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5,200 Days Aboard ISS, and the Surprising Reason the Mission Is Still Worthwhile
HughPickens.com writes Spaceflight has faded from American consciousness even as our performance in space has reached a new level of accomplishment. In the past decade, America has become a truly, permanently spacefaring nation. All day, every day, half a dozen men and women, including two Americans, are living and working in orbit, and have been since November 2000. Charles Fishman has a long, detailed article about life aboard the ISS in The Atlantic that is well worth the read; you are sure to learn something you didn't already know about earth's permanent outpost in space. Some excerpts:
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
Almost anyone you talk with about the value of the Space Station eventually starts talking about Mars. When they do, it's clear that we don't yet have a very grown-up space program. The folks we send to space still don't have any real autonomy, because no one was imagining having to "practice" autonomy when the station was designed and built. On a trip to Mars, the distances are so great that a single voice or email exchange would involve a 30-minute round-trip. That one change, among the thousand others that going to Mars would require, would alter the whole dynamic of life in space. The astronauts would have to handle things themselves.
That could be the real value of the Space Station—to shift NASA's human exploration program from entirely Earth-controlled to more astronaut-directed, more autonomous. This is not a high priority now; it would be inconvenient, inefficient. But the station's value could be magnified greatly were NASA to develop a real ethic, and a real plan, for letting the people on the mission assume more responsibility for shaping and controlling it. If we have any greater ambitions for human exploration in space, that's as important as the technical challenges. Problems of fitness and food supply are solvable. The real question is what autonomy for space travelers would look like—and how Houston can best support it. Autonomy will not only shape the psychology and planning of the mission; it will shape the design of the spacecraft itself."
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
Almost anyone you talk with about the value of the Space Station eventually starts talking about Mars. When they do, it's clear that we don't yet have a very grown-up space program. The folks we send to space still don't have any real autonomy, because no one was imagining having to "practice" autonomy when the station was designed and built. On a trip to Mars, the distances are so great that a single voice or email exchange would involve a 30-minute round-trip. That one change, among the thousand others that going to Mars would require, would alter the whole dynamic of life in space. The astronauts would have to handle things themselves.
That could be the real value of the Space Station—to shift NASA's human exploration program from entirely Earth-controlled to more astronaut-directed, more autonomous. This is not a high priority now; it would be inconvenient, inefficient. But the station's value could be magnified greatly were NASA to develop a real ethic, and a real plan, for letting the people on the mission assume more responsibility for shaping and controlling it. If we have any greater ambitions for human exploration in space, that's as important as the technical challenges. Problems of fitness and food supply are solvable. The real question is what autonomy for space travelers would look like—and how Houston can best support it. Autonomy will not only shape the psychology and planning of the mission; it will shape the design of the spacecraft itself."
We are 11 trillion in debt. Space exploration is a nice to do when a country has its house in order.
NASA, as far as astronauts go, is very "ground control" centric. To wit:
"Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers."
What the true scope of their work is not given.I suspect that a few do the "schedule" part.. it is a 24/7 operation. The rest are doing logistics: What supplies are needed, do we have power, oxygen, fuel.
However, ISS is a very labor intensive thing. To get a document signed off can take dozens of signatures from all over the place. Most of the signatories are really signing to say "nope, this document doesn't impinge on anything I'm responsible for", but still, you need the document signed.
But ultimately, everything is manually done: typically with processes developed in the 70s to use systems designed in the 70s. Send a request to do X to person Y, who verifies that time is available, then they send it to person Z who verifies that power is available, who then sends it to person A, who verifies that there's no conflict with operation Alpha, Beta, then person B verifies there's no conflict with operations Charlie, Delta, and Echo.
ISS operations is like a small village of 10,000 people each of whom have their specialized area of expertise.
The idea here is interesting but I'm not convinced for three reasons: first, the fact that massive staffs are used to plan out their days isn't necessary great evidence that it really is difficult: that could be administrative bloat. Second, for much of a trip to Mars days will end up looking very much like each other until one is actually on planet. They won't be doing much in the way of experiments on the way to Mars. Third of all, a 20-30 minute delay will not really create that many problems with getting plans from Earth unless one is in some sort of emergency situation.
Maybe they should start giving more responsibilities and capabilities to the expert systems running in the computers aboard to do all those tasks. Lets start the HAL series.
The primary use for the space station is to practice with sending astronauts in space. The problem is that there's no actual use for people in space, so the practice is useless too. Sure, we all hear the stories that a human geologist could do stuff so much quicker than a remote controlled robotic rover. Of course, these stories never discuss how much extra time you'd need to get the human geologist there in the first place, and what it would cost. In the same time, and for less money, you can launch a few dozen unmanned missions, each to a different location, carrying different kinds of tools, and get more results.
Space used to be something you did to be the best, because it was hard, &c.
Now, thanks to the constant stream of press releases from SpaceX, it's become just another boring business venture in the public consciousness - not something to do for its own sake, to advance the lot of humanity, but as a mere means to the end of profit. I must admit that it's reduced my interest in space exploration, too.
And it's not that space has somehow been privatised - NASA was always subcontracting - but that the management of projects has been privatised. In two decades' time we'll have just another Boeing, but this time providing end-to-end boondoggles, with The People now lacking the resources to get things back on track.
The fact that NASA allows the astronauts so little authority now to make decisions implies their reluctance to trust human judgement in stressful conditions. Too many variables.
Send the robots first. Figure it out. Then the ones who need food.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
I'm sorry, but that just flies in the face of reason. If its true, then NASA is doing something badly wrong. It should not take 50x as long to figure out what order to do things as it does to actually do them. I could understand a complex operation like a spacewalk taking 50 man hours to plan for a one hour project, but the majority of things that people do simply do not benefit from that extreme level of planning.
A good example of the over-thinking that NASA does is the Columbia Crew survivability report. Many tens of thousands of hours were spent on the analysis that concluded the same thing that just about anyone could have stated after 30 seconds of deliberation: There were many different factors involved in supersonic re-entry, most of which are fatal, and there is no known technology that could have saved the crew from any significant portion of those factors. Yet NASA felt it necessary to spend millions on that part of the investigation...
If people want to continue NASA in any meaningful way, two decisions need to be made: First, what do we really want NASA to accomplish? (meaning we the people, NOT we the NASA), and how much will it really cost.
I can virtually guarantee that no one cares if NASA achieves any more science. What people want NASA to be achieving is the engineering of going into space and staying there. Everything else costs more than it is worth, and should be undertaken only if the costs can be partially subsidized by the engineering projects needed to achieve cheap space travel.
Given the progression of human engineering expression, space travel should be accessible to a significant minority of the worlds population. 35 years after the wright brothers, the entire upper middle class could afford to fly. 35 years after Apollo, only a handfull of people have even been to the moon, and less than 100 individuals could afford to pay out of pocket to do so today, and even if they did, they would have to wait 10 years for someone to put together a dedicated mission.
NASA has failed in its primary responsibility to the American people: Make space travel commonplace.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
The true value of our efforts in space comes from ambitious projects that inspire people to take up STEM subjects (e.g. not to trot out the same old stat, but the 7:1 return in the USA economy from the Apollo missions is a prime example). At the moment the ISS isn't doing a very good job in this area compared to the Mars probes or Rosetta, especially when you consider the cost of the ISS project.
If the ISS wants to ramp up its relevance and earn its tax dollars, then it should be focussing on more ambitious projects.
I've always found the debate about going to Mars/the Moon to be missing the point: what humans need is to move away from planets entirely. Learn to live out in space itself and you can go anywhere. Once you've escaped the harsh mistress that is the gravity well, why go back to another one?
Right now the US seems to be somewhere back before John Glenn (system being designed). I watched the first moon landings; I never dreamed I might see the funeral of the last man on the moon.
Best comment comeback to anti-space I have ever seen.
So,
Perhaps Google is setting it's sights too low with Google Car. Maybe they should be (or are) working on Google Spaceship where everything is automated: navigation, human's schedules, communication, monitoring of everyone's health.
They could call the AI system GAL... Google (Heuristically) programmed ALgorithmic computer)
Certainly one of the biggest boondoggles ever. At an estimated cost of $150B through 2015, that is $24 million per day! (based on 6250 days by end of 2015). Extending the math, that is just over $1.5 million per orbit.
And for what? What inventions or unique processes have been discovered or perfected and put into use on earth to better our own lives? What scientific results have been significant? (I won't even ask for memorably significant) What non-human experiments were done what could not have been done far cheaper by other means? Did the TV news ever lede with "An incredible scientific breakthrough by astronauts/researchers on ISS was announced today...."
Using just a third of that money, NASA (and lets be honest, almost the entire cost is paid by the US) could have spent over $6B more on exploratory missions to each of the other 8 planets (including Pluto). And still had $100B left over to spend on projects, scientific or otherwise, at home.
I'd argue this given how little a budget has been given to NASA when compared to things like the F-22 and F-35 programs the US Government runs. People who bedevil the space program aren't looking at the big picture of return we've gotten over the years. Yeah they always can do better but they already have done exceptionally well especially when compared to some military defense contractor spending projects that would dwarf NASA and have no return of value other then money spent in someone's district and a product that was substandard and/or delivered late.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
scaling it for humans on all but eating, pooping and procreating. Slashdot serves no essential purpose other than to keep slashdotters busy with something on their mission to a grave. See how easy that was? We can play madlibs with that argument all day for any activity. Humans want more. Humans explore. Space included. Spending 1 out of every 100 tax dollar on it is a very small price to pay.
This was a difference between the Soviet space program and the US one.
Cosmonauts were far more autonomous, one of the reasons is that USSR lacked ground relays for uninterrupted communications with the crew.
They were for several hours per day without ground control.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's old news to anyone actually paying attention. It was highlighted as a problem as far back as the Skylab SL-3 and SL-4 missions. In an email exchange with NASA scientists working with the Flashline Research Station back in 2002 (or so) I outlined the need to streamline communications and transfer some of the decision making and planning authority from the (simulated) mission control to the station commander and from the station commander to his subordinates. Unsurprisingly, the NASA study ended up reaching the opposite conclusion - the existing system worked,and there was no need to even seriously try any other system. That, ultimately, is why they don't have any real autonomy or practice having real autonomy.
Not to say that if NASA didn't fund it, the Dept of Defense wouldn't, but JPL (a NASA center) does a lot of the work on GPS, particularly for precision positioning and geodesy applications.
the processes used are 40 years old, and legacies of the days when "on-board" computation was extremely limited. NASA has always been "ground control centric". When the "trans-earth injection" burn had to be made behind the moon for Apollo, the big sigh of relief when the signal appeared at the correct time coming out from behind the moon was "the astronauts didn't foul it up". While astronauts do a lot of useful and unique things, NASA's general philosophy is to tightly script every action so that there is no uncertainty or unexpected events (there's a whole process to deal with "process escape", in fact). On Skylab, the astronauts got so fed up with "scripted every minute" that they went on strike for a couple days. This has happened on ISS too, and the Atlantic article discusses it (5 hours work in a procedure scheduled for 20 minutes).
And, NASA has *so many* procedures that are *so interrelated* but very few people having an end to end view, it is very hard to achieve incremental improvement. There's no "rip out the architecture and put a new one in" possible, not that it would be successful.. many have tried, both in Govt and in Industry for big complex systems, and failed.
So, to take a practical example, say you want to send a 1GByte movie from the ground to an astronaut... this is a multi-week process. You send the file to someone who is responsible to getting it up to ISS. They see if there is some radio link time available on the high rate Ku-band links, and schedule it, essentially by sending a formalized request citing a catalog service identifier (the people who run space communications are contractors, who are paid to follow specific procedures, and with performance metrics related to following those procedures... changing the procedure means a contract renegotiation). That request eventually results in a scheduled event for comm. Then a request is sent to the people who actually run the transmitters, and they say "ok, put the file *here* and we'll upload it according to your specified schedule". Meanwhile, someone on the ground has to command the equipment on ISS to be ready to receive the file, and that has a whole (manual, with computer assist) scheduling process too. You need to get "command window" time on the *other* radio links (S-band) to be able to send commands to equipment on ISS. Different frequency band, different equipment, different formats for the data, different people involved, different performance metrics on the contracts. Now you've got your two sessions hopefully aligned: you got the folks on the ground ready to squirt the file AND you have the folks on the ground ready to "turn on the recorder" on board to receive the file.
The event occurs: someone gives permission to radiate the commands turning on the recorder, someone gives permission to radiate the digitized movie, hopefully nothing goes wrong.
Now you wait for the telemetry to return (within an hour or two) and you analyze it to see if it worked. If it did, then you get another command window to move the data (on ISS) from its temporary holding place to somewhere where the astronaut can get at it (a file server on ISS). You've probably scheduled that command window at the same time as you put in the request for the other windows, but, it *is* a different set of equipment on ISS, so there's probably a different set of people who need to review the commands you're going to send to do the file check and move.
NONE of this happens automatically. There are "scripts" (or "timeliner") to automate some pieces, but there's still a lot of (at least in a virtual sense), "technician flips switch from standby to transmit" kind of operations. And, of course, immense recordkeeping and log requirements: every single person in the process probably has some way in which they log the request received, the proposed action, the actual action, any variations from procedure or expected results.
God forbid anything hiccups, because that might require rescheduling a new event from scratch, not to mention an anomaly investigation.
It all comes from the same pile, which is the American taxpayer.
What do you expect? The population of America is becoming more and more NON-WHITE, and most of them couldn't give a toss about space travel, because their IQ isn't high enough.
"Spaceflight has faded from American consciousness" - LOL. Thanks to the nation-wrecking JEWS who opened your borders, took over the banking system and Congress, and send you to fight THEIR wars for them. And heaven forbid anybody actually criticises the Jews - don't you know they are the eternal victims?
Watch "The Treblinka Archaeology Hoax":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47rbRNSGQUs
Oy vey! Such sufferink!
At this point, send probes, not people.
Seems almost all the solar system's objects have been studied most effectively by probes.
Would rather see future space research be to study and send probes to promising 'Earth 2' exoplanets.
If another human-habitable planet is discovered, then might fuel real breakthroughs to get humankind finally spreading across the galaxy to colonize it.
It seems once we see a real Goal (which to me would be finding another human-habitable planet), then we really start working towards it.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
building the many-ton thing and gaining the skills needed to do so if not on a near-earth platform? Right now, our ability to get to Mars is about sending something the size of a mini-cooper that no one would like to be inside of as it lands (13G, stabilizing spin, 45 ft airbag bounces...). We've sent a series of landers that have the abilities of high-end lawn tractor piloted by a device with the brains of an obedient turtle on a 40 min round trip conversation delay. And each lander has done a bit of work and sent back a message that basically says "send another lander with different instruments". A person who can make decisions in real time, cope with exigencies and dust off the solar panels is not an inherently bad idea.
and NASA supplies the telemetry services for them. More than zilch on that alone.
Is convincing that army of ground support folks to relinquish their vice-like grip on the control they wield. There is a reason they are called "Controlllers" and "Directors".
I thought you were better than that, slashdot...
"We’ve got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey."
Sorry but this is one ludicrous comparison, it's akin to saying a man on the moon was inaugurated long before the 7 wonders of the world.
And where I quit reading as the rest was just going to be sensationalism.
intelligent countries that do not want to get plunged back into the Internet dark ages had best dominate space defense of our satellites , our communication systems, and our lives.
Only ignorance believes that space travel and dominance is not important....and maybe an occasional trip to Mars
What arrogant nonsense you spew! Does the "US government" speak for all of humanity? No they do not.
If space was easy to do, that mythical government conspiracy you advertise would have been broken wide open by the Russians. Or the Japanese, Europeans, or now the Indians. Oh I know, SpaceX or Blue Origin or Armadillo Aerospace are actually covert actions by freedom-seeking rebel factions, glorious revolutionaries battling The Man! That's why they take place in Nicaragua, or Vietnam, or Bolivia.
Oh wait...
Somewhere over the horizon there will be a New World discovered. We should be sending astronauts with beads for when we get there first.
50 people around the clock is 16 or 17 on a shift. Figure a third of those are gofers. So a dozen people at a time, trying to coordinate a house sized thing going 17.5k mph across a series of comm links and keep each other shift coordinated... it's not off the charts. You have that many people making sure a head of state's day goes okey dokey.
It takes 50 staffers to make the schedules? Sounds like bloatware.
Anyone here know what a "synopsis" is? Apparently not, since we put half the article in the front page.
For example, when you wrote " If you put out an add[sic] looking for volunteers for a mission that is almost 100% guaranteed to kill the volunteer, you will still get many thousands of times the number of volunteers as you need" you overlooked something VERY important: they won't be the KIND of volunteers you need.
"Risk" and "Redundancy" are two VERY subjective things. Statistically you can compute a 1% chance a rocket will fail, BUT that does NOT mean you can say with ANY degreee of certainty WHICH of the first 100 launches will be the one that fails, nor for that matter can you forsee that you might launch 200 times successfully before suffering 3 failures in a row. The calculated "risk" will let you compare several alternate plans and pick the safer one, but it is absolutely NOT predictive with any degree of certainty. Redundancy is similar; some entity like Boeing can argue (as they did with the 777 to the FAA) that fewer engines equals more safety by virtue of fewer systems that can fail, or argue as SpaceX has with the Falcon9 that 9 engines are better than 1 because each contributes so little to the required thrust that if it fails the others can throttle-up to cover for the bad one. Both companies can point to absolute proof of their argument with situations where their argument won the day in an actual flight. Big firms like Boeing have actually taken both sides of this argument (the four engine redundancy of the 747 was one of the big arguments for its safety for over-ocean flights)
The truth is that government agencies, like NASA, write the rules they need for the projects they want. NASA put two men aboard the first shuttle mission even though it was a completely untested vehicle with no launch abort system and practically no chance for survival for failures during the 1st 2 minutes of flight or the plasma-inducing part of reentry. NASA had a high threshold of risk before men landed on the moon and for the first few shuttle flights, but the risk threshold came WAY down after the Apollo13 mission and again after Challenger and Columbia (because politicians got cold feet fearing voter backlash even with NO evidence that the public actually was getting cold feet, indeed the public was more-supportive of replacing Challenger with a new orbiter than the people in congress were)
The biggest problems with ISS are that [1] we built one that is too small, [2] we put it in the wrong orbit, and [3] we stopped flying shuttles; ALL of these were politicians messing with things for their own twisted reasons.
1. it's FAR smaller than the "Space Station Freedom" Reagan proposed, and lacks many of the facilities "freedom" was supposed to have (like the large centrifuge module that is sitting on the ground unfinished and gathering dust, the maintenance and construction hangar that was to aid in satellite and exploration missions, and the US propulsion and guidance module the lack of which now makes ISS vulnerable to Russian blackmail). The crew is so small (currently 6) that the required maintenance takes too large a percent of the time of the people there. With a crew of perhaps 20, three of them might spen 100% of their time on maintenance, but the rest would be doing full-time productive work. The station was initially hugely shrunk by the Clinton administration as a cost-saving move, and then re-shrunk further by Bush43 post-Columbia when NASA was ordered to pronounce it "complete" as soon as it was minimally operational even though that meant major modules would never be put in place (the Bush team just wanted to "get it done" and then retire the orbiters ASAP to eliminate the political risks of another orbiter loss).
2. It was SUPPOSED to be in either the same orbital plane as the moon, making it an excellent departure point for regular moon missions assembled at Freedom from shuttle-launched modules OR in the plane of the ecliptic making it ideal for assembling and launching manned and unmanned missions to the other planets. The orbit ISS is in is horrible for this; it was selected during the Clinton years as part of the change from Freedom to ISS when the Russians were invited into the project (both to share costs and to keep Russian space workers doing peaceful stuff after the Berlin Wall fell). The current orbital inclination makes the ISS pass over Russian facilities thus enabling the otherwise underpowered (for missions to ISS altitude but in those other orbital planes) Soyuz to reach it. The result though is that nothing is gained trying to use ISS to stage missions to other places.
3. Shuttles were supposed to SHUTTLE people and supplies and experimenters to and from a station very frequently; perhaps even weekly. Now without shuttles, only Dragon can bring any real mass safely home from ISS, and Soyuz provides so few seats and with such severe conditions, particularly with high G forces and landing jolt, that we are not able to fly typical university and industry researchers WITH their experiments for missions of perhaps a week or two.
The US needs to SERIOUSLY clean-up ALL defense contractor buying programs, whether it's Lockmart F-35s, Lockmart Orion space capsules, Boeing air tankers, etc BUT we do not need to "trim" the military budget first; our military buget has been falling as a share of the budget for decades; in the 60's the pentagon got most of the federal budget, but now it's social spending and interest on the debt that are eating us alive. We actually have MORE treaty obligations now than we did in the sixties (our presidents and our State Department "experts" LOVE signing treaties, which they pretend have no COST, and then they grumble about the costs of the military capacity required to back-up those very same treaties) with many of our allies pouring their money into social spending and completely depending on us to protect them (and some of them then have the nerve to point to our big defense budgets as evidence that we are militaristic!)
The US could, indeed, reduce its military budget provided it reduced its role as "global policeman" but this would either require ceding that role to countries the world would like a lot less (like China and Russia) or it would mean our allies like Germany, England, Canada, Japan, Australia, etc would have to triple or quadruple their defense budgets (which NONE seem inclined to do)
Any such journey is definitely worth it because what matters here is the JOURNEY itself and not the DESTINATION! Even all our lives is one such journey!
http://popularbloggingtopics.c...
would never happen for several reasons:
1. because the robotic exploration champions have a demonstrated track record of total irresponsibility; EVERYBODY in Washington knows how severely these clowns lied about the James Webb telescope (among other programs) - they planned it to cost half a billion and launch in 2007, but now it's up to nearly 9 billion dollars and it's team has started leaking that it might slip from its 2018 launch date (it's already 11 YEARS over schedule and more than 1000% over budget) and even its apologists now claim as part of their defense that it's not nearly so over-budget because they initially mislead everybody on the costs and that the current cost is only perhaps 4 times what they internally thought it would cost.
2. the taxpayers DO get mildly interested in an occasional robot rover as long as they don't know what it cost, but they do not actually get inspired by robots.
3. your hundred billion dollar robot would still need a hundred years to do the science that one geologist could do in person in a year. This problem will only grow worse as destinations get further from Earth. Nothing beats the human brain, human creativity and imagination, and human dexterity in the realm of exploration - and when you have to suffer the round-trip signal delays of deep space missions, the amount of science that can be done by man remotely commanding robots is a severe constraint. Every robot out there has, essentially, a "panic" mode it falls into (all too frequently) where human judgement is required, and everything done remotely is so severely planned because a single glitch can cause the robot to lose contact permanently.
4. there is no reason to send a robot if man is not going to follow. Simple academic curiosity is not enough reason to justify billions of dollars that could otherwise make life better here on Earth for actual people. We have plenty of pretty pictures from Hubble to fill all the pages of future astronomy books and use as backdrops in Hollywood productions and we can tell kids fictitious inspiring tales of "long ago and far away" if we just want to tell stories of far away places. If, however, man will eventually be going to these places to harvest resources and to colonize them, then we have an actual need for REAL DATA and a justification for spending money on sending robots to do the initial recon work.
It's perfectly understandable that in a resource-constrained environment, there are people interested in space but unqualified (or too timid) to be astronauts who want to build careers in the field and who, therefore, are big supporters of robotic exploration and critics of manned spaceflight. Such people see every dollar spent sending man into space as a "wasted" dollar that could have funded their pet robot project. After all, one can in the era of unaccountable robotic exploration, spend ten years pushing a mission idea, another ten or fifteen building the robot, spend several years monitoring it on its flight to its destination, spend a few years remotely operating it and then a decade analyzing the returned data ... and then retire to a cushy professorship at some university. Very few things in science say "lifetime job" like a robot headed to another planet. Twas not always this way; there was a time when a team would design and build a series of probes (like the Rangers) designing them and their missions, building them, overseeing their launches and operations and still have time in their careers to move on to other stuff. Not so today. Today, deep space probe people are just as corrupt and adept at milking the government as the most corrupt defense contractors.
Yes, on the face of it, the US military budget is larger than the combined budgets of the next 10 or so (it fluctuates a bit), but the claim is always issued by people and groups who intend to decieve the general public who do not pay attention to details.
First, The US government pays more money for each bit of hardware. Most US military hardware is made by highly-paid unionized workers with expensive retirement programs and even the raw materials are obtained in a more-expensive way because of US environmental regulations. China, as a contrasting example, can get its raw materials from unregulated strip mines and use nearly slave labor (compared to the US). Therefore an American tank will always cost vastly more than a Chinese or Russian tank. There's a famous saying that "quantity has a quality all its own".
Second, the US military is an all-volunteer force. The US government must, therefore, provide wages and benefits to its service personnel and this is actually where most of the US defense budget goes (even though we have fewer people in uniform than, for example, China). Indeed, a large part of the US military budget includes benefits for retired servicemembers and those disabled by their service.
Third, much of the US military spends its time defending our allies. We station people in South Korea, for example, who do NOTHING to protect the American people and in fact would be a trip wire that would drag the US INTO a war rather than defend us from one. This makes diplomats giddy and helps politicians pat each other on the back, but it has actually a negative defensive value. This has gotten so bad that a new situation has arrived in which the UK has currently cut its navy so severely that they do not have enough engineers to man their ships and the US has had to lend them some sailors. As an American, I am happy to see us do it for such an old ally.... BUT I wish the people there would WAKE UP and support a military strong enough to defent its own nation. Winston Churchill would be completely embarrassed and shocked by the state that current UK politicians (of all parties) have put their nation's military into.
Irrelevant. Humans are excessively inefficient carriers of DNA. Be free in the knowledge bacteria will outlive you and your spawn.
Best enjoy nature and family and forget this fascination with science let alone philosophical pursuits.
Remember you are only a stupid meat carcass that pays taxes
The cry of "Put the Astronauts in Charge" is as old as the Mercury program. The plain truth is that NASA needs to be scrapped, and we need to start over with a new agency that has a MISSION. Today, it's a jobs program who's main function is coming up with reasons to keep the budget increases in place year after year, and it's not doing that great of a job at that.
This should be written in to EVERY FEDERAL AGENCY, that after so many years, they are disbanded, the paperwork shredded, and we just start over.
This is exactly what happens in Corporations when they suffer big losses, or get acquired. It is a natural, evolutionary cleansing process that governments never do... It's a big part of the reason we have such an alarming deficit... All government agencies are on an auto-pilot growth program - that has nothing at all do with RESULTS and everything to do with getting funds in the congressional district that pays for the contributions to the politician's PAC.
Murphy was an optimist