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NASA Finally Admits It Doesn't Have the Funding To Land Humans on Mars (arstechnica.com)
For years, NASA has been chalking out and expanding its plans to go to Mars. The agency's Journey to Mars project aims to land humans on the red planet during the 2030s. For years, the agency has been reassuring us that it will be able to make do all those audacious projects within the budget it gets. Until now, that is. From a report: Now, finally, the agency appears to have bended toward reality. During a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics on Wednesday, NASA's chief of human spaceflight acknowledged that the agency doesn't really have the funding it needs to reach Mars with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. These vehicles have cost too much to build, and too much to fly, and therefore NASA hasn't been able to begin designing vehicles to land on Mars or ascend from the surface. "I can't put a date on humans on Mars, and the reason really is the other piece is, at the budget levels we described, this roughly 2 percent increase, we don't have the surface systems available for Mars," said NASA's William H. Gerstenmaier, responding to a question about when NASA will send humans to the surface of Mars. "And that entry, descent and landing is a huge challenge for us for Mars." This seems like a fairly common sense statement, but it's something that NASA officials have largely glossed over -- at least in public -- during the agency's promotion of a Journey to Mars.
And we'll have the best space program in the world.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
.... the color black is found to be darker than most others.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
but not enough to keep the humans alive during or after
Folks, the little data we have (compared to those who have all the data), it was becoming obvious. Only recently it was revealed that Mars' surface has a cocktail of substances that would "wipe out living organisms" (see this link https://www.theguardian.com/sc... ). The length of time, the sending of supplies, and trying to terraform, it's undertaking that would take an incredible amount of resources. And that is assuming the first manned mission even got there (which is question). I think many, many people questioned whether we would actually go to Mars in spite of all the hype. Funny enough the hype have information suggesting more and more that this is harder than anybody thought. So...we'd better start taking better care of our planet because it all likelihood, we aren't going anywhere. Perhaps like the North American expedition, someone will hock "The Queen's jewels", but save a few insanely rich tycoons sending a bunch of "serfs" on a possibly doomed test mission, this Mars dream, I suspect will postponed for a LONG time.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Considering NASA costs next to nothing (about 0.5% of the US govt's total budget), and the studies I've seen referenced show its return on investment to be about $10 for every $1 used (granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate, but even if assuming a huge error margin that's still great ROI), it's no wonder you chose to post that anonymously.
1. Tell Trump there's coal on Mars - jobs for coal miners!
2. Start a rumour that Mars has no vaccination regulations - kills 2 birds with one stone as all the antivaxxers pour their money into a modern version of the B Ark.
3. Flatly declare that it is impossible. Someone will come along to prove you wrong
4. Tell the MRAs about the martian slave women. Then tell the SJWs about the MRAs wanting the martian slave women. See who gets to Mars first.
5. Tell the Christian and Muslim Taliban about the martian slave women walking around "all bare neked".
6. Tell the GOP that Martian women have multiple pussies to grab.
7. Tell the states that have passed bathroom bills that there is no such thing as a Martian male, so there's no such thing as a martian transsexual wanting to pee in their women's toilets.
8. "Gotta build a wall on Mars to keep the illegal aliens at bay."
9. Get Alex Jones and Breitbart to say that NASA doesn't lobby for enough money because Mars is full of Republican martians and refusing to go to Mars is a democratic plot to suppress voters.
10. "Russia and China and even India are all going. There's going to be a "planet gap" between the US and those countries that makes the missile gap look like a blip in history."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
We're going to Mars... on a shoestring budget... that gets smaller with each passing year.
They cost 1/20th as much as manned missions and do at least as much (arguably much more) science.
For instance, look at WMAP, which contributed massively to cosmology and high energy physics and was launched on time and on budget. The results have been analyzed in thousands of papers, including the three most cited physics papers of the last few decades. It cost $150M (yes, M).
Meanwhile, the ISS is running about $150B (yes B), and it's absurd to think that somehow it's worth the relative cost. We could have hundreds (or at least many dozens) of WMAPs, Voyagers, Mars Rovers and other diligent automatons scouring the solar system, crash-landing into comets, and otherwise pushing the frontier of human knowledge, or we can have a few dudes sit around the ISS with their ant farms.
NASA was always confused about whether its mission was space exploration for the sake of aeronautics or for the sake of science. During Cold War, it was probably aeronautics with scientific exploration as a pretty-plausible veneer over the military applications. Today, it's likely the need for more public victories than a quiet-but-useful pursuit of knowledge.
No such chance. They want an immediate ROI, within months. Years, tops. Something like a Mars mission would not only take decades to come to fruition, it's even likely that the ROI will not fall to the ones investing but to someone else.
The 60s and the moon shot program meant a huge leap forwards in technology. More even than WW2, and with a LOT less blood spent on it. But not only "hard" technology, we gained even a lot more in terms of new insights in logistics and organization. The logistic and organization problem they had to solve, i.e. how to coordinate many different suppliers and many, many thousands of people, to deliver on time, to deal with delays without endangering the project itself, eliminating redundancies without creating bottlenecks in case something couldn't be delivered on time, all these problems are exactly the same problems large corporations face today in a global economy. They benefit greatly from it.
Of course, that's something everyone benefits from, not just NASA. Not even just Boeing, Grumman and Rockwell who built the CSM, the LEM and the Saturn V. You won't find private investors for something like this, nobody puts his money on something that is then easy to copy and use by the competition.
And you can't patent organization systems.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(sarcasm) I think I'm going to have a hear attack and DIE from that surprise...(/sarcasm).
Not enough funding eh? Tell me something I didn't already know..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And that is not even taking into account all the scientific advancements that were gleaned from it which has made everyone's life easier and more comfortable. NASA a waste of taxpayers money? I THINK NOT!
Now if only we can get Congress to step up to the ROI ratio of NASA.
Perhaps they can focus on making better space propulsion systems to make solar system travel faster. Current tech is mostly chemical rockets and using gravity as a slingshot. What they need to develop is the equivalent of the Star Trek impulse engine. Try hiring more Scottish engineers?
If these logistic and organization problems were solved in the '60s, why do they keep coming up today? Even within NASA own projects.
The stupidity of the U.S. populace is astounding. It is self funded by tax dollars. The ROI is generated by all American businesses who use NASA's technology for free to create all kinds of things that enhance our economy which in turn creates taxes which then go back into the agency. NASA technological developments and spin offs are probably creating enough of a tax base to actually fund the whole military.
One of NASA's missions is to do that kind of research and quite literally give it away to anyone who wants it.
This is completely incorrect. Since 1980, the Bayh–Dole Act allows research agencies to license and profit from the technologies created under Federal grants. https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/60521...
They're yet to come up with a way to properly shield any humans on Mars from radiation even in the short term.
Considering NASA costs next to nothing (about 0.5% of the US govt's total budget), and the studies I've seen referenced show its return on investment to be about $10 for every $1 used (granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate, but even if assuming a huge error margin that's still great ROI), it's no wonder you chose to post that anonymously.
If that ROI were true, then NASA should be self-funded by now.
The integrated circuit was developed by two government programs: NASA's Apollo computer, and the U.S. Air Force's Minuteman guidance. While the IC had been invented by Noyce and Kilby, nobody in particularly had a use for it-- discrete parts already did fine, why put more than one component on a chip?-- except for NASA and the Air Force, who needed to develop lightweight computers, and funded the development of IC chips specifically for lightweight computers.
So, yes, if NASA had been able to take a cut from half the profits of the IC industry, and thus the computer technology that they (co-) developed, yes, the space program would be self-funded.
Cuomo probably
Wait for China to develop the tech, then steal their IP. Offer cheap tech outsourcing to India and let them train us while paying our people.
p>NASA farted around with the idea of reusable rockets for over thirty years and got nowhere past an outrageously expensive and downright dangerous space shuttle and said "good enough" and called it a day -- for DECADES. No wonder companies like SpaceX are coming in and applying a little bit of modesty to their designs and in consequence are running circles around NASA,
You do have to keep in mind that SpaceX blew up their first three rockets in a row. At the time that NASA picked them to develop the Falcon-9, nobody else in the world had any faith that they would be anything other than a marginal company that would build a small capacity rocket to put a small payload in low orbit cheaply but with questionable unreliability.
For all practical purposes, the partnership between NASA and SpaceX is the very reason SpaceX even exists.
NASA's problem is not the bureaucracy, per se: it is the fact that NASA does everything in public, and the public does not allow NASA to fail. If you aren't allowed to fail, then it is very difficult to make large advances.
NASA would never have been allowed to continue a project that had three very public failures in a row. The first public failure would have produced congressional hearings, and the second would have cancelled the program with prejudice, along with sarcastic editorial cartoons in every newspaper in the world.
The reason that SpaceX can succeed is specifically because they are allowed to fail.
The failure in this case isn't science. There is no scientific question about getting to Mars with SLS and Orion. The failure here is engineering.
Cost is an integral part of engineering. Many, many unfeasible engineering projects are physically possible. The art of engineering is finding approaches to achieve goals given the resources available, counting time as a resource of course.
So what they've been doing, while technically impressive, is just bad engineering: spending resources on an approach which won't achieve the objective within the given constraints, based on the wishful thinking that people will suddenly want to spend lots more money on the project in the future.
Sometimes when you can't achieve an objective, the smart thing is to find an alternative objective that's worth doing in itself and also leaves you better positioned to work on the original objective.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Pick one, we can't afford both.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Right now manned space in general would be better off if they gave the SLS budget to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, to make a few big honking rockets for going to Mars or anywhere else they can sell a ticket for.
NASA should steer out of the launching business altogether and focus on space science and new technologies, and let the private sector take over the known technology of space launchers.
If you assume that NASA continues its past trajectory of "cost-plus" contracting, of course the cost will be out of reach. But the economics of "launch" are rapidly changing, due to SpaceX and several other players such as Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, and MoonEx.
Given the Trump administration's (apparently) positive attitude toward space exploration, and "commercial space" in particular (led apparently more by Pence than Trump), I think there might be a re-assessment of this price tag in the next couple of years, especially as Boeing and SpaceX get their respective "Commercial Crew" vehicles tested and qualified for flight ops.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Look at that, I get modded down for providing a link FROM NASA proving that NASA can and does profit from licensing their technology. You space nutters will even hate on NASA if it doesn't fit your fantasies.
The problem isn't money, its waste. They've burnt $25-35 Billion on Constellation/SLS so far and they don't even have a functioning rocket yet. With that kind of money you could launch over a hundred Falcon heavies each with a component for an interplanetary craft. Now it's not completely their fault, they had to press HARD to keep CCDev afloat despite being under budget and more capable than expected. The cost plus contracts need to be tossed and all future projects should come with a fixed budget and incremental funds dismemberment for achieved goals with NO bureaucratic hoops (use of shuttle components, rockets designed by politicians, etc).
While the IC had been invented by Noyce and Kilby
Why should NASA get any credit for inventing something when they were merely a customer?
The answer is that they didn't get credit for inventing it. But "who gets credit for inventing the IC" wasn't the question posed. The question was about the return on investment of NASA funding. NASA (along with the Air Force) funded the research needed to turn the concept of an integrated circuit into an actual product. The answer to the question of what was the return on investment is that this particular investment, in developing the IC from a concept to a commercial reality, has a very large return.
The return on investment, however, did not return to NASA. It returned to everybody who uses computers, or cell phones, or any electronic device using integrated circuits.
We landed men on Mars. Faced with humiliation after having faked a moon landing themselves and witnessing a superior man launching a mission to Mars purely paid for and even fueled by his will, the embarrassed liberal media has hidden the whole operation. It was sort of like what happens when man sees the face of God, they utterly and completely broke and joined forces with all broadcast and internet providers to erase all evidence in transit. So, it's fake news that he hasn't already achieved this goal.
Actually, I thought they were building a military branch in charge of space? If they get any significant slice of the military budget they could actually do some cool stuff.
If we can't even get to Mars, how will we ever explore Uranus?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
false, we can and have identified the minerals on Mars just fine with Rovers.
In the past, oil on Mars. That didn't happen. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What nonsense, a sustainable human colony elsewhere is more than a century or more away if it is even possible. "getting off this rock" is not relevant to space exploration today, the tech dosen't exist and is not used for what we do today
To paraphrase Douglas Adams:
"Space is a crummy place to live. Really awful. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly inhospitable it is. I mean, you may think things are pretty bad in Detroit, but that's just peanuts to space."
People keep talking about how we need a backup plan for Earth because we're going to mess it up. I think they're failing to realize that nuclear winter, Chicxulub-like asteroid impacts, ice ages, runaway desertification, a thousand other unlikely extreme scenarios, or just about any physically possible conjunction of any of these would all leave Earth a more resource-rich and hospitable environment than any other mass in the Solar System.
With improvements in rover and probe technology I don't think there's any rational justification for sending meat into space until we have vastly improved materials science, propulsion, and launch systems - the kind we might have, say, five hundred years down the road. If somebody wants a huge engineering challenge just to send people where nobody's been, try creating undersea colonies or something instead.
536 people have been to space. Please list the scientific discoveries about space that they have made that could not have been done with robotic probes. Not spin-off technologies. Not circular "what happens to a person in space" questions. I want an actual apple-to-apple comparisons with the scientific data gathered by probes. You name drop a couple of Apollo astronauts, but the scientific discoveries from those mission came from analysis of returned samples, not data gathered by the astronauts while on mission. A robot with a shovel would have accomplished the same thing.
The top two would be China and Russia. China in particular, has a robust manned capability, has run two national space stations in recent times, current one still going.
While China does have a human space program, they've launched a grand total of six missions carrying people in thirteen years. I'm not sure if I'd call that a "robust" launch rate. I'd call it "very slow".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
...China has much more advanced abilities in space than NASA has and is advancing at a drastically faster rate too.
Hardly a "drastically faster rate".
Their budget grew 5 times since they landed on the moon. Sure they get less from a "percentage of federal budget" perspective but even the federal budget has ballooned well outside of the feasible limits a government can spend on.
They said it will cost ~$6B to get 4 humans to Mars. If you get $20B/year with a mandate to go to Mars within 10 years, what would you spend it on in that time?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
We could send people to Mars today. Granted, their chances of survival would be near zero. It may even be as low as 50/50 to make it to Mars orbit and under 10/90 to manage to walk on the surface before death. But these are much better odds than many past explorers enjoyed.
Those explorers were usually private explorers who sometimes had government backing. After a brief period in which the governments actually took full charge of the missions and has now allowed the efforts to mostly stall for almost half a century, we are thankfully seeing real explorers return to the advanced exploration game.
The new explorers will accomplish with vastly less expenditure what NASA will not or perhaps can not. It is far cheaper to follow an incremental path in which people live a bit longer into each mission until we finally achieve success. The cost of trying to reach NASA quality levels on the first attempt guarantees failure of the mission before it even leaves the ground.
RIP NASA.
We really have to make it possible guys! The hard part is to make a cable light and strong enough to attach a geo-stationary satellite to the earth's surface. Graphene nanotubes are the best candidate but we still have to figure out how to produce it in such lengths. Still, if we put out money into saving fuel to reach earth's escape velocity, the inner solar system would be much cheaper for humans to travel and we could start thinking about building and maintaining bases on the moon and other planets. I still dream I'll be able to see this space elevator in my lifetime.
War on Mars! Done deal!
The millirary's
The US has military spaceplanes.
Many supporters of the space program have placed great stock in the benefits of technological spinoff from the space effort for the American economy. Proponents estimates of the rate of return from NASA spending range from $7 in return from every $1 of NASA spending (Lyttle, David, "Is Space Our Destiny?" Astronomy, February 1991, page 6) to $23 in return for every $1 of NASA spending (Chase Econometric Associates, "The Economic Impact of NASA R&D Spending," prepared under NASA contract NASW-2741, April 1976).
.....
But the fact that the total NASA investment of $55 billion yielded a paltry $5 billion in true spinoffs, creating entirely new products or industries, suggests a very poor return of ten cents on the dollar. Again, this should not be surprising, given the highly specialized nature of much of the engineering and development work conducted by NASA.
So rather than being an unusually good investment paying 7:1 or 22:1 for each dollar invested, NASA has an astoundingly bad 1:10 payoff -- about a factor of 100 worse than the commercial economy as a whole.
NASA Technological Spinoff Fables by The Federation of American Scientists
https://fas.org/
It's two obvious items where we can swap spending a trillion dollars for 100 million dollars (0.1%).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If they can't develop anything because they are not allowed to fail, what is the purpose of keeping them around? NASA does do good stuff particularly with aeronautics and research, but manned space is not part of this.
I put my confidence in Musk's SpaceX to achieve Mars human landing. Bezos is nowhere near with his amateur just-the-tip rocket.
You do have to keep in mind that SpaceX blew up their first three rockets in a row.
Yes, at the time they were toying with the Falcon 1 for Musk's pocket money. The other green grass efforts in history of rocketry were not much more successful at a comparative level of cumulative investment and experience.
Ezekiel 23:20
Do we have a problem with the engineering? It sounds to me like you're complaining about the management.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
How about health care? US health care is ridiculously expensive. If we could stop paying for all the insurance overhead and divert that to NASA, NASA would be in great shape.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate"
Almost as if it's on purpose ...
Rather, almost as if it's... actually difficult. E.g. how exactly do you calculate the value to society of the reduction in accidents by grooved pavement?
Why is it whenever some random government official gives a sob story about not having enough money that the immediate response is to suggest taking money from the military? Shouldn't the immediate response be asking why this person is working for the government in the first place?
I can point to the US Constitution on where it says that Congress is to raise a army, provide a navy, organize a militia, build forts, and so on. The Constitution spends a lot of verbiage on the defense of the nation and so it should be no surprise that the government spends a lot of money on the military.
Can someone point to the line in the Constitution that justifies spending anything on NASA? Or funding a mission to Mars? Did we declare war on Mars? Is that a place where we should be building a fort?
Looking at the other powers granted to the federal government I'm finding it hard to see what might justify the federal government funding a manned mission to Mars. Are we going there to establish a post office? Is someone on Mars counterfeiting US currency?
I can see the need of a civilian agency like NASA to do things like regulate the satellites launched by US entities, public and private. Perhaps even be a central agency to be responsible for the launching of government assets into space, civilian (like NOAA weather satellites), military (like reconnaissance satellites), and dual use assets (like GPS).
I think that the NASA director of human spaceflight should keep quiet or go find another job. NASA should not be in the business of launching people into space.
I might change my mind if it involves sending people like himself on a manned mission to land on the sun. Every government official that cries for my tax money is eligible for being a member of the crew. Why stop at Mars? Why not go bigger? No one has been to the sun either.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As I said, it's a difficult figure to calculate. How do you put a ROI figure on the existence of things like LASIK and kidney dialysis machines? Over the years I've googled the topic numerous times, and the number of articles concluding that there's a vast positive ROI outnumbers those that claim the opposite by a huge amount. I have no way of evaluating whether yours is any more accurate than any other of them. Although, your article refers to 1990 as "recent", so presumably it's getting close to 30 years old now, which may or may not be relevant to the calculation.
Sure, if you believe you can make the argument that healthcare is unnecessary while at the same time explaining that wars in the middle east are necessary, sure.
In my example, I'm only taking the money out of our war budget, not the normal federal budget. Military still gets ~600B/year to maintain forces with my suggestion.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Technically, the Soviets did crash some rockets into parts of Europe, yes.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
A country that only valued its ability to defend itself is the former Soviet Union. There was never an attack, and yet that nation no longer exists.
What is the US defending itself against? The world? Because it spends more than most of the world combined on its military.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Link!?
Requiem for the American Dream
The question is not "Is healthcare necessary?", which I hope we'd all answer "yes". The question is "Is it necessary to pay as much for it as the US does?", and the answer to that is clearly "no".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Canada spends around $6K per capita on healthcare, the US nearly $9K. We very likely can spend more efficiently than we do, but the costs can't be driven down quite as much as you seem to imply. (of course the cost of living in Canada is lower than the US. Rent in the US is 29% more than Canada for example)
One thing we could do is not offer advanced services to most people, these would be considered life saving procedures today but wouldn't have been available 40 years ago. Is it wrong to provide 20th century healthcare to the masses in the 21st century? I think that if cost were of a primary concern, then we would have to consider it. Better to have appendectomy freely available to anyone who needs it than not have any healthcare because the money isn't there for equal access to open heart surgery. While I don't think we have a money problem to degree, the argument of money keeps coming up so it's fair to offer alternatives.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Comparisons of public health systems do include things like life expectancy, etc., and the extremely expensive US system comes out as mediocre.
One problem with the US system is that we've got a very large amount of overhead in the system, due to inefficiencies that other countries do without. If we were to cut that off, we could approach the subject more easily. It seems likely that the US would have an expensive health care system in any case, but not that expensive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes