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NASA Priorities Out of Whack?
amerinese writes "Just last week, we saw a story on NASA reconsidering the fate of the DAWN mission, another reminder of the space agency's budget woes. Gregg Easterbrook over at Slate.com argues not only is the budget a little short, but NASA's priorities are all wrong. From the article: 'For at least a decade, it's been clear that the space shuttle program is a clunker. Nonetheless, NASA's funding remains heavy on the shuttle and the space station, while usually slighting science. This year's proposed budget for fiscal 2007 takes the cosmic cake.' Is NASA just not thinking creatively enough?"
Whilst I agree with the vast majority of this article, the planet finder project should be given a much higher budget, study of the earth should have a much higher priority, I think the author leaves the Near Earth Object study a little low on the list, I would think this should be at least number 2 on the list of priorities, first save the Earth from itself the study of moisture is important so this is fine, second save the Earth from a huge chunk of rock eliminating mankind, from there on down yes cool study other object in our solar system, study possible locations for other life out there.
Additionally I am not sure about the moonbase, until we get a definitive answer on the question of if water exists on the moon I don't see the point in building a base there, really we should be putting a lot more focus on studying the moon, what rare minerals can we find, is there any water anywhere that can be used to fuel spacecraft travelling further than the moon. These questions can all be answered with probes and possibly robotic landers we should be putting more effort into studying in this way before we even consider sending people back let alone building a base there.
I am interested in the study of the universe, I am curious about development of galaxies and black holes but I am more interested in protecting our species from an extinction level event either from us damaging the planet or from an asteroid wiping us out. It seems like NASA is really just trying to get popular support here. For the unknowing masses building a moonbase would seen really impressive, having mankind walk on the moon again would be a great advertisment for NASA, "hey look guys we still got it". Given the set backs they have experienced in recent years I can kinda understand their reasoning to feel like they need the public behind them again, but I think a report saying we have found a way to save the Earth would be a lot better for their publicity than a report saying we have some guys bringing more rocks back from the moon.
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People see shuttle launches on TV. And most will, at least, not protest the money being spent. But they might get pissy about billions vanishing into a black hole of government science whose results they cannot watch on TV. NASA's prioritization is, at least to some small degree, a slave to public opinion. Yet another reason why privitization of the emerging space industries will be helpful. Then, at least, informed people with money can set priorities as opposed to politicians who just want to get elected.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
And a huge chunk of it is spent on bureaucractic bullshit. Paying admistrators, and their secretaries, and their benefits, and their health insurance, and remimbursing transportation costs, and federal audits, and enviromental impact surveys, and nasa.gov, and PR, and ...
Another chunk of it goes into funding existing missions. We STILL have to keep paying for Voyager if we want anybody listening to it. For every probe that's out there, we have to pay for the earthbound hardware that listens to and talks to it, the talent that knows how it works and can troubleshoot problems, and the scientists on the publi dole who analyze what we get back.
That leaves some money leftover for NEW missions. Some that money goes into paying private contractors to build parts, some goes into research into new technology, some goes into upgrading and maintaining he shuttle fleet, some goes into the ISS. Some goes to foreign governments. Russia doesn't launch our astronauts for free.
How many probes could we launch with all that money? We could have probes flying all over the solar system. We could have fundamental research into remote robotics.
I imagine that with $13 billion we could launch thousands. There'd be no money leftover for building the ones we launch next year, though. Or paying for the crews to maintain the ones we launched last year.
There is no reason that through mass production, NASA couldn't be launching thousands of probes a year. If you're launching that many, they don't have to perfect. Launch 10 of them at every target, hoping five will end up working.
Sure there is. A probe costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Even at a mere $100 million, $13 billion is enough to build only 130 probes, to say nothing of paying for launch, maintainance, and scientific analysis.
NASA needs to completely change their culture and use some intelligence for a change.
I suggest that it is your intelligence, in this case, that needs some looking into.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Here's an experiment: Find out what state NASAs big dollar items come from. Then look at who is on the committe that controls the NASA budget and what state they are from. Look for correlations. After that, we can talk about priorities at NASA.
If a bunch of engineers and hard scientists got together and decided how to spend NASA's budget most effectively, we'd see only automated missions. The data gathered would be wonderful, it would be efficient, and their budget would be cut in half the next year by Congress.
Manned exploration is the sizzle that sells the steak. You have to keep a manned program going to keep the short-attention-spanned taxpaying pinheads interested in space. If space is just drones and bots flying off to take soil samples and collect space dust, the money will get diverted to a subsidy to study how pet monkeys could be used to deliver nuclear warheads to a target or some other stupid Pentagon project.
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No, but finding aliens, a la Species is.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
One of the arguments given for completing the ISS is that other nations have contributed to it, and it would not be in good faith for the US to stop working on it.
How much for us to just buy them out? I suspect much less than the cost of completeing it.
While there are points to be made about how the shuttle is a bad choice for space flight and science isn't getting the funding that's needed, this author clearly doesn't understand all the benefits of manned space flight. I mean seriously, saying that the moon is only interesting to geology postdocs? That all people do in space is to take each other's blood pressure? He clearly lacks ANY knowledge of the science and innovations we gain by reaching new frontiers. One of his references is to a radical writer's article that thinks Apollo missions stopped off it orbit before going on to the moon and fails to understand the concepts of where to get fuel, where to stage equipment and where to practice somewhere relatively close by. Now, not only are blogs spewing crap but "news" sites are too.
One can easily argue our national priorities are considerably out of whack. Easterbrook argues there are better places to spend the money than the projects which have been proposed. He might be right. But it's easy to argue that the proposed projects do have value.
A moon base might not help Mars exploration. But a moon base can begin the process of using lunar resources to support both exploration and human needs on earth. There's more to space than scientific exploration.
The James Webb Space Telescope might focus on the distant universe and questions of esoteric value. Planet finding, on the other hand, will have little real impact on humanity as well, at least in the near future. Both projects do have worth, however.
Of greater interest to me is comparing NASA funding to other things our society does. Back in October the Washington Post proposed canceling Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, and cited the need for health care for poor children as a worthier alternative. What few people recognize is that health care spending in the U.S. is 100 times the NASA budget. Health care spending is also increasing annually at multiples of the NASA budget. If poor children aren't getting decent health care, that's the fault of the health care industry, not NASA.
NASA, while far from perfect, does appear to be struggling to improve and is making some progress towards that end. It would be nice if other American activities -- for example education -- showed the same kind of work at improvement.
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Wow. You clearly have no idea of the realities of the situation, yet you feel free to make wild claims about what you think can be done with NASA's money.
Let's see... $13 billion... of which most goes to the manned-missions right off. So that's ISS and the shuttles getting the bulk of the money. Research for aerospace stuff gets another reasonably heafty share. In fact, when you get down to it, the solar system exploration budget is around $2 billion, total. That goes to fund research, build new missions, and support existing missions.
In reality, missions are very expensive and mass-producing parts doesn't fix that. Every single mission has to be launched, which is a huge fraction of the total expense right there. Fuel isn't going to get a lot cheaper through the wonders of mass-production. Neither is the man-power needed to plan the details of each mission and to work out and check things like the trajectories. (I'm periphrially involved with selecting an extended tour on a mission right now. It's complicated to say the least.) And modular components only work if the modules are sufficiently useful to a broad number of missions. This is generally not the case, as it turns out. Every mission has specific goals and requirements that almost always demand a new suite of designs. (Check out the latest Mars missions; the new objectives have caused their instruments to be VERY carefully and specifically designed.)
And to put $13 billion into perspective: that's a few percent of what the war in Iraq has costed so far and around 1% of what it will ultimately cost us. In fact, that's the price of about 7 stealth bombers. Which were easier to mass-produce than interplanetary missions, incidentally.
Your intuition for the money here is dead wrong. I'm not saying NASA is above reproach; it very much so is not. (I can spend days ranting about how much they waste time and money.) But if you want to help solve the problem, you'll have to understand the situation first.
Easterbook just doesn't get it. Earth observation is nice, but it can be done with existing technology - commercial space satellites, high atmosphere observation balloons and planes. It doesn't require the scientific and organizational might that NASA embodies. The moon base does have uses. Firstly, there is the study of human phisiology in space. Second, there is the construction of telescopes and sensors of various types to give us a much better understanding of space. Third, is the mining of HE3 (heavy helium) for propulsion purposes. Fourth, is a platform for other space operations. It is going to be expensive. No doubt.
I agree that the space shuttle is a problem. But I don't understand why he brings up the two disasters seen on TV. It is as though he thinks that the real disaster was the PR problems which resulted. If that is the case, he is only making it worse. What we need is a redesigned shuttle. The Shuttle is out of date. There are new technologies that could be harnessed to make it better. In addition, there is the very real problem that the shuttles wear out. They may be reusable, but that doesn't mean they are going to last forever.
I want to see more funding on long term programs, the far-out stuff like NERVA, anti-gravity, and the like. These are the kind of programs that NASA was chartered for.
Additionally, they've got this mandate from Bush to try to get to Mars ASAP, building a moon base first, which could use up their entire budget right there.
Beyond all of that, they feel they have to be careful to keep the public interested, or that their funding will be cut. Surveys have shown that most people are primarily impressed with human space flight, and I'm sure there's pressure on NASA to maintain manned missions even if they're just bread a circuses, and they could get a lot more science done for the money without them.
So I agree that $13 billion should be enough for NASA to accomplish an incredible amount more than they do, but not "should be enough" and isn't because they're all incompetent, but "should be enough" and isn't because they can't spend it on the important things for one reason or another.
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$13 billion sounds like a lot, until you consider that the Pentagon has a FY 2005 budget of $401.7 billion, which is 30.9 times greater than the NASA budget (and doesn't include the cost of the Iraq war). I personally believe that NASA's budget should be tripled or quadrupled. They should also streamline management to get better work done more efficiently. Space science is one of the few branches of science that is so prohibitively expensive and technically challenging that a concerted national effort.
Unmanned space probes are cool, no doubt, but manned space flight is where it is at. We have to learn how to live off planet. There is a whole universe that, absent any proof of intelligent life, is ours for the taking, and using NASA to create some orbital mirror of satellites with which we can watch ourselves flex is boring. I don't fund NASA so some scientist who can't get a job making a cool product can do a thesis, I do it so that I can be inspired, and yes, manned space flight is inspiring.
I like the Space Shuttle. Yes, we can rail on about how it didn't meet its goals, how it was overhyped, but stop for a moment and look at what it actually is and does? It's practically a space station in its own right, it is so big. It launches like a rocket, lands like a plane, can bring back stuff in a fairly roomy cargo bay and has a cool robot arm. It's turned the notion of in-space assembly from the stuff of science fiction into ho hum routine. Before the space shuttle, we didn't even know if we could build a human space habitat. Sure, we could launch one, but build one? And we've done it.
I wish that we could build a newer shuttle, and, I wish we could send it to the Moon. I understand that CEV is better built for that. But, when they launch that CEV, look around inside, and compare it to the shuttle. The new CEV will have less room than the old shuttle.
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13 billion. You say that as though it's an astronomical sum. To you and I, who measure things in hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars, it is. To the federal government, whose budget is in the trillions, and who can run deficits with near impunity, it's less than pocket change.
13 billion is less than 0.7 of the total federal budget. It's practically nothing. And it's one of the few government agencies that can actually produce real, tangible, ROI in terms of technology developed, not to mention the advances in our understanding of the universe, which can't be measured in dollars and cents.
Contrast your precious 13 billion to what else the government blows money on -- 553 billion on military expenditures (not counting veteran's benefits which account for another 76 billion). We've dropped 250 billion in just a few years on this Iraq war. Nearly 80% of the national debt is military related, and the interest alone nears 353 billion dollars. Per year.
And you're saying NASA is overbudgeted?
Yes, they could do a lot more if they funneled money into R&D for mass production, modular probes, fast cheap and out of control. But 13 billion is not really a lot to play with for a program that is, by its very nature, expensive. With mass production, you could possibly lower the manufacture costs per probe, but what about the not-cheap task of actually launching them, designing new ones, administration overhead, on and on?
When you think about all the stuff we have today that is a direct result of the space race, 13 billion is not asking a lot, and is far from being the most bloated of government spending.
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The article's author seems to be arguing that NASA's main priorities should focus on areas of earth science. While I agree that earth science is important, I have to wonder how much NASA should even care about that stuff -- they are an aeronautics and space administration after all.
If I was head of another government department with a strong mandate for earth sciences (NOAA), I'd only want NASA's help to get some of my earth-pointing satalites up there and keep them flying -- and to stay out of the way beyond that.
The President names the head of NASA, the head of NASA sets the tone and agenda for the whole organization. Very rarely does the head of NASA not fall into line with the President's space policy (if he has one). Congress approves or disapproves the plan set forth under the direction of the NASA administrator. Thus the focus of the space program is directly traceable to the President's thoughts and goals in this area.
In addition to sending men to the moon/Mars being a good sound bite for the general public, manned missions tend to be heavily oriented towards a Florida/Texas locale with a subsequent influence on their economies. Considering the obvious interest our current President has in those states, it's one more reason (not the only one), this administration has focused on manned missions.
We need to find a better balance between manned and unmanned missions for NASA, I think the pendulum swings a bit too far in either direction sometimes, and now is one of them. They really do have a symbiotic relationship, and we have need of both. Apart from that, it's time to put the shuttle down and work on our next manned vehicle more seriously - there's no good reason to keep those things flying anymore, send one to the Smithsonian and call it a day.
Between the ISS and Shuttle ops, 40% of the budget goes to Lock-Mart and Boeing just to keep the ISS' lights on. Then 25% for technologies to support the Moon/Mars plan.
The remaining 35% ($5.3 bil) for space science can only go so far. Got existing missions to support/complete. Plus, this Administration ain't too hot on Earth science missions. The data returned tends to include a lot of climatology data they don't want to hear about, so it's cheaper to not collect the data in the first place, rather than twist researchers' arms after the fact.
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Anyone who is in the "know", knows what NASA's primary object is.
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We are in a race against time against catastrophe. This planet is a death trap that history (as attested in the fossil record) has shown time and again in mass extinctions, supervolcanoes, tsunamis, asteroid impacts, ect. The only way we are going to survive long term is to establish manned colonies and spread out in the universe, and we are behind schedule! Our manned space program is not a frivolous waste of time and rescources. What better science can be done by a rover that cannot be done better by a trained geologist on site? No rover or probe sent to the moon ever did a better job than the apollo astronauts, whose scientific accomplishments are often glossed over or ignored. Plans are afoot to construct a huge array of antennas on the lunar farside making the most awesome radio telescope ever concieved, but It WILL NOT get built without MANNED spaceflight! It is hyperbol to suggest that science funding is being permanently cut. The manned program needs more rescources NOW to re-establish capability to leave earth orbit (that we foolishly discarded 35 years ago after spending billions to develop it! At the same time They must finish the space station to meet international obligations and only the shuttle can do the job. This is only a temporary situation. The Shuttle WILL be retired in 2010, and after the CEV and associated boosters are developed their operating costs will be far lower than the shuttle. More of NASA's budget will then be available for a more robust science program. And as I have said, you will not be able to beat the science that can be done by astronauts, on site. But the most important thing is, in the wake of NASA's scientific explorations establishing infrastructure, private concerns for mining, construction, tourism, what have you, will follow, and the first space colonies will get started.
As someone who is closely involved in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), I find the way that Easterbrook chooses to pitch it against Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) quite peculiar. He thinks that looking for the first galaxies that formed in the Universe with JWST is esoteric, which in some senses it may well be, but searching for planets around other stars with TPF is, for all practical purposes, equally so. Both goals are, nevertheless, very exciting and inspiring.
In fact, JWST is a general purpose observatory in much the same way Hubble is, and will enable a very broad base of astronomy, from cosmology at high redshift in the early Universe, all the way back to the formation of planetary systems in our own Galaxy, and to the study of objects in the Kuiper Belt of our own solar system. Again, practically speaking, these are all esoteric and yet you only have to look at the public's fascination with the enormous number of astonishing discoveries that Hubble and other astronomical telescopes have made to realise that such things play a vital role in our philosophical understanding of our part in this vast Universe.
With regards the idea that JWST is somehow NASA's spolied child, keep in mind that the US astronomy community identified it as its number one priority in the most recent Decadal Review of the National Academy of Sciences, along with the European and Canadian communities: NASA is following through on this outside recommendation. Of course, there are grave problems in the NASA space science budget and no-one likes to see missions cut or delayed, and yes, there have been cost overruns on JWST (albeit largely due to non-technical issues outside the JWST project's control), but it's simply wrong to believe that NASA has somehow made its difficult decisions in a vacuum.
Most astonishing though is Easterbrook's naive assertion about gravy train aerospace contractors building the JWST: just who, exactly, does he think is going to build TPF? A couple of University of Podunk astronomers and a dog? TPF is, if anything, even more technologically challenging than JWST and can only be built by many of the very same aerospace contractors: it's bonkers to think otherwise.
Finally, on naming the former Next Generation Space Telescope after James Webb, while, I remember very clearly the moment that was announced by NASA and yes, it was a bit of a shock. All the same, it's important to remember that Webb put in place much of NASA's space science program at the same time as running Apollo, so his credentials are respectable at the very least. In any case, get over it: let's get the JWST done and launched, and answer some of those fascinating esoteric questions.