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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?"
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!
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.)""
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?
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
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?
The cost of colonizing our solar system (which for self-contained colonies probably will far exceed one trillion) can be better spent on asteroid surveillance and making the world a better place so we don't need nuclear weapons.
"It's probably a misplaced decimal point....I always screw up some mundane detail like that"
WTF? Over?
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.
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.
I'd place the likelyhood of a nuclear war rendering Earth uninhabitable higher if we did have perminate self-supporting settlements elsewhere, than if we stay on earth. So long as we are confined to earth, politicians cannot make planet destroying scale wars on others without affecting themselves. Once we have other planets you can attack someone else and not kill yourself. (though retaliation is still a factor)
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...
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.
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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...with out unemployed people who would be left to post on slashdot??
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!
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.
some rouge asteriod
Well at least it wasn't a rogue rouge asteroid, they are some bad mofos, heaps worse than the verte and bleu asteroids, rogue or not.
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.
> 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.
And getting a crew to Mars and back (alive) is a vastly more difficult problem than the moon missions were.
I, for one, will be surprised if it can be done for a trillion dollars. Especially if you throw in the lunar sideshow. But more likely we'll spend half that much, and then drop the project.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
or a strike from some rouge asteriod! ...from the red light district of space!
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.
Original quote was "A billion here a billion there, after a while you're talking real money!" and was atributed to Evert Dirksen of Illinois. Actually, if you amertise the cost of the 60s NASA programs as development e costs of doing business in the creation of: computers, chips, Intenret, out modern culture/ technology/ and all our jobs/ etc. It comes out cheap. And besides: we got Velcro, Teflon and Tang thrown in for free!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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".
That line of thinking is complete and utter crap.
So what are you doing with your hard earned cash? Paying for internet access to post on slashdot? Give it to the poor, they obviously need it more. Be a trend setter.
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
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...
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!
Perhaps they could sell a few screws to the Pentagon... the going rate is about $500 I think.
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...
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???
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.
"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.
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.
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
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
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
This issue struck me in a NPR piece interviewing kids at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum shortly after Bush's speech. A majority of the kids thought of manned space travel as an escape from a disposable used up world. How sad really. Of all the motivations for going to the Moon or Mars, escaping a ruined Earth is about the least pratical.
I hope someone is able to put space exploration into an inspiring context that motivates people to achieve at a high level doing great things for great reasons, rather through a cynical appeal to our worst fears and selfish agendas.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
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
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
The cost of colonizing our solar system (which for self-contained colonies probably will far exceed one trillion) can be better spent on asteroid surveillance and making the world a better place so we don't need nuclear weapons.
Um, what's the point of asteroid surveillance if you don't have nukes to take them out with anymore? You want to send a mission to divert the asteroid? Wouldn't it be easier, and cheaper just to have somebody up there already to do that?
Instead of observing asteroids, let's mine em. That way, if we get a rogue one headed for earth, we'll have plenty of mining equipment up there that can land on the bugger while it's still a ways away, and strip it of enough mass to divert it or make it a non-threat.
Can't do any of that if we're still huddled on the ground. Besides, don't think of the 1 trillion as a non-returnable cost, but as insurance (putting humanity in more than one place) with a future annunity (resource extraction, a new frontier for the adventurous, cheaper space access, and a lot more business for manufacturing both here on the ground, and in space.)
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????
For THIRTY FOUR YEARS of operation of both a Moon base and Mars operations I'd say that's reasonable.
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
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!
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
I dunno... I think that if a permanent manned base on the moon and a fairly comprehensive exploratory trip to Mars could be made for $500B, that might not be too bad a deal. The mineral rights for the moon alone could be worth quite a lot. Titanium and aluminum are found in vast quantities in some areas in the form of ores that, while not the preferred source on earth, are still quite usable. An abundance of electrical energy without any worries about what tailings might harm or kill may make for a very attractive investment.
The biggest question is how you get them safely back to earth, or how the manufacturing facilities are set up on the moon.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
I do believe 30b a year is about twice what it costs us to maintain our ground based nuclear deterrance forces.
IIRC...
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
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.
Scene one: Starving child from [insert famine stricken country here] with distended belly, sticks for arms and flies sucking at eyes. Scene two: government officials hurling around billions to get someone to step on a piece of red rock The only thing to add to that is ":-("
im in ur
Hey! Yeah! Maybe we can send Bruce Willis and a bunch of oil riggers to drive around the asteroid in a dune buggy on steroids setting nuclear charges.... Oh, wait, they did that in a (really bad) movie already.
I can't believe you got modded up as "Insightful."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Well, what did you expect? The environmentalist movement, and their willing thralls in the media, have been propagandizing for decades that the Earth is little more than a black cinder living on borrowed time. Of course we have problems, no one is going to deny that, but if you pound into people's heads that the Earth is used up, don't be surprised if they believe it.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Insightful? Come on.
Obviously the writer of this comment did not bother to read the actual article, only the Slashdot readers' meta-comments.
The article states that the original, mistaken, media estimate of $1T was based on just such an assumption, only taking the 1989 proposal, not the Apollo program, as baseline. The large estimate came from a misunderstanding of what was included in the 1989 plan/budget. In fact, because several of the prospecting missions and technological developments that the 1989 plan relied upon have already been completed, the new price tag is significantly less.
The journalists who had to be the first to get their story out are at fault for simply repeating what one reporter wrote without checking the facts, and waiting until the actual proposal came out, rather than making up numbers unrelated to the actual initiative.
You're proving the article's point by simply parroting what you've heard in the past, without critically examining the uninformed claims that flew around at the time the initiative was proposed.
Come back when you understand that to have a valuable opinion on an issue, you need to be well-informed. In this case it should have been easy, since all it would have taken to make an informed comment on the linked article would have been to read it.
They're coming to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids...that's what Red asteroids do.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
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/
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
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
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 $400 bn because the Congress would not pay any more. So given the demand for senior's drug coverage what is the probability that a program that costs at least twice as much being passed?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"...Money is tight here now (I work at NASA and am embroiled in the CEV start-up operations) and NASA is terrible at managing a tight-budget program like this would have to be...."
Here's a sneaky bit of inside info: Everyone is crap at managing programs on this sort of scale!
The complexities and pitfalls of multi-million, let alone multi-billion projects leave managers flipping coins or using more sophisticated predictive methods, only to be told "Most likely" (darn, better give the damn thing a longer shake next time).
The only, repeat only way a really big (ie. 10^7 US$+) 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
- 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 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
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.