Smithsonian Using Kickstart Campaign To Save Armstrong's Moon Suit

qpgmr writes: The Smithsonian is appealing for assistance to raise enough money to preserve Neil Armstrong's moon suit. The "Reboot the Suit: Bring Back Neil Armstrong's Spacesuit" campaign launched Monday on Kickstarter, marking 46 years since Armstrong's moonwalk in 1969. Smithsonian reports: "....on the anniversary of that 'small step for a man,' the Smithsonian Institution announced a plan of action that is, in its own way, a giant leap for funding the job with what the Institution’s first federal Kickstarter campaign. With a goal of raising $500,000 in 30 days—by offering incentives such as exclusive updates to 3D printed facsimiles of the space suit gloves—museum officials hope to be able to unveil a restored spacesuit by the time of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing four years from now, in 2019."

Comments

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.

We spend about 538 billion a year on non-defense discretionary spending.

We spend about 420 billion a year on "mandatory" spending.

We spend about 230 billion a year on interest payments to national debt.

Wee spend about 600 billion on the military.

Yet whenever anyone wants to raid a fund to pay for something... its the military budget.

Why is that?

And I should point out that the military is one of the few things the government does that it is supposed to do and it is one of the few things the world... especially our allies need us to be competent in.

So why are you raiding the military budget? Do you want the US to pull out of NATO? Maybe sunset its guarantee to protect Japan? We could let Israel get genocided. Maybe let the Russians run wild in Eastern Europe. Possibly allow the North Koreans to invade and enslave the south koreans?

Where would you like to cut the US military budget?

Maybe cut their medical care? That's a popular one. Or maybe you'd like them to not have the latest high tech stuff so when we go to war more of our people die... or we have to kill innocent people because the military will have to compensate for having bad weapons by using them less discriminately. That precision bomb that blows up one building but leaves the rest standing is expensive. Much cheaper to drop a lot of dumb bombs and flatten the whole neighborhood.

What would you like to cut? Obama is talking about cutting the ability of the US to fight two wars at once. This was something we built into the US budget during and after WW2 because we had to fight the Japanese and the Germans at once. A two front war. So... maybe that's what you want to cut.

Its all well and good to say "lets cut the military budget" but what does that mean? What are you cutting specifically?

I'm a little troubled...

[Karmashock]

That they don't have the money to pay for this out of petty cash. I also question why it is costing half a million dollars.

It sounds like they're mostly taking pictures of it and then putting a website up with historical information they can pull out of records and the pictures.

Why does that cost half a million dollars? I'd feel better about this if they put that out to an open bid. I'm quite certain that you could get a very reputable outfit to do it for a fraction of this amount of money.

This is probably a bad example but I think this gets to something I'm talking about here:
http://www.cleanoilpainting.co...

Okay, that's what it costs for the restoration of an oil painting. And that is finer fiddlier work than the space suit.

Lets take their high number of 2500 USD and say that is what it would cost to restore 80 square inches of space suit. This is a huge inflation of the art restoration costs because they're saying this would cost 500 dollars for 80 square inches. But we'll go with the high number just to make a point.

Okay human body has about 2790 square inches of surface area... we'll double that for inside and outside and just treat the suit for this example like its skin. Then we'll divide that by 80 square inches and then multiply that by 2500 USD... and we get:

174,375 dollars. And that still sounds really high to me. But its a tiny fraction of the money they're asking.

But they also promised to take high res photos. So lets look at what that costs.

I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand. But lets say its 80 grand because its the government and you can reliabily get them to pay 10 times what something is worth without them batting an eye.

That's still 173 + 80 grand. So... What's left here? Making a website? Who here thinks that explains the gap in costs?

So yeah... I don't understand the 500 grand bill on this. It seems wildly inflated.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Just like we cut education spending and improved quality with the public education system right?

Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.

The thing lost in your statistics is that the US if you compare equal demographics to equal demographics compares very very well to other countries even the hyper socialized ones.

Where things fall apart is if you compare people and cultures that exist in the US but not somewhere else.

Compare white women between the ages of 22-35 with any country you like... the US does just fine. Compare it against sweden if you like... same thing... the numbers are about the same. Where things get bad... and very bad at that is when you start to compare inner city minority populations or simply average them into the total.

Those stats are HORRIBLE. They're a fucking nightmare. Crime stats, drug addiction, literacy, high school graduation, college graduation, average income, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenaged pregnancy... the stats there are BAD.

But if you exclude that segment of the US population and recalculate... the US stats are quite good actually.

Now here you're going to say "you can't exclude a portion of the system"... okay, but now we have to admit that the problem is CONCENTRATED in a specific segment. And rather than applying your solution to EVERYONE when the problem is not suffered by EVERYONE maybe you should instead focus on what the fuck is going on in those communities that makes ALL the stats so bad. I mean, can you blame the lack of socialized healthcare on the literacy and high school graduation rates? Kinda hard to do that isn't it?

So once you're doing that, you're going to have to focus on what went wrong in these communities because they actually used to be better than that. They've gotten WORSE over time... not better. And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.

And fucked everything up.

What public service in the US do you think your new healthcare system is going to resemble. Because I can tell you now, that it would very rapidly look just like the public education system unless you instituted systemic reform in government unions just as a start.

And absent that... your idea would endanger the health of my entire country for very little if any objective return.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

We spend about 834 billion a year on government healthcare subsidies.

Actually, plenty of people do want to cut that budget, but can't for ideological reasons.

The US spends just over 17% of GDP on health care, which is a figure only exceeded by Tuvalu. Most developed countries (e.g. most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) the figure is around 9-10% of GDP. Even France spends less than 12%.

So, yes, you could cut that figure by a third simply by building a real public health system.

For every dollar in premiums you pay your insurance company, they spend 15-20 cents in administrative costs and profits. (You can see that if you read an insurance company annual report on their web site. The "loss ratio," usually 80-85%, is the money they pass on to the doctor or hospital.)

Then your doctor gets 80 cents. He has to spend another 20 cents in administrative costs to deal with the insurance company. (Compared to less than 5 cents on Medicare.)

So if you just cut out the insurance companies, you'd save 35% right there. Other big expenses here are the cost of drugs, hospital services, and doctor services.

I don't know if Obamacare has helped or will help in any significant way. Given that the AMA supported it, probably not.

There was a good story in the Washington Post, based on a Netroots Nation meeting, which gave a reasonably good brief explanation of how Obamacare got here and why it will fail.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Liberal activists see Bernie Sanders as champion for causes failed by Obama
By David Weigel
July 20, 2015

Basically, Obama and the advisers he picked decided that the only way to pass a health care bill was to give the Republicans and the corporations everything they wanted. They struck a deal with the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the doctors' organizations, etc. to give them everything they wanted. So you have to buy your Obamacare through a private insurer, instead of having the choice of a public option.

The problem with Obamacare is that the premiums and copayments are enormous. A single person making $27,000 a year would have to pay one month's income a year for the premiums. Then (depending on the plan) the insurance wouldn't kick in until she spent $2,000 or $3,000. Then she might have to pay 20% or 40% of the costs, until she reached the maximum, which is $8,000. It benefits somebody who has more than $8,000 a year of medical expenses.

In other words, you wind up paying twice as much as they do in Canada. And in this country, the burden falls most heavily on the lower middle class. It's a regressive tax.