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Next-Gen Mars Rover In Danger of Cancellation
OriginalArlen writes "NASA's next-generation rover, the nuclear-powered, laser-equipped Mars Science Laboratory is reported to be at a serious risk of cancellation due to budget and schedule overruns, including non-delivery of vital parts by a subcontractor. Costs are running over $2B so far, and the already thin schedule of Mars missions planned for the next decade — with budget ring-fenced for an outer-planets flagship mission — is in danger of further cuts."
Anyone else thinking that this is just a smokescreen to develop the most awesomest Battlebot ever?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"It may be time to put NASA brains on some more immediate problems, like alternative energy, and studying the causes of the continuing decline of every ecosystem on earth. Visiting Mars may be a lot nicer knowing that the astronauts have a habitable planet to return to."
2 comments:
1) Neither alternative energy or biodiversity is in Nasa's purview. we can debate whether it should be the business of the Federal Government at all, but NASA's not the place for it.
2) Per Larry Niven, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program". If one views the survival of the human species as important, rather than the survival of the ecosystem per se, then having an escape plan is ALWAYS good policy.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Sheesh.... why every time there is a NASA/LHC (circle the appropriate) story there is always someone who yells: "forget space, forget LHC, forget any difficult research (circle the appropriate) and think of children/poor/3rd world nations (circle the appropriate)
How many times does it have to be repeated...."you never know what kind of benefits this research may bring! It needs to be diverse!"
you know if they shifted the budget for 1 week of the iraq war to this project that probe would already be, well probing things...
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Anyone else notice that Bush's term is leaving the US space program without a Space Shuttle or alternative for staffing or servicing the Space Station that we paid more than our share to build, and actually devastating the manned missions to Mars that would keep our lead among our global competitors? Remember when Bush ran for reelection in 2004 promising us a Mars mission, though everyone knew he was "kidding"?
What we'll have left, after Bush's term is done (in which he put Star Wars scientist and CIA venture capitalist Michael Griffin in charge of NASA) is a space program that mainly launches spy satellites and promotes "space supremacy" for the Pentagon and the CIA. Military satellites now used to spy on Americans.
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make install -not war
Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, biblical?
Ray: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor... real Wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies.
Venkman: Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon: 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanos.
Winston:The dead rising from the grave!
Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
But deficit spending is killing the USA.
Are the pork barrel last minute additions to the $700 billion buyout package for this kind of stuff? NASA doesn't have lobbyists? No congressmen from Florida or Alabama have this kind of pull?
There have been major problems on Earth ever since there has been civilization. If we waited to go exploring and discovering until we eliminated war, poverty, crime, and pollution, we would never go anywhere. We'd also miss out on the chance to learn things which could help us to deal with those problems more effectively.
Besides, this is a false dichotomy. We don't need to visit Mars OR save Earth. Earth is more essential, but if we are able we should do both.
The time to start putting NASA brains on alternative energy solutions, and studying the causes of global ecosystem decline was in the 1960s.
Good thing we did just that. Fuelcells, solar PV, and pushing mechanical efficiencies to their theoretical limits has been among the best Return on Investment from our NASA budgets ever since the Apollo Program. Global ecology might not even exist without NASA satellites both inspiring the public and gushing data to scientists. Innovation in energy engineering and ecology science has been falling back to Earth for about as long as NASA has been lauching devices off of it.
In fact, the R&D for visiting Mars has lots of "dual use" in delivering "survival tech" here on Earth long before we ever get to Mars. And of course the systems on Mars will need efficiencies and exploitation systems that will work here on Earth, Mars' sister planet. Plus, studying Mars' "parallel evolution" more directly, especially after its climate has evidently catastrophically changed from one more like ours today, is an unequaled opportunity to study what looks like our possible future, without either waiting or having to guess.
These are the main reasons to love space, and NASA's exploration of it. Because Earth is in space, too. What NASA teaches us about space, we learn about ourself. And since NASA primarily teaches us about machines for living in space with extremely limited resources, while we push ours at home to the brink, we need more of exactly what NASA has already given us now more than ever.
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make install -not war
Just to clarify, the rover is not $2 billion over budget, which is the impression I got from the summary. It is $500 million over its $1.5 billion budget, and part of that is due to inflation.
If we try to delay the launch, the delay will cost us an extra $300 million. If we cancel the launch, we just spent $2 billion on nothing, and the science it was meant to do remains undone. This shouldn't be a hard decision:
1. Pony up and get this thing launched.
2. Investigate how this happened so we can avoid overruns like this in the future.
Couldn't it just be repurposed to fight terrorists?
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Given how well the two MER rovers are working, why not just build a couple more of them and send them to different locations on Mars? Seems like right now it would be better to explore more areas and get a better overall view of the martian geology. Better to have a limited (from a science standpoint) presence on Mars than put all your eggs in a $2B basket, IMHO.
1) Neither alternative energy or biodiversity is in Nasa's purview. we can debate whether it should be the business of the Federal Government at all, but NASA's not the place for it.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
2) Per Larry Niven, "The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program". If one views the survival of the human species as important, rather than the survival of the ecosystem per se, then having an escape plan is ALWAYS good policy.
Strange. I thought the dinosaurs died because they were unable to adapt to a changing environment. Is the sensible solution spending a huge amount of resources trying to invent an environment has an extremely low probability of success, and and even lower probability of long term viability, or preserving our existing environment that has supported life for hundreds of millions of years?
Than banking industry is NOT free market, the rent of money is set by the Federal reserve, you need a license to do banking... where do I start ?
Most environmental problems can be traced back to state intervention and lack of property rights. Not all, but most.
As for space colonization, it's the best bet against catastrophic events. Redundant systems are good.
\u262D = \u5350
The US is in a very bad position with respect to "Big Science". The problem basically is that any congress can't tie the hands of any future congress, and the consequence of this for science is that every single project faces cancellation, every single year. This has led to the cancellation many projects, a prominent example being the Superconducting Supercollider.
Science has a much longer-term view than congress. Congress, at most, has a view that lasts 2 years (to the next election), and practically it's much less than that. The US needs to devise a scheme to keep these projects going through hard times, and through fickle congressional actions. A constitutional amendment is unlikely, but how about some creative financing, of the "trust fund" variety? When things run over budget, bring in auditors, fire some people, but at all costs, make sure the science happens.
I'm at CERN, where the funding comes from member states as a fraction of their GDP. As a consequence, CERN has an extremely stable budget compared to US labs. If a project runs over-budget, the lab can simply delay the project. They also have a large permanent staff, so when new ideas come up, they can very quickly move to answer scientific questions, without building entirely new facilities. The expertise already exists here.
Canceling a project has disastrous consequences. Not only do you lose the science that would be gained, you may also lose the scientists, and technology developed along the way. It really is selling out future generations, and sacrificing technological advancement on a long timescale. It's very hard to see what will happen 50 years in the future, but I don't think human colonies on Mars are out of the question, perhaps spurred by the discoveries of the Mars Science Laboratory. Basic research has always paid off in the long run.
The US will lose out on the discoveries that will be made by the LHC. The US could have done it with the SSC a decade ago. How many more times does this have to happen before the US realizes it's a bad idea to cancel projects, and fixes the problem?
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
Sorry, but this sounds like a classic bad management decision. Take folks off Project A in favor of Project B. Here is the problem... the folks who do Project A might not be the right people for project B. Some will. Some won't. Now, all those smart folks without a job. What do they do? They are smart, they find other jobs. Now, open Project A back up. Those folks just jump at the opportunity to go back to that project, right? If you think so, you know little about human behavior. Those folks will be settled in to a new life, fund a different way of being happy and making a living. You have just lost decades of wisdom and knowledge about a very specialized area of knowledge.
And subcontractors. Think about them. There are a lot of businesses that give NASA what it needs in terms of components. Some, this is their only (or main) job. Some it is a division of a larger corporation. cancel all NASA projects for a while. Now reopen in a decade. You are going to have to rebuild that supply system again. It doesn't happen quickly or cheaply.
Now is research into cleaner energy important? Yes. But don't destroy another system because of it. There are more intelligent ways of going about it.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Before you reply: "WTF?!" McCain has a decent policy on our space program, and has supported it while in Congress. This is one area where he's not like Bush.
I'd rather over spend a little on a space program than on a war.
Eschew Obfuscation
The government does not like a $2 billion cost overrun and yet it give's $700 billion dollars to a bunch of morons who can't keep their business afloat.
Not to mention that it's not an either/or choice. We could do both. Space really doesn't cost much money in the big picture; you'd get way more money for children/poor/etc. by getting people to spend less on cosmetics.
"We don't need all the people on earth to escape. I think we can safely leave all the lawyers and politicians behind."
My strategy is to divide the populace into 3 categories - the most important, the breeders, and the non-breeders. That's also the priority for launches.
The "most important" category will be filled with those who have the power to influence the system to get themselves rescued - politicians, lawyers, Hollywood types. We load them all onto a ship and launch them first, to prepare society for the future colonists.
Then, right after launch, we blow the fucker up.
Then send up the breeders. They'll make it OK. As for the non-breeders, they really wouldn't relevant at such a point in human history.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Well, remember, the people at NASA might not have the skillset we need to look at issues like biodiversity and alternate energy. The engineering and aerospace skills the people have may not translate. MBAs might look at people as fungible goods, but the guy who has been doing extensive research into orbital mechanics might not actually know much about things which are applicable.
The problem with that is, if you suspend it, and you ever wanted it back ... there's a huge ramp-up time to get your space program back on line. There's also a lot of stuff that you need a space program for -- we've become highly dependent on communications satellites and the like. You don't want to give up on that.
I think governments (or anyone) should avoid looking at is as "either we invest in space" or "we invest in alternate energies". We should continue to invest in both, because there is a need for both.
If you're really looking to save money, I bet there's an awful lot of defense and other spending you could look at.
Well, as much as it's a fairly glib quote from Niven, it's not really that opposite to what you said.
In a lot of ways, investing in a space program and investing money in basic scientific research can be looked at as trying to learn how you'd adapt to a changing environment. Only, it's what you do when you have opposable thumbs and frontal lobes instead of waiting for evolution to sort it out for you.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We don't have time to spend money on microbiology, we have more pressing matters, like half the country having smallpox and polio!
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Right. Let the free market do for the environment what it's done for the banking industry.
I would be in favor of temporarily suspending the NASA program, utilizing those resources to come up with new energy technology, and then licensing that technology to help fund the resurrected space program.
Well, frankly, it does not matter if we are talking free market or not. Humanity has a horrible record at killing the environment, with to the behavior of corporations and governments being the worst offenders because of the scale.
As for suspending NASA...besides the "bad management decision" reply later in this thread, people seem to forget that all the research that NASA does shows up in other beneficial ways. It shows up in medicine in better diagnostic tools and items like the IEDs which are showing up in public locations everywhere (and which some of us may unfortunately need some day). It is showing up in ways which improve our crop yields in more sustainable ways, so that more people may be fed per acre, and so that less productive locations can even grow food on a limited basis. It goes towards energy efficiency of devices (be they lights or engines on a jumbo jet). And then it also shows up in understanding how the environment works, in part by providing access to other environments to compare our own against. This means that we can better understand things such as global warming, which should be treated just like a gun pointed to your head. Loaded or not, it deserves respect, because if it is loaded, there is no redo, second chance or what ever... Pfft... you are history. (A lesson many on this planet should learn and remember.)
One other important fact to consider...the reality check of just how much is really spent on NASA. $17.3B for 2008, which is less than 2.5% of the bailout just passed, and about 0.6% of the $2.9T budget for FY2008. Far down from the historical percentage of 5% during the Apollo project. Yes, every little bit would help reduce the budget deficit, but with removing money from NASA's budget, you are really just hurting things in the both the short and long run.
Helping build UN*X and the Internet since 1981.
Given the state of the financial system, the ever increasing presence of the government in our lives, and the ever lessening regard citizens have for the wellbeing of their community, that may well be the most insightful typo in the history of Slashdot.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Coincidentally, I threw together this chart yesterday when arguing with a friend about NASA's budget and how space exploration is "a huge government waste".
http://foofus.com/amuse/public/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg
(disclaimer: I do work for NASA).
Most interestingly to me is that if NASA's budget stayed the same, it would take 47 years to spend as much money as the 2008 wall street bailout - which would be the retirement date for a brand-new, young hire.
Alas, it is in the nature of politics that if NASA's budget were "temporarily suspended", it would never be unsuspended. What you're essentially wishing for here is that NASA cease to be, and the USA get out of space travel/exploration.
A changing environment precipitated by a honking big rock falling from the sky.
Note that we're not quite up to diverting a dinosaur killer. But we ought to be capable of doing so within 20 years, if we don't give up on space travel/exploration now.
Which means there's a really good chance we'll never "go the way of the dinosaurs". We may make ourselves extinct in other ways, but we should be immune to falling rocks within my lifetime.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The US Banking indusry was destroyed by Woodrow Wilson in 1913 when he created the Feral Reserve. And I quote:
"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
-Woodrow Wilson, after signing the Federal Reserve into existence.
Free Market is not the problem. It is government involvement in said Free Market which creates ALL the issues.
I am not sure what you are arguing. Are you for or against government control in those issues? It's that most of the problems you name were in part caused by companies and in part by lax government control.
That fishing example you gave. You seem to be saying that removing those quotas will somehow solve overfishing? And that trusting companies that only care about short term profits will work better? Or that letting fishermen who can barely make a living because there is too many of them handle this problem will work better than actual strict quotas?
For the amazon forest problem, short term lease is indeed a problem, but it's not all there is to it. How are you supposed to make money with a patch of forest covered land? Owners of those fields will see that the value goes up, you are right about that, by cutting down the forest and growing soy.
Let's add another, just for the sake of it. Do you think that the companies who created CFC cared about the ozone hole? They only started looking into new products because it would be more damaging for them to break the law by using more cfc rather than changing to something less damaging.
So, I hardly see how having absolute property rights actually help reduce pollution.
Think about this: Axe and Dove are actually the same company. Vincent L.B.
Chris Columbus would probably had trouble setting up any sort of permanent self-sustaining colony the first time out. Incidentally, there were a few more voyages and a couple of failed colony attempts, but wouldn't you know there's a damn lot of people over here who didn't descend from the natives.
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle