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NASA's Bolden Claims NASA Is 'Doomed' Unless It Stays the Course To Mars (spacenews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: According to a story in Space News, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made a speech at the Center for American Progress in which he declared that if the next president deviated from the Journey to Mars program, the space agency would be "doomed." The point he was making, that programs of that nature, have to have consistent support over several presidencies and congresses, was a valid one. The point was equally valid in 2010 when President Obama abruptly and without warning canceled the Constellation space exploration program. Bolden, however, had a ready answer for that, which may not be convincing on close examination.
It's an unfortunate byproduct of our electoral system that most government departments have trouble seeing beyond the 4 year election cycle, because a whole new group of people could be in power by then and completely reverse the direction they've been taking for this time.
This problem is amplified in the United States, it seems. Countries like Canada, Australia, most of the EU don't have this problem; the political parties are often quite similar in terms of their policies, differing usually only in name and a few minor things.
It's hard to think of a solution that might help the US situation, apart from an agreement between the two major parties that, for major undertakings like the mission to Mars, if the other assumes power then it will continue.
Of course, every politician and their dog will want conditions on that; riders, perks, kick-backs, etc. It's hard to see how it could actually work in practice.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
I blame most of the destination argument on the creation of the Mars underground in the 1980's. Prior to that NASA was focused on using the Shuttle for industrialization in LEO with projects like demonstrating the repair and return of satellites, building structural items in orbit, tethers, etc., all logical starting points for building a Cislunar industrial capability that would have given us the Solar System. NASA didn't even have plans to send robots to Mars. By advocating that we needed to skip the Moon and go rushing off to Mars they started this entire useless destination debate that has paralyzed space policy ever since.
Although their arguments made no rational or economic sense, falling back on outdated ideas like "manifest destiny" and painting Mars like a second Earth, they struck some cord among a very vocal hard core group that has shouted down any rational space strategy ever since. We see it now with Senators force feeding the SLS with money it doesn't need while starving commercial crew because the SLS would, in theory, be able to take astronauts to Mars. As a result the ISS is only one Soyuz failure away from being abandoned.
We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that is already well mapped and explored.
end quote
mfwright@batnet.com
Back in the time of the Apollo program, NASA was very popular. Today the Moon is been there, done that. Mars rovers? We currently have G3 roving around. G4 isn't going to generate tons of excitement. But going to Mars? To put, since it's NASA, good ol' American Boots on the soil of another planet? To be the first to have Real American Heroes planting the Stars and Stripes on the Red Planet broadcast "live" to a worldwide TV and streaming audience? That's going to generate a hype we haven't seen since, indeed, Apollo. Without sending Americans to Mars, NASA will only be of significance to the science community, with the associated budgets appropriate for that role.
What NASA can learn from the Mars One project is their idea to use tv coverage for funding. Set up a consortium of broadcast partners from around the world and negotiate. No need to give everything away for free.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
In the early 1960's the USA had the fear of Soviet missiles to motivate it. We don't currently have anything equivalent. Maybe if the Chinese send a person to the moon we'll finally get worried enough to devote the resources.
The closest thing to the "Sputnik scare" of late is 9/11 (twice), which basically drove us to invade random countries, snoop on ourselves, and hold endless email hearings. We landed on our own moons this time.
Table-ized A.I.
Time for NASA to start a line of "Mars or Bust!" merchandises; anytime a federally funded agency work to pay its own way is a Good Thing (tm) I am sure the both houses of current congress agrees...
I personally think that's why the original moon shot succeeded -- it captured the imagination of the American people. It was something we wanted to see happen. Without that, you don't have much.
I suspect that part of "NASA is doomed" is that without clear, consistent goals, NASA just seems like a money pit. Funding Constellation would arguably have put NASA more in the "moon shot" category. Defunding it after the money already spent, pushed NASA more to the "money pit" side.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Do you think IASA will let me hitchhike with them?
Bolden has a point that NASA needs a high-profile, long-term goal.
Whether Mars is the best option for that goal (probably not) is a completely different issue.
The Germans say: "Totgesagte leben länger", in English there's life in the old dog yet (or, to misquote Twain: "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"). Are there things wrong at NASA? Of course, you can read that on /. at least once every month and range from being a giant bureaucracy to being politicized (rotten) to the bone.
Maybe you are right. Maybe NASA it its current form should die, so a New NASA can rise like a phoenix from its own ashes. Leaner, meaner, and a-political. But that's just a dream. Senator X from Y needs to make sure the industry in Y gets part of the pie, so does Congressman M from N for N's industry.
But the main point is: NASA needs to find something the American people can rally behind. That's Mars. Whether that takes us to the Moon first, and Phobos second, and Mars third doesn't matter. Whether it takes us until 2050 to set up all the infrastructure, digging the underground habitats, having the drones/rovers collect and move enough ice/water doesn't matter as long as there are defined waypoints with successes, a new Moon landing, a Phobos landing, etc. But you can't get the big budget if you're not with the popular crowd in the average American's mind.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Sorry, but we need 100 new state-of-the-art stealth bombers. Victory is Life!
I'm not against human presence in space : it would be good to create a space economy beyond LEO, even just for species survival.
However, I see hardly any work being done in this direction : the first step would be understanding and building closed systems (aka Biosphere) that would allow us to stay in space. We do not know how to do that and the ISS is far from a closed system as it completely depends on Earth for supplies.
Once that step is perfected, you could literally go anywhere in the solar system.
Instead we have these stunts like putting people on Mars : they might go there, take a few photos,get a few rocks, get back and that's all.
Consider this :
1) Robots can do this already and by 2030-40s when we might send people they will be MUCH better than now at the same cost.
2) If you are interested in the science of Mars, sending people is VERY inefficient. The greatest part of the money spent is actually to get people there, keeping them alive and returning them, only a small fraction for science. With a cost of $100-450B, just imagine, if Mars science was your objective, what could be achieved with the same money: sample returns ($6B each), rovers everywhere ($2B each), robots digging , experiments, etc. etc. Not to mention exploring other interesting location in the solar system like Europa, Enceladus and Titan.
Instead of a few people in ONE small location, limited to the little science possible after most of the money has been spent to send them there.
All to satisfy some romantic feeling and not advancing humans in space either.
At any given point, NASA is exactly what congress wants it to be, which is the problem.
Unlike NASA's mission to the moon, there are non-government entities that are now funding missions to Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.space.com/28215-elo...
NASA could focus on actual Science, like sending unmanned missions into space and collecting data, as opposed to manned missions. This seems like a much more cost-benefit way to spend taxpayer money. Let the private companies fund the projects with questionable value.
Maybe if the Chinese send a person to the moon we'll finally get worried enough to devote the resources.
No, we won't - we'll just utilize them to get our dudes to the ISS for cheaper'n the Russians'll do it.
God help me, I kind of miss the cold war. What a time to be alive - actual dreams were dreamed.
We are in a Dark Age of manned space travel
And nothing of value was lost.
Bolden is saying "Don't do what we did".
That's certainly true. Mars isn't in the top three priorities for NASA under the current administration. Mr. Bolden (the head of NASA), said these are the three things Obama asked him to do with NASA:
When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Obama] charged me with three things.
One, he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math;
he wanted me to expand our international relationships;
and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good
A manned Mars mission would never cost a trillion. Perhaps you're thinking of the whole SEI debacle in the early 90's, this is where we would return to the Moon, build a base, establish a significant amount of space infrastructure and then conduct a mission to Mars. This was costed out in detail and included projected overruns for an estimated cost of $250billion over 20 years ($12 billion a year). However someone in the OMB got the number and decided that "since NASA always has overruns, lets double that to $500billion". Then some Congressional staffer got the $500billion number and decided to double it again to produce the famous Trillion dollar number that the media ran with. Of course like every President since Johnson, George Sr. wasn't willing to spend any political capital on space besides the usual press conference that every president uses to extol the virtues of NASA, change their goals so they have to start all over again, and then never pay it a second thought.
"Trillion" is certainly a sizeable overestimate. But the Zubrinians (let alone the Mars One Nuts) are just in the opposite, far too optimistic in the other direction.
Everything else you wrote I entirely agree. I'd add that it's especially true when people try to push humans by arguing that "It's for Teh Science!" Because humans can do so much more, you see? Because they apparently have HiRISE imaging systems in their retinas and mass spectrometers in their palms and maybe a setup for X-ray fluorescence under their ears or something.
The reality is, science is done by... gasp...wait for it... scientific equipment. So of course you can send a human and have the human operate the scientific equipment, no question there. You could have a human orbiting Mars running HiRISE for example. But of the two things - the person and the telescope - which component is the one that's actually needed and which one is the remora hanging onto the side?
On the surface, yes, humans can reduce latency. To that I have to say: .............. and? .............. so?
What the heck does latency matter? We can only afford to launch a mission every few years. What does it matter if it takes the mission three days or three years to get its results? And no, humans aren't just going to "spot" neat things that a rover wouldn't - the rover's "eyes" are far better than the human's. And the rover operators control the rover to be just as "curious" as a human would be - moreso, really, because they have to long to plan every little tiny step. They launch whole investigations on what the ground looks like after the wheels kick it up or why the sand in one place slips a little bit more than in a place a couple dozen meters up the path.
The other one human spaceflight fans add is "repairing". Because, you see, failed Mars missions could have been saved by humans. SAVED! Except for, of course, manned spaceflight adds an order of magnitude more ways for the vehicle to fail. And most failures cannot be saved from. Seriously, check a list of how spacecraft en route to Mars have been lost. CATO launch failures. Failure to reach orbit. Failure to leave Earth orbit. Incorrect insertion trajectory calculations. Instability during reentry. Landing system hardware failures. And on and on. How is a human supposed to save these things? There's a few humans could have saved, but the large majority, no.
Humans eat up the vast majority of your payload. Without the remoras onboard and all of the associated systems for giving them a roomy, pressurized environment and keeping the chemical ratios therein balanced and shielding them from radiation and giving them water (heavy) and having water recycling systems and toilets and food stocks and carbon dioxide scrubbers and beds and exercise equipment and medical systems and let's not forget a whole habitat to live in when they get there, you'd have 1-2 orders of magnitude more payload return capability.
For all of the "benefits" of sending humans they want to raise the cost of a Mars mission by 1-2 orders of magnitude. For the same amount of money e could send dozens of diverse science missions to every corner of the planet containing every conceivable scientific payload and returning samples from bloody everywhere. Or we can send people to one place with a far smaller set of scientific equipment, because all of their budget was eaten up on the whole "keeping humans alive" thing.
But hey, we'd reduce the latency...
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
What would be doomed is his vision of what NASA should be doing ten to twenty years out. At present manned exploration of Mars is not even big enough to warrant a line item in NASA's 2016 budget request, which means it's not a big part of what NASA is doing now. Mars exploration *is*, though, with 412 million requested to do serious and productive science.
You know what *would* doom NASA? Gutting its Earth and planetary research to fund an astronomically expensive manned mission to Mars in twenty years. I think an excuse for gutting NASA's Earth science program is part of the political imperative for a manned Mars mission.
I'm not against a manned mission to Mars per se; I'm against the opportunity cost. For the price of keeping a human crew alive and healthy for six years in bathed in deep space radiation and setting them down on the surface of Mars with an acceptable safety margin (very hard to do), we could get so much more done with robots. Extrapolating from Apollo to a manned Mars mission is very risky; Mars is immensely harder than the Moon in almost every respect. I don't think America is ready to spend Apollo program dollars every year for two or three decades, so what we'll get is a half-assed program that starves everything else NASA ought to be doing with very dubious prospects of success.
Eventually the time will come when the marginal value of a human mission will exceed the marginal value of the additional robotic missions the same funding would secure. That will be the time to start planning a manned Mars mission. I expect we might even get humans there faster that way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The point was equally valid in 2010 when President Obama abruptly and without warning canceled the Constellation space exploration program.
"Without warning"? You mean that the Augustine commission was secret? Nobody saw it coming that a lousy program that had delivered too little by that time for too much money got scrapped?
Ezekiel 23:20
Firstly, going to Mars is unlikely to cost a trillion. NASA's estimate is $100 Billion (http://www.space.com/16918-nasa-mars-human-spaceflight-goals.html) over 30 years. However, let's take your way to high number of a trillion over that same 30 year period to be conservative. That works out to $33 Billion a year. The DoD's budget for next year is $500 Billion (http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/fy2015/fy2015_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf). That's PER YEAR! That means we can go to Mars if the military can live with 93% of their budget. Note that as recently as 2000, their budget was $400 B (80% of what it is now), so that's pretty feasible (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#/media/File:InflationAdjustedDefenseSpending.PNG).
And people also need to realize that it's not like NASA puts all this money in $100 bills and launches it. That money goes to engineering firms to design, machinists to cut metal, all sorts of thermal, hydraulic, electrical products. That money is spent on the economy doing things that benefit people.
No, it's just NASA's mission to Mars that would cost a trillion dollars (and it's why it's not going to happen). By now it's become pretty clear that NASA is never going to Mars. Anyone who wants humans on mars now has to pin their hopes on either foreign countries or private companies.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
We used to do things precisely because they were hard and bold and inspirational. Now we whine that we don't have the money, when the army gets enough in 1 year to completely pay for going to Mars (which would in practicality be spread out over a couple decades).
Expensive science NASA wasted it's slim credibility on the CAGW scam. We need a different funding and reward model for ***successful*** science talent. More prizes, fewer sinecures. Let industry tackle Mars, asteroids and / or the Moon for profits, we already have the basic technologies. A smaller NASA should focus on science beyond Jupiter or inside Venus orbits, and the stars.
The easiest solution: Don't bother. It's a comparatively minor issue for the safety of the mission and you won't find any shortage of potential applicants because of that.
Ezekiel 23:20
No a bad idea that, they could team up with Disney and produce a series of movies etc. and split the profit.
I'm in complete agreement that manned space missions are not cost effective in finding out about our solar system. Too much of the money goes to keeping the not terribly capable sensors (people) functioning, not to collecting useful data.
OTOH, one billion doesn't get you a lot in space, Especially after one pays to get a payload 170,000,000 km out to Mars and manages to land it on the surface. The Curiousity Mars Rover mission cost around $2.5B. A REALLY complex payload like the Webb space telescope (of which I am not especially a fan) is running somewhere around $8B and the cost overruns may not be over.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
You can not earmark donations but you can donate to NASA. These donations are even tax deductible. I'm pretty sure Google will find the link for you. I donated when I sold my business. I'd hoped to be able to earmark the funds - specifically for deep space research via a replacement for the Hubble or similar device. The reply that I got for them, I can probably dig out the email if needed, was something along the lines of, "You can donate, we'd love it, but you can not donate for specific goals. If you'd like to donate then here is how and this is how to write it off on your taxes." It was a pretty nice reply but I was unhappy that I could not donate to a specific goal or project.
I have no problem with NASA being a money pit. Not all necessary research is profit motivated. I dare say, funding things that the private industries will not is kind of the point of government spending unless we really want to scale back a lot of things. I'm partial to science for science sake and I love pure research. I'd rather my taxes go there instead of to the military industrial complex. We're pretty good at bombing brown people, not so good at funding a trip to Mars.
Why Mars? Well, if we want humanity to survive then we absolutely need to get off this rock. In order to do long-distance travel we will need to be able to sustain life away from this planet. In fact, if we can sustain life away from this planet then we might be able to, eventually, just be able to live in a variety of space craft and not actually need to colonize (and probably ruin) other planets. Sure, distances may be many generations away in duration but that's okay - we wouldn't even have to move in and fuck over the locals in different solar systems or galaxies. Mars is, potentially, a step in that direction.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Err... Probably not verbatim. I think I was four or five at the time. And no, I don't remember it from then - I remember it from the many times it was aired.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why? There's nothing there. The only possible use for a moon presence would be manufacturing rockets to go somewhere else. And we just don't have the technology to make that work.
The Obama administration killed Constellation when it rolled-out its 2010 NASA budget proposal in Feb 2009, then faced bi-partisan outrage in congress and THEN came up with a committee in May 2009 to justify what it had done. Like all such committees created to justify pre-selected outcomes, the members were handpicked by the administration, thereby guaranteeing the results that were desired. No honest commenter will cite the results of any such hand-picked political committee on any subject. Had the committee been assembled by persons outside the admin, like a bipartisan congressional committee, or perhaps appointed by a judge as part of a legal case (i.e. somebody other than a President demanding a particular outcome) it would have credibility as unbiased.
That committee (formed 3+ months AFTER the decision to kill Constellation was made within the admin) was named "Augustine" after the former LockMart boss (the company best-known for over-promising, over-charging and under-performing on many defense projects) Norm Augustine who was expected to lend political gravitas and credibility to the pre-determined outcome.
Seriously. Here's why:
All military and space programs in the US are budgeted with completely phony accounting that is never applied to the rest of the government. When One of these programs is created, it is priced according to the following sort of equation:
ProgramCost = R&D costs + Setup costs + personnel training costs + operating costs + costs of facilities used during operation
and then:
UnitCost = ProgramCost / number of units.
This LOOKS rational, but it's not. Here's why:
1. The R&D of any program actually informs many other later programs. Apollo, for example, was "billed" for all the R&D to put a man on the moon, but most of the long-term benefits of that R&D cost actually went into the general economy over the past 50 years. The moon flights needed that R&D, but got less benefit from it ultimately than the rest of the economy did. This is proper bookkeeping, but not honest accounting.
2. Setup costs are often higher in big high-tech systems than for any other field because they are cutting-edge and not pre-existing from other projects. Custom jigs and molds and manufacturing tools are often required (for something like the B-2 bomber that included massive new autoclaves for the composites and tools made of special materials to not damage the stealth coatings, etc). There is no way to bill other parts of the economy later for the benefits provided by these tools when they are first created so the whole cost goes to the program. Again, proper amd honest bookkeeping, but not really honest accounting.
3. Operating costs are always false in government accounting. Federal government employees are nearly impossible to fire and Federal government facilities are almost never sold-off but all must be accounted for (in a book-keeping sense). Therefore, employees (and all their costs) and facilities (with all maintenance costs) get billed to whatever related programs the accountants can use whether they are actually involved.
This all becomes worse when congress or an administration panics over total program cost and then cuts back on the number of units...usually slightly cutting total cost while ballooning the per-unit price since the full setup and R&D costs must be covered by the number of units.
The shuttle program suffered terribly from this accounting. It was forced to bear the costs of all the KSC facilities and people, and nearly all the facilites and personnel costs of places like JSC and Stennis (since it was THE high-profile program of NASA) so shuttles appeared hugely expensive to fly. Depending on the year, NASA priced the program at 3 to 5 Billion annually. The actual cost per flight will never be known but was estimated inside the agency at approx $500 million, but there was an annual $3 or 4 Billion "overhead cost" even if no flights were made. A year with 2 flights might cost $4 billion and a year with 6 flights 5.5 billion. This is terrible accounting. It lead people to think that it the shuttle was cancelled, huge piles of cash would be freed-up to go into Constellation or commercial crew or whatever else people dreamed-up. That was false however, because the overhead costs never go away, they just shift to whatever new program comes-along (currently SLS) suddenly making the new program "too expensive". SLS is now going to be "too expensive" and "$1 Billion per flight!!" and other nonsense (as long as people talk about only flying it once or twice per year so all the overhead gets assigned to one or two flights per year). The actual flight per yer of SLS (less overhead) will be cheaper than Shuttle was (less overhead). All the hardware is cheaper to build, the "standing army" of contractors is far smaller, and no orbiter refurb between flights will be needed. The ISS currently bears the costs of all the ground facilities and people who support it and missions that supply its crews and experiments for its entire projected life (that's why it's labelled as costing $100+).
Remember: no matter WHAT program NASA
Sending people to space is the sole chance we have to avoid extinction.
Everything goes extinct. Sooner or later we'll have another massive ice-age, or a volcanic superplume, or get hit by a giant rock from space again, or some star within 20 lightyears will go nova and every higher lifeform (including us) will be either dead or sterile, or we'll get hit by a gamma-ray burster. For the latter two, we wouldn't even have any warning since the deadly stuff travels at the speed of light.
The average lifespan of a species is 10-million years, we're already there.
There is one chance, and one chance only, to avoid our inevitable extinction (for which 5 years from now is exactly as likely as 50 or 500 or 5000). We spread the risk - we need to colonize other worlds.
Start with the moon or mars (and Mars is actually probably easier since it has the ability to retain an atmosphere so teraforming is much more viable). Get people there - and you've made the cost of launching elsewhere much cheaper. More importantly - you've now greatly reduced the risk - the odds of both Mars and Earth colonies being wiped out at once is massively smaller than the 1 to 1 odds of it happening to either.
As long as one survives, it can repopulate the other - and the next step is to spread outside this solar system.
Who knows, that way we may actually outlive the sun - here on earth there is zero chance of that (granted that is a long term goal, but it's also a longer term risk so it's okay).
The reason we should be investing in space, and notably in manned space travel is because that's literally the only chance we have to not end up like every other dominant species that came before us.
The dinosaurs lasted 3 times as long as mammals have been around... and there isn't one left - and that's just the most famous one. When the Permian age ended it ended in a gigantic graveyard... 94% of all the species on the planet went extinct at once. We still aren't sure what killed them all - though evidence points to a possible collusion between a comet and a volcanic superplume (there is strong evidence that large impacts can cause superplumes on the other side of the earth basically doubling the deadly effects).
None of our technology could survive that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Racist!
Rick B.
Going to the Moon had NOTHING to do with capturing the imagination of America. This was an arms race with the Soviet Union pure and simple. That's why there was money for this project.
LMOL....The F-35 program clocks in at $1.3 Trillion dollars and counting. Each F-35 will cost around a $100 million minimum. You think NASA can go to Mars cheaper than the F-35 program? That's some delusional thinking.
So what Bolden is really saying is that they have nothing to fall back on if the Mars thing doesn't work out. If the rocket fails. If there's some biological problem that comes up. or even if some other mission of importance comes up. It's Mars and only Mars and if it's not Mars it's nothing. Goddamn NASA how fucking stupid are you rocket scientists anyway? WTF?
This is like my four-year-old cousin who throws a fit if he can't have the exact candy bar he wants. He proclaims he'd rather starve than eat something else. Fine. Do it, I say, much to the horror of his mom and dad.
If my toddler cousin starves to death because he could not have candy, and NASA ceases to exist without Mars, then I say neither of them deserve to exist. Let them both die. But I really think my cousin will eventually eat something else and I feel NASA will find something else to do.
Sig for hire.
The problem with NASA and indeed all human efforts at anything is that we can't see beyond 4-year cycles in the West and somewhat longer cycles in China, negated by the lack of most of the space program needed to make the plans happen, if they had the plans.
Getting to other planets takes a lot of money over a long time scale. Apparently Mars will take a couple decades or so. And we may not make it.
Getting to anything farther away, or long development projects like the warp drive and so on, threaten to take tens of decades. It may take a century or two to get to a warp drive. Humanity has no history of supporting goals like that. We don't even have words to describe making that kind of commitment that transcends the time lines of nations. But even for a Mars missing taking decades, we cannot do it. We lack the ability to support anything like that.
Inheriting the stars will take huge amounts of time and effort. We won't be able to do it. I welcome humanity proving me wrong.
Sig for hire.
When putting humans on Mars finally approaches inevitability, historians will attempt to define the starting place for the journey. "...and it all began back in the year ???? with President [NAME]". Bolden's statement is simply posturing the Obama administration as the Kennedy-like launching point to Mars. It is just political bullshit, nothing more.
NASA can wipe the slate clean in 2017, and as long it provides a new plan to keep an experienced work-force from fleeing, the start-over will not doom NASA. In fact, with the pace of technological changes continuing to accelerate, a couple of start-overs should be expected between now and 2039.
I meant devote resources to a US Mars landing, not a US moon landing.
Table-ized A.I.
gas, grass or ass, nobody rides for free
?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
WOW, it definitely looks like you know you're talking about. You of course know that the F-35 total program costs include building 2,500 aircraft, upgrades, parts and maintenance for the estimated 53 year lifetime of the aircraft. Lets break it down and assume the most inefficient process possible. We'll use the SLS "Pork launcher", $10B to develop through 2017. Lets assume they spend another $10B to finish the Block II design, and cost it out at $1 billion per launch. NASA's current baseline projects 10 launches per manned mission. We'll assume 7 manned missions (same as Apollo). So we're at $90 billion for launch vehicle development the launches themselves Mars Lander, Hab module and propulsion , lets say another $40Billion to develop and $4 billion a pop per mission. So that's another $68 billion. (Or 2.5 times what it cost to build ISS not including launches). Another $2 billion a year in operational costs over 20 years. This brings us pretty close to $200 billion over 20 years without including any potential cost savings coming from commercial space operators like SpaceX. I'd like to the "delusional thinking" that leads to a spending more than $1.3 trillion to go to Mars
"and cost it out at $1 billion per launch. " Isn't this the same NASA that used to blow ~1B/Shuttle launch for a small payload into a low earth orbit? Enough said.
Considering that the Liberal party won the election, and one of the platform promises was to cancel the F35 order immediately and go with something less expansive and more reasonable, I think the answer to that question is going to be zero...
As probably a good chunk of Slashdot is already aware, this problem is not new, has been around for a long time, and will continue to be around for a very long time. About the only difference in terms of NASA is the scale of the issue, and perhaps some enhanced interdependence.
If you work in IT and government, two of the biggest problems you will face are:
1) Generally speaking you get a yearly budget. That is all you get to spend. You need to spend all of it. You can't save it. You can't plan ahead. You will probably get a similar budget next year, but maybe not. In many cases you get large projects. Projects large enough that completing it in a year just isn't feasible. You typically break the project into phases, chunks of work that can be completed within a year, within budget. You have to "risk manage" pretty much everything. Get your budget cut, then you have to make adjustments, sometimes meaning that a project falls off the truck. If that happens, projects can get delayed, staff move on, perhaps eventual failure. I've seen enough money dumped into a project over multiple years to think there is no way this will not move forward, only to have some manager create some grand new strategy to which the project no longer fits, and it is abandoned in place for something else, then management moves on etc... Much of this can happen in the private sector as well, but I would say it is worse in government.
2) On top of yearly budgets, and fickle management, you get political change in government. Which can mean several things, many of which are not good to any project partially completed. First, just like in the first point, budgets can be massively adjusted. Change from year to year usually isn't drastic, but a new government with different priorities may just not fund you, in which cases projects just die for lack of resources. Speaking of priorities, it could be that whatever project you are working on, isn't something the new political masters agree with ideologically, in which case it is probably immediately dead no matter what. On top of that, political parties generally speaking don't want others to have success, so worst case they will torpedo projects that might make the previous party look good, best case they simply re-brand it, call it something else, and claim it as their own... Which can have some hilarious results, particularly in code and architecture when everything was called something else, then suddenly now it is change to something new, and not everything (that people can see) is changed, so you see tons of old documentation and references that don't make any sense anymore. Here is where that whole argument about having IT gray beards around and not just a bunch of kid code monkeys and no one will have the history anymore of why the application is so weirdly designed etc...
Anyway when dealing with 10's of millions it can be tough. I would imagine when dealing with amounts several magnitudes greater, developing things that need to be completed in an iterative order for success, can have some pretty dicey "risk management" going on... When you get to the end and figure out that the propulsion management system was never developed due to cuts 3 years ago, and you are months away from a launch window that won't be around again for another 20 years... Well I can see how that might be frustrating enough to say that they are "Dooooomed" if the politicos don't get their act together.
After a massive ice age, or volcanic superplume, or giant rock impact, Earth will be by far the most hospitable place in the Solar System. We've had all of those before. Given a nearby nova or gamma ray burst, the whole system will be irradiated so getting to the Moon or Mars won't help.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I never said life wouldn't survive, it has survived all of those many times.
Life is extremely resilient. Species are not.
Life would survive. We won't.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You're right that anywhere within the solar system doesn't help much with the radiation risks, but that's why I said the solar system is just a stepping stone to the rest of the galaxy.
Spreading out to survive localised disasters has been a key to our survival since our ancestors first diverged from the chimps. It makes no sense to stop now.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Mocking me won't change reality.
Our planetary history is one of repeated mass extinctions. We have zero chance of surviving one.
But we may gain a chance... if we aren't confined to one planet.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *