Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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
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.
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".