Or, you might say it was a sad state of a communist country that they had to be the first to privatize their space launch equipment...
There's a mild correction here. Arianespace was the first commercial orbital launch provider, established in 1980. US companies were allowed to provide commercial launch services in the the mid 80s. It wasn't until the 90s that the Russians and their allies entered the commercial launch market, but they did have the first (and so far only) commercial manned launch services on the Soyuz.
That's an interesting thing to believe, but I'm not sure how it could be true.
That's the thing about what ifs. They are invisible. My view is that most of the technologies that NASA is heralded for, would develop pretty much as they have.
Frankly, I tire of the "spin off" propaganda game where someone claims NASA developed something merely because some NASA funding found its way into the tech ancestry tree at some point. There's no consideration of effectiveness of the research or whether the research would have happened anyway (which I think is most often the case).
The thing is that NASA had special requirements different from everybody else.
That's why it's more expensive to develop for NASA.
When these requirements were fulfilled, other uses for the results were found.
You have the timeline screwed up. Other results were found both before and after. NASA is just another consumer of weird technological stuff.
For instance, if I look at the Pioneer/Voyager missions - they were delivered in time, in budget and with outstanding quality - exceeding pretty much all of the required parameters.
And no significant pushing of technological envelopes that wouldn't have been pushed anyway.
Now I have worked in private industry for a lot of years and have yet to witness such a spectacular success
So what? Private industry has the virtue that its successes provide concrete value.
It was Japan's containment by the Western powers that led to it's desperation.
And better containment might well have changed their strategy from aggression to something a lot less bloody.
And FDR's programs were leading the nation into recovery by getting people back into work.
We can't know for sure, but it's worth noting that there have been a large number of recessions since, and for the most part, job loss and recovery is fairly symmetrical with respect to the point of maximum job loss. The Great Depression is one of the few where it isn't. A natural explanation is that the attempts to "lead the nation into recovery" made the problem worse. As an aside, we see similar effects in the US economy today from Obama's attempts.
The great problem here is how is this eloquent approach any better than doing nothing? It's worth noting that the outcome of this great attempt has been a crappy school system, hollowed cities, and the reemergence of institutionalized racism in the form of "reverse discrimination".
We are the generation of incompetent politicians.
Which could easily be solved by not giving them power.
a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.
If FDR was such an excellent leader, then why did the Second World War happen in the first place? He didn't have the power to stop things like the French leaders and Stalin had, but his economic policies (for example, state-enforced oligopolies, special labor union powers, clunky work programs that didn't do much of anything) directly contributed to US weakness at a time when that was a really bad idea. A strong US would have kept Japan at bay. And there were times during 1936-1938 when Germany could have been thwarted by determined intervention from the other European powers.
And FDR died in 1944 a year before the end of the war. So he can't take credit for leading the country out of the Second World War, especially since he'd have likely have put back into place the failed policies that caused so much trouble leading up to the Second World War.
Other places are far more 'homogeneous' and regulated when it comes to most things and so are easier to make generalisations about.
I'd consider that a warning sign. Fast food is also homogenous and regulated (look and feel of food and packaging rather than the usual sense of food regulation such as food safety), but at least they have a reason for it (cheap, consistent product, that people who prefer the familiar, will eat over and over again). The US indicates that people when they have a choice between five weeks of vacation and getting paid more, tend to want to get paid more.
This makes me a bit cynical of the original poster's claim that vacation time is a measure of "standard of living" when it is readily relinquished by choice in the US for things that the poster doesn't include as one of his indicators.
Regardless, cultural norms (and quasi-taboos) that we broadly hold today would be challenged. Sustaining a village of 300-800 mixed age individuals in frontier conditions is vastly different than growing an outpost for a couple dozen adult professional pioneers from a modular deployment.
Fundamental values... the essence of law itself would be unlike anything we know in civil society today.
I'd have to say that this part of your otherwise excellent post is nonsense. We already have groups (for example, some Inuit villages in northern reaches of North America) that live under such conditions. They may be moderate outliers in terms of culture, but they're still part of civil society.
It's not a matter of funding, but a matter of economics. There are big economies of scale in launch frequency. There are huge fixed costs such as R&D, launch pads, launch teams, etc. And there's the learning curve effect where highly complex activities become cheaper, more mundane, understandable, and less error prone, the more often they are done.
One can't take advantage of these, if one builds a low frequency launch vehicle. That's what NASA has been doing ever since the Saturn V, building a series of large, low launch frequency launch vehicles one after the other. But from the supply chain point of view, the current cycle of develop and abort (going back several launch vehicle attempts) is optimal for funding. One gets paid a lot of money and doesn't have to deliver much of anything.
The military missile programs in the US and USSR on the other hand, while they don't launch a lot of missiles, they do make a lot of them and as such, take most of the advantages of the above.
The missile programs while not at all cheap were easily affordable on a NASA-sized budget. According to Wikipedia, development of the Peacekeeper missile was around $20 billion in 80s money. That's about three years of budget for NASA at the time (it'd be more like two today). The Minuteman program was apparently similar in cost (Encyclopedia Astronautica claims development costs of $2 billion ranging from the 50s through the last decade).
Larger launch vehicles can put up somewhat larger structures (because the payloads can be wider and heavier), but IMHO the main constraint for actual NASA activities is the cost of the activity, not the physical dimensions of the payload. For example, if the US-launched components of the ISS had been physically shrunk in dimension about 10% in width (5.5 meters width down to 5 meters), so that they could be launched on a Delta IV Heavy instead of a Space Shuttle (none of these components were particularly heavy, the heaviest parts were the Russian parts and those were mostly launched by Proton rockets). Then NASA could have dropped the Shuttle in 2000, instead of 2011, and saved somewhere around $20 billion in cost, just from no longer having to maintain the infrastructure for the Shuttle. NASA probably have had to spend some of that savings to accelerate Delta IV development (teh Delta IV Heavy didn't actually launch till 2004) and perhaps develop a capsule for use with the Delta IV Heavy, but I gather those costs wouldn't be much larger than a few billion dollars. That's still savings of more than 5% of the NASA budget for the last ten years.
In other words, with a modest reduction in capability and the phasing out of the Shuttle a decade early, one gets a substantially cheaper space station (and a fair chunk of the NASA budget for the last ten years). This is typical of the sorts of choices that NASA has made over the past half century. So in my view, NASA has plenty of budget for its current activities (and any proposed goals such as lunar bases and Mars manned exploration), it just doesn't spend that money even remotely well.
In other words, NASA had some modest value as an early consumer of various state of the art technologies. My view is that this stuff would have been developed anyway and for less, without NASA involvement.
Yes, because there is simply no way a producer and a consumer would ever manage to connect without some rich ass facilitating it?
Do you really believe that?
It's the world we live in. Reality is what's left when we stop believing in it. Most of the products we buy didn't come from anywhere near us. Somehow in the absence of rich people we'll develop some sort of ESP that allows us to find the products we need and make the products that other people need.
Remove the upper class in one well targeted plague and the middle class would do just fine.
There'd be a new "upper class" inside of five years populated by newly wealthy "facilitators".
It was nice while it lasted, the people are friendly, and it's a nice place to visit, but I don't want to *live* here. I don't think I'm alone in this.
You've probably heard this saying about Silicon Valley. "It's a nice place to work, but you wouldn't want to live there." I heard that back in 1999. No surprise to me that it still holds.
but what Europeans consider a good life is similarly hard to impossible to get in the US: good public transport, guaranteed health care, holidays.
That's a remarkably weak argument. Are you some sort of CIA false flag troll pretending to be a European?
Let's go through the argument? Public transportation? The US has point to point privately owned transportation, namely the car, that is superior to public transportation except in highly urbanized areas or between points a great distance apart. That's most travel in most of the US.
Sure, I'd love to be able to hop on a high speed rail for my trips from home to work in the US, but where am I going to find enough European taxpayers to fund it? There's not enough people wanting the service at the price they'd have to offer in order for it to make sense economically.
Guaranteed health care? What is the "guarantee"? It's certainly not that the health care works! Everyone dies in the end.
Holidays? I get three months a year right now plus I work in a US national park. In the past, I've gotten as much as a year off for holiday. No one paid me for it though. I can see how you'd want that particular "free" lunch. But why should you get them? And what are you giving up for it?
That's one of those bureaucratic things. NASA has the expertise to launch and manage those sorts of satellites, so they tend to get the responsibility of doing so. It's probably a bit inefficient, but nothing like having a zillion federal law enforcement organizations with overlapping areas of responsibility.
Because the DoD has a great degree of autonomy compared to the USAF. The intent, design, and initial users of GPS came from the DoD. They got Congress to fund it. The USAF merely implemented GPS.
I know all about freedom of speech and how this is one bad apple, nonetheless too many idiots are seeing this as another freedom of speech thing.
Smart people see it this way as well. Because it is a freedom of speech thing.
Let's all be insensitive about each others culture, I'm sure we will have a better society.
What's the point of claiming otherwise when we're not so sensitive? Why play pretend?
My view is that if Allah/God exists, he must prefer developed world societies, despite all their decadence and arrogance, over societies that enshrine the laws developed by observant Muslim societies. The former certainly do better than the latter. And I believe that is in large part due to things like freedom of speech.
in fact we have an excellent 1900 era education system
If we did, then we'd be more competitive with countries like China. I think it's crazy to assume that most US school systems would fare any better in 1900 than they do now. They're just shitty systems that don't educate very well either in a 1900-style or a 2012-style.
Except NASA's budget goes right back into the pockets of the American people, plus we get space missions.
Not taxing people or borrowing money in the first place leaves that money in the pockets of the American people. In the absence of productive use of that tax money, you're just redirecting unproductively a portion of the wealth of the US.
This is just a variation of the broken window fallacy (here the broken window being the redirecting of funds through taxes). Somehow taking money from one person and giving it to another for a poor reason is somehow seen as good for the US economy. Why I don't know. But that's little different from chucking a rock through a window and forcing someone to buy a new window.
Now, NASA does do space missions and there is some value to those. But my take is that the US is probably taking at least an order of magnitude reduction in the effectiveness of the money it spends on NASA. Some stuff, particularly, the Space Launch System, probably has negative value (after one considers both the loss to taxpayers and damage to the commercial US space launch market).
The space program should be left to those countries that have their environmental, energy, population and human rights problems solved.
The developed world qualifies.
And there's 0.00% chance that we'll be able to overcome these same limitations as they apply to long term space flight, exploration or colonization if we can't adequately manage the same terrestrial limitations, right down here!
To the contrary! Why will these problems get solved here on Earth when there isn't a lot of incentive to solve them? In space, you'll have resource limitations unheard of except in the most isolated places on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you might say it was a sad state of a communist country that they had to be the first to privatize their space launch equipment...
There's a mild correction here. Arianespace was the first commercial orbital launch provider, established in 1980. US companies were allowed to provide commercial launch services in the the mid 80s. It wasn't until the 90s that the Russians and their allies entered the commercial launch market, but they did have the first (and so far only) commercial manned launch services on the Soyuz.
FDR used it well to the benefit of the US.
Didn't happen for starters. Not much point to reading history books in order to learn false history.
That's an interesting thing to believe, but I'm not sure how it could be true.
That's the thing about what ifs. They are invisible. My view is that most of the technologies that NASA is heralded for, would develop pretty much as they have.
Frankly, I tire of the "spin off" propaganda game where someone claims NASA developed something merely because some NASA funding found its way into the tech ancestry tree at some point. There's no consideration of effectiveness of the research or whether the research would have happened anyway (which I think is most often the case).
The thing is that NASA had special requirements different from everybody else.
That's why it's more expensive to develop for NASA.
When these requirements were fulfilled, other uses for the results were found.
You have the timeline screwed up. Other results were found both before and after. NASA is just another consumer of weird technological stuff.
For instance, if I look at the Pioneer/Voyager missions - they were delivered in time, in budget and with outstanding quality - exceeding pretty much all of the required parameters.
And no significant pushing of technological envelopes that wouldn't have been pushed anyway.
Now I have worked in private industry for a lot of years and have yet to witness such a spectacular success
So what? Private industry has the virtue that its successes provide concrete value.
But it does suggest that they aren't particularly unique or special and that we can get along without them.
Not both. Yes, they aren't unique or special, at least as you see it. But that doesn't mean that we can get along without them.
It was Japan's containment by the Western powers that led to it's desperation.
And better containment might well have changed their strategy from aggression to something a lot less bloody.
And FDR's programs were leading the nation into recovery by getting people back into work.
We can't know for sure, but it's worth noting that there have been a large number of recessions since, and for the most part, job loss and recovery is fairly symmetrical with respect to the point of maximum job loss. The Great Depression is one of the few where it isn't. A natural explanation is that the attempts to "lead the nation into recovery" made the problem worse. As an aside, we see similar effects in the US economy today from Obama's attempts.
Keep in mind that the protestors can alter the environment as well. Sounds like a couple of hoses could negate this weapon.
We are the generation of incompetent politicians.
Which could easily be solved by not giving them power.
a circumstance that is largely due to the excellent way FDR lead the country into and out of WWII.
If FDR was such an excellent leader, then why did the Second World War happen in the first place? He didn't have the power to stop things like the French leaders and Stalin had, but his economic policies (for example, state-enforced oligopolies, special labor union powers, clunky work programs that didn't do much of anything) directly contributed to US weakness at a time when that was a really bad idea. A strong US would have kept Japan at bay. And there were times during 1936-1938 when Germany could have been thwarted by determined intervention from the other European powers.
And FDR died in 1944 a year before the end of the war. So he can't take credit for leading the country out of the Second World War, especially since he'd have likely have put back into place the failed policies that caused so much trouble leading up to the Second World War.
Other places are far more 'homogeneous' and regulated when it comes to most things and so are easier to make generalisations about.
I'd consider that a warning sign. Fast food is also homogenous and regulated (look and feel of food and packaging rather than the usual sense of food regulation such as food safety), but at least they have a reason for it (cheap, consistent product, that people who prefer the familiar, will eat over and over again). The US indicates that people when they have a choice between five weeks of vacation and getting paid more, tend to want to get paid more.
This makes me a bit cynical of the original poster's claim that vacation time is a measure of "standard of living" when it is readily relinquished by choice in the US for things that the poster doesn't include as one of his indicators.
Regardless, cultural norms (and quasi-taboos) that we broadly hold today would be challenged. Sustaining a village of 300-800 mixed age individuals in frontier conditions is vastly different than growing an outpost for a couple dozen adult professional pioneers from a modular deployment.
Fundamental values... the essence of law itself would be unlike anything we know in civil society today.
I'd have to say that this part of your otherwise excellent post is nonsense. We already have groups (for example, some Inuit villages in northern reaches of North America) that live under such conditions. They may be moderate outliers in terms of culture, but they're still part of civil society.
It's not a matter of funding, but a matter of economics. There are big economies of scale in launch frequency. There are huge fixed costs such as R&D, launch pads, launch teams, etc. And there's the learning curve effect where highly complex activities become cheaper, more mundane, understandable, and less error prone, the more often they are done.
One can't take advantage of these, if one builds a low frequency launch vehicle. That's what NASA has been doing ever since the Saturn V, building a series of large, low launch frequency launch vehicles one after the other. But from the supply chain point of view, the current cycle of develop and abort (going back several launch vehicle attempts) is optimal for funding. One gets paid a lot of money and doesn't have to deliver much of anything.
The military missile programs in the US and USSR on the other hand, while they don't launch a lot of missiles, they do make a lot of them and as such, take most of the advantages of the above.
The missile programs while not at all cheap were easily affordable on a NASA-sized budget. According to Wikipedia, development of the Peacekeeper missile was around $20 billion in 80s money. That's about three years of budget for NASA at the time (it'd be more like two today). The Minuteman program was apparently similar in cost (Encyclopedia Astronautica claims development costs of $2 billion ranging from the 50s through the last decade).
Larger launch vehicles can put up somewhat larger structures (because the payloads can be wider and heavier), but IMHO the main constraint for actual NASA activities is the cost of the activity, not the physical dimensions of the payload. For example, if the US-launched components of the ISS had been physically shrunk in dimension about 10% in width (5.5 meters width down to 5 meters), so that they could be launched on a Delta IV Heavy instead of a Space Shuttle (none of these components were particularly heavy, the heaviest parts were the Russian parts and those were mostly launched by Proton rockets). Then NASA could have dropped the Shuttle in 2000, instead of 2011, and saved somewhere around $20 billion in cost, just from no longer having to maintain the infrastructure for the Shuttle. NASA probably have had to spend some of that savings to accelerate Delta IV development (teh Delta IV Heavy didn't actually launch till 2004) and perhaps develop a capsule for use with the Delta IV Heavy, but I gather those costs wouldn't be much larger than a few billion dollars. That's still savings of more than 5% of the NASA budget for the last ten years.
In other words, with a modest reduction in capability and the phasing out of the Shuttle a decade early, one gets a substantially cheaper space station (and a fair chunk of the NASA budget for the last ten years). This is typical of the sorts of choices that NASA has made over the past half century. So in my view, NASA has plenty of budget for its current activities (and any proposed goals such as lunar bases and Mars manned exploration), it just doesn't spend that money even remotely well.
In other words, NASA had some modest value as an early consumer of various state of the art technologies. My view is that this stuff would have been developed anyway and for less, without NASA involvement.
Yes, because there is simply no way a producer and a consumer would ever manage to connect without some rich ass facilitating it?
Do you really believe that?
It's the world we live in. Reality is what's left when we stop believing in it. Most of the products we buy didn't come from anywhere near us. Somehow in the absence of rich people we'll develop some sort of ESP that allows us to find the products we need and make the products that other people need.
Remove the upper class in one well targeted plague and the middle class would do just fine.
There'd be a new "upper class" inside of five years populated by newly wealthy "facilitators".
and getting employees to work productively for less than the economic value they produce.
There's no point to getting employees to work productively for more than the economic value they produce. You just end up with a bankrupt business.
It was nice while it lasted, the people are friendly, and it's a nice place to visit, but I don't want to *live* here. I don't think I'm alone in this.
You've probably heard this saying about Silicon Valley. "It's a nice place to work, but you wouldn't want to live there." I heard that back in 1999. No surprise to me that it still holds.
but what Europeans consider a good life is similarly hard to impossible to get in the US: good public transport, guaranteed health care, holidays.
That's a remarkably weak argument. Are you some sort of CIA false flag troll pretending to be a European?
Let's go through the argument? Public transportation? The US has point to point privately owned transportation, namely the car, that is superior to public transportation except in highly urbanized areas or between points a great distance apart. That's most travel in most of the US.
Sure, I'd love to be able to hop on a high speed rail for my trips from home to work in the US, but where am I going to find enough European taxpayers to fund it? There's not enough people wanting the service at the price they'd have to offer in order for it to make sense economically.
Guaranteed health care? What is the "guarantee"? It's certainly not that the health care works! Everyone dies in the end.
Holidays? I get three months a year right now plus I work in a US national park. In the past, I've gotten as much as a year off for holiday. No one paid me for it though. I can see how you'd want that particular "free" lunch. But why should you get them? And what are you giving up for it?
Realistically, the boss is little more than a facilitator.
And the facilitator is the most valuable role in society. Without them, there's no job and no product to buy.
That's one of those bureaucratic things. NASA has the expertise to launch and manage those sorts of satellites, so they tend to get the responsibility of doing so. It's probably a bit inefficient, but nothing like having a zillion federal law enforcement organizations with overlapping areas of responsibility.
That gives them more than enough money to spend on NASA and old people.
More than enough for NASA. Not for old people. Those entitlements are real pricey and getting more so.
Because the DoD has a great degree of autonomy compared to the USAF. The intent, design, and initial users of GPS came from the DoD. They got Congress to fund it. The USAF merely implemented GPS.
I know all about freedom of speech and how this is one bad apple, nonetheless too many idiots are seeing this as another freedom of speech thing.
Smart people see it this way as well. Because it is a freedom of speech thing.
Let's all be insensitive about each others culture, I'm sure we will have a better society.
What's the point of claiming otherwise when we're not so sensitive? Why play pretend?
My view is that if Allah/God exists, he must prefer developed world societies, despite all their decadence and arrogance, over societies that enshrine the laws developed by observant Muslim societies. The former certainly do better than the latter. And I believe that is in large part due to things like freedom of speech.
in fact we have an excellent 1900 era education system
If we did, then we'd be more competitive with countries like China. I think it's crazy to assume that most US school systems would fare any better in 1900 than they do now. They're just shitty systems that don't educate very well either in a 1900-style or a 2012-style.
Except NASA's budget goes right back into the pockets of the American people, plus we get space missions.
Not taxing people or borrowing money in the first place leaves that money in the pockets of the American people. In the absence of productive use of that tax money, you're just redirecting unproductively a portion of the wealth of the US.
This is just a variation of the broken window fallacy (here the broken window being the redirecting of funds through taxes). Somehow taking money from one person and giving it to another for a poor reason is somehow seen as good for the US economy. Why I don't know. But that's little different from chucking a rock through a window and forcing someone to buy a new window.
Now, NASA does do space missions and there is some value to those. But my take is that the US is probably taking at least an order of magnitude reduction in the effectiveness of the money it spends on NASA. Some stuff, particularly, the Space Launch System, probably has negative value (after one considers both the loss to taxpayers and damage to the commercial US space launch market).
The space program should be left to those countries that have their environmental, energy, population and human rights problems solved.
The developed world qualifies.
And there's 0.00% chance that we'll be able to overcome these same limitations as they apply to long term space flight, exploration or colonization if we can't adequately manage the same terrestrial limitations, right down here!
To the contrary! Why will these problems get solved here on Earth when there isn't a lot of incentive to solve them? In space, you'll have resource limitations unheard of except in the most isolated places on Earth.