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How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger published a piece that touched on one of the most vexing issues surrounding NASA's "road to Mars," that being that of cost. How does one design a deep space exploration program that "the nation can afford," to coin a phrase uttered by the old NASA hand interviewed for the article? The phrase is somewhat misleading since one of the truisms of federal budgeting is that the nation can afford quite a bit. A more accurate phrase might be, "that the nation is willing to spend."
Just cancel the F-35 project. That will buy you about 5 trips to Mars.
Right now, China is extending over it's neighbors and other "contested" areas. Russia is trying to recreate the soviet empire, then there are a lot of countries trying to develop nuclear weapons while led by sociopaths ...
If you discount so easily the need for military might, then history has nothing for you.
You want to go to Mars? How about Saturn? Or a neighboring star or galaxy? Maybe even skip to an alternate universe all together?
Hollywood does it every year for $50-200M a pop. Most of the people in this country believe all the impossible stuff they do in the movies is real anyway, and couldn't tell if even the basic physics was so screwed up as to be laughable. Heck, even the school systems and police - you know, the "smart ones" we let teach our kids and the experts on explosives - get all their bomb identification training from Hollywood.
You want these people to fork over real money for real science when fake science that makes them feel good can be had for $11.50 a seat and a $4 soda?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
You've understood an important point, but missed a critical companion point. You're correct that cash doesn't normally disappear, it circulates. But the money represents _value_, resources. _Value_ can disappear , resources CAN be squandered.
If scientists spend $1 million of their time doing anything else, such as working on vaccines, you end up with $1million worth of vaccine research done, and still they spend their salaries on stuff. If the engineers design safer cars, we get safer cars (millions of them), and the engineers still spend the cash. On the other hand, if the engineers spend their time designing a space probe, we get a space probe (one) and then literally send that value off into space.
When we say "spend $100 million on mars " what that means is "spend $100 million worth of engineer's time, rather than spending that time on making cars safer, making high speed internet more affordable, etc.)
You CAN argue that it's better to spend that money (engineering time, etc) on a mars probe than to spend it on anything else. And that's exactly the argument you have to make. Because we only have a certain number of engineers , and they only work a certain number of hours. Dollars are a way to put a consistent number on all of the different resources used up in a project, including people's time.