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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.
Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.
Here we all talk about ROI and we wonder why the companies don't do any research anymore. It is because research can never prove what the ROI will be. And if you know what the ROI will be, you won't get something new. At the most something improved, but most of the times something cheaper.
Google is one of the few companies that invests in products that might become useless.
Why not just do things and then see where it leads us. Are we not a curious species? Do we not know what and how just because we crave knowledge?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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.
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