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Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?
StartsWithABang writes: At its peak — the mid-1960s — the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today? That number is down to 3%, the lowest it's ever been. In an enraging talk at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, John M. Logsdon argued that astronomers, astrophysicists and space scientists should be happy, as a community, that we still get as much funding as we do. Professional scientists do not — and should not — take this lying down.
Article hits the problem on the head, but doesn't do a great deal to address it, beyond a basic but kinda meaningless "lets show the world what we can do!".
People perceive these as "troubled times", and unless the space nutters can come up with an actual tangible end benefit (beyond furthering humanities understanding of the universe) I think it's going to remain status quo. Vague statements about technological advances probably won't cut it either. Of the small percentage of people who actually care about general technological advanced, an even smaller percentage are convinced it's best done through dangerous and expensive space programs.
The moon landing happened because the USA wanted to stick it to Russia's ass. Without a similar concrete end goal, I don't think we'll see much development. Sad as it sounds, I think the best hope is the eventual militarization of space.
Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.
NASA's bound to shrink. Particularly if you start from a baseline of the "mid-60s." Medicare, which takes up a very large and ever-increasing proportion of the budget, was not even passed until '65. Social Security was much less expensive because in the mid-60s most baby Boomers were still in High School. If you add in the recent mania for balancing the budget solely by cutting that pesky non-defense discretionary spending (and nobody actually seriously proposes cutting either a) Social Security, b) Medicare, or c) the Defense Department), there is absolutely no way NASA's getting a $5 Billion a year budget increase. Given increased partisanship, the fact that the non-Presidential party almost always controls at least one House, that nobody in the other party wants the President to be able to take credit for a moon-shot, and that the American people hear NASA's in the $18 Billion range and think that is a lot of fucking money; the politics of getting increased NASA funding are hideous.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
But if that happens it will almost certainly have to be a Republican President, because it's very difficult for Democrats to win the House, and it would have to be a truly great politician with a strong commitment to space exploration because the GOP base is a) more anti-tax then the Dems, b) more anti-deficit then the Dems, and c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle, and d) not that fond of scientists. You'd almost need a couple years of 5% economic growth because that would wipe out the deficit and let the President spend money without pissing off low taxes people or deficit hawks.
beyond just that scientists want to science.
The problem with we shouldn't fund "X-ers or X-ists for doing X" is that for X = science you get something totally different in return from anything else. You get new and demonstrable knowledge.
You need to work on your math... It is way, way off...
Maybe they should be aware of how much they got back from the investment. Just going to orbit, not landing elsewhere, the impact on everyone's life is all around, from weather/climate prediction to GPSs on phones. And maybe some activities that would have even more impact on our everyday life (zero-g manufacturing/alloys made from captured asteroids?) need more funds to be able to be done. And if well things in the space could give obvious returns, reaching other planets could get us unexpected yet (or only suspected) benefits.
Landing elsewhere and planting a flag is nice as a symbol, but things that have economic return may sustain a complex space program a bit better.
Of course, there are things that may end having infinite ROI, if by standing there we could avoid the end of mankind (detecting threats and avoiding them, or at least having a backup copy elsewhere). Delaying it till is too late will be much more expensive than doing it now.
After WWII the country believed Gov't worked and was good for people. We believed that the space program was a response to a Russian threat. We have somewhat the same motivations now, expect that a large number of people believe any money spent by the Gov't is bad. We muster much more money now for big machines because OMG it would be terrible if the Chinese had a machine faster than ours. In science we are more motivated to use money to fight competition, not because it will help our society. We are also of course motivated by things people understand, e.g. curing cancer, though strangely not fighting diseases like Ebola which we think is restricted to Africa and which congress did not fund at the levels requested.
There's a real distortion in what we spend and what people think we spend. Polls have been conducted about whether we spend too much or too little on various items in the discretionary budget. They often think for example that many believe we spend too much on foreign aid, and those same people believe we spend more than 10x what we really do on foreign aid.
The labs i worked in spent less than 200kDollar/Year and researcher. In average 10-15 impact points in publications per year for each lab. For the cost of the ISS or a moon shot you could finance my expriments a hunred thousand times over, so i really would appreciate if the decisions are made carefully.
What i really love to see is automonous systems in orbit, i.e. telescopes. I would thing if you uses the money for the ISS on other things, maybe we would not have to built radiotelecope arrays on earth, but coul put them in space. Instead of rdeaming of a manned mars mission, we should send many probes to other planets and moons.
The scientific achievement of the rovers on mars (and the comet mission!) are significant beyond anything we could have dreamt of.
Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?
You've obviously already made up your mind, so why not just state so outright instead of prevaricating with a question?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There are several other space-faring nations now. When you look up and see a Chinese base on the Moon, or Mars, then will it be time for the government to care?
I'm perfectly capable of managing my own defense, thank you very much. You crypto-statists with your "police" and "national defense" are nothing more than collectivists pretending to be rugged individualists. You're just as effete as the bleeding heart redistributing liberals.
How will that materially affect you, other than hurt your ego?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
This is the same argument used for military R&D spending - there are lots of useful civilian results. The problem is that if you throw a big pile of R&D money at anything you'll likely get some useful results. The question is whether you get a good ROI. Compare NASA to, for example, Xerox PARC (Ethernet, the GUI, laser printers, etc.) or Bell Labs (the transistor, access control lists, UNIX, etc.) and see which produced more inventions that benefitted the economy as a whole per dollar spent.
Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs. Do you really think that NASA is the best ROI for taxpayers?
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They said the something about the Apollo program, they brought back moon rocks. You may have noticed we haven't been to the moon in 25 years.
To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing of value on the moon. Instead, it's full of razor sharp rocks and razor sharp dust. Why would anyone want to live there? Just to wave that flag you planted around every day?
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Does Musk qualify? He wouldn't be doing what he's doing for much longer without business from NASA and/or other government space agencies. He's not running his own space program any more than Lockheed-Martin is running their own air force.
Branson's really is a private program, but whether it qualifies as a *space* program is debatable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, he just knows how to multiply. 350 million people x $0.005 = $1.75 million. The projected NASA budget for 2015 is a little under $17 billion, which works out to a little over $48.00 per American. If you come up with a wildly different number, either show your work and provide cites for the numbers, or STFU.
the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration.
we did this due to the cold war. the Soviet Union had managed to put the first satellite into orbit, the first man into orbit, and made the first hard landing on the moon with Luna 2. they invented the first ion engine and autonymous rover and the worst part for the United States was that as a nation they did this without any regard for profiteering or revenue. this was directly contradictory to our doctrine, yet made a very immediate statement about the apparent superiority of the soviet system of sciences and education. We did not explore space for any other reason than the fact that we as a nation had been directly challenged and bested. That had we not made great efforts to explore space, the state would have sustained damning losses to their thesis of governance.
we dont explore space at a greater pace because the nature of our government, a plutocratic oligarchy, cannot derive any immediate or long-term profit from it. purse strings are clinch knotted to the waistcoat of our 21st century robber barons and so far, fleecing the government of the public-sector technologies and sciences used to propel our space exploration during the 70's and 80's in an effort to privatize and monitize is the only apparent gain. To continue exploring space, we need to stop funneling money to SpaceX in the form of tax-backed loans and grants and instead apply tax revenue directly to the only organization that has consistently and successfully acted in the public interest of exploration and knowledge of space: NASA.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I heard that in the 60's we went to the moon. Yet, we haven't gone back since. Why not?
This is the 21st century. A moon mission is long overdue.
NASA should have a mission to setup a webcam station on the moon for the public to view the moon for themselves.
If they could send people and machines to the moon and have radio communication in the 60's, there is no reason in this day and age that they couldn't have a "moon cam" for public viewing.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Except that right now, private space efforts are popping up everywhere. Corporations may be run by MBAs, but quite a few of their billionaire founders are famed for their long-term thinking.
Compare NASA to, for example, Xerox PARC (Ethernet, the GUI, laser printers, etc.) or Bell Labs (the transistor, access control lists, UNIX, etc.) and see which produced more inventions that benefitted the economy as a whole per dollar spent.
Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs. Do you really think that NASA is the best ROI for taxpayers?
The problem with NASA is largely the senators dictating how the money will be spent, which leads to a huge amount of wastage. The shuttle is a good example - NASA could only get the funding if they made a space craft that fitted some fairly mutually exclusive specifications - the result was a space craft that could do none of those things especially well and almost certainly more expensively than building several separate craft tailored to specific jobs.
Look at the A-3 test stand as another example: it was designed for the Constallation programme, and when Obama cancelled the programme the partially constructed test stand was of no use. Congress demanded that NASA keep constructing this useless piece of hardware and they spent about $200M on it _after_ it was known that there was no use for it. How can you expect NASA to be value for money when it is treated as a jobs creation programme and forced to waste money like that?
SLS is probably another good example - insanely expensive, not least because congress are actually dictating the engineering requirements, and no doubt the government will order NASA to scrap it before completion, completely wasting all the money that was invested in it. Despite its huge cost, I kinda hope that SLS doesn't get scrapped, because then at least the money has gone into something that can be used instead of yet another useless cancelled project.
Far better would be to just give NASA a lump of money and tell them to do with it as they please - the money would still end up invested in paying people to do jobs (the jobs might not be in the various senator's chosen locations, but they would still happen), and we'd probably have a lot more science at the end of it instead of a huge pile of half-completed scrapped projects.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
There is lots of gold in space. One asteroid that NASA has looked at closely (Eros 433) has been estimated to contains trillions of dollars worth of gold at current prices as well as platinum, iron, nickel, etc.
It is usually considered the the bulk of the crustal gold and other heavy minerals were deposited on earth from asteroids during the late heavy bombardment.
Retrieving the gold, etc. from asteroids is certainly difficult and expensive using currently develop tech. but the gold is most certainly out there.
That's right. Call his bluff. You'll find that a lot of people are willing to cut spending across the board. And incidentally, lack of agreement on social welfare programs is a good reason to cut those programs. But it's not the only reason for or against cutting spending in a given program. There should be a consideration of return on investment which is usually completely missing from consideration in advocacy for increasing NASA or social welfare spending.
How will that materially affect you, other than hurt your ego?
The US enjoys its current leadership position in the world, and its current high quality of life largely as a consequence of its technological superiority between 1950 and 1990. That superiority brought some exceptionally bright and talented people from all over the world to US schools and to the US market, and those people helped to fuel US dominance. Its "ego" is a consequence, not a cause of that condition. So, looking up to an Indian moonbase or a Chinese Mars base would encourage those talented innovators to see China and India, rather than the US or Europe, as the places where cool stuff can be developed. It will encourage the next Elon Musk or Sergei Brin to move not to the US, but to China.
There just aren't enough smart people in the US (or in any other country for that matter) to maintain dominance. If a country can't poach the smartest people from other countries, then it's going to decline. Government policies hostile to the advancement of science and technology make it harder to recruit those scientists and engineers.
Vague statements about technological advances probably won't cut it either. Of the small percentage of people who actually care about general technological advanced, an even smaller percentage are convinced it's best done through dangerous and expensive space programs.
A friend of mine works for a contractor that produces NASA's "Spinoff" publication, which highlights the broad contributions from NASA research and programs: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/. Several of us were ribbing him about how NASA does a pretty bad job of publicizing the publication designed to showcase its public benefits.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Manned space flight is a luxury, the amount spent on it should rise and fall with our economy- Unless we have a specific goal, worth suffering for, to justify a continuing budget. Robotic spaceflight and exploration (actual science) should be continually funded, because it happens over a very long time frame and a gap in funding would ruin the investment.
Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.
You don't really want that. If churches were taxed, they would have the could act like any other corporation. The only thing that keeps them from being able to say "Vote for Joe Blow or you will go to hell" is their tax exemption. If you look at the books of most churches, they really don't have a lot of income after expenses, so the taxes would be low. The only taxes you would gain would be property taxes and sales taxes, but since most of their expenses are in employee payroll, it would really just be property taxes.
Don't tax the churches, it removes the gag order on what they can say in the public forum!
It would be better to tax people that have 8 years or less of formal religious training. Jesus told us we would always have the poor. He didn't say to make a career out of it. Do you really know anyone that believes the Earth is 6,000 years old? Compare that to the number of people walking around with their hand out.
What we really need is a tax on stupidity.
Or just tax the job creators who are increasing their wealth instead of creating jobs.
America was never a strong "Science" country. The education system sucks (on average), the people don't care about science (on average), STEM gets no respect (in general). But America had a secret weapon, money. They could recruit the best and brightest from the whole world and fund the R&D and Apollo projects that nobody else could or would. Now that the money is gone America has to rely on its own capabilities, and that's not looking so good.
Maybe it's because I haven't had my morning caffeine but I can't follow your train of thought at all. Again, maybe it's just me but I think those tracks must have been laid on now-melting permafrost.
Are you really talking about punishing people for not having formal religious training? What are you, some kind of monk?
"Do you really know anyone that believes the Earth is 6,000 years old?"
YES! Too Many! And... some of them have only recently come to believe that. It's getting worse!
As some bureaucrat once said: work expands to fill the budget available. Fund researchers to spend years developing an experiment, and they won't have it ready next Wednesday.
The IRS hasn't really been enforcing that rule.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pr...
What has Sergei Brin or Elon Musk ever done for me? Or, for that matter, anyone other than their shareholders and employees?
There's an awful lot of economic activity in Silicon Valley. That economic activity feeds everyone from Google employees to coffee shop barristas and grocery store clerks. The taxes paid by Google, their employees, and the supporting economic activity support city, state, and federal government functions that benefit you. Vibrant economic activity provides social stability that benefits you.
It's sad that the only benefit you seem to recognize is a personal check.
I agree in general in principle, but I'm sure that the A-3 will get lots of use over time. Probably not enough to justify its cost, but "gigantic vacuum chamber capable of withstanding the thrust of a huge rocket" is not something that's going to sit idle forever. I'm more concerned about what it'll cost to reactivate it in the future, though... I mean, if it takes a long time and sits idle for 10-15 years, will they have to spend another couple hundred million dollars to get it back into working order? Is it just going to rust away, or will it last?
Wonder if they could make it into a massive freeze-drying facility in the meantime ;)
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Whenever this debate comes up I'm reminded of two snippets from the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. In the first episode, there is a pre-meeting to discuss what to present to JFK. The head of the national science advisory, ironically played by Al Franken, scoffs at a manned moon mission saying that all we'd get for our 20 billion dollars are some rocks. Later in the series as they show actual historical footage of man-on-the-street interviews as Apollo 11 is making its landing. There's one beatnik who says, "It's a groovy trip but there are a lot more important things to do first." Usually, those folks spout off about eliminating world hunger or affecting world peace or eliminating poverty. Those things, while noble causes, are wholly intractable problems. Americans have spent trillions on trying to deal with them and all we've gotten are more Ship B people. The dreamers still believe that they can be solved by hiring more Ship B people and creating more government programs. These are not engineering problems that are solved by designing something tangible and making it function. Solving engineering problems has the added benefit of being able to apply the knowledge to other engineering problems. Devoting resources to intractable problems only results in increasing the parasitic economy.
Great idea. There should be a new tax of for those above a certain annual cap, say a $1,000,000 per year. Anyone in this category would then see their taxes raised by 80% of any any income over the $1,000,000, with a tax credit determined by how many new jobs they can demonstrate they created that tax year. Jobs should be categorized so that higher skilled jobs and higher paying jobs gain a greater tax reduction. That way the entire "trickle down" theory of economics can actually be made to work. Somehow, I doubt a single one of those GOP "jobs", "jobs", "jobs" politicians would actually support such legislation. For them, the facade and hypocrisy are far more important than "jobs", "jobs", "jobs".
No, it was Joe Taxpayer. Give credit where credit is due. Not to the middle men who spent the money. Otherwise, one never makes any case for government spending as opposed to tax breaks for billionaires.
> Really, who paid for the developmental science of tang?
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/01/tang-was-not-invented-for-the-space-program/
> Teflon?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/molecule-of-the-month-teflon-the-nonstick-myth-that-stuck-did-you-think-that-your-hitech-frying-pan-was-a-spinoff-from-the-space-race-john-emsley-explains-that-the-truth-is-the-other-way-around-1414648.html
> Transistors
Bell Labs all the way, totally private. This is well recorded in any number of great books. You might want to try "Silicon Fire".
> , ic circuits?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit
> High frequency electronics? Plastics? Explosives?
None had to do with NASA, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But them again I'm not sure what any of the remainder of your poorly-spelled and almost unreadable rant is supposed to be saying.