The Fight Over NASA's Future

swestcott writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about the transition to the Obama administration and NASA's transition to the new Orion."

Comments

I need rehab

[mcgrew]

Troll biter's rehab. Damn but it's hard to ignore the clueless trolls. I guess I'm off the wagon again, I have to respond.

"Pork"? WTF??? Do you have any idea how many technological advances, especially in medicine, that have come from the space program?

Do you have cable TV? A cell phone? GPS? None of these would be possible were it not for the "pork spending" on space. All of them rely on sattelites.

"physics"? What kind of drooling anti-nerd can't understand that launching a heavy machine into outer space doesn't use physics?

"Chemistry?" You realise how much chemistry work is involved in fuels?

If I were modding I would be undecided whether to mod the parent as "troll" or "funny". Who let all these clueless MBAs in here anyway?

But teh gubment is BAD! Corporations are teh GUD!

[damburger]

NASA is being set up to fail, because of the prevailing pro-corporate attitude in the US. The idea is that private entities are efficient, responsible, and capable of long-term planning and technological development. So nobody wants to be accused of being 'socialist' by giving more money to a government agency.

The original Apollo program cost $135 billion in modern(ish) money over about 10 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_costs_and_cancellation

Whereas Constellation is being given $3 billion a year for about 20 years, or about $60 billion in current money.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/detail/10004394.2006.html

So the US government is expecting a great deal more, for a lot less money, when there has been no real development in interplanetary manned travel since Apollo.

Re:Are all the news stories sensationalist?

[oneiros27]

Griffin's quote and basic sentiment reminded me of JFK's 1962 Rice University speach:

... We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. ...

Interesting conversation...

[RobBebop]

"I don't frankly know what the answer is," [Dr. Crowley, of MIT] said, "but I know it's a lot closer and a lot more complicated answer than the one playing out in the media and the blogs."

I think they're talking about us.

===

But in all seriousness, the cost of running the shuttle for 5 years is $x and the cost of developing the Constellation program in 5 years is $y. Meanwhile, NASA's budget is not x+y and if they wanted to try to develop Constellation in 3 years its cost would be closer to $y^2.

It seems like people can't grasp the rudimentary guideline of engineering development: you've got limitations in quality, cost, and timeliness, and on any challenging project you need to pick one of those limitations that you won't particularly worry about.

I do like the articles conclusion though... NASA's budget is way too small for the amount of good that it can do for the world and for the amount of high-tech science jobs that it can create. As long as everybody in the nation has food, shelter, telecommunications, and power... there is no reason NASA's budgets shouldn't balloon.

Re:Cancel Orion, keep the Shuttle

[Amiga Trombone]

We managed to find $25 billion to fund bailing out a moribund auto industry. It seems to me putting that money into a forward-looking industry rather than a backwards-looking one would have been a much more worthwhile use of the money.