that the moon program easily cost over $1 trillion dollars.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Do you have anything to base that on other than a wild-ass guess?
Dr. Robert Zubrin has a well-thought out plan that costs about a twentieth of that ridiculous $1 trillion figure. Go read about it on http://www.marssociety.org.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'm sorry - could you show me *any* 1000 man corporation that burned through a trillion dollars over ten years?
As for your 5 man figure - again, *what*? Let's say those five guys earn an average of $100,000. Benefits usually add 50% to the total so that's $150,000 each, a total of $750,000 for five men, not two million. Even if we assume another $50,000 per man-year for hardware, rent and so on we still haven't reached 50% of your figure.
Clear, Dark Skies
A few years later some students will be able to go to the moon for a few million, if Virginia Tech Terascale Cluster is any harbinger.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Can you imagine a nuclear space vessel going columbia on us in the atmosphere? accidents happen, but that accident could be ugly ugly. I think if we devlop nuclear vessels the nuclear part should be assembled after it launches and it should never reenter.
The reason those numbers are distorted is simple: that's $1 trillion that could be used to help the poor.
Indeed, the best thing the government could do to shut these "help the poor" peple out is to just give each man, woman, and child below the poverty line a trillion...then let them sink or float on their own.
What we'll find is that the vast majority of them will sink - meaning that any more $$ spent on them is wasted. It'll show the left in particular that helping the poor is mostly fruitless. And that it's not the lack of government funding that causes problems, it's the people who are the problem.
When humans are involved, don't we take the estimate and multply by ten?
Cheaper than discovering life is creating it.
Here are some cheaper options:
1. Sink a few hundred billion into the rover AI/evolver development. Send it to mars. Tell it to go forth and multiply (build/maintain/operate robot factories).
2. Invent an intelligent lifeform here, then give it time to get bored of earthly contraints and leave to mars or elsewhere. Hope that it writes home.
3. Invent an intelligent life, then wait to be assimilated. Benefits include universal travel for some [parts] of us !!
3. Wait for the Dolphins or Whales to go to Mars. Feed them plenty of fish until them.
You read it here first!
"...Money is tight here now (I work at NASA and am embroiled in the CEV start-up operations) and NASA is terrible at managing a tight-budget program like this would have to be...."
Here's a sneaky bit of inside info: Everyone is crap at managing programs on this sort of scale!
The complexities and pitfalls of multi-million, let alone multi-billion projects leave managers flipping coins or using more sophisticated predictive methods, only to be told "Most likely" (darn, better give the damn thing a longer shake next time).
The only, repeat only way a really big (ie. 10^7 US$+) project will come in on time and on budget will be if the cost and duration are subject to renegotiation between customer and prime contractor at regular intervals - I'm no expert on XP, but this close partnership seems to echo some of XP's tenets.
That's how it is. We are just unable to account for all variables and possiblities without building in truly ludicrous contingencies. Even if the customer would finance these contingencies - and they won't - the immense financial safety net is still a frank confession of our technical inability to plan and organise effectively on these sorts of scales.
T&K.
Political language
Could this kill the plan before it has a chance to start?
The plan is not just unrealistic, it's stupid; remember that a big chunk of the money that Bush promised to give to space program would come from "redistributing" the money within NASA.
I.e. they will kill all other programs, pour money into space program, add a few billions of their own, and that's it!
Now you are in situation where a) you can't go to Mars because funding is - obviously - not sufficient; b) you can't make progress in any other area because you dismantled all other programs.
See, this really has nothing to do with trillions... even if you look at figures 2 orders of magnitude smaller, the plan breaks down.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
Could this kill the plan before it has a chance to start? Is this trying to say that costing less than a trillion dollars will kill the plan?
Mind you ISTR there has already been mention of the terrible effect of terraforming on the Martian environment.
freedom, n. Allowing people you don't like to do things you disapprove of.
Get votes.
Unless your friendly neighborhood robotic base has a Diebold product. :)
Seriously, though, I think we can bring it in for under $1 trillion; that kind of doughage is pretty ridiculous. Start off with a space elevator - that alone will shave tens of billions off the cost of developing lunar and Martian bases.
Still, even if it is $1 trillion, it's a damned sight better way to deficit spend than in imperialstic endeavours.
- It assumes that it will be able to leverage on work done by other people.
- That no problems arise during the development process.
- That there is no inflation during the development process.
- That there are no unforseen problems, landmines, etc...
Virtually every page is filled with let's-be-happy optimism and vigouros handwaving to divert attention from the gaping holes. (For instance, over half of the technologies Zubrin relies on haven't been tested beyond laboratory workbenches. In-Situ Fuel Production in particular has some pretty large obstacles.)NASA's estimate is probably too high, but Zubrin's is off-scale at the other end.
At this point we should point out one of the key reasons why the mission can be done cheaper than this: you can radically reduce the amount of mass required by producing the propellant for the return trip on Mars. Instead of carting 100-odd tonnes of propellant, you cart a few tonnes of hydrogen (maybe even mine indigenous water), and a few tonnes of nuclear reactor. Voila, radical cost reduction.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The problem with this is that starvation is more of a political problem than a technical problem anymore.
Just look at what happened in africa. We hear about starvation and send food aid, only to have it confiscated and used to feed the 'governments' army who then proceeded to burn the farms to starve out their enemies (the farmers). Or North Korea, you can't tell me that if it wasn't for the policies of Kim Jong-il, that there wouldn't be enough food to almost eliminate the hunger problem.
Or do you suggest that we occupy Africa and invade North Korea?
Establishing a permement presence on another planetary body, or visit another planet is going to take lots of research. Some of this research may solve current problems in ways that we would have never thought about otherwise.
We 'waste' money in many other ways, such that a few billion dollars a year is nothing. Heck, we could free up that much by simply making tax codes easier to understand, resulting in fewer accountants spending time trying to understand and comply to them.
We need to do visionary things, or we'll start stagnating.
I don't read AC A human right
The following is an editorial I wrote which was published in our local paper.
President Bush's plan for manned space missions to the Moon and Mars at the expense of such a successful project as the Hubble Space Telescope is unwise. The proposed funding for that initiative is nothing near the actual funds required for sending people to Mars, much less the Moon.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has announced that as part of the NASA reorganization the planned servicing mission for the Hubble has been canceled. This will cause this valuable mission to end prematurely and prompted us to action with http://savehubble.org.
Mr. O'Keefe has stated that the major reason this mission was canceled was safety. However, we have an overwhelming amount of data to the contrary. The other reason for the cancellation was time constraints due to the new space initiative. The public is not likely to support a President, or a new space initiative if it does not include one of the most popular missions of all time.
Other claims say that Hubble is past its prime and that ground telescopes can do most of the same work. Neither is true.
Hubble is anything but past its prime. NASA's own website states that very day the Hubble Space Telescope archives 3 to 5 gigabytes of data and delivers between 10 and 15 gigabytes to astronomers all over the world!
Hubble has been NASA's most productive mission, accounting for 35 percent of all discoveries in the past twenty years. As for the relevance of such data - Hubble's data accounts for twice as many referred papers in astronomical journals as the next biggest contributing facility.
Just a few of Hubble's most recent accomplishments in 2004 have been: Returned new data about "dark energy" that is causing the universe to accelerate. Found galaxies in formation less than one billion years after the big bang. Detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of planet outside of our solar system.
Ground-based telescopes simply cannot do what Hubble does. Hubble is sensitive to all wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the near infrared. Many of these wavelengths are blocked by the atmosphere and cannot be seen by earthbound telescopes.
It is also untrue that the future Webb Telescope will be a replacement for Hubble. While this telescope will be very sophisticated, it will be observing mainly in the infrared only, not the range that Hubble observes in.
As part of our efforts to save Hubble, we have setup a form where visitors can send an email to President Bush and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. The web form is filled out with a letter that asks them to reverse their decision to doom Hubble and let this national treasure continue to do valuable work.
We are also asking congress what what they think about the servicing mission and future of the Hubble Space Telescope. We will be publishing responses, or lack thereof, from all House Representatives and Senators at http://savehubble.org.
Chuck Peters
http://starryskies.com
Rule of thumb for a small tech company is that 5 people cost about $2,000,000
per year. We can de-rate that sum a bit (say down to $1.5 mil/anum) because
we will be operating with larger organization with lower overhead costs. So
we get about $300,000 per/year per/person or about 300,000,000/year total.
That's $300 *million*.
Multiply by 10 years and we get about 3 trillion dollars.
Nope, that would be 3 *billion* dollars. Minor difference.
You've obviously never worked in a paper-intensive office before.
Firstly, it doesn't take 25 minutes to type each and every letter. You boot the computer once, and can generally type hundreds of letters. For most companies, form letters are the rule. Instead of typing an entire letter, you can just put in the customer's name and address (takes about 30 seconds if you're slow), and off you go. But wait! With computers, we have these funky things called databases, and you can do a merge of your database info into your formletter template. Etc, etc... Add it all up, and I've seen offices that can take 10 typists and replace them with a single typist and a computer. Hell, at one point I was able to fire off several hundred letters in 15 minutes of work. Try doing that with a typewriter.
You're right though, computers waste employee time - if they're sitting around wasting their time to begin with. Which they could do equally as well by chatting with their co-workers, reading a book, talking on the telephone, or any of a thousand other things. The presence of a computer does exactly zero to change that.
Believe me, I've been around long enough to work at a place that went from 100% typewriters to 100% computers. We managed to grow the business to well over 10x its previous size, without increasing staff numbers. On top of that, we did things we never would have thought feasible/possible before.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Back in the late 60s/early 70s, most of the cost was technically in the research. The final costs of sending people to the moon ranged in the millions of dollars, between 5 and 10 million, if I recall correctly. This was in 1970s dollars. If applied with today's economy/inflation, that's more like 500 million to one billion dollars. Miles away from the trillions quoted. Even if they had to construct a moon base, you're talking 1-5 billion.
Leave it to the Bush administration to use the new "idiot friendly" math.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
WHY DID THE US DEVELOP THE SPACE SHUTTLE
WHEN THE SATURN 5 IS SO MUCH BETTER?
The Space Shuttle has a lift off thrust of 6.6 million pounds.
The Saturn 5 Boosters have a lift off thrust of 7.5 million pounds.
The Space Shuttle can take into low earth orbit payloads of up to 40,000 pounds.
The Saturn 5 could take a 100,000 pound load into high altitude orbit. The complete lunar lander weighed 100,000 pounds and a Saturn 5 rocket apparently took it all the way to the moon (way beyond high altitude orbit).
This means that the Saturn 5 can carry 280,000 pounds into low earth orbit.
So, one Saturn 5 launch is equivalent to SEVEN Space Shuttle launches. You only have to launch one Saturn 5 to carry the same payload to low earth orbit (say, in order to build the international space station) as SEVEN Shuttle launches.
Which would be cheaper, researching, developing and using the Space Shuttle, or just using the existing Saturn 5's to haul SEVEN times as much gear into space.
Something, smells in the land of the US of A. Something, smells real bad,....
Isn't it curious that the Russians, Europeans and the Chinese all have cheap expendable launch vehicles with which to launch satellites, yet the US (with all its Saturn 5 experience and technology behind it) does not.
And, did you notice the embarrassing run of failures (the rockets blew up) that the US had (in the 90's) when it attempted to develop its own expendable launch vehicles (no, the US did not use the Saturn 5 (or even some derivative vehicle) for some unexplained reason) in order to compete with the Chinese, French and Russians in satellite launching business.
A quote:
The shuttle is really the most complicated vehicle ever to orbit the Earth and it is the most expensive. The number of missions, originally predicted to be more than fifty a year, quickly fell to about eight while the operational and development costs rose as quickly as the vehicle leaving the launch pad. These costs are often even more expensive than the expendable launch vehicles (ELVs) that the space shuttle was supposed to supplant as the main road to space.
Personally, I'd rather see somebody solving the problem, and if it takes paying off the aerospace industry to do it, I can live with that. Though I think the bulk of the payments will come from the energy industry as soon as a proof-of-concept is working. What's not to like about a zero-pollution source of energy that doesn't require buying fuel from anybody?
You'd rather spend the money on more oil wars until there is no longer any oil to fight for?
You can tell us that renewable energy is the answer for everybody, if you enjoy being laughed at rudely.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The lowest bidder (usually) got the contract, but then, whatever they could charge Uncle Sam with a straight face (unforeseen delays, cost overruns, etc) the US paid without comment.
The US doesn't necessarily pay without comment. I have an uncle who works as an accountant with the Defense Department auditing department contracts. He has personally saved US taxpayers many millions (could be a lot more, but his job is top secret so there isn't much he can say, and most of what I know I've heard from my aunt), and when you figure in all of the other auditors, there is a lot of attempted overcharging that gets caught--probably well into the billions.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Still, if $60bn is the 'too high', conservative-NASA end of the scale - it does point up the ludicrousnes of the gigabuck estimate that's been bouncing around in the media.
Lets say that NASA's number is only a little over-conservative - the Mars mission actually comes in at around $50bn plus the various 'launch infrastructure' missions to the moon and earth orbit cost another $50bn - the total cost is still an order of magnitude lower than the $1trn pricetag that has been bruited about everywhere.
Amortised over 20 years it comes in at a pretty reasonable (for federal govt values of reasonable)$5 billion per year. Which is about... what, a third of NASA's current budget isn't it? Sounds entirely achievable if the political will and focus could be sustained (which I doubt).
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
Note: 1 oil-barrel = US $33
open4free
Robert Heinlein had a pretty good method to get the metals back from the moon in the classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".
Just don't let that Al Queda guy drive the catapult on the moon.
.
Sig em Duke !
Like Hell...
I work for a gov't contractor (Hence posting as AC) and that is bullshit.
There are various types of contracts, but the vast majority I work on are firm-fixed price. You tell them what it costs, you do the work, you get paid. The only add-ons are gov't requested changes, which they negotiate (read as squeeze every bleeding cent of your profit out).
Those huge cost overruns are on Design-Build, Time & Materials, and research contracts. Matter of fact, the one time & materials job we did ended up with us under budget. That even included a VECP (look it up) where we were paid $30K without doing any work, but for saving the government twice that by changing the spec to a commercially available product (No, it was not a Mil-Spec contract.)
There are decent people in contracting, we just hide because we are so damn busy. It is like screwing up and showing your boss how competent you are, leading to more work.