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NASA’s newest rocket is a colossal waste of money
- acqbu 4y agohttps://archive.ph/pwkc4 https://archive.ph/pwkc4
- seydor 4y agoLaunching people into space should not be a priority at all. Most of the western world is dangerously aging, but there arent any (large scale) anti-aging projects.
- gravelc 4y agoEveryone who has ever been born is dangerously aging as far as I can make out. Doesn’t seem unique to one hemisphere.
- melling 4y agoThe associated cost with aging is the real problem. Alzheimer’s, for example, is about $300 billion a year, on the way to $1 trillion. https://www.ajmc.com/view/economic-burden-of-alzheimer-disease-and-managed-care-considerations https://www.ajmc.com/view/economic-burden-of-alzheimer-disea...
- dark-star 4y agoThis is probably only because the US "health system" charges ridiculous amounts of money for Aspirin to arbitrarily inflate the prices
- garyrob 4y ago"Everyone who has ever been born is dangerously aging as far as I can make out." Except for those who have already dangerously aged a bit too far.
- Keyframe 4y agoGetting off the planet is a priority, among many others.
- seydor 4y agowith the genetic makeup developed entirely by and for planet earth? How is that a reasonable position
- hackflip 4y agoEvolution isn't paused
- loonster 4y agoSo evolution is just going to stop? Given enough time, humans will evolve to better survive their new homes.
- seydor 4y agoevolution works over millions of years. The whole of human history is ~200 generations , during which nothing changed. And no animal ever evolved to fly or live in outer space
- Keyframe 4y agoThat's a bit silly position to take. Different take would be if something happens to the planet, we all go. We need redundancy. Let alone all of the other possible benefits, starting with resources.
- jbverschoor 4y agoSo we can have wars and destroy that one too? Maybe first try to fix the problems here
- Keyframe 4y agoWe can do multiple things at once. Weird, right?
- zeryx 4y agoMaking it easier to have kids is the solution here, age related death is the natural equalizer
- bryanlarsen 4y agohttps://www.startus-insights.com/innovators-guide/4-top-anti-aging-medicine-startups-out-of-204/ https://www.startus-insights.com/innovators-guide/4-top-anti... lists 204 startups, more than the number of rocket startups. Calico alone has received $2.5B in funding, which is more than SpaceX has received in any one of its rounds.
- mhaberl 4y agoI completely disagree. Western world is aging, bu we don't have a global issue of aging (e.g. population of Africa is growing) - as a species humans will survive this issue. However - when (not if) an asteroid hits, we are all gone. We mostly can't anticipate a hit, and even if we could, we could just watch it destroy us. We must become multiplanetary species to survive.
- seydor 4y agoAfrica is not funding research though. And the hypothetical asteroid is much less likely than a truly deadly pandemic or nuclear or biological war. Humans will never become multiplanetary. Another, engineered species will
- fastball 4y ago> there arent any anti-aging projects Yeahhh, so this isn't true. Just because you don't know about them doesn't mean they don't exist.
- hrnnnnnn 4y agoThere are though. One such is Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation
- bergie 4y agoJust like everything else in the globalised economy, young people are being manufactured at scale in places where the manufacturing costs are lower (for instance, Africa). So “aging western society” is mostly a question of logistics.
- kurupt213 4y agoYoung Africans aren’t a replacement for westerners. They are culturally too dissimilar.
- krapp 4y ago>but there arent any anti-aging projects Sure there are. The coming environmental collapse, the collapse of technological civilization soon to follow, increasingly virulent pandemics, violence, poverty, hunger, the rise of global fascism and war, self-driving cars plowing into pedestrians. The future presents a bountiful cornucopia of options for never reaching adulthood.
- kurupt213 4y agoOld age gets us all. Deal with it.
- djmips 4y agoComparing the price of a craft that can go to the moon with an orbital launcher is pretty unfair don't you think?
- thematrixturtle 4y agoHuh? SpaceX's Starship is designed to go to Mars.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoAnybody can design anything to go anywhere. Starship doesn't exist.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoStarship exists as much as SLS does.
- Isinlor 4y agoTo me it looks very real: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/rvmKpUhryN6qQmNffvqnXH-970-80.jpg.webp https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/rvmKpUhryN6qQmNffvqnXH-970...
- djmips 4y ago"Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for instance, has shown it is possible to build reusable rockets that can send astronauts and cargo into space for around $50m per launch, far less than the projected $2bn (or more) for each ride aboard the sls" - that $50m is not Starship pricing that's the more run-of-the-mill Falcon 9.
- croes 4y agoAnd Teslas are designed to drive autonomous
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- temptemptemp111 4y ago
- mempko 4y agoWhat kind of market is it called when there is only one buyer for a product? What's so stupid about this article is that Starship too is part of Artemis program.
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- dannyfraser 4y agoIt's called a monopsony.
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- tech2 4y agoThat would be a monopsony, making NASA a monopsonist.
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- leto_ii 4y ago> Within the next six months, SpaceX will put Starship into orbit. Really? I haven't heard news about Starship in quite a while now. > Its biggest rocket yet, the heavy-lift vehicle will be able to carry similar payloads into space as the sls for, Mr Musk reckons, just a few million dollars a launch. Mr. Musk reckons all sorts of stuff, mostly fanciful. He has also been reckoning that Tesla will achieve full self driving next year, for the past 7 years or so. He has also reckoned that Neuralink will allow people to communicate telepathically, that hyperloops make sense, that we'll have Earth to Earth rocket transport, that the boring company will revolutionize tunneling etc. So far NASA has delivered vastly more than Elon Musk. > Given the increasing competition from companies such as Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, it is hard to see a role for nasa’s bloated sls. Bloated SLS may be, but has Blue Origin actually done anything useful? Joy rides for billionaires don't count.
- cyberge99 4y agoThere have been some Defense missions that sent “unlabeled” payloads to LEO, but I agree with you. The learning and takeaways from Nasa launches are highly underestimated here in the comments. Also, ask any Nasa engineer if they’re in a dead end job/industry; you’d be remise to find one.
- Isinlor 4y agoIt's not just Mr. Musk reckoning stuff, but NASA too. Artemis program will not land on the Moon without Starship. In fact, SLS is almost useless without Starship due to 2 billion launch cost. There are no payloads for SLS besides Artemis program. Even Europa Clipper spacecraft will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.
- CaptArmchair 4y agoThis is the extreme take that's echoed across online fora by proponents of commercial enterprises such as SpaceX. There's an big argument to be made for the efficient investment of "taxpayer money". Then again, the SLS program does fund the private space industry. While it's easy to dismiss it as a mere "jobs program", it did / does provide a bed for the next generation of engineers to learn, gain knowledge, become experts and so on. It also provided a bed for contractors and subcontractors to grow their businesses. Just like the Apollo program did. The big difference with the likes of SpaceX is that the latter aims to provide a completely integrated platform with all the components. At a fraction of the cost. In a way, SpaceX aims to mimic Apple's business model. It's already a commercial brand in it's own right rather then some white-label name. While choosing the cheaper, efficient option would seemingly be preferable, a public government isn't a private customer. It's the 'res publica' that represents society and its manifold interests. So, that leaves us a poignant question: Would the cheap price and efficiency offered by a single private actor who does everything, really be worth trading in supporting a diverse, competitive, advanced space industry as part of a public mission? After all, when taxpayers point fingers to the Senate, let's not forget that this institution exists in a democratic model which the people of the United States have chosen as part of their own representation over the past 250 odd years. Pork and barrel politics are - ultimately - part and parcel of a well-functioning consensus model that doesn't let one dominant voice determine whose interests should be favored at the expense of all others. Finally, in the grand scheme of things, NASA's budget in FY2020 represented 0.48% of all federal expenses. As far as the taxpayer is concerned, the cost of SLS over a decade pertains to a negligible fraction of their contributions through taxation on an individual level.
- bradgessler 4y agoI don’t think people understand how bad the charter is for SLS. Obama tried to cancel the program (called Orion then) and Congress brought this back. The rocket you see standing on the launchpad has 4 used space shuttle engines strapped to the bottom of it because Congress mandated they have to use existing components. Imagine optimizing the design of a rocket for a congressional mandate like this—how does that provide a bed for the next generation of engineers?
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- tablespoon 4y agoThou shalt not blaspheme the market by collectively building anything. This is the 11th commandment, handed down by the Economist in the City.