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?"
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
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
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.
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.
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."