Slashdot Mirror
Can Rep. John Culberson Save NASA's Space Exploration Program?
MarkWhittington writes The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger has published the seventh in his series of articles about the American space program and what ails it. The piece focuses on Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who has two fascinating aspects. The first is that he is taking over the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA funding. The second is that he has a keen appreciation for the benefits of space exploration for its own sake and not just for his Houston area district.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system.
I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
"Welcome, gentlemen, to Aperture Science. Astronauts, war heroes, Olympians--you're here because we want the best, and you are it. So: Who is ready to make some science?"
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Send a probe to Europa, but instead of sending more men to the Moon, do a sample return mission to Mars.
He's... eh... he's an elephant? - Peter Griffin
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Or glory?
What's the real mission here? Space exploration is such a loaded term, what does it mean? Do you need to send test pilots in the upper atmosphere? For what? What can they do that can't be done on the ground? Is getting 400 kilometers closer to Andromeda somehow changing anything?
And glory? That's nationalistic flag-waving nonsense. Let's all grow up and set aside the fantasies here.
And again, we get a liberally biased article mentioning the affiliation of a Republican politician in a negative ... Uhm. Never mind.
I wish him luck and would love to see his vision put in to action. Unfortunately for him, and American space exploration, most of the members of his own party in Congress do not believe in science.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
First, a single person is not supposed to be able to do anything within our Senate or Congress. It takes votes, and a majority must agree with anything this person puts forward for legislation.
Second, nothing is getting done in our Government due to massive cronyism and corruption. Until that is fixed, we will continue to see nothing but garbage come out of our Politicians. Start petitions to put people on ballots and vote _them_ into office. People with high moral character, not career politicians. Outside of an outright revolt or military coup, that is the only hope we have to fix things.
Ballot information is here, and more information is here.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science. That's why it's done on the public dime.
As for gov't inefficiency: it's a myth brought on by a few high profile pork projects (the US Military comes to mind) and underfunded DMVs. Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient. Also, go work in management for a large (private) corporation sometime and tell me again how amazingly efficient they are compared to government.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
2500 hundred years...
yeah....i know i know....
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
Why is Snark Required?
NASA over its entire history has been almost a complete waste. They have done precisely one cool thing in their entire history: landing humans on the moon. Everything else has been stupid.
"Look! We built a telescope!" Yeah that's cool but I don't care, we already had telescopes.
"Look! We built a re-usable spaceship!" But then you didn't go anywhere with it.
"Hey, we have this permanent space station!" Who cares? Is that another world? No.
"We landed robots on some places!" Call me back when they are humans.
"But we've done so much useful science!" I'm in favor of the government funding science but we already have the NSF.
Humans on other worlds, or pack up and go home. Thus, they should pack up and go home. They should have packed up and gone home after the Apollo program. And when we started riding with the Russians into space? Can any American think of a bigger humiliation than that?
NASA has been a failure for longer than I've been alive (1979). They don't even have plans to put humans on other worlds. Reagan should have defunded it. Bush should have defunded it. Clinton should have defunded it. The War Criminal should have defunded it. Obama should defund it.
Go home, NASA. Shutter the offices. Your scientists can go work for the NSF and America can save the embarrassment of your constant underperformance.
I wonder sometimes.
NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.
NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.
NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.
The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.
All of this in less than fifty years.
You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.
Really, has NASA done that badly?
The human body is a fragile bag of water, not well suited to radiation exposure, temperature extremes,changes in air pressure, high acceleration forces, or long periods of isolation from a sustaining biosphere. Almost anything that can be done in space is better done by robots. The ONLY reason for people to venture into space is to get to the surface of another habitable planet for which we are evolved. And there is only one such place in reach: MARS!
Yes there are good reasons for going to Mars. Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us. We have the technology to colonize Mars now. To make it economical, colonization should be a one-way pioneering trip. Nobody comes back, ever. (I made this suggestion to NASA 17 years ago and was told that NASA does not do suicide missions. Now, many folks at NASA have come around to my point of view. )
Rep. Culberson has not learned the crucial lesson from the demise of the Apollo program... that political motivations for exploring space are not sustainable in the minds of a fickle constituency that wants to be entertained by a list of new "American Firsts in Space". Colonization of Mars requires the serious dedication of the best scientists of Earth to the mission of human survival.
Forget the moon. In terms of the fuel required to reach it on a one-way mission, it is not really much closer than Mars. I has far less to offer as a base for a new sustainable human civilization. (Although I'm sure it would make a nice military base to shoot stuff at Earth). The fact the Rep. Culberson is talking about returning to the moon is the best indication that he is not a serious thinker about why NASA should be involved in human space travel.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
But NASA's problem has always been that Congress are full of cheap bastards who'd rather cut taxes $10 Billion then add $10 Billion to NASA's budget. The rest tend to be frivolous bastards who'd much rather fund early childhood education with that $10 Billion then build rockets.
He's going to have some money (at some point the economic growth we've been experiencing will be reflected in a much reduced-deficit, and if Congress was smart they'd use some of that money to fund things like space exploration and infrastructure repair), but with the current laser-like focus of every-goddamn-body on deficit reduction he'll have a devil of a time coming up with $10 Billion in new money without a) cvutting programs Obama Likes (which will get the bill through Congress, but then get it vetoed), or b) not using the money to pay down the deficit (which will make it virtually impossible for the bill to get out of his Subcommittee, and could provoke a veto).
I love the idea of steadily increasing NASA's budget, but how many strings are attached? Getting rid of bureaucratic red tape is a good thing, but handing over full control of NASA to congress? Congress is much of the reason why NASA is in such a bad position, forcing them to use a network of politically located/connected facilities and defense contractors that create a VAST amount of waste and pork spending. Congress should only create objectives, provide the funds and appoint the heads of NASA. Leave the fulfillment of those goals up to NASA within their budget. The Next gen launcher is a perfect example of Congresses meddling, requiring that NASA use the old shuttle contractors ballooned costs by tens of billions of dollars, before they canceled it Constellation was ballooning by closer to a hundred billion.
Accept the facts that (a) nothing but reprocessed dirt goes into space (the money stays home) and (b) this home spent money is the best kind of welfare (get an education and get some of it) and (c) a space program is far more noble than a weapons program....and then do whats best.
And there is the real prize - hidden in plain sight. He wants to usurp the power of the Executive Branch and arrogate it to Congress. But it's for the children!, er, NASA! and so it slides right by most commenters here.
I know it it's fun to pretend that stuff. Just like some people enjoy pretending that Obama was born in Kenya. It kind of makes you look silly, though.
When a private corporation, or any state agency in any of the 50 states hires you to work THIS YEAR, while promising you'll get paid retirement from 2035-2055, they pay out that money to a 401k or other retirement fund THIS YEAR. Work done in 2014 gets paid for in 2014, with revenues generated in 2014.
Failing to set that money aside , normally in the care of a disinterested third party, is fraud and can send you to prison. That's a significant chunk of the white collar guys in prison- they didn't actually set aside funds in the appropriate accounts for various things, they only pretended to.
The matching principle is a fundamental principle of accounting that you learn in the first few weeks of Accounting 101. You have to match expenses (employee pay) with the revenues they generate (postage collected) . You don't get to collect the benefit now and just say "we'll pay the expenses in 30 or 40 years, long after the current board is gone". You have to recognize the expense in the same period as the revenue it generates. Again, disregarding Generally Accepted Accounting Principles is how suits end up in _prison_.
The US Postal Service is actually very unusual in that they had workers working in 2010, but promised to pay for that work in 2030-2050, using revenue they HOPED to generate in 2030-2050. The problem here is obvious - USPS might not be generating any significant revenue in 2040, so how are they going to pay all of those retired workers they promised to pay? With no money set aside, they won't get paid. That's fraud, and that's why private company officers who try that crap can end up in prison.
So you're basically advocating that USPS should commit felony fraud upon it's workers, by promising to pay them a handsome retirement but making no arrangements to see that they are actually paid.
Just in case you actually believe that, here's a little information about what was actually going on, with an example.
In 2014, I did some work for the state of Texas and the state promised that they'd pay for that work 30-50 years from now, when I'm retired. Just as all public corporations are legally required too, Texas follows Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) , and therefore recognized that expense in 2014. They got the benefit in 2014, so they needed to pay the cost in 2014. That's why Texas has set aside $130 billion dollars, managed by disinterested third parties, to cover the future retirement costs it has already incurred by having us work for them. See http://www.trs.state.tx.us/inf... for details. The key point is that the state already got the benefit of my work, so they already paid it's cost, the retirement they promised I'll get later.
That's called the "matching principle " and is a basic part of GAAP. When corporations fail to follow GAAP, the executives can go to prison. You might wonder why. That's because they've acquired my services by promising that I'll get paid later; if they make no preparations to ensure that I'll actually get paid later that's fraud. Fraud in the billions is felony fraud and sends suits to prison.
What USPS was doing was having people work now, and promising to pay them 30-50 years later, but making no provision to make it possible to actually pay them. They were having employees work in 2000 and HOPING that in 2040 they'd have revenue to pay the promised retirement pay and benefits. Of course USPS might not be making any significant revenue in 2040, so there might not be any way to pay retirement in 2040 for workers who worked in 2000. The workers would be shit of luck, screwed out of the retirement they were promised. That's often considered felony fraud, but it's how the USPS was operating.
Congress figured that felony fraud on the postal workers'was a bad idea, and ordered USPS to do two things. First, they had to start setting aside _some_ money to pay the retirement benefits they had already promised to people who had already done the work. Second, they had to WRITE DOWN A PLAN for the fund to become sound within ~50 years.
They didn't have to follow generally accepted accounting principles yet, but they had to have a plan on how they'd get their shit together within the next 50 years. That's where the "not even born yet" silliness comes from - the idea that USPS has to at least come up with a written plan as to how they won't still be committing the same fraud on their employees 50 years from now, if the USPS still exists in 50 years.
The several hundred kilo 2003 Mars exploration rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) were at the ragged edge of the maximum mass that can be landed with airbags, independent of the shock loads. To go higher, you need rockets for soft landings. MSL/Curiosity is in the 1000kg range.
But the real challenge *today* isn't getting things to the surface. Probably a 50% chance of success on any given launch. It's getting them to land reasonably close to each other. The landing ellipse today is around 5-10km in radius, which greatly restricts where you can land if you want your multiple payloads all retrievable in a reasonable time frame (e.g. you land a "moon rover" type device that an astronaut can drive and fetch them with). No landing in places with too many rocks, or too steep terrain, or too much wind, etc.
One of the big drivers for MSL and the skycrane landing system was the ability to put more mass in a precise location on the surface of Mars, which is something you kind of need for sample return. You can run all the analyses (and they've been published, multiple times) and there's a sort of sweet spot at 700-1000kg: it give you a capable rover that can find spots and get the samples, it can land a big enough rocket to get the samples back up into orbit, etc. Sure, you *could* do all that with a fleet of MERs, but MER didn't have the precision landing capability you get with MSL, and it certainly didn't have the precision landing capability of future Mars landers (e.g. the ability to avoid landing on a big, mission ending rock).
NASA? The same NASA that cost $2 billion a year whether Shuttle (a failure if there ever was one) flew or not?
NASA doesn't deserve saving.
The GOP has worked hard to destroy NASA and keep it as a jobs program. They are the ones that screw it up constantly. Even now, they are the bastards that have gutted private space while trying to increase funding for SLS.
And this bastard things that he will SAVE NASA????
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Had he REALLY supported science and NASA, then he would be focused on getting funding out of CONgress's hand. they are the ones that continue to destroy NASA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have an idea -- add a small excise (sales) tax on electronics and other high-tech good, with that money dedicated to NASA and a few similar agencies, such as NOAA and NIST. Then there would be a guaranteed source of funding for the very important research these agencies do.
First, they were being reckless like the rest of the government, promising hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits in the decades ahead with NO money set aside and no plan to actually PAY those benefits (so your kids and grandkids will pay most of their cash to the government in taxes, which they probably will rebel against given that THEY will want to have families and homes and food to eat, OR the benefits fund will go bankrupt and lots of retirees will be outraged when their checks stop).
The "cardinal sin" of the PO, however was in its unique details: Since WWII, the Post Office built a track record of hiring an unusually-high percentage veterans. In the aftermath of WWII, this was a great way to pad the impact of all those returning GIs, most of whom were easger to settle-down, get married, have kids, and have a peaceful 9-to-5 job. The Post Office and the Pentagon, however, implemented some funky bookkeeping that served both agencies well in the short term but which the subsequent generation of managers, bureaucrats, union bosses, and politicians never wanted to "fix" (so, like good government people, they buried it). The PO employees who were vets had part of their pay and benefits hidden "off-book" over in the huge cold-war pentagon budgets. Over time the accounting slipped through the cracks and BILLIONS of dollars in future beneft payments were not being accounted for by ANY department, and the old immediately-post-WWII justifications for some of the gimmicks were long gone. As a result, the PO had the benefits programs that were absolutely the worst in the US in terms of future solvency and everybody in DC knew it. The ONLY possible fix was to tell the PO that it had to act at least a tiny bit responsible and START setting aside the cash needed. Yes, the PO was the first part of the government to get hit with these mandates (becasue they were the worst and therefore the most-endangered) but gradually all the other agencies are going to have to step-up. If businesses not backed by a government can live by government-mandated accounting rules and regs, then the PO can too.
The fact that Concorde was done by the Europeans had NOTHING to do with the matter. The fact the Boeing has not done the A380 has not led to the demise of 500-seat full-double-decker airliners.
Boeing was working on a more-capable SST (AFAIK the mock-up still exists and is, after quite a long and confused hsitory, back in Boeing's hands at the seattle Museum of Flight being restored) than the Concorde and was seeking government funding as a national technology program in the 1970s when the initial "green" wave hit the US. Environmentalists began ranting and raving about supersonic aircraft endangering the Earth, NIMBYs were screaming about sonic booms, the nation was wallowing in debt, largely driven by the confluence of Johnson's "Great Society" programs and his Vietnam war. In response to all the protests, sonic booms over land were banned (eliminating ALL over-land SST routes and thus severely limiting the routes such planes could fly and thus the number of planes that would ever be bought and operated).
Democrat congressman Sidney Yates and Democrat Senator William Proxmire waged, and won, the fight to kill any American SST. Proxmire attacked it along the financial lines (he was famous for attacking any government spending he did not like), and Yates went after the environmental aspects for a one-two knockout punch. The American SST was dead LONG BEFORE the "Arab Oil Crisis"... it was killed because Boeing could not afford to fully fund the development of such an advanced plane with such small sales prospects, and government backed-away in response to the the deficits and the 1960s and 1970s environmental movement's lobbying and protests.
Most of the people who put a man on the moon were Christians, and many were Jewish. The vast majority of Americans in the late 60s (who solidly supported the moon program) were Christians.
No amount of ignorant atheist propaganda can change history. No matter how often some idiot cites Democrat talking points about ignorant "Bible-thumpers" being "anti-science" it does not change the reality that most of the famoust scientists in history were religious (Newton, Copernicus, etc) that many famous theories now accepted my mainstream science were first proposed by religious people (including "the big bang" which was proposed by a Catholic) and rejected by secular scientists (who feared things like the big bang, and talk of asteroids hitting the Earth in the past smacked of "catastrophism" and might give support to religion). Even the "Earth-centered-universe" model was initially pushed by non-Christians NOT the Christians. The Catholic church adopted the idea from the non-Christian thinkers at the time and was then left "holding the bag" when their Pope had put his stamp of approval on it but the secular people abandoned the idea. Indeed, it was the Catholic monk Copernicus who debunked the idea.
If you want a political party that is "anti-science", try the Democrats: THEY often oppose genetically modified crops, nuclear energy, are frightened by modern chemistry (and seemingly most of the periodic table) reject the genetic evidence that unborn children are actually HUMAN, etc. while ignoring all the hard math and pretending the world can run on solar and wind power and pretending that recycling is cost-effective (most of it is not, and many locales toss the recylables into the landfills with the rest of the trash after collecting it separately from the citizens). They also keep pretending that "cures" for things like AIDS are "just around the corner" even though man has NEVER cured ANY virus (it MAY well happen eventually, but there's currently NO scientific evidence of that). They also like to pretend that Global Warming is going to do horrible things, BUT they reject any solution that wins-out in a cost-benefit analysis (all of which have shown it is better to spend money and energy mitigating effects than trying to stop it if you assume it is indeed happening).