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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!
"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.)""
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 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.
"It's probably a misplaced decimal point....I always screw up some mundane detail like that"
WTF? Over?
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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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.
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.
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!
The issue is, though, that NASA doesn't have the funding to do this. And Bush isn't going to give it to them, as that would disastrously breach the image of a "small-government" President that he tries (sometimes successfully) to project. Its an electon-day pledge to try and make him look like a visionary and nothing more, and will wind up in the dustbin of history as soon as he gets re-elected.
And why not? In some parts of Vegas, $500 is the market price for a screw...
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
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.
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.
^^^ Precisely the point of the article. It seems that people of a certain political bent are willing to condemn and set aside ANY goal, no matter how admirable, or how much they would have supported said goal if it wasn't THIS PRESIDENT promoting it.
Look at point number one, above. Stated as unassailable fact, this person clearly has such a terrific AXE to grind, they aren't interested in even considering that it might be simply true. They just slap on their tinfoil hats and rant because it is George W. Bush.
Just like his AIDS initiative you say? He committed $15 Billion - 3x the US gov't's previous funding. You say it's smoke & mirrors, but the money's already flowing.
-Styopa
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 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.
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.