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NASA Proposes Ending Voyager
darylb writes "NASA is proposing ending the 28-year old Voyager program, which costs a paltry $4mil per year to operate. One of the two Voyager probes is approaching the edge of what can be thought of as the sun's atmosphere (where the solar wind bumps up against interstellar wind), a place where no probe has gone before. Canceling this project means saving almost nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent so far. The craft will be out of juice by 2015 in any case, so the marginal cost for the extra, invaluable, data would be minimal." From the article: "NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division arose in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget by nearly one-third -- from $75 million to $53 million."
This is typical: threaten an agency's budget and they'll respond by threatening to cut their most valuable services first.
Bureaucracies are inherently dumb. But don't take my word for it - read "Bureaucracy" by Ludvig von Mises.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
Average salary for PhD Physicists is $78k, Applied Math PhD is $90k. Factor in health benefits and taxes and it is easy to see a million or more eaten up by salaries.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
scroll down to the middle of this list and you might revise your thinking on uids vs actual people
During Bush Sr.'s tenure, we also lost the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas. Another Basic Science project that just wasn't sexy enough to fund.
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It would zip past voyager in a couple of decades, more realistically. The last high profile mission with an ion engine took a year to reach the moon. Apollo took a few days. Ion engines are wonderfully fuel efficient, but they have incredibly low thrust. They also require a lot of power. Solar panels are fairly light, and work fine in the inner solar system. Solar panels are essentially useless out by Jupiter. So, you need a fairly heavy power generation system in order to power your ion engine, which means that the low thrust will impart an extremely low acceleration. (At least heavier than voyager, because it only had enough power to work electronics, and make heat. The ion engine would need *much* more energy than that.) Sure, after a few years of continuous burn, it'll be going fast, but it does have a long way to catch up.
Firstly you need the 70m dishes of the DSN to communicate with the Voyagers at the current distances. Given the age of these things most of the documentation is printed (and not online), stored in lab books etc, and not formally published. I think it would be an impossible burden to disseminate enough knowledge to get it all working (and I work on the mission!). Even then you need considerable expertise to understand the data from the remaining instruments.
Whoops, I was calculating for 10m$/yr. 4m$/yr? Heck, that's pretty cheap. Thinking about it, they're probably not using 100% of the time from a big radio receiver, so that probably explains the discrepancy. And their people might not all be Phds, and they might have lower rent.
What a crazy random happenstance!
I wonder how much equipment is required to receive signals from the voyager?
Just a little.
The Deep Space Network's 63 meter dishes were actually upgraded to 70 meter dishes specifically for the Voyager spacecraft around 1980. Access to the 70 meter dishes is hotly contested and likely ends up being more than a small fraction of that $4 million per year.
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Sounds like you're actually agreeing with him.
BTW, this is known as the sunk cost fallacy.
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I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
You mean nucular rockets, right?
Dup of this.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Orion is a different thing from a nuclear rocket. A nuclear rocket uses a fission pile to generate energy, which is then used to heat a propellant to great temperature, expelling it at a higher velocity than chemical rockets.
The Russians had a very clever nuclear rocket (liquid metal IIRC) which used the same material for moderator, coolant, and propellant.
This in turn is different from ion drives, which (to oversimplify) use a particle accellerator for thrust. Ion drives have the best ISP of anything (most acceleration per wieght of fuel) but a poor thrust-to-mass ratio, so good for interplanetary travel but you can't get off the ground with one. Nuclear rockets don't have the ISP of ion drives, but they can be better than chemical roclets and still get off the ground.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bringing down the cost of space flight will do "dick" for pure science? Giving NASA, or other independent research agencies, the ability to loft cargo into orbit for a fraction of the cost -- how does that not benefit us all? Not to mention all the other side-benefits that might arise.
Do you believe that Integrated Circiut technology should have been kept within NASA, instead of letting IBM, Motorola, Intel, etc. have a go at it?
Your post is so full of BS I'd be surprised if you hadn't taken a dump on your keyboard.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Why is this modded funny? It's not, it's scary. Because it's true.
Don't be a troll. Moderators why is this insightful ?
Its insightful because people still do not understand how much the war costs. They are throwing around HUGE numbers, and people still can not "grasp" them. Sure its all relative, and there are orders of magnitude (pretty popular around here) between the 160 billion USD spent in two years and the number of [scientific things] in a [scientific thing], but the problem is that all of the numbers are large enough for one (if not all) to lose perspecive.
In the spirit of hogsheds and old Koreans, the spending of the war could fund well over 32,000 (thirty-two thousand) additional years of Vyger mainenance and research. [~160,000,000,000 / ~ 5,000,000 ] This is unnecessary, as only ~15 years of funding would be needed, so in useful war perspective, funding Vyger to the end of its scientific life would take ~0.00046875 wars in Iraq (if the war ended today).
And these calculations are generous! (hopefully the math is correct and the point is not lost)
You are correct that it is better to write the politicians and have them adjust how they spend tax dollars but until people have enough perspective to care, they never will.
For more \fun\ numbers, visit thecostofwar and see American tax dollars at work!
|plastic....or gasoline?|
Well, from what I read in the article, it doesn't sound like NASA wants to cut these programs. It's a "senior review" by outside experts that prioritized NASA's list of projects, and NASA said that if they followed that list, Voyager would be on the cutting block.
The universe is held together with duct tape and karma. What goes around, comes around, and gets stuck to your forehead.
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Sorry, but no. This is not a secret plan. Those who advise the Bush adminstration (like Grover Norquist, who is a frequent guest) have been very upfront that this is exactly what they want. Just do a search for Grover Norquist and "starve the beast." That's their name for what they want to do.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.