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NASA Admin Says Shuttle and ISS are Mistakes
Teancum writes "NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was recently interviewed by the USA Today Editorial Board regarding the current direction of the U.S. Space Program, and in the interview he suggested that the past three decades have been a huge mistake and a waste of resources. As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources. Griffin quoted in the interview regarding if the shuttle had been a mistake "My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible." Regarding the ISS: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in.""
Sure, that $250 billion could buy us another year in Iraq!
But seriously, the ISS is not a waste of money. When you think of all the research done there, the international goodwill spread there, it is well worth the cost. I do wish the degree of internationality was a bit larger. Simply having Americans and Russians isn't very diverse -- it would be nice to see China/India/other aspiring space powers to join in the fun (and help with the bills).
Headline doesn't reflect the Michael Griffin quote in the summary :(.
I wonder if he is aware of the recent wars that the US has gotten involved with. Talk about real wastes of money. At least the Shuttle program, and the ISS to a lesser extent, have furthered our knowledge of science and engineering, rather than just our ability to mindlessly destroy.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I RTFA and can see what he's saying that the shuttle and ISS were basically mistakes, and I agree. However, I'm not so clear about his proposed alternatives. Is he shilling for Bush's "Man to Mars" mission and saying that should have been our goal since the 1970s? That would certainly be a wise career move (at least for the moment) but what purpose would it serve to send a man to Mars? We can't even get some of our unmanned probes to the Martian surface successfully. Maybe we could try to get a probe there and back to Earch first.
Remember spaceship one used knowledge and tech that NASA developed/figured out.
They were first to do it privately, not first ever.
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
When you consider our prodigious investments in both combat and weaponry, it's hard to see any kind of space exploration as anything other than progress.
Having no space program would be a mistake. Having an inefficient one just reminds us that there is always room for improvement.
Do you like German cars?
As a total cost for both programs that has exceeded $250 Billion, you have to wonder what other useful things could have been developed using the same resources.
"Useful"? I hate it when people use words like that in reference to the sciences. It's like they think every last penny of the national budget that's not being spent on Medicare or disaster recovery should be spent feeding the homeless.
How do you define "useful"? This is NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Their entire charter is building giant cans that explode out of one end in order to throw chunks of metal into orbit. They're science, which means $99 out of every $100 they spend goes toward what amounts to research and development of ideas nobody else can implement, and then working with them for a couple of decades to see what comes of them.
How can you gauge the "usefulness" of the Cold War space race in the 1950s and '60s? Yet that race eventually led to the technology and processes which, today, have placed hundreds of communications, weather, and astronomy satellites in orbit. Was any of that "useful" at the time? Heck no. We haven't gained one "useful" bit of knowledge from our trip to the Moon in 1969, but we didn't know that would be the case until we actually went there.
NASA's budget is on a shoestring as it is. Give them credit for doing what they do with as few dollars as it is. You never know when an investment will pay out until it does.
It's fairly well known that the space shuttle was a compromise between NASA and the military. In order to get the budget, they agreed to design requirements that involved weird payloads and the ability to launch them into polar orbit. That in turn drove the design to be what it is today.
In terms of the space station, it seemed to quickly turn into an exercise to divide up the money according to country and state. I'm not even sure what science goes on up there any more. These days the reduced crew seems to spend their time repairing the place. Crazy.
Imagine if the Space ship One team had 250 billion...
.com era to realise that.
They would probably become just as inefficient as NASA. Generally, the bigger the budget you have, the less efficient and more wasteful you become. You've only got to look at some of the excesses of the
they wouldn't have accomplished jack, if NASA hadn't come up with the tremendous knowledge base that current teams get to draw from.
NASA could put a tiny ship with barely any payload into low orbit decades ago. Not really all that comparible.
Your post was rated insightful? More like overly-rehashed nonsense.
He offers plenty of criticism of the current plan, but the article lacks one important detail:
- Exactly what would Mr Smartypants have had us do with the money?
I mean, he states the shuttle was "deeply flawed". What would he have built? Kept shooting Apollo capsules up forever more? Built an Apollo 2? And if the ISS isn't in a good orbit, what orbit would he prefer? And additionally, how were we supposed to know the Shuttle wasn't a solid idea, until we had actually built a few and tested them operationally?
It seems to me he's just trying to ride the wave of popular opinion that says the shuttle must go and the ISS isn't interesting. It's plenty easy to offer criticism, but it's a bit harder to come up with an viable, alternative solutions. If he's going to be so critical as to call the last 30 years a mistake, than it's only fair he steps up to the plate and specifically outline what he would have done better.
The thing is, even if Scaled Composites had 250 billion in one large lump sum, it wouldn't get them very far at first. You see, the Space Shuttle was nickled and dimed into existance, as was pretty much all of the space program (except maybe Apollo, those budgets were kinda wild).
In fact, if we go back to why the Space Shuttle concept was even dreamed up, it was to cut costs, so that the program wouldn't have to keep nickel and diming their way into space. Of course, it didn't save them as much as they had hoped, and more recently has scaled up quite a bit in expense maintaining old flight hardware, but nevertheless the reasoning is all there.
I mean we can all look at what we've spent to date in any industry, find flaws of where the money was put, credit them to bad engineering, cutting corners, whatever you like, but the point remains the money is spent and you should be working towards moving your industry in a forward direction and not spinning your wheels trying to figure out what to do next.
This is why I'm supporting the SDLV so much. We have flight hardware that works, and has worked many times. The flaws have been hammered out by catastrophies that happened with the Shuttle hardware that can now be retired to a museum. Even if this will set us back a few years, and it will make us look like the Soviets had it right all along, we will still be moving forward into further reaches in space, and we'll be able to go back to the moon (something the shuttle would have never allowed us to have done).
Sometimes it's good to have disasters like these; it makes you look at yourself and realize that man is mortal and that the hardware you're flying on is only as good as its weakest link. It makes you grow out of complacency and mundane attitudes about flying into space. And it opens up people's checkbooks to help mend the ailing space agency. The only really sad part is the loss of human lives to make people realize that this needed to have been done years and years ago.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
NASA waited too long to move past the shuttle, by now they should have been useing the next genneration of shuttle one that can fly into orbit. This thing that they are doing now is just a waste.
If it was up to me I would cut NASA just to unmanned stuff and set more prizes to private business for achiving goals like orbit and moon orbit etc.
To those to say we could have spent the money to feed the poor and other things, the space program has taught us things we could not have learned on earth and things that help or one day will help all mankind...
Absolutely. Flood that money into the private market and let it take their chances with space exploration.
I can't believe a NASA Administrator (read: advocate) would be so candid. But the point here is not that space exploration is bad, or science is bad or we are bad at science or we shouldn't invest in science. The point is Government is bad at science. Government is bad at running a multi-hundred billion science program. Government is inefficient. Government is bad at ensuring safety and reliabilty.
What we need is less government involvement, whether it is domestic government or foreign governments. Yes, japan, china and india can help stem the costs - private japanese, indian and chinese firms. Not more mismanaging governments. Other space exploration will just be run by the same types that run the UN. Gross incompetence, malfeasance and inefficiency.
"It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Yes, man should avoid things that are aggressive and barely possible....things like going to the moon or going to mars...make up your own.
Is anyone else bothered that this guy is in charge of an organization that we consider on the edge of "barely possible" and he considers such things as mistakes?
I wonder what his vision is? I assume from that statement that its either moderately aggressive or not aggressive at all, and very possible. Lets not explore science because at this point...we kind of know whats possible...why look at the barely possible. Those supercolliders....garbage...get rid of them.
I wonder if he also subscribes to the intelligent design hogwash....because I think one of its tenants is that some things are just too aggressive and on the edge of possibility (too complex) that we as humans can't hope to understand them.
why do people always refer to spaceship one when space shuttle articles come up.
space ship one wasn't designed as an orbital vehicle. in the fact that it was designed to do one thing and one thing only, it actually mirrors the short term thinking that went into the space shuttle.
therein lies the issue. and it isn't just with NASA. All of our governmental goals are short term. So there is no natural evolution of our technological process in regards to space.
just our whole governmental process is screwy. How is it that George Bush promises no tax increases in light of the recent meteorological disasters. How is this fucking possible? Would I have a problem with a slight tax increase to cover shortfall and to finance the rebuilding of an american city? No. Would I have a problem with the slightly increased cost of what we learn of protecting our coastal cities because this is a country built on the economic might of its coastal urban centers, especially because I live in one? No. Who are these people in our country that favor these reduced tax rates; it's like the governmental equivalent of anorexia. How is this possible, Mr. Bush? Regardless of whether there are billions of dollars wasted on other things, and I assume they are, they've already been allocated. Where is this cash coming from? And who the fuck cares about Mars when we can't get back to ORBIT. Orbit, Mr. Bush. We can't get to orbit.
Our government is like a macrocosmic MTV. Short attention span.... much ado... about nothing. Everyone knows that overspecialization breeds inherent weakness, but we keep making task specific ships.... we keep overspecializing over and over, which forces us to throw out designs when administrations and priorities and mission requirements change.
and please, lets not even refer to space-ship one - it's a glorified bottle rocket. It's not even innovative; the air force pioneered all the research in the 50s. It doesn't even have avionics; which is why it pitched wildly (catastrophically!) during one of its "record" setting flights. We shouldn't be "piloting" spaceships; shit, as a species, we can barely drive.
un burrito me trampeó.
Absolutely. Flood that money into the private market and let it take their chances with space exploration.
.coms failed; they had little or no ideas, but a ton of cash to blow on hardware.
Bad idea. I don't want to be picking up would be space explorers off my lawn each and every morning. Better to put money into ventures you know have some kind of chance than to just flood the market with money. This is why so many
The point is Government is bad at science.
Sore point really. Government can be an aid or a hindrance to science as society guides it to be. It just so happens we wouldn't have rocket science or even jet science if it wasn't for a government's overinflated military spendings and need for the next latest and greatest weapons. Things you take for granted are almost all rooted back to some government spending. Remember ARPANET?
What we need is less government involvement
No, what we need is less governmental hindrance, and from what I've seen, the goverment is apt to do just that right now. Step out of the way of anyone who wants to go into space, and even provide a little room in the budget for them. The FAA has been more than pleased to grant several air-worthy and space-worthy some flight time recently. This is the American government at work for science.
Lastly, I want to add my own point. Space flight in this country is generally overlooked by people. Most people equate the saftey of spaceflight to the saftey of air travel, which is a gross misunderstanding. While we were singing the praises of the Apollo-era astronauts, the Space Shuttle Astronauts are generally not even given a single block of airtime on television, or a mention in the evening news. Most people don't even realize that there are people in space this very minute, and think it's a generally safe place to be. This needs to stop. Space flight is exceedingly dangerous, it's industrious, hard work, and the people who have the courage and training to hop on top of a million gallons of high explosives need to be seen as national heros for what they are doing. The work they are doing right now in space is almost entirely peace-oriented, even if the science could easily be turned to make weapons. These are the kinds of things we need to look at as a society if we ever want to colonize space. Sadly I don't think any of the things mentioned above will happen in my lifetime.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I agree. The idea of going to mars is quite appealing. I am in favor of furthering our knowledge of the universe and life beyond our small planet. However, with all of the economic challenges that we've got, there's no question that the money could go to some better use than flying to mars. Honestly, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fly a handful of people to mars for what purpose? Just to show that we can? Meanwhile, there are thousands of Americans living in poverty.
In some ways it doesn't seem right that we don't take care of our people better than we do before spending billions on space exploration. The priorities seem mixed up to me.
I believe in the 60's JFK made a challange of going to the moon by the end of that decade. They did it. So why is it going to take 13 more years to do what has already been done. I mean it took them less then 10 years to do it with more archic technology then we have now, why is it going to take us at least 3 more years then it took them almost 40 years ago?
The ISS had its start under Reagan, and there were no doubt many political and bureaucratic reasons for it getting started. But by the Clinton Administration, it was _continued_ primarily for one purpose: to allow the US to indirectly subsidize the Russian space industry, and give all those soon-to-be-unemployed Russian rocket scientists a paycheck. Thus giving them less reason to wander off to Iran, Pakistan, China, etc. And that seems to have been fairly successful.
sPh
1) Cheap, reliable, frequent trips to geosnychronous orbit.
2) First generation platform at one of the Lagrange points [wikipedia.org].
3) Lunar observatory on the dark side.
4) Another Hubble-like telescope at L3.
5) Space elevators, aynone?
Items 1 and 2 are good goals, but 3 is mistaken. There is no dark side of the moon except in your CD collection. The far side get's just as much light as the side you see. But it is an excellent place to put a large radio telescope, where it will be naturally shieled from terrestrial noise. Item 4 is more or less OK, but an advanced interferometry telescope would be a better goal. The notion of a space elevator is and will remain a fictional device for some time to come. Basic materials research into high strength cable is one thing, but the Indian Rope Trick notion isn't going to "fly". For example, it's not just the wind and rain from tropical storms you have to worry about, but the lightning. Problems with a space elevator are legion, and they're not just technical.
I'd like to replace the last item with a goal of developing autonomous robots, at first designed for specialized tasks, and eventually movng to more general purpose devices. This could be a center of excellence that NASA could really leverage for their own purposes and for others.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
There's a thing called overspecialization. Ever heard of it? Sure it works, but will it scale well? lol... and from a company called scaled composites no less.
The fact that there are no avionics means that much will have to be redesigned from scratch. lol
And like I said, much of this "testing" was done in the 50s. lol.
And like I said, it's not "their" tech. The air force did it in the 50s. Ever heard of the cold war? lots of good tech came from it. check it out.
un burrito me trampeó.
Because the fuel tanks are useless for a space station.
They have no protection from radiation or micro-meteorites. To make them safe you have to completely replace the exterior of the vessel or at least cover it with tiles / armour.
They aren't empty spaces internally they are full of tanks and plumbing (with traces of extremely volatile fuels left behind). To make them safe you have to completely replace the interior of the vessel and clean it.
Considering the amount of wiring / plumbing that goes into a habital space station trying to do all that work from scratch in zero G as opposed to on the ground with thousands of trained technicians is just ludicrous.
Thousands of engineers did think of the idea and they all decided it was a worthless idea
No, what we need is less governmental hindrance . . .
Government involvement == government hindrance. The (US Federal) government is incapable of 'providing a little budget' for something without attaching all sorts of strings to the money. The fact that the FAA is 'granting' flight time to vehicles is not the government supporting anything. It's the government interfering less than normal.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Oh yes, the "Scaled Composites kicks ass, NASA sucks!"-argument.... SC has the benefit of being able to take advantage of stuff NASA, ESA and Soviets invented for them. Shuttle and the like were built from the ground up. Gradual evolution from something else was not possible, because there was nothing to evolve from. Some of the required technology did not exist, so it had to be invented. Computers were at their infancy when they designed the shuttle etc. etc.
Now all that hard work is done, and we have so powerful computers that the computer I'm typing this message on, is propably faster than all the computers combined NASA had when they designed the Shuttle. Now we have Scaled Composites who marches in, takes advantage of all the stuff NASA pioneered at great expense, and they barely manage to get one spacecraft (with just the pilot, and nothing else) in to space for short amount of time. And they shout off "look how cheaply we can do this!". Well, no shit Sherlock, since NASA and others did all the hard work for you! NASA had none of that whiz-bang technology at their disposal that you take for granted! The foundation on which SC can build their space-operation on already exists. It did not exists back when NASA designed the shuttle, NASA had to build it from the ground up. And that takes money. SC didn't do it, they just take advantage of it.
Yes, what SC did was great. But I'm getting sick and tired of listening to the "NASA sucks, Scaled rules!" choir of fanboys. NASA has done A LOT of work for space travel, and now we have others taking advantage of their pioneering work. Usually it is very expensive to be the first one at doing something. Those that follow have easier job in front of them.
And of course it's very easy NOW to point out the flaws in the Shuttle. And of course it's easy NOW to deisgn something better than the shuttle. And the reason for that is that we can learn from the shuttle! NASA didn't have that luxury when they designed the shuttle, it was the first of it's kind.
NASA does lots of stuff. SC managed to barely do a sub-orbital spaceflight. Maybe NASA spends more money, but they also do A LOT more than SC does!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Engineers were criticizing the shuttle as it was being built and pointing out the flaws in it's design before it was built. The problems that the shuttle has have all been predicted. One doesn't need a operational test to know that if I fling my self off a 100 story building I will end up as a crumpled dead smear on the ground.
What would be the point of outlining an entire plan of "What would I have done if I was king of NASA?" I prefer that he outline what he will do NOW. Which if you note the beginnings of this was announced last week.
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why do people always refer to spaceship one when space shuttle articles come up.
Good question. My only answer is that Space Ship One has reinvigorated people thinking about spaceflight, even if SSO is a farcry from the STS.
just our whole governmental process is screwy. How is it that George Bush promises no tax increases in light of the recent meteorological disasters. How is this fucking possible? Would I have a problem with a slight tax increase to cover shortfall and to finance the rebuilding of an american city? No. Would I have a problem with the slightly increased cost of what we learn of protecting our coastal cities because this is a country built on the economic might of its coastal urban centers, especially because I live in one? No. Who are these people in our country that favor these reduced tax rates; it's like the governmental equivalent of anorexia. How is this possible, Mr. Bush? Regardless of whether there are billions of dollars wasted on other things, and I assume they are, they've already been allocated. Where is this cash coming from? And who the fuck cares about Mars when we can't get back to ORBIT.
Many people will have disagreements about this paragraph. I've already heard hundreds of sentements like "Why would you build a city under sea level anyways", "Why should my tax dollars go somewhere that isn't helping me", etc. Some people simply don't realize what their dollar is actually doing for them, and some people don't really realize the value of a dollar. Only a few people exist that actually don't have a clue of either side of this issue, and to all our lamenting I think one of them is in the White House as we speak.
As for the point about space; by setting a goal to go to Mars, you encompass the goal of getting into space. A plan already exists as a back up plan to the shuttle; Soyuz capsules will be bought from Russia, and, when they are ready, SDLVs will replace the ailing Space Shuttle as our main route to space. Not only will we see space flight get cheaper per pound, we will see a greater number of people getting into space, as it is almost trivial to launch 50 people into space once you remove the cargo limitations from that launch vehicle.
Lastly, people fear change, which is why the government tends to be very short-sighted with its goals. Setting short term goals of even 10 years (which might seem long term to most of us, but this is a government; governmental long terms are hundreds of years) is hard for congress because the next politician will simply come in and undo what the last one did. Now that the Republicans have railroaded our government, we will see a lot more focusing of budgets, lots more spending, and probably, lots more taxes. There are good things and bad things about every situation, and limiting yourself to the short-sightedness of one political party or spectrum really can make you miss the triumphs of another. I'm personally a Socialist, but I do have to commend the Republicans, first of all for attaining the position they are in, and second of all, for not being frugal in a time of need. My biggest fear, though, is that no internal investigations will happen as to why these things have taken place in the first place, but I don't think the Democrats will let this one go.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
"My opinion is that it was... It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the point of space exploration as a whole? That it's really hard, fraught with danger, and constantly pushes the envelope of what's possible with our technology and ingenuity?
We stunned the world by putting men on the moon, but for chrissakes, that was decades ago. With advancements in technology since then, we should have half the solar system under our belt by now.
As for the scientific aspect, one point that manned Mars exploration advocates have made is that military test-piloting skills will, at most, only be needed for a few minutes, while scientific skills will be needed every day. Therefore, it makes a lot more sense to select scientists and engineers and pick ones who show a reasonable level of piloting skills, rather than pick the hottest flyboy they can find and try to teach him to become top research scientist. But, as I understand it, NASA's already figured that out. The whole insistance on having a crew made up entirely of test pilots ended with Apollo.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Government involvement == government hindrance. The (US Federal) government is incapable of 'providing a little budget' for something without attaching all sorts of strings to the money. The fact that the FAA is 'granting' flight time to vehicles is not the government supporting anything. It's the government interfering less than normal.
I take it you believe heavily against the government, and that's fine by me, but you've done nothing to strip my point from validity.
The government is more than capable of handing money over to anyone it wants, and in fact, you probably wouldn't have made it through elementry, middle, high school or college if they hadn't have (of course you'll say the government never gave you a grant, but what you fail to realize is that they gave your institution a grant, and thus, helped pay your astronomical schooling fees). Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule, but if you are one of them, you are exceptionally wealthy or exceptionally poor and never went to school at all.
The fact that the FAA monitors flight is something they've also done for you. If it weren't for them, all kinds of machines that should never see air travel would be up there fluttering around, and coming down on people like you on a whim. In order to prevent "the sky is falling" catastrophies from making the nightly news every day, the government instituted a way of tracking, monitoring, and guiding the aircraft over your head so that you don't even think about it when a Boeing 747 comes barreling over your head in a large city. If you think that the government "interfering" by trying to keep your life well and protected is a shame, then perhaps you are in the wrong country. That same government keeps a house over your head with building codes, keeps the food you eat safe with regulations and guidelines, and tries to prevent you from being ill with hospitals, and the CDC. But of course, you don't think of any of this during your ordinary day, and don't realize just how much you need that government supporting you to maintain the quality of life you have now. If you don't mind it, though, you can find a nice little island somewhere and live off coconuts for the rest of your days.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I don't see the RutanGang as a model to follow. Sure, there is a lot of bravado and ingenuity but I really don't think you can compare the product against what Nasa has accomplished.
What Nasa is now saying is basically that politics have intervened with science and technology at a great cost. The ISS is in the wrong spot and is not suited to the tasks at hand. However, it does provide a number of usefull lessons and shows us that StarTrek style space exploration should remain in hollywood. Long term habitation in space is a stupid thing to do and now that we have learned that, we should concentrate on the rock we live on, send robots out to space.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Because NASA actually wants to get stuff into orbit and beyond, instead of just barely peeking out of earth's atmosphere.
What I think you, and others, fail to realize is why the net, amongst other things, was invented in the first place.
DARPA created the net. Note the D in DARPA stands for "defense", as in, to keep you safe from foreign invaders. The network kept military installations in contact with each other quickly, when someone realized this technology would work just as well in the private sector, keeping people together.
So let's start to think of what other things can be attributed to Defense budgets.
Computers were first used in governments to crack codes from other goverments, arguably dating as far back as Caesar's ciphers (though, you need to think of a computer in the human sense, for this). Mechanical computers aided the government, and eventually the private sector got ahold of the idea.
Human transport! People needed ways to get to people to conquer lands. So engineers figured out how to build extremely effecient bridges, people figured out how to make things float. Of course, these things were invented by private citizens, but were capitalized by, you guessed it, the military.
Firearms, the original concept was invented as a toy, was quickly modified by a government to produce weapons, which were then turned and used again by the government to create designs for even more powerful weapons, which lead us to space flight. But of course, the private sector really had a jump here, the Chinese tried to fire a man into space thousands of years ago. Sadly, I don't think they ever got anywhere...
Face the world around you and realize that governments invent things to control people. Uncontrolled people are less productive than controlled people. Though we might have figured out something as complex as space flight entirely in the private sector, it would probably have taken another thousand years, if even that. People would run around killing people because they wouldn't give them their latest and newest inventions and as soon as someone actually had the time to do something on their own, they too would meet their demise either at the hands of their inventions, or other inventors. People aren't naturally civilized; we are brutes by nature. Just look at New Orleans if you need any example of that. Even when well laid plans were in place, they failed and people took law into their own hands and became what we Americans are so against.
So, please realize that government is a delicate balance, and that the things you and I take for granted are almost assuredly invented because a government needed it. Most of us wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for government, and I'm sorry your middle/high school didn't teach you that lesson.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
So what? The main engines have not been the cause of either of the Shuttle's spectacular failures. The solid rocket booster killed Challenger and damage to the tiles on the wing killed Columbia.
That the engines may not be the most cost-effective is a problem to be sure, but clearly NASA has engineering problems more significant than keeping costs down.
There's no excuse for the wasteful and incompetent management of the Iraq war. If our leaders weren't so arrogant they would have required real support from the international community as a prerequisite to invasion. They would have gotten informed opinions from real experts (manipulators like Chalabi make me sick), they would have let skilled people manage the war (not idiots like Rumsfeld), and they would have been honest with their own people. The WMD issue is extremely humiliating for the United States because, to the objective observer, it looks like we invaded the wrong country - and at a time when we had just raided the piggy bank in tax giveaways and were still running an operation in Afghanistan!
Now, it's true that Saddam was a nasty dictator. It's true that Iraq could possibly have had a better system in place. I realize that the popular conservative view of the day is that the rest of the world is full of children that need our constant monetary and military support. None of that even comes close to excusing the blunders, incompetence, and arrogance of our leaders. I'm sorry if this sounds overly liberal, but sometimes it's good to be critical of the government.
The shuttle was originally sold as a cheaper way to get things into space. It's not meaningfully cheaper. They said it would cost $28 million per launch. As of January 1986, (in the same 1980 dollars), it cost over $200 million per launch. They said it would turn around in seventy-two hours. As for reliability, how many fatal failure modes does the shuttle design have? What sort of improvement over the final Apollo design is that?
Which of its original design goals has the shuttle actually met?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
At this stage of the game, what is it that we can do on Mars with a manned mission that we cannot accomplish better, cheaper, and safer, with a robotic mission?
Create a date in history that will be remembered for thousands of years?
The people in the shuttle program are primarily military personnel, so it's even more interesting that we are now requiring the same level of security and safety for shuttle flights as we are for commercial airline flights. These are supposed to be our frontiersmen, who explore the next and most dangerous places to be explored. So why is it that if a shuttle engineer has a bad dream the night before the launch they cancel the entire flight?
What the hell happened to taking risks? The risks are what made the payout worthwhile--now we've got years and billions of dollars between shuttle flights for reasons that wouldn't have made NASA flinch ten years ago. A cry-baby syndrome has snuck its way into its bureaucracy via whiny Americans that have lived their entire lives without risk or discomfort. It is due in part to this that our space program is in as poor shape as it is.
From a top level perspective -
A human is a flexible, general purpose machine. A robot is a specialized machine. Sure, you can build a robot that can do one function (slowly) that a human could do, but that means for every function you need to build a new robot (or add a component onto your existing one).
With a human, you need to solve the problem of supporting the system - air, heat, food, water, etc. While this problem is by no means easy, the key is that you only need to solve it once.
1. The pressurized ballpoint pen had nothing to do with NASA. It had already been developed by a private corporation and offered to NASA. NASA funds did not contribute to the development, and the pen was not designed with 0 gravity in mind. It just happened to be a possible solution for a problem.
2. Tang - see above.
But you know this. Great attempt at a troll though, and kudos on not getting modded -1 Troll!
There is a big difference between getting to 100km with a payload of three people and building something that can make it to the ISS and higher orbits with a significant payload. And the reason that the shuttle is several technology generations behind, is because it's thirty years old.
NASA has no clear mission that the average tax payer can understand. Bush's plan of going to the Moon and Mars is another huge blunder, because again, we'll do one-off missions rather than build any real capability to do things in space.
What we really need is an overall plan to identify and develop resources in space that can be exploited economically. The space elevator could easily be completed with the kind of money that was spent on the shuttle and ISS, and it would eventually give us very economical access to space.
We need to work on technology to divert asteroids, not just to protect the Earth from possible collisions, but to capture asteroids that have valuable resources that we can mine.
The New World didn't get settled by explorers, but by people who moved there to stay. We won't really conquer space until we establish and populate colonies in orbit, on the Moon, and on Mars. But even those goals should be put on hold until we have some kind of strategy for making them pay off. Considering the enormous wealth available in a single nickel-iron asteroid, it shouldn't be hard to develop such a plan.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
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