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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."
If fans of Enterprise can scrape up money to try and save a show, surely there is no
problem getting a few thousand geeks to "buy" Voyager from NASA.
GWB talks about this great "Ownership Society", well, here we go!
I, for one, would pay a few bucks to own a peice of history.
My great-great-great grandkids will be safe when Vger comes back because
they own it. Vger wouldn't kill it's owners, would it??
What a brilliant example of farsightedness on behalf of the Bush administration; or better, a brilliant example of the lack thereof. :-(
...) in a decade or two?
We want to have a manned mission to Mars, but we don't want any exploration of what else is out there in our solar system...
Spending billions of Dollars in the hunt for non-existent WMDs, instead of spending a couple of millions on the exploration of something that DOES exist. (I would think that all the extra congressional and presidential work in the Schiavo case probably cost more than what Voyager would cost for a year)
On the other hand - being European, I would wish ESA *had* funds like for the number of projects that NASA still has the money for...
I wish, someone would try and clue in politicians on both sides of the Atlantic!
I think, the Indians might be the ones doing it right - they are trying their first space missions, but unlike the others before, they are from the start trying to keep them on a tight budget (given that the country has a huge growth, but not too much "left-over" money for things like space programs). In a couple of decades, when India might be in a position to seriously fund space programs, their "budget" experience might really come in handy to make the most of their money for the space projects... Will they be the next big space nation and out-do the "modern" world (US, Europe, Russia,
Canceling this project means saving almost nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent so far.
The amount of money spent so far has nothing to do with whether we should spend more money. Spent money is gone, no matter what we do. New expenditures should be evaluated on their own merits.
I would agree, however, that this seems like a project worth continuing.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Didn't Bush last year propose sending humans to the moon and then mars? And his follow up budget proposes budget cuts to accomplish this?
Did someone explain to those guys that Jules Verne's book is Science Fiction?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Just a quick not-well-thought-out idea, but what about trying to turn this over to the public, maybe some sort of amateur consortium -- some sort of "open source science". I'm sure they've got huge amounts of data on these little guys, is it accessible? Does anyone have a tutorial for macgyvering a 386, a microwave and some tinfoil to send/receive Voyageur instructions?
and now back to the fallout shelter...
If that 75 million figure is correct, I'm sure there would be quite a few takers in the private sector. I mean Mark Cuban paid 280 million for a basketball team for crying out loud. How cool would it be to have a space exploration division, complete with working rockets!
-Ryan C.
4 mil for 10 employees on a project like this sounds about right.
;) Your loan repayment will probably be something like 125m$; that'd be around 5m$/yr for total comm hardware costs. We're up to 7.5m$. Add in any other hardware costs they might encounter (for example, rent on supercomputing work to process the data, or whatnot), additional services that they need to pay for from other departments, travel, unlisted managerial overhead, etc, it's not too hard to come up with 10m$/yr.
10 employees, all likely with PhDs, underpaid (like NASA tends to), would be perhaps 65k/yr each ->650k$. Benefits and personel costs will at least double this, probably pushing up somewhere around 1.5m$. IT costs, office rent, power, and other "basics" will put this somewhere around 2.5 m$, possibly more.
Of course, I'd suspect that the most expensive part will be rent on their comm equipment. Here's where I wish I had my partner, who is studying to be an actuary, with me. Your communications hardware will probably cost somewhere around 50m$ in terms of capital costs, with operating costs of perhaps 1m$/yr. Lets assume a repayment time similar to the operating time, and put that number at 30 years. Lots of assumptions here, I know
What a crazy random happenstance!
Its particularly sad turn-off the magnetospheric spacecraft, since the magnetospheric is such a complex system and being able to collect data from mulitple spacraft is so vital to understanding the system. Though the instruments on spacecraft do degrade over time, I know that the Polar spacraft, for exaple, is still collecting useful data. it is still being used in multi-spacecraft studies, along with newer spacecraft like Cluster, to better understand the magnetosphere.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Amen. Comparing NASA's budget to the DoD's is like looking at an ant standing next to a human - especially when you consider that a lot of military expenditures aren't included (veterans benefits aren't included, wars are all "supplimental", nuclear weapons are in the DoE, most national debt was incurred to pay for military activity, etc)
Of course we need a military. I'd say "of course we need a strong military" as well. But spending almost half of the world's total, while our nation's scientific organizations get the scraps? That's wrong.
What a crazy random happenstance!
I'm not talking about donating cash, but donating time/equipment.
I mean, Voyager is out there right, it's still sending data back no matter what. If NASA cancels the project, the data will still be coming back...I mean, they don't send a janitor out there to switch it off.
So is it so out of the question that people get together some dishes...probably cheap ones laying around that the small digital dishes put out to pasture...and grid them together to get the signal. THEN collect the data? Is that at all possible?
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Your communications hardware will probably cost somewhere around 50m$ in terms of capital costs, with operating costs of perhaps 1m$/yr. Lets assume a repayment time similar to the operating time, and put that number at 30 years. Lots of assumptions here, I know ;) Your loan repayment will probably be something like 125m$; that'd be around 5m$/yr for total comm hardware costs. We're up to 7.5m$. Add in any other hardware costs they might encounter (for example, rent on supercomputing work to process the data, or whatnot) . . .
What on Earth (or not on Earth) are you talking about? NASA does not take out loans for comm equipment - it is paid for up front through appropriated funds or budgeted yearly as a cost for payments to foreign ground stations. Nor do they use rented supercomputers to process telemetry. Landsat data is processed by commodity Linux hardware/software. EO-1 data is processed to Level 0 on a freakin' DEC Alpha box.
Despite the stereotype that some people like to present, NASA does not generally throw money around like a drunken sailor. Once the data is captured, processing can be done on anything with enough bits. The missing monetary piece is mostly the cost of data capture and storage/archival of the raw and processed data - it's not free, especially when you take the mandated backups into account. This is a subject that is going to bite us more often in the future. How much effort and cost are we willing to expend to protect data, especially historic data? The archives are growing every year, and the cost goes up, generally borne by federal agencies, including NASA.