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

[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

[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

[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.

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?