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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?"
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.
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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?
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.
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.
"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.
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...
on the same line of thought, why can't it be spent on more useful things such as lowering taxes, creating a decent broadband (say, fiber) infrastructure like some other companies have, medicare, improving quality of life in general (cleaning up cities, things like that)? why spend all this money on something that, in my mind, has no real use to us?
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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".
Best way to debunk an incorrect price tag is to provide a more accurate estimate, backed up with details on how you arrived at that estimate. Geesh.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
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.
This is a complex issue. On the one hand, the space program has many more benefits than initially aparent. Innumerable medical, technological, and biological discoveries have stemmed from NASA and the space program. These have disseminated into the public and have improved our overall quality of life. Presumably, similar discoveries would take place with such a large mission.
On the other hand, you are very right about the neglect of the poor and impoverished in our country. But I think this problem is one small part of an overarching social degradation. Organizations like the Red Cross are finding it harder to fund their programs. People don't give as much of their income to the poor anymore. And we have also become callous to the needs of those near us, in our own neighborhoods. Most people will not help someone that goes crawling past their door. This is partly due to the increased risk of crime (another growing social problem). But to feed and clothe all the people in the U.S. and the world will take action by individuals like us, and have a much larger impact that a government program that throws money... although that might help.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
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???
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
You realize that only one of those is something the Federal Gov't should do, don't you? Lowering taxes is a good thing for the federal government to do, and should always be (but never is) accompanied by reducing the size of government and getting its fingers out of a few pies. The Federal Government should not be poking its nose in the broadband infrastructure or cleaning up my city. Those are services that should be the prerogative of local governments. As for socializing medicine, it's a noble goal to provide free medical care to everyone, but that's not the federal government's business either. Providing for the needs of the citizens should be the responsibility of the states. It makes perfect sense to do things the way they are defined in the Constitution, because accountability tends to vary inversely with the size of the constituency. It's a lot harder to pork up a local project and get away with it than it is to pork up a federal program, where you have several layers of insulation from the actual voters. Space exploration is one of the few things the Federal Government should have its fingers in.
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Or for one more example, during the Desert Storm flavor of Iraq wars someone thought they would save money getting fax machines from an office supply company rather than the expensive Mil-Spec ones. They had a half life of some fraction of a day (heat, sand, grit, noise adn vibration of F18 takeoffs).
There is waste fueled by corruption, systemic waste from bloated management structures (a little knowledge of transaction cost economics goes a long way) and in some instances doing unusual things is expensive. Going to the moon is one of those. MRH
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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.
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according to the navy, a bare-bones aircraft carrier costs $4.5 Billion
And holds 4,000 crew members, weighs ~17,500 tons, contains 5 acres of deck space, and has engines capable of 30+ knots around the world, non-stop. Scale it back to a craft weighing somewhere between 100-300 metric tons, burning hydrogen for a 4-8 month trip, and the $10 billion figure should look a bit more reasonable.
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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
It seems that people of a certain political bent are willing to condemn and set aside ANY goal, no matter how admirable, or how much they would have supported said goal if it wasn't THIS PRESIDENT promoting it.
Look at point number one, above. Stated as unassailable fact, this person clearly has such a terrific AXE to grind, they aren't interested in even considering that it might be simply true.
Then again you might not be considering that what he says might be true. If you think the Bush White House doesn't politicize EVERYTHING--even things they full do intend to follow through on--then you're sadly mistaken. They have proven themselves to be extremely partisan and abrasive. Maybe that's true of all White Houses, but it has never been as clear to me as it is with Bush. Make of that what you will.
Besides, why WOULDN'T Bush, or any president, do something like that? Get on TV, propose a new plan that a lot of people are going to like and watch the other party in Congress shoot it down. Makes you look like a great guy and the democrats (in this case) as the obstructors of progress. If Bush were to win a second term, it would likely also help the Republicans keep control of Congress.
But politics aside, I simply question if this is the right time for a space mission. I want to see space exploration resume as much as anybody, and I like the idea of a manned mission to Mars, but the economy simply isn't doing very well regardless of what the "economic indicators" say it should be doing.
Oh, the economy is probably improving a bit, but there's no denying that a lot of people still don't have jobs, and many of those who do are grossly overqualified for what they're doing; a programmer working the drive-through at McDonalds will show up as a person employed, but there is something wrong about that. But at the same time, we've got two wars/occupations to fight (Afghanistan and Iraq) with continued crises in North Korea, Iran and the Israeli/Palestinian issues. Terrorism hasn't gone away. In fact, terrorists just pulled off one of their bigger successes in some time. There is just too much else to do right now than fly to Mars.
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.
No, see, by "make the world a better place" we mean "kill all humans". It's all in the Robert McNamara Foreign Policy Dictionary.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
so, $1 Trillion over ~30 years means they're guessing it will take the world somewhere more than 300,000 people working on this project a year for 30 years. That's a lot of required manpower.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
You should revisit 'Lord of the Flies'.
July 20, 1969.
That day, two men touched down on the Moon, pointed their camera back towards the Earth, and a billion people all over the world sat awestruck at how very small and fragile we all are.
Damn it, this has never been about return on investment, or about finding spinoff technologies to make us rich. It's about curiosity, about a deep, compelling drive to explore the unknown, to drive it back, and to stand in wonder at what we find there.
If you want to turn the greatest of all human adventures into a simple TCO analysis, by all means go ahead. If you want to bitch about the government using your money to do it, go ahead. I'm sure I could find a few programs that you support that I would want to see eliminated.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
First: There is nothing motivating us to go there like we had in the space race days. (Oooo, gotta beat those.... ?Canadians? to Mars).
Second: It's set too far into the future. Over 20+ years, there's bound to be a president who says "It's costing us how much for this project? Cancel it! Put the money for the war!" (Oh wait, that's Bush. But someone will probably cancel it).
Third: Has anyone seen how long it's taking to get the internation space station up? Wasn't it supposed to be done (or nearly done) by now? Plus, it was supposed to be an international venture to unify the world. The US going to Mars on its own is saying what? "You guys screwed up the ISS so badly, we'll just go to Mars on our own."
I'd love for it to happen, but the cost isn't what's going to kill it.
If this initiative were actually funded, it would be a tremendous boon to the US economy -- we've been suffering from at best blind-sighted and at worst disingenuous supply-side economics policies (ie major tax cuts) at a time when what we really needed was large-scale government spending to provide real economic stimulus.
A space program would also be specially targeted towards the underemployed.
However, this administration has a history of mendacity (this is undeniable) and of putting forth poorly-thought-out "bold, visionary" plans that wind up making things worse by being unfunded (eg No Child Left Behind). That's strikes one and two.
But it could still be a home run, without the real kicker, strke three -- the plan proposes to make the cuts in other research now, but actually getting somewhere with the other research much much later. That's the part about this that I don't trust -- no one will be around to see this plan through to completion, so it will probably get scrapped when the government is completely starved. The sacrifices are immediate but the rewards distant and uncertain? --> bogus.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Get votes.
I doubt that there will be any follow through on the Mars shot. It was not even mentioned six days later in the state of the union address. It has not been mentioned since. The press corps were uniformly skeptical, as are the public.
Not long after they knifed Hubble. The fact that the Christian fundies were complaining about spending money on questioning creation is probably pure coincidence.
I think that regardless of what happens in November the most likely thing will be the cancellation of the shuttle and ISS shortly afterwards. If it is unsafe to fly to Hubble just the once the 50-100 odd shuttle launches required to complete and maintain the ISS are a complete non-starter. At present reliability rates we would see a couple more disasters en-route. And no, I don't think for a second that NASA has been fixed.
A Mars shot would cost one heck of a lot more than a trillion dolars. There is no way that Congress or the seniors are going to stand for it unless they are confident their social security and medicare benefits are completely safe. The drugs benefit for seniors was priced at $400 bn because the Congress would not pay any more. So given the demand for senior's drug coverage what is the probability that a program that costs at least twice as much being passed?
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"...Money is tight here now (I work at NASA and am embroiled in the CEV start-up operations) and NASA is terrible at managing a tight-budget program like this would have to be...."
Here's a sneaky bit of inside info: Everyone is crap at managing programs on this sort of scale!
The complexities and pitfalls of multi-million, let alone multi-billion projects leave managers flipping coins or using more sophisticated predictive methods, only to be told "Most likely" (darn, better give the damn thing a longer shake next time).
The only, repeat only way a really big (ie. 10^7 US$+) 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"
That was point #2 of my plan. Read much?
I know that was #2 of yoru plan. You said your plan is based on technology we have today. Where is it? Where are these nuclear powered space planes?
Pegasus launch solution. It shows that the concept is highly workable.
"highly workable" is a long way from "developed and proven."
Nuclear Thermal Rockets are 40 year old, well understood beasts.
And hydrogen fuel cells are a 100 year old technology. Why am I still driving an internal combustion engine powered car?
[Why would you assume that?] Because that's what my plan called for.
So not only is your plan based on technology we don't have working, but it is also based on infrastructure that we don't have. Kinda like sci-fi, eh?
Here is my plan to get to Mars. Assuming we have matter teleportation technology, we can just send one side of a teleporter to Mars like the latest Mars rover. And then we can just teleport everything back and forth. It is technology we have today... sorta. I mean, weren't they able to teleport a photon in some lab?
Look, my plan is based around building a Mars mission in a roundabout fashion. By building the infrastructure first, we can not only reduce risk, but we can make great strides toward building a space economy. If all we wanted was to go to Mars, we could simply construct heavy lifter craft to get the prep-work cargo and the Mars craft into space and toward Mars. Nothing to it.
So, you'd just leave the astronauts there?
Honestly. Unfortunately, we'd also repeat the mistakes of Apollo. By creating a super-expensive mission with zero economic return, we'd manage to get there, come back, then state that it's too expensive and stay home.
It IS too expensive.. and we WILL stay home.. for now.
Honestly, downplaying and grossly underestimating the technical and logistical hurdles of getting to Mars and back is no way to get your plan implemented or taken seriously. As far as I can tell, you're just another techno-junky with his head in the clouds.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
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.
Russians are the best bet, since China is not known for design innovations; their Shenzou spacecraft is an enlarged Soyuz! And Indians have yet to launch a man to orbit, though they are currently in a race with China to reach the moon.
Of course, due to politics it would be impossible for NASA to outsource to Russia (thanks to Iran) and even more so, China (nuclear collaboration with Iran, Pakistan *and* North Korea; most likely future strategic competitor etc.).
A joint ESA-Chinese mission is not so far-fetched though. Both are already cooperating on the GPS replacement project, Galileo.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut