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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?"
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Uh, that's a takeoff on a quote attributed to American congressman Everett Dirksen. "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."
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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-$800 billion.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
FWIW-
I used to do oversight work on contractors that did gov't jobs.
The lowest bidder (usually) got the contract, but then, whatever they could charge Uncle Sam with a straight face (unforeseen delays, cost overruns, etc) the US paid without comment.
So a typical job of 250,000$, when it was all said and done, might actually have cost the gov't over 600,000$. Now start adding multiple contractors to a huge undertaking like this (one builds the suits, another the food, a third the life support, etc) and you can *easily* see where the original figure paled in comparison to the final pricetag, with most of that simply being pork and profit.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Even still it is worth while to get people to other planets. I just don't know if we should look outside of the Solar System now, or wait a few (hundred/thousand?) years for faster travel so that would pass those earlier ships in flight..
a. FTL travel is impossible
b. The solar system is uninhabitable and cannot be terraformed.
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
I would gripe at you for not reading the article, but the server is only barely responsive.
Quick summary: The trillion dollar figure was based on the $500 billion number that the George Bush Sr. presidency came up with during its own initiative. That number was rounded up to $800 billion to adjust for inflation, and then rounded up yet again to produce a nice, round $1 trillion.
Finally, the master stroke: While the original estimate was for 34 years of operations on both the moon and Mars, the reporter claimed $1 trillion to be the cost of a single Mars landing.
Once it hit the news, everyone else copied it, and the public perception grew that this would be a fiscally irresponsible program.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Yes, NASA spent a ton of money getting us to the moon. But what you're forgetting is that we did it in a very very short amount of time. The first spacewalk was in 1965 (by a Russian, not us, so we might not have been as advanced at that time), and by 1969 we were setting foot on the moon.
That's 4 years from first stepping out into space to landing and stepping out onto the moon. The current plan is not to step on the moon within 4 years, and even if it were you must remember that some of the R&D work is already done.
$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
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
For THIRTY FOUR YEARS of operation of both a Moon base and Mars operations I'd say that's reasonable.
The original price tag given to Bush Sr was generated by following a VERY poor plan for reaching Mars, and included money for all sorts of sideline stuff like finishing a super expanded version of the ISS (so it could be used for assembling the ship for the Mars trip, etc).
A number of much more reasonable plans were put forth by people other than NASA, but not in time to make a difference. It would seem that these early super-inflated prices are still going to hold us back.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Read the last part: the estimate was a total over 34 years, meaning the bill would be about $3B a year. Not too pricey given the full scope of the federal budget.
Beyond that, the original $500B proposal was probably over-estimated, because everyone in NASA (along with private contractors) tried to get their pet projects added to the mix. So you end up with things like nuclear-powered ships that aren't strictly necessary.
Obligatory Slashdot-Mars-story link: The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Grab a copy of the Summary Tables for the US budget and take a look at Table S-3 on page 5. It shows the budgets for various agencies and how they've grown or shrunk since 2001.
Exit, pursued by a bear.
what's the point of asteroid surveillance if you don't have nukes to take them out with anymore?a pp-r.htm
The point is you don't need any nukes if you get the warning in time. See this extensive article at FAS: http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2020/
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
Aaah yes, Bush's AIDS funding.
The funding that comes with strings attached. Such as, governments have to encourage abstinence, and can't say that condoms help prevent its spread. It won't go to facilities that also provide abortions or abortion programs. Most of the money will be spent on pharmaceuticals made by US companies.
The figure of US$15B is also misleading. That figure is spread over a very long period of time. For 2004, the amount is US$2B.
- 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.
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