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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?"
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?
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?
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.
"Computers, communications and fuel cells is just the very short list."
And wrong.
I'll bet your one of those people who think the "space raced" helped us to invent velcro and teflon, too, when in fact, those things were invented decades before people knew what Apollo even *was*.
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...
"Things" will never be running smoothly down here. There will always always always be poor, hungry, and starving. You can imagine a uptopia in which no one is left wanting, but I can tell you: such a place could not be populated by humans.
The root of the problem is that most people just don't give a fuck, and even when they do: there are plenty of dishonest "donation operated" corporations to take thier money in the name of the poor.
I can't get too upset for reporters using "$1 trillion" as a metaphor for "unknown but freaking enormous pile of money" -- it's not like this is a bond issue. Or (and I'm saying this as a likely but not certain Bush voter) the shamelessness with the cost of the Medicare bill.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You mean like France and Russia's prime mimisters being channeled cash from the Food for Oil programme, while crates of inedible rotten produce were dumped in Iraq?
Yeah, that's right. Chirac and Putin, and other high level officials have been BRIBED with MILLIONS A YEAR over the last decade to keep Saddam in power.
When this story is broken wide open, the UN will literally fall apart for the corrupt and sleazy clusterfuck that it is.
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
Not really. You have to remember that Apollo was creating technology on the way. WE ALREADY HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY TO DO IT TODAY. What we need is the following:
1. Heavy lifters for putting 100+ tons per launch into Low Earth Orbit. Energia Vulkan can do 200 metric tons. The Space Shuttle's engines can lift ~150 metric tons. We just need to remove the 117 metric ton shuttle out of the equation.
2. A cheap method for taking people and light cargo (read: only a few tons) into LEO. A nuclear thermal powered space plane would do nicely here. If 100% of the hardware that goes up comes back down, we'll be in good shape. It's okay if it exhausts radiation as long as it doesn't exhaust radioactive isotopes. (The radiation will disperse within seconds, but radioisotopes hang around for years.)
3. Space only, nuclear thermal rockets for missions to the moon and Mars.
Here's the plan:
Use your heavy lifters to throw a *useful* space station into Low Earth Orbit. This station should act as a construction yard and staging point. Construction crews can be ferried up via space plane.
The space plane should only be launched over the ocean to prevent accidentally raining down debris on people. On return flight, it should come down over the ocean, then make a controlled flight back to the coast.
At the station, the crews should construct the Moon/Mars craft and ready it for departure. The moon would be easy for an NTR rocket. A trip of a day or less would be feasible. If we've got our heads screwed on straight, we can use these craft to start mining the moon and nearby asteroids. This will allow us to return expensive materials to LEO for a very low cost.
Once a Mars craft is built and successfully deployed to Mars (with its own NTR spaceplane on board for landing maneuvers), the station and other hardware should be rented out to commercial enterprises. These guys can then look at making a business out of the infrastructure in place and create a new space economy
Cost figures:
Engergia Vulkan Factory Retooling: 10-15 million
Energia Launch: ??? (probably ~20-50 million per)
Station Construction: 3-7, 100-200 metric ton modules built of traditional building materials. (No expensive composites!!!) ~$10 Million per module.
Construction Equipment: ??? Fill in with standard metalworks and fab costs
Nuclear Thermal Spaceplane: This should use as much proven technology as possible. Development would be expensive (Let's say $1-3 billion) but the cost savings per flight would more than make up for those costs.
Nuclear Thermal Interplatery Craft: Depends on how large you want it. The bigger it is, the more costly it is. You could probably splurge and build it for $10 billion.
If you add up the worst case figures, you're still not even approaching 100 billion. And once the infrastructure is in place, you now have a new economic frontier to explore.
FWIW, this is not science fiction. We have all these technologies today. Unfortunately, fear of nuclear power combined with several non-space administrations (Nixon, Carter, and Clinton) have stopped us from making it a reality. Arguably, Apollo happened before we had mature technology, so that was a factor in things taking so long. One way or another, Space could give our economy explosive growth, and could do so on ~10 years of NASA budget.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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????
Do you have any speculation on where the economic growth might come from?
Here are a few off the top of my head:
1. Mining: There are asteroids out there that are nearly entirely composed of precious metals. These would fetch quite a price on the market. The less valuable materials (e.g. water, carbon, hydrogen, iron, etc.) all are very valuable for perpetuating the space economy.
2. Tourism: How many people want to visit the moon? Or Mars? Or visit an exclusive hotel in a hollowed out asteroid? Or take a cruise to Venus?
3. Shipbuilding: The military would LOVE to have a space carrier that could deliver planes and munitions to any place in the world within an hour or two. Colonists looking to explore would happily ban together to purchase a colonization ship. Exclusive cruise ships need to be built by someone. Etc, etc.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that space becomes accessible to the upper-middle class. Once space becomes accessible, many people will want to spend money on it. Support of this would produce mountains of new jobs, research and development, future defense spending (can't let our enemies and friends gain an upper-hand in weapons technology), etc.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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'
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.
I do believe 30b a year is about twice what it costs us to maintain our ground based nuclear deterrance forces.
IIRC...
Give a man a mountain, and he'll try to climb it. Show a man the stars, and he'll try to reach them.
.. like war or something equally unpleasant. Like "Pop Idol".
It might not bring any immediate benefits, but it's human nature to do these things. And it can bring a nation a lot pride and faith in itself. If they are not striving for something like this it would just turn elsewhere
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!
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.
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
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
An interesting article just appeared by the physicist Steven Weinberg.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17011
Excerpt:
"Looking into the future, we need to ask, what scientific work can be done by astronauts on Mars? They can walk around and look at the terrain, and carry out tests on rocks, looking for signs of water or life, but all that can be done by robots. They can bring back rock samples, as the Apollo astronauts did from the moon, but that too can be done by robots. Samples of rocks from the moon were also brought back to Earth by unmanned Soviet lunar missions. It is sometimes said that the great disadvantage of using robots in a mission to Mars is that they can only be controlled by people on Earth with a long wait (at least four minutes) for radio signals to travel each way between the Earth and Mars. That would indeed be a severe problem if the robots were being sent to Mars to play tennis with Martians, but not much is happening there now, and I don't see why robots can't be left to operate with only occasional intervention from Earth. Any marginal advantage that astronauts may have over robots in exploring Mars would be more than canceled by the great cost of manned missions. For the cost of putting a few people in a single location on Mars, we could have robots studying many different landscapes all over the planet."
He makes a number of interesting points. For the cost of the Hubble repair mission, we could simply have made another Hubble telescope and sent it up, several times over.
Pretty much the only science done that needed human presence in space has been on the effect on humans of living in space. But that can't justify humans going into space, since it would be irrelevant unless they were already going there for some other reason.
Above all, manned space missions would drastically pull funding away from cheaper, and potentially more numerous robotic missions, of the sort that have revolutionized fundamental physics and cosmology in the past few years.
At the end he points out that the whole proposal is possibly just a diversion anyway. At any rate the Bush administration would be gone by the time the bills came due.
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.
In many ways it doesn't, as Jerry Pournelle said back in the 70s once you are in orbit you are half-way to anywhere.
Having said that, distance does of course have an impact on the budget. Absent a revival of the Orion concept, going to Mars would involve a mission running for several years rather than (as in the Moonshots) several days. So straight away you have a much more significant logistical challenge.
You either have to take your supplies along with the manned mission (*very* expensive), send them along in resupply payloads (not so expensive, but now you have a new class of failure modes) or make more during the mission (experimental, may not be appropriate for all classes of supplies).
Furthermore the crew are going to have to be self-supporting for the duration of the mission. This means their vessel is expected to last for several years and the crew will need to have the capability to repair or replace failing components without calling back to base for special resources (resupply could be possible, but we are talking a lead time of at least several months so the crew would have to be able to improvise something to last them that long).
Fault-tolerant, failsafe and reduntant systems, spares (or feedstock for spares plus manufacturing kit) all add mass and might well add new mission specialists (remember the 'Janitor' character from one of those crappy Mars movies a few years back?) to your mission profile.
More mass means more fuel or more non-manrated resupply loads or more automated supply manufactories (if you adopt Zubrin's philosophy of 'living off the land'). All these things increase your logistical tail, which either cuts in to your scientific/flag-planting payload or increases the overall budget.
Of course there are a bunch of infrastructure or basic capability costs to a mission which are pretty much fixed and which wouldn't change much between a Mars mission and (say) a Jupiter Moons mission or an Asteroid rendevous mission. But distance translates into time, time translates into logistics and logistics translates into money.
Actually it occurs to me that this sort of problem-domain would make a good computer game - has anyone done something like this?
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h