Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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.
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.
--
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.
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
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.