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

$805M budget

[hawguy]

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

Re:$805M budget

[OhPlz]

Probably impractical, but imagine if more things in government were funded at-will. Then the projects the people truly care about would receive funding. People could point to the things they helped accomplish rather than feeling like they're pissing their money away into pork projects and padding the wallets of the well connected puppet masters. A space suit today, maybe Mars tomorrow.

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?

Re: $805M budget

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, he just wants to reduce DoD paper clip usage...

Re:$805M budget

[kmarple1]

RTFA: "The Smithsonian’s federal funds—about 70 percent of its resources—are restricted to safeguarding collections, research and the costs associated with operating and maintaining the museums. But exhibitions, public programs and the recent digitization of the collection have largely been privately funded."

Re:$805M budget

[Pseudonym]

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.

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

Re: $805M budget

[Karmashock]

I'm responding to this because it wasn't a troll question... I also felt answering it would get people to think about an issue for more than the .5 seconds they normally do which invariably leads to no actual thinking ever happening in the first place:

To be fair, he's saying that the DoD "Over Spends" so much on paperclips that you could raid the DoD budget indiscriminately and pay for the suit restoration.

here you might say "well, why do you say over spend"... because otherwise you're saying that the government is spending X on paperclips and doesn't need to because apparently they either buy too many or they aren't using them for anything.

Here is what you use paper clips for... to hold bits of paper together. So if you're using them... then what are you going to do when you don't have them?

  Staples? Folding the sheets just so? Maybe putting them in a folder?

And that causes your staple budget to go up... and that ignores that there are feature differences between staples and paperclips. Paper clips don't damage the paper when you use them which means you can separate out individual sheets or add sheets. Or folding... doesn't work as well as paper clips which means close efficiency from whatever that does. Or folders means you're now spending more on folders which are more expensive than paper clips per unit and are basically a superior version of the same thing at a higher cost.

I know I sound autistic going through this but details matter. The context of the statement was that there was so much fat in the military budget they could just bill it to the DoD. Now I'm sure the DoD does waste at LEAST half a million a year on all sorts of stupid shit. But every branch of government does that as well.

Obama and his wife took two separate government secret service protected planes to go to Los Angeles on the same day. Now, if they had shared the same plane that would have saved money. But they didn't. They chose to take two planes because "reasons". And I'm not beating up on Obama for that. you see it in every government department. They do stuff like that all the time.

The US Federal government got in trouble recently for running the sprinklers too long in California. They have a very bad drought there and for that reason they're being asked to not run the sprinkers for more than 6 minutes a week. Instead they're running them for about 6 hours a week.

Typical stuff. The city hall of San Francisco dumps about half a million gallons of drinking water down the drain every day to run water boiler heating system for the building. Again... in a drought. Never mind that they could recirculate the same water every day for at least a year at a time without any problems.

Its typical.

So if you want to raid a budget... I'd like people to stop picking on the military as if they're the only ones that do retarded shit on a regular basis. They ALL do it. Raid the general fund if you're going to take money out.

This would properly be filed under the "discretionary non military" fund. ANd that make up about 420 billion dollars of our annual budget every year. So add it to that.

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

[Strider-]

Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.

Who said anything about nationalizing anything? A real healthcare system doesn't have to be nationalised.

Take the Canadian system, as a prime example. As it is not something enumerated in either the constitution, or the British North America act before it, by default healthcare is under the jurisdiction of the provinces. Each province runs its own single-payer insurance system, and sets standards for care and outcomes. In turn, each province is divided into regional health authorities, which for the most part own and operate the hospitals in their region, as well as handle things like health inspections of restaurants, initial investigation of disease outbreaks, and so forth. In turn, unless they are on the hospital payroll (rare), doctors in turn are free to operate their practice as they see fit (private business, partnership, chain etc...) the only proviso being that they either have to be in the public system, or completely out of it, no double-dipping.

The net effect is that hospitals, and doctors are operated locally and in the case of hospitals, in a non-profit manner. This results in a reasonably efficient system that costs far less than the US system, while delivering similar or better outcomes.

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

The issue is very complicated. I think a more productive way of looking at it would be to break down the numbers into what is spent on various things and that would help us isolate where the costs are.

It is possible they're general. But I've never found an issue where that was the case. Typically what happens is that you have something in the stats that is HUGELY out of whack and when averaged into the total it distorts the statistics.

For example, lets look at what doctors make in the US:

Okay, wages for doctors range from 135 thousand a year to about 300 thousand a year for specialists.

Lets compare that to the UK... where they make about 50k to about 80k... in british pounds... so
77,000 US dollars to about 124,000 US dollars for specialists.

Point is the doctors in the UK make about HALF what they do in the US.

So that's one thing we can look at. Why are we paying TWICE as much for doctors as they do in the UK? Does that mean we're getting higher quality doctors, does that mean the UK is getting lower quality doctors? is there an issue with medical schools not training enough doctors in the US? Does the UK have a better program for teaching doctors?

Something I've noticed in the UK is they have a lot of imported doctors. People that grew up in India, went to medical school in india, and then immigrate to the UK to practice. I've been to a few UK hospitals and they're largely foreign born. Which implies the salaries being offered are below market rates for the UK.

That suggests that even if the US is over paying for doctors, the UK is likely underpaying.

If you'd like to talk about Canada...

They appear to be paid roughly what US doctors are paid.

You get the idea. You break it down. Simplifying everything to one number is not useful. You have no detail to form an opinion. To see that number and just say "well you should socialize your system" is simplistic. You don't know what is going on. The existing cost inflation is as likely to be caused by subsidies as anything.

We've seen that in the education system where every time university subsidies for student loans are increased the universities increase tuition.

The cost of university education has outpaced inflation. And the reason for it is that the government keeps giving kids zero interest loans and increasing the amount they'll give. The Universities just adjust the tuition so they take 100 percent of the loan + they take whatever the student or family might be able to afford on top of that.

We saw similar things in the housing crisis in that the government was giving cheap loans to buy houses. This caused market inflation because the cost of housing simply went up every time the government increased the subsidies. Why not increase the price of my house? If you've got more money to spend then I'll set my price at whatever you'll pay.

So you can't just abstract everything down to one number. You lose all the details.

As to what public service you'd like this new Health care system to resemble... you can't use another country as the model. Its like saying you want a US university system in Zimbabwe or an American news organization in China. These nations are all different and whatever you build in the US is going to be run by Americans and is going to be subject to American economics and is going to be subject to american local, state, and national politics.

So... find an analogue. What you'll find is that US services that are highly regulated tend to become heavily beurocratic, bloated, and inefficient... and often the quality drops. The reasons for this are mostly political. They tend to have employee unions which agree to deliver campaign donations and votes in exchange for lax auditing of their functions, over staffing their departments, and paying the union better than market rate.

There is a reason the most successful economy in the US is Washington DC. The government pays people very well and they don't fire people unless they're horrifically in

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Most Doctors in the UK do private referral work on the side too, once they've specialised / chosen their field coming out of medical school + their internship / mandatory A&E training.

Source: My father who just retired as an NHS GP and private Dermatologist.

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.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

Here is the best model I can find for what you'd get in the US.

The VA hospital system. This is a medical system set up for US soldiers in the US. It is entirely operated by the US federal government and it is widely regarded to be some mixture of corrupt and incompetent. There have been quite a few scandals with it recently.

Mostly stuff about putting people on wait lists forever. A lot of soldiers die waiting for treatment in the system.

When I hear "lets socialize the US healthcare system"... I think of the VA hospitals.

I've studied the VA system, and they're getting a bad rap.

First, you have to judge them by their main purpose: When a soldier comes back from Iraq with a brain injury, their job is to keep him alive and get him functioning as well as possible. They do the best job in the world. There is no place in the world that can treat head wounds as well as the U.S. military. Nobody. Same with the guys who have a foot blown off by a land mine.

If some 60-year-old vet comes in with trouble urinating because of an enlarged prostate, they're going to take care of him, yes. But he may have to wait for somebody with a more urgent problem. Like a coronary bypass or stroke.

Second, Congress wanted to cut taxes. But they wanted first-class service from government agencies. They wanted everything but they didn't want to pay for it. So they ordered the VA to cut their waiting times. But they didn't give them the money to hire more doctors to do it. So what do managers do when you tell them they have to do the impossible or they'll be fired? As any MBA will tell you, they cheat. They fudged their appointment records, just as any private business manager in the same situation would do. (Hello Enron?)

Third, the VA system does some of the best medical research in the world. When they do a treatment hundreds of thousands of times a year, they do a study to find out which treatment works better, which hospital gets better results, and which doctors get better results. (No, they don't fire the doctors with worse results, they retrain them.) They do that for heart disease, stroke, cancer, eye disease, amputations, everything. I went to a lot of medical conferences, and they're always talking about "the VA study" in their field, which is usually the best study available.

For example, I just read a study about how the VA was trying to figure out how to give pain-killing drugs to vets in severe pain. If you don't give them enough drugs, they're in pain. If you give them too much, and if you give them opioids, they can die from an overdose. The VA doctors figured out how to optimize it.

So yes, if I had a heart attack outside a VA medical center, I'd feel comfortable that I was getting the best care in the world. I'd trust them to make a tough diagnosis, and to treat a serious, life-threatening disease. If you were crippled, I'd trust them to get you walking again, if anybody could do it.

Don't whine to me because you can't get an appointment this month. Tell Congress to give them enough money to hire more doctors.

Re:$805M budget

[DanJ_UK]

Those charts are more realistic in terms of salaries, the top end of which are more than double your initial quote.

Doctor's don't 'go private', they do private work as well as working for the NHS.

In the UK if you see a private doctor you still need a referral from your NHS GP, everything has an involvement with the NHS somewhere along the way.

Some private doctors may be better and more specialised in their fields but they'll be working from the NHS too mostly on consultant referrals.

One of the biggest and primary benefits of private medical insurance in the UK is the screening. For example, we have some very advanced technology and cancer treatment in the UK, but we have a trailing survival rate see here, because the amount of time and money to constantly screen everyone hasn't traditionally been prioritised or funded accordingly, leading to deaths from advanced stages of cancers that would otherwise have been easily curable.

This is changing slowly, the government just announced pumping an extra £400m into guaranteeing diagnosis within 4 weeks but that, IMO, will do little to help if you still can't get a GP appointment quick enough (there are sometimes waits of 2 - 3 weeks just to see a GP unless it's an absolute emergency.

The NHS is stretched to its limits, people come here on 'health holidays' for free treatment but that's also changing, you'll be required to provide your proof of residency / nationality very very soon.

keep the stains

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want the stains removed. They're part of history. They're badges earned by actually making the trip. Preserve it: sure. Clean it: no way.

Re:keep the stains

[DerekLyons]

I don't want the stains removed. They're part of history. They're badges earned by actually making the trip.

That's an assumption, not a fact. Fortunately, the Smithsonian knows the difference and plans to research the history of and determine the source of the stain and how it relates to the history and use of the suit before making any decisions. It could just as easily be a manufacturing flaw that didn't manifest for decades, or a handling error at NASA postflight, or a consequence of storage at the Smithsonian - in none of these cases are they part of the significant history of the suit nor are they badges earned by actually making the trip.

Or, to put it another way, once again the professionals involved know more than random Slashdot posters.

Re: keep the stains

[gjh]

Perhaps it should be allowed to decay untouched. As a piece of history. A one time achievement. Like our space ambitions.

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:I'm a little troubled...

[Overzeetop]

Just because you don't like to cost doesn't mean it's not accurate.

It is almost always more expensive to restore an old [anything] than it would be to build a lookalike from scratch. Materials fail and have to be very carefully repaired. Have you ever tried to repair fabric in a historically accurate way?

I happen to deal in buildings, and most people don't realize how complex it is to restore an old building while keeping as much of the historic content as possible. It means you spend $10000 to internally repair and strengthen a damaged beam that might cost $200 in steel and $350 in fabrication to replace. That trim work that's very similar - but not exactly the same profile - as the $1.10/LF chair rail at Home Depot will cost you $400 for a custom knife, $3/ft for the lumber, and $75/hr to have it milled, plus shipping and markup - and you're probably only going to be 20-30LF to patch in places where the old lumber could not be saved or where it was cut out (say for a door) and you're putting back the wall.

As for ilcdover - how many workers currently employed by them worked on the Apollo era suits and still remember all the techniques used for assembly? I'm going to guess the number is right around zero. How many of the materials used in modern suits they do have experience with match the condition of the materials used in Armstrong's suit? How many workers have used that material after it's been laying around for 50 years? How much are you willing to save to risk damaging the suit forever?

Re:I'm a little troubled...

[AmiMoJo]

It does seem high, but comparing it to oil painting restoration isn't really fair. Oil paintings are well understood and repair is somewhat routine. We know what techniques to use, how materials will react etc. Plus, for that money you won't be getting fully insured work on a priceless bit of art.

For an Apollo era space suit a lot of the documentation has been lost, or at least needs to be found. Samples of the material need to be found to test processes on before using them on the real suit. Not just testing for discolouration and stuff like that, but testing for accelerated deterioration that might affect it in 10 or 20 years time. It's a new process on a unique artefact.

Re:Wow I thought you were kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math is off a bit. That's 711M for Salaries AND EXPENSES. Actual salaries is ~300M based on their request for a 1% raise of 3M.
So they make roughly 50k/yr on average.

137 Million Objects

[westlake]

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

The Smithsonian owns 137 million artifacts.

That translates to a budget of $5.88/yr per artifact for research. conservation, storage and display, security, outreach and all other purposes and expenses.