7 ms·

NASA appears no longer to be shooting for the stars

31 points by eplanit 16y ago

Vivtek 16y ago
I like the fact that we don't have money for $9 million a day to go to the moon, but we have about $800 million a day to screw up Afghanistan even more than it already is, and $1.9 billion to soak into the sands of Iraq, also for nothing obvious. Fiscal scolds drive me crazy when they overlook mere elephants in the room - this is like a whole pod of blue whales. (Note: figures from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html)
- mberning 16y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. Our financial priorities as a country are a wreck. You would really be downvoted if you had pointed out how morally and intellectually bankrupt we are as well.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    I downvoted because it was an off-topic attempt to digress into talking about the war, a topic which is always guaranteed to start a very dull argument pretty much anywhere. Let's talk about NASA.
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      too late sigh
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      I thought it was pretty clearly an attempt to talk about our financial priorities by illustrating how minuscule our savings will be by cutting a moon program. I now see that mentioning the war at all was foolish - it kills all debate about whether that much money is actually doing anything useful.
  - mquander 16y ago
    If it helps, I downvoted this and the parent because it is sycophantic and content-free. Everyone agrees that our financial priorities are a wreck. Say something substantial. I have no idea how you could expect such a post to engender anything more than a flame war. The only thing worse than this is if you made a big post about how "morally and intellectually bankrupt" we are.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I downvoted you, but I feel like I owe you an explanation. Here's the problem with what you said. The use of lethal force in the national interest is either justified or it is not. I mean, you can't half-kill somebody. If it is justified, then whatever the cost, we have to pay it. It is a matter of survival and critical national interest. Compared to this, any other program doesn't make sense. We're doing what we have to do. It trumps everything else. If it's not justified, then by definition we're wasting money doing something that involves killing people. Any other program would be better than than this. Everything else trumps it. But we haven't gotten anywhere at all. It's either obvious and non-optional, or optional and totally unworthy compared to anything else. Neither of these two conditions tells us anything about the space program. It's just a way of commenting on the war -- a way that you can insert into any policy discussion about anything, without moving the discussion forward any. It's off-topic. You want to talk funding, pick something everybody can agree is somewhat optional and discretionary -- keeping lots of military bases open, foreign aid, public financing of campaigns, entitlements, whatever. But picking something where we're actively trying to kill folks just takes the conversation to a place where logic and reason can't go. Whether the war is a good idea is probably a crazy-good topic of conversation somewhere, but it has fuck-all to do with NASA or funding.
  - Charuru 16y ago
    You're making it far too simple. The military industrial complex causes us to spend more money on the military than we should. It's definitely possible to support a military effort but at the same time not overspend on it. I'm not saying that we're spending too much on Iraq/Afghanistan, just disagreeing with the principle. On the other hand, not so sure about those fighter jets. :(
    - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
      Hang on here, I'm not the one throwing up Afghanistan as compared to NASA. That would be the parent poster. I met those comments at the same level of abstraction as they were presented. EDIT: You guys read my comments and think I'm some kind of shill for the military-industrial complex. But that's not my point at all. What I'm trying to tell you is that comparing the high-level goals of national defense to the space program doesn't work. And if the high-level goals don't compare, it's not like you can pop down to some lower level and compare. You'll always get trumped at the higher level. This is a categorization and logic error -- nothing to do with politics. One B-2 bomber may be much less valuable to the nation than a new space system, but you can't compare bombers to rockets. Bombers always win. Charuru is heading in the right direction. Instead of picking a war -- arguably the one thing that has to be "on" or "off", pick the entire national defense system. Does the X dollars spent on national defense compare favorably against the Y dollars on NASA? That's the high-level question. If you argue at this level, and then somebody tries to pull you down lower "Yeah but it's not like we can just stop fighting in Afghanistan" then _you_ get to pull the trump card: "we're not talking about using lethal force in the national interest. We're talking about total expenditures and how they match up against the national interest."
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Downvote or not, the article is about how America can't afford a space program, and my comment is about how that really pisses me off given our clear priorities. But yeah, in retrospect, it's flamewar material and I probably should keep my big mouth shut. It's just ... I'm in Europe for the summer. And I know Europe has its own problems, but they're actually doing some stuff here that makes the place a better place to live, instead of taking huge piles of money and burning it. The roads are better, the cities prettier, the public services more helpful, the health system more efficient - it just kills me. I live in Indiana, largely because the real estate market has crashed and it's so cheap (and yeah, I'm from there, but that's why I went back). Indiana really can't afford squat now, because all the money is being sucked out and spent on wars to profit the rich, or just plain being gift-wrapped for them because they're too big to fail. And now we can't even go to the moon.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Europe learned the hard way. Ever hear about the British Empire? The colonization of Africa? French Indochina? Europe was just ahead of its time in killing people for marginal gain continents away.
  - w00pla 16y ago
    > And I know Europe has its own problems, but they're actually doing some stuff here that makes the place a better place to live, Unfortunately Europe has its own problems. The arms industry in Europe is even more corrupt than in the USA (the french company Thales/Thompson resorted to changing its name every 5 years to shake off the bad name). The European Union is an extremely expensive and failed project and the public finances in many European countries is a huge mess (e.g. Portugal, Spain, Greece). They have big immigration problems and social problems (e.g. large and growing Muslim minorities in most countries). The birth rate has all but collapsed and they will have serious economic problems in the long term.
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      Heh. I don't know whether you're American, and so you don't know how damn cool Europe is, or European, and so you don't know what a shambles America is, or you're from somewhere else entirely and just don't know anything at all, but either way, you're so incredibly wrong. Without loss of generality, I will assume below that you are European. The arms industry in Europe can be as corrupt as it wants - it still doesn't consume the incredible proportion of GDP ours does, and it still doesn't own your government outright. That corruption is utterly, utterly insignificant in terms of how European society is run and where the money actually goes. I'll grant you that arms corruption is a Bad Thing, and making money off killing people is even worse, but Europe ain't got nothing on America in that regard. (Note: right now. Clearly, in the past, this was not the case, but we're discussing current affairs.) Public finances in many European countries are a mess, yeah. I give you Indiana. Or even better - I give you California, which has started selling its historical monuments and state parks in order to stave off bankruptcy. Europe has nothing like immigration or social problems. They think they do. But they really, really don't. Large and growing Muslim minorities are, and let me make this perfectly clear, not a problem. They are a good thing. The birth rate collapsing is a good thing. I don't care about retirement problems because they don't exist; the fact that they are actually planning for retirement at all is what makes Europe superior. And I'll draw your attention to the fact that those large, growing Muslim minorities are in fact paying into the retirement system. Just because it's not white, Christian money doesn't mean the system isn't working. And more importantly, Europe doesn't have (as many) thieves and brigands in power trying to get that social services lockbox open so their friends can buy more yachts - and the European media springs on that shit like rapid weasels when they do try it, because in Europe, they still report actual news, and the people, clearly remembering times when the government was demonstrably and openly against them, watch the government like a million hawks, and oddly enough, journalists there are OK with that. And I'd like to state, just for the record, that if you think Europe is facing serious economic problems in the long term, I'd like to draw your attention back to America. The difference between Europe and America is that some people in Europe are at least planning management strategies; the corresponding people in America are mostly trying to figure out which part of Peru they're going to retreat to when things finally collapse. But the point in your post that I really feel the most urgent need to address is this flabbergasting notion that the European Union is a failed project. The European Union has been expensive, yeah. It's not even a tenth as expensive as the Iraq War, and here's the key: it isn't a failed project. There is no, no, no fucking way you can say the European Union has failed until you see an actual renewal of the centuries of warfare that ravaged this continent until the advent of the European Union. I am, right now, sitting in Budapest, which joined the Union in 2005. To get here, I drove through Switzerland (part of the Union in all but name), Italy, and Slovenia, and then I drove back through Austria and Germany to return our rental car before flying back to Vienna (long story; one-way rentals are Not Cheap here). I've lived in Europe, and come to Europe, a lot over the last twenty years; my wife is Hungarian. So I know a lot about what I'm saying here. The advances I've seen this summer (it's been five years since I could afford to come) have blown my mind. Just the thought of driving across Slovenia in a single evening on their freaking new freeway system alone... What I'm saying here, and above, is that Europe is prosperous. Oh, everybody's complaining about the Union right now - ever since Germans realized that a run on Greek banks affects them through the Euro zone. But the Union was inevitable, and the expansion of markets and lowering of trade barriers has been very profitable to Germany indeed. They're just really panicky about spreading inflation (something about that explosive inflation in the 30's really scarred the public psyche there). But failed? No. The European Union is the greatest thing humanity has ever achieved - don't get me wrong, I love the American Constitution, and I'm all for ranking it right up there at the top of greatest innovations ever. But the history of Europe is one of blood and bombs, for the last couple of millennia, and now they're at each other's throats only at the rhetorical level. The Union is a success. If you've never been here, I encourage you to visit. If you've never left, I encourage you to examine some other parts of the world before thinking Europe is a failure. (tl;dr: nyah, nyah, you're wrong, Europe rocks)
sliverstorm 16y ago
Can anyone comment on what role the obsessive safety culture mentioned in the article may have played in NASA's current declining trajectory? It's interesting to see that they have ramped up testing; IIRC, all the problems they've had were tied to manufacturing mistakes, not design flaws. This makes me think safety would be best served by more rigorous Q&A to prevent flaws, rather than testing runs to find them.
- mkn 16y ago
  So, I have a BS in Aero/Astro Engineering. This doesn't exactly qualify me, because when you graduate you're not an engineer, merely ready to become an engineer. That said, it seems to me that the safety culture is a symptom, not an underlying cause, of the troubles that NASA is facing. Fundamentally, the political nature of NASA planning and acquisition drive NASA-designed systems toward complexity and high-performance. It is the complexity and performance of (especially) launch vehicles, combined with their stringent requirements and catastrophic failure modes that drives the safety culture. If they didn't obsess over safety, these monstrosities would fail every time. Take a typical aerospace quality part that has $700 worth of material and labor in it. Because it is engineered with a factor of safety of, 1.05-1.2, for example, there is a $25-30,000 paper trail that documents the mine where the ore was extracted, who did the refining, what the heat treatment process was, where it was performed, and so on and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam. Take the (awful) STS, for example. Congress was promised "airline-style" operations for this "space pickup truck." Well, an airliner has 0 mission-critical parts. A wing spar can fail and the skin should hold the wing together. The STS has over 700 mission-critical parts. For example, if an O-ring fails on a booster, everybody dies. If some foam hits the leading edge of the wing, everybody dies. High-perf mission-critical parts seem to be a result of the political need for the appearance of technology leadership. I can almost guarantee you that the O-rings and leading edge pieces were manufactured in different states. High part-count is an artifact of the procurement process. Elon Musk has talked about what makes SpaceX's pricing possible. (Note that they're offering launch services at 1/5 the cost of the shuttle.) He has a vertically integrated rocket factory. In one state. NASA could not build the Falcon 9 if it wanted to simply because they could not vertically integrate in one state. Every state would get a piece of the pie. Algorithmically, because that's the crowd, here, you pay an exponential administrative cost for each of the factors: performance, lateral integration, and complexity. We've done all three. NASA treats the fact that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built as a point of pride, for political reasons. It's actually our national shame and folly, and has set space access back 30 years.
TGJ 16y ago
The Space program may be best served by moving to the private sector. I believe the private sector will be able to do it faster, cheaper, and just as safe as Nasa. The only thing that worries me is once control is conceded from Nasa to the private sector, the government will regulate the new industry harshly. It is sad to see the American Dream squashed because of politics but I think a new chapter is around the corner written by the citizens and not bureaucrats.
- sprout 16y ago
  >The only thing that worries me is once control is conceded from Nasa to the private sector, the government will regulate the new industry harshly. Thinking like that is what led the EPA to allow BP to neglect to install an acoustic trigger that could have prevented this whole debacle in the gulf. Harsh regulation is essential if you want safety. The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight. There's only a few things that people are willing to pay $1000 a pound to send into space. One of them is communications relays. Another is cameras. The third is themselves. I'm hopeful that space tourism will be the killer app for human spaceflight, because the current model of "let's fucken just send people up to see what happens" has pretty much reached its endpoint: we know what happens.
avar 16y ago
I recommend these videos by Dr. Robert Zubrin and Jeff Greason for some context: http://www.youtube.com/user/spacevidcast#p/search/7/d9J7HgnxK10 http://www.youtube.com/user/spacevidcast#p/search/7/d9J7Hgnx... http://www.xcor.com/video/isdc.html http://www.xcor.com/video/isdc.html Essentially, NASA has lacked any concrete direction since the 70s, and projects like Constellation are stupid because they waste a lot of NASA money on developing NASA's own launch capacity. When NASA should just buy (or pay to upgrade) existing capacity such as the Delta IV Heavy or Falcon 9 to fit its needs. Most importantly, with development of launch capacity moved out of NASA, NASA will have to specify the ends, not the means. Being the party that sets the budget, makes the design, and implements the design is a very bad position to be in.
c1sc0 16y ago
What NASA (and society as a whole) needs is less focus on safety. Go do some wild things & if volunteers die in the process, accept that risk.

31 points by eplanit 16y ago

I like the fact that we don't have money for $9 million a day to go to the moon, but we have about $800 million a day to screw up Afghanistan even more than it already is, and $1.9 billion to soak into the sands of Iraq, also for nothing obvious. Fiscal scolds drive me crazy when they overlook mere elephants in the room - this is like a whole pod of blue whales. (Note: figures from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html)

mberning 16y ago
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Our financial priorities as a country are a wreck. You would really be downvoted if you had pointed out how morally and intellectually bankrupt we are as well.
- hugh3 16y ago
  I downvoted because it was an off-topic attempt to digress into talking about the war, a topic which is always guaranteed to start a very dull argument pretty much anywhere. Let's talk about NASA.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    too late sigh
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    I thought it was pretty clearly an attempt to talk about our financial priorities by illustrating how minuscule our savings will be by cutting a moon program. I now see that mentioning the war at all was foolish - it kills all debate about whether that much money is actually doing anything useful.
- mquander 16y ago
  If it helps, I downvoted this and the parent because it is sycophantic and content-free. Everyone agrees that our financial priorities are a wreck. Say something substantial. I have no idea how you could expect such a post to engender anything more than a flame war. The only thing worse than this is if you made a big post about how "morally and intellectually bankrupt" we are.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I downvoted you, but I feel like I owe you an explanation. Here's the problem with what you said. The use of lethal force in the national interest is either justified or it is not. I mean, you can't half-kill somebody. If it is justified, then whatever the cost, we have to pay it. It is a matter of survival and critical national interest. Compared to this, any other program doesn't make sense. We're doing what we have to do. It trumps everything else. If it's not justified, then by definition we're wasting money doing something that involves killing people. Any other program would be better than than this. Everything else trumps it. But we haven't gotten anywhere at all. It's either obvious and non-optional, or optional and totally unworthy compared to anything else. Neither of these two conditions tells us anything about the space program. It's just a way of commenting on the war -- a way that you can insert into any policy discussion about anything, without moving the discussion forward any. It's off-topic. You want to talk funding, pick something everybody can agree is somewhat optional and discretionary -- keeping lots of military bases open, foreign aid, public financing of campaigns, entitlements, whatever. But picking something where we're actively trying to kill folks just takes the conversation to a place where logic and reason can't go. Whether the war is a good idea is probably a crazy-good topic of conversation somewhere, but it has fuck-all to do with NASA or funding.
- Charuru 16y ago
  You're making it far too simple. The military industrial complex causes us to spend more money on the military than we should. It's definitely possible to support a military effort but at the same time not overspend on it. I'm not saying that we're spending too much on Iraq/Afghanistan, just disagreeing with the principle. On the other hand, not so sure about those fighter jets. :(
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    Hang on here, I'm not the one throwing up Afghanistan as compared to NASA. That would be the parent poster. I met those comments at the same level of abstraction as they were presented. EDIT: You guys read my comments and think I'm some kind of shill for the military-industrial complex. But that's not my point at all. What I'm trying to tell you is that comparing the high-level goals of national defense to the space program doesn't work. And if the high-level goals don't compare, it's not like you can pop down to some lower level and compare. You'll always get trumped at the higher level. This is a categorization and logic error -- nothing to do with politics. One B-2 bomber may be much less valuable to the nation than a new space system, but you can't compare bombers to rockets. Bombers always win. Charuru is heading in the right direction. Instead of picking a war -- arguably the one thing that has to be "on" or "off", pick the entire national defense system. Does the X dollars spent on national defense compare favorably against the Y dollars on NASA? That's the high-level question. If you argue at this level, and then somebody tries to pull you down lower "Yeah but it's not like we can just stop fighting in Afghanistan" then _you_ get to pull the trump card: "we're not talking about using lethal force in the national interest. We're talking about total expenditures and how they match up against the national interest."
Vivtek 16y ago
Downvote or not, the article is about how America can't afford a space program, and my comment is about how that really pisses me off given our clear priorities. But yeah, in retrospect, it's flamewar material and I probably should keep my big mouth shut. It's just ... I'm in Europe for the summer. And I know Europe has its own problems, but they're actually doing some stuff here that makes the place a better place to live, instead of taking huge piles of money and burning it. The roads are better, the cities prettier, the public services more helpful, the health system more efficient - it just kills me. I live in Indiana, largely because the real estate market has crashed and it's so cheap (and yeah, I'm from there, but that's why I went back). Indiana really can't afford squat now, because all the money is being sucked out and spent on wars to profit the rich, or just plain being gift-wrapped for them because they're too big to fail. And now we can't even go to the moon.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Europe learned the hard way. Ever hear about the British Empire? The colonization of Africa? French Indochina? Europe was just ahead of its time in killing people for marginal gain continents away.
- w00pla 16y ago
  > And I know Europe has its own problems, but they're actually doing some stuff here that makes the place a better place to live, Unfortunately Europe has its own problems. The arms industry in Europe is even more corrupt than in the USA (the french company Thales/Thompson resorted to changing its name every 5 years to shake off the bad name). The European Union is an extremely expensive and failed project and the public finances in many European countries is a huge mess (e.g. Portugal, Spain, Greece). They have big immigration problems and social problems (e.g. large and growing Muslim minorities in most countries). The birth rate has all but collapsed and they will have serious economic problems in the long term.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Heh. I don't know whether you're American, and so you don't know how damn cool Europe is, or European, and so you don't know what a shambles America is, or you're from somewhere else entirely and just don't know anything at all, but either way, you're so incredibly wrong. Without loss of generality, I will assume below that you are European. The arms industry in Europe can be as corrupt as it wants - it still doesn't consume the incredible proportion of GDP ours does, and it still doesn't own your government outright. That corruption is utterly, utterly insignificant in terms of how European society is run and where the money actually goes. I'll grant you that arms corruption is a Bad Thing, and making money off killing people is even worse, but Europe ain't got nothing on America in that regard. (Note: right now. Clearly, in the past, this was not the case, but we're discussing current affairs.) Public finances in many European countries are a mess, yeah. I give you Indiana. Or even better - I give you California, which has started selling its historical monuments and state parks in order to stave off bankruptcy. Europe has nothing like immigration or social problems. They think they do. But they really, really don't. Large and growing Muslim minorities are, and let me make this perfectly clear, not a problem. They are a good thing. The birth rate collapsing is a good thing. I don't care about retirement problems because they don't exist; the fact that they are actually planning for retirement at all is what makes Europe superior. And I'll draw your attention to the fact that those large, growing Muslim minorities are in fact paying into the retirement system. Just because it's not white, Christian money doesn't mean the system isn't working. And more importantly, Europe doesn't have (as many) thieves and brigands in power trying to get that social services lockbox open so their friends can buy more yachts - and the European media springs on that shit like rapid weasels when they do try it, because in Europe, they still report actual news, and the people, clearly remembering times when the government was demonstrably and openly against them, watch the government like a million hawks, and oddly enough, journalists there are OK with that. And I'd like to state, just for the record, that if you think Europe is facing serious economic problems in the long term, I'd like to draw your attention back to America. The difference between Europe and America is that some people in Europe are at least planning management strategies; the corresponding people in America are mostly trying to figure out which part of Peru they're going to retreat to when things finally collapse. But the point in your post that I really feel the most urgent need to address is this flabbergasting notion that the European Union is a failed project. The European Union has been expensive, yeah. It's not even a tenth as expensive as the Iraq War, and here's the key: it isn't a failed project. There is no, no, no fucking way you can say the European Union has failed until you see an actual renewal of the centuries of warfare that ravaged this continent until the advent of the European Union. I am, right now, sitting in Budapest, which joined the Union in 2005. To get here, I drove through Switzerland (part of the Union in all but name), Italy, and Slovenia, and then I drove back through Austria and Germany to return our rental car before flying back to Vienna (long story; one-way rentals are Not Cheap here). I've lived in Europe, and come to Europe, a lot over the last twenty years; my wife is Hungarian. So I know a lot about what I'm saying here. The advances I've seen this summer (it's been five years since I could afford to come) have blown my mind. Just the thought of driving across Slovenia in a single evening on their freaking new freeway system alone... What I'm saying here, and above, is that Europe is prosperous. Oh, everybody's complaining about the Union right now - ever since Germans realized that a run on Greek banks affects them through the Euro zone. But the Union was inevitable, and the expansion of markets and lowering of trade barriers has been very profitable to Germany indeed. They're just really panicky about spreading inflation (something about that explosive inflation in the 30's really scarred the public psyche there). But failed? No. The European Union is the greatest thing humanity has ever achieved - don't get me wrong, I love the American Constitution, and I'm all for ranking it right up there at the top of greatest innovations ever. But the history of Europe is one of blood and bombs, for the last couple of millennia, and now they're at each other's throats only at the rhetorical level. The Union is a success. If you've never been here, I encourage you to visit. If you've never left, I encourage you to examine some other parts of the world before thinking Europe is a failure. (tl;dr: nyah, nyah, you're wrong, Europe rocks)

sliverstorm 16y ago

Can anyone comment on what role the obsessive safety culture mentioned in the article may have played in NASA's current declining trajectory? It's interesting to see that they have ramped up testing; IIRC, all the problems they've had were tied to manufacturing mistakes, not design flaws. This makes me think safety would be best served by more rigorous Q&A to prevent flaws, rather than testing runs to find them.

mkn 16y ago
So, I have a BS in Aero/Astro Engineering. This doesn't exactly qualify me, because when you graduate you're not an engineer, merely ready to become an engineer. That said, it seems to me that the safety culture is a symptom, not an underlying cause, of the troubles that NASA is facing. Fundamentally, the political nature of NASA planning and acquisition drive NASA-designed systems toward complexity and high-performance. It is the complexity and performance of (especially) launch vehicles, combined with their stringent requirements and catastrophic failure modes that drives the safety culture. If they didn't obsess over safety, these monstrosities would fail every time. Take a typical aerospace quality part that has $700 worth of material and labor in it. Because it is engineered with a factor of safety of, 1.05-1.2, for example, there is a $25-30,000 paper trail that documents the mine where the ore was extracted, who did the refining, what the heat treatment process was, where it was performed, and so on and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam. Take the (awful) STS, for example. Congress was promised "airline-style" operations for this "space pickup truck." Well, an airliner has 0 mission-critical parts. A wing spar can fail and the skin should hold the wing together. The STS has over 700 mission-critical parts. For example, if an O-ring fails on a booster, everybody dies. If some foam hits the leading edge of the wing, everybody dies. High-perf mission-critical parts seem to be a result of the political need for the appearance of technology leadership. I can almost guarantee you that the O-rings and leading edge pieces were manufactured in different states. High part-count is an artifact of the procurement process. Elon Musk has talked about what makes SpaceX's pricing possible. (Note that they're offering launch services at 1/5 the cost of the shuttle.) He has a vertically integrated rocket factory. In one state. NASA could not build the Falcon 9 if it wanted to simply because they could not vertically integrate in one state. Every state would get a piece of the pie. Algorithmically, because that's the crowd, here, you pay an exponential administrative cost for each of the factors: performance, lateral integration, and complexity. We've done all three. NASA treats the fact that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built as a point of pride, for political reasons. It's actually our national shame and folly, and has set space access back 30 years.

TGJ 16y ago

The Space program may be best served by moving to the private sector. I believe the private sector will be able to do it faster, cheaper, and just as safe as Nasa. The only thing that worries me is once control is conceded from Nasa to the private sector, the government will regulate the new industry harshly. It is sad to see the American Dream squashed because of politics but I think a new chapter is around the corner written by the citizens and not bureaucrats.

sprout 16y ago
>The only thing that worries me is once control is conceded from Nasa to the private sector, the government will regulate the new industry harshly. Thinking like that is what led the EPA to allow BP to neglect to install an acoustic trigger that could have prevented this whole debacle in the gulf. Harsh regulation is essential if you want safety. The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight.
- hugh3 16y ago
  The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight. There's only a few things that people are willing to pay $1000 a pound to send into space. One of them is communications relays. Another is cameras. The third is themselves. I'm hopeful that space tourism will be the killer app for human spaceflight, because the current model of "let's fucken just send people up to see what happens" has pretty much reached its endpoint: we know what happens.

avar 16y ago

I recommend these videos by Dr. Robert Zubrin and Jeff Greason for some context: http://www.youtube.com/user/spacevidcast#p/search/7/d9J7HgnxK10 http://www.youtube.com/user/spacevidcast#p/search/7/d9J7Hgnx... http://www.xcor.com/video/isdc.html http://www.xcor.com/video/isdc.html Essentially, NASA has lacked any concrete direction since the 70s, and projects like Constellation are stupid because they waste a lot of NASA money on developing NASA's own launch capacity. When NASA should just buy (or pay to upgrade) existing capacity such as the Delta IV Heavy or Falcon 9 to fit its needs. Most importantly, with development of launch capacity moved out of NASA, NASA will have to specify the ends, not the means. Being the party that sets the budget, makes the design, and implements the design is a very bad position to be in.

c1sc0 16y ago

What NASA (and society as a whole) needs is less focus on safety. Go do some wild things & if volunteers die in the process, accept that risk.