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President Bush's Money For Space Cometh
citanon writes " The Washington Post reports that
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has delivered, via the omnibus spending bill passed
Nov. 20, the President's full budgetary request of $16.2 billion dollars for NASA as a part of his
Vision for Space Exploration. Despite earlier reports that NASA's
budget will be cut, DeLay, whose congressional district now includes the Johnson Space
Center, was able to deliver the full budgetary request without any debate. NASA now has "enough money to forge ahead on a plan that would reshape U.S. space policy for decades to come."
Despite this early victory, questions regarding the full cost of the program remain unresolved. It is also unclear whether the NASA
bureaucracy will be able to rise to the challenges posed in the initiative and which current projects will suffer as a consequence."
the Constellation-X x-ray telescope, successor to Chandra: postponed indefinitely
the LISA gravitational wave antenna: postponed indefinitely
the Explorer program, which launches small, often university-designed missions like WMAP (cosmic microwave background), HETE (gamma-ray bursts), and SWIFT (just launched!). Funding for future missions is on hold.
Not to mention that the National Science Foundation just got a few-percent funding cut.
Temporary occupation of Iraq: $1 billion to $4 billion per month
177 mill per day
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Small hint, your debt is huge and increasing.
You've had trade deficit since early 70's.
That means that in 3 decades every single year, you have liven either by what was saved before hand or on debt, as a nation, not just goverment. There is difference between goverment in debt to corporations and individuals inside the country or being in debt to other countries banks.
There is big difference of havin 50% more imports than exports. Consumerism ends when foreign banks stop lending your country. Expect lower salaries, higher taxes and economy thats ruins, while rest of worlds hates you at same time, for not paying your debts on time, and your actions in close past.
On the other hand. Nasa money goes to internal economy which is good for you. Bad news is that the internal economy will move that money out of country.
2000$ per person per year. Is the rate your nations debt growing towards other nations.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
I'm an Aerospace Engineer and have formerly worked for NASA.
What's wrong with this is not the amount of funding or anything of that nature -- it's the grandly stupid and misguided "Moon/Mars Initiative" that Bush is pushing and that the idiots on the manned space side of NASA are leeching on to.
1. Without very clearly articulated and well thought-out plans for how we're going to tackle a serious challenge like Mars, it won't happen. Current contractors like LockMart, Boeing, Orbital, etc., are chock-full of incompetent people. NASA's manned space side is perhaps even more full of them. They are incapable, and I mean this in all seriousness as someone who has worked in this industry, of developing soundly engineered ideas and solutions to the problems of this kind of space travel.
There are certainly people who have thought very hard about the best ways to tackle these problems, but they will be roundly ignored. This includes people like Robert Zubrin, Buzz Aldrin himself (Ph.D. in Astronautics), and so on. The contractors will be listened to when they say "we can't do that," the umpteen layers of poorly run and managed NASA manned space folks will believe them because most of them long ago stopped being able to solve hard technical problems, and people will die trying to make some of this happen (literally: don't expect Columbia to be the last disaster of its kind).
2. While many manned space people are having wet dreams about gaining some more money and a new space "vision" (no matter how poorly thought-out or articulated), *real* programs that have *demonstrated success* have been cut. Remember reading here a few weeks ago about the Mach 10 Hyper-X program? You know, the one that after 40+ years of scientists and engineers trying to get a free-flight hypersonic scramjet experiment properly funded and run, came up with roaring success? Guess what? Once Bush broached the Moon/Mars "initiative", the X-43 follow-on programs were cut. Those groups have already disbanded. There is anger on the Air Force side since I think X-43C (maybe B, I don't remember which of the two) was supposed to be a joint project.
A poster above pointed out existing NASA space programs that will suffer or are currently suffering. I'm not sure which is worse -- stopping *real* progress and frustrating the very people who have demonstrated success, or deluding the American people that we are on track to recreating Apollo-level achievements on a large scale and setting us up for a larger, even more wasteful, and incompetent manned space side of NASA.
Don't get me wrong -- this is not an anti-space exploration rant. Going to space is one of ventures that had grand and wonderful repercussions for society. This is an anti-stupidity-in-aerospace rant.
That those Americans seriously interested in our heritage and progress in the aerospace realm are not aware of just how incapable the U.S. aerospace industry (as a whole) has become is a great national tragedy. (E.g., do you *really* believe Boeing when they say the 7E7 is "20% more efficient?" Hint -- without *serious* changes in engine architecture, burning "20% less fuel" is, as Ralph would say, unpossible.).
I've mentioned this company before, but I'm really hoping that t/Space will get a contract for the Vision for Space Exploration. t/Space is an exciting company which includes people like Burt Rutan (of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), Elon Musk (of SpaceX), Red Whittaker (of the Red Team, which constructed an autonomous vehicle which competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge), and several of the new companies in the budding space industry.
According to their page: Our core mission requirement is to enable prompt, affordable, safe and sustainable lunar exploration and development by the largest possible number of Americans, both in person and via telepresence.
Under our approach, government incentives focus exclusively on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government incentives will be matched to specific top-level needs, but the "invisible hand" of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support. With this competitive industrial base, two major processes become possible:
* Market forces will continually launch new products that replace established goods and services (the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter [Austrian economist 1883-1950] identified as the key element of capitalism). Poorly performing systems will be killed off quickly via competition rather than via burdensome NASA reviews or Congressional intervention.
* Capability gap analyses will be performed by dozens and ultimately hundreds of companies on a continuous basis. As happens now in all competitive industries, the successful companies will be those who listen closely to their customers and accurately predict their future needs - in other words, capability gap analysis by multiple independent profit-seekers.
Commercial firms will create and own infrastructure that offers services that overlap in many cases. The overlaps found in a competitive private space economy will provide the resiliency now lacking in single-string solutions such as the Space Shuttle and Space Station, for which there are no ready alternatives. While functional overlaps are viewed as inefficiencies in centrally-planned systems, in a market-based system they drive costs lower (by reducing monopoly power and spurring innovation) and accelerate schedules (by eliminating single-point bottlenecks among suppliers and spurring competition).
If I understand correctly, tSpace's plan is to design an overall space architecture, and have companies compete for different components, whether they be launch vehicles, space station life support modules, or lunar landers. Many of these components will also be available commercially, keeping the price down and the reliability high.
I highly recommend reading through their presentation. The things they show in their are incredible. Here's a few of their points:
Safety results from design choices, not oversight
* Attempting to produce safety by inspection, quality control, documentation, meetings, etc., is ineffective and costly
* The right choices include a robust and resilient concept, vehicles with ample margins and reserves, and high flight rates using smaller vehicles
Flight history determines if a vehicle is "human rated"
* Requires hundreds of flights for statistical validity
* "Determination-by-analysis" is just an estimate
Cost is an object
* Expensive systems have too few units built to give resiliency to the architecture, and/or high operating costs lead to unsafe low flight rates.
Name one...
i da nce.html
:)
I'll bite: an embedded, real-time, mission critical, digital computer built with integrated circuits, used to navigate the CSM and land the LM, dubbed the Apollo Guidance Computer.
If you look at histories of Integrated Circuits, or Computers in general, you'll see that the Apollo Guidance Computer comes up again and again. The AGC is considered to have a made critical contribution to digital technology and laid the groundwork for the very computer you're using to read this.
Why?
1) Bleeding edge technology. While transitorized flight control systems had been used on missiles before, the AGC had two firsts: it was both digital and used integrated circuits, specifically a whole lot of NAND gates. Prior to this, flight computers used discrete components, and were analogue at heart. The AGC also pioneered the computational architectures used to support hard real-time operation, essential if you want to trust a microchip to control a chemical plant, or car brake system.
2) Establishing a market. The AGC's development poured a lot of money into a field that many manafacturers were not exactly clamoring to get into [see point 3]. In the early days, the AGC was responsible for purchasing something like 40% of the global IC output. This helped drive investment into making more complex ICs (early circuits only had a handful of components, and yields were appalling): in other words, the development of the AGC, driven by the demands of the space program's incredibly tight operational requirements, helped kickstart Moore's Law.
3) It made the IC acceptable. Modern techno types, raised on digital technology, forget how much suspicion there was about IC technology initially. One big reason was reliability: with discrete components, every component could be tested individually and operating characteristics established. With ICs, engineers were being asked to swallow little black boxes that they couldn't test in the same ways they had for decades. An entire profession felt threatened. People presenting IC technology were known to face angry crowds of engineers at conferences. When NASA pulled off the Apollo landings using a digital computer, it was the end of this dissent. In fact the AGC proved the general case of digital control technology: previously analogue technology was still seen as the gold standard.
4) Commercialization: The AGC moved the IC from an exotic military component to a civilian technology. In part this was due to providing a large market for IC technology itself, but also because NASA was a civilian agency it allowed the technology to be more easily disseminated. (both because of fewer restrictions on NASA workers and because NASA technology was more palatable than nuclear missile technology)
Good places to read about this are:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-mit-apollo-gu
(which includes one of the excellent History of Computing articles from Dr. Dobbs)
Microchip by Jeffery Zygmont
A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Cerruzi.
Calculating the money generated and saved by the ubiquity of digital control technology and the IC are left as an exercise to the reader.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who