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It feels weird seeing boondoggles like the Senate Launch System actually deliver. On the one hand it’s exciting because we’re actually really possibly maybe fin

by n8cpdx 4y ago

It feels weird seeing boondoggles like the Senate Launch System actually deliver. On the one hand it’s exciting because we’re actually really possibly maybe finally going back to the moon. On the other hand, it is at the price of, minimum, $1,000,000,000/launch. A successful launch doesn’t actually change the reality that it was and still is largely politically viable only as a jobs/pork program. I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model. I’ve been waiting for this since I was in the fifth grade, so I should be happy. But then, I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago.

eesmith 4y ago
> I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? Yes. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond... ] For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceﬂight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Space missions are not worth their cost only if one thinks about them as tight closed black boxes that don't produce any advancements in their own and other fields.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    If I hear the spinoff argument one more time, I'm going to gag. That's all a Panglossian argument that there was no other better way to have spent the money. In any case, several of Etzioni's arguments were clearly NOT thinking about tight closed black boxes. Here are three: > It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors. ... > We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. ... > the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves The quote from the LA Sentinel flips your black box argument around, pointing out the benefits come with a people cost: > .. argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)." The linked-to M.A. thesis has more direct quotes, like protestors who want some of the money diverted from the space program to feed some tens of thousands of people who don't have adequate food, nor comfortable homes from which to watch the Moon landing. These are issues we still delay facing.
  - philistine 4y ago
    Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first. The moon is an interesting destination for its Helium-3. We will run out at some point on Earth (Helium literally floats away), and going to the Moon for this resource could very well be our first extra-terrestrial mining operation.
    - bnralt 4y ago
      > Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first. The first geopositioning satellite[1], first satellite that broadcast of a human voice from space[2], and the first photos taken from orbit[3] all predate the first human in space[4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_6 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1
- GolfPopper 4y ago
  My family has copy of Mr. President[1], a 1967 game that simulates a US presidential election in fairly detailed fashion. As part of the game, the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates will have positions on a number of controversial issues, one of which is Space exploration, right up there with things like entitlement programs and Vietnam. As a kid in the 80s, most of the issues made sense as "yeah, people still debate this", but seeing space exploration there as a big, controversial thing while living through the heyday of the pre-Challenger shuttle program always gave me this strong sense of cognitive dissonance. 1. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/476/mr-president https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/476/mr-president
kube-system 4y ago
> A successful launch doesn’t actually change the reality that it was and still is largely politically viable only as a jobs/pork program. This is sometimes seen as wasteful, on the surface, but there are very real benefits to doing things like this, even when it is much more expensive than alternatives: 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability 2. having backup launch capability 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US These are all generally good for furthering science and technology, and our economy, but it is critical in times of war (and as a deterrent to war) The romantic nature of space is definitely the best way to sell these programs, but there are much more pragmatic reasons to be doing them.
- touch_abs 4y ago
  Im not sure you actually achieve any of this with the SLS, and NASA in general. 1 and 2 are irrelevant if the cost is too high for anything that isnt a political stunt, to be a real alternative it needs to be something that a commercial payload might plausibly choose. 3 and 4, are compromised by the political nature of NASA spending, I dont believe the current institution is capable of innovation. The talent of the people is uncertain, not due to the individuals, but the way work can become visible (also the hiring, promotion, and leadership determination is based on politics not merit) Apart from long range experiments, nasa is really the cutting edge at the moment. 5 is just another way tax money evaporates.
  - yazantapuz 4y ago
    > I dont believe the current institution is capable of innovation But leaving aside the SLS, there are missions like the mars rovers and the james webb telescope, that I think show innovation and scientific success (but I do not live on the us, so i have an incomplete view).
- skissane 4y ago
  > 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability SpaceX suddenly going out of business (as in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) seems rather unlikely. The same is true of ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. Absolute worse case scenario would be Chapter 11, in which the business continues to operate under new ownership, and the current owners lose everything – but even that doesn't seem that likely. Anyway, the chapter 11 scenario is still a risk with the cost-plus procurement SLS model – Boeing (or Aerojet Rocketdyne, or Lockheed Martin) going through chapter 11 might not have doomed SLS/Orion, but it likely would have caused delays. In fact, it is open to doubt whether SLS/Orion-style cost-plus contracting has any real advantage over commercial from a bankruptcy risk perspective, for two competing commercial providers must have less bankruptcy risk than a single non-commercial government contractor > 2. having backup launch capability Multiple commercial providers, like they've pursued for commercial cargo and crew to ISS, and are still planning to pursue for Artemis HLS, would meet that just as well as an SLS-style program could. Given they likely could have afforded at least two commercial systems for the cost of SLS+Orion, it seems this actually gives worse backup than commercial does. > 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US This doesn't seem relevant, given that the most likely firms to have provided NASA with a commercial SLS alternative – SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, etc – are all US firms anyway. In fact, IIRC, the NASA procurement documents for commercial crew and cargo, and Artemis HLS, all said only US firms could respond. ITAR makes it a lot harder for US space firms to offshore jobs than most other industries. > 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech While it is true that NASA doesn't own the engineering for the commercial programs, in the way they own SLS engineering, NASA engineers are still heavily involved in the commercial programs, for review/advice/consulting/sign-off/etc. This factor is the most plausible of all those you've mentioned, but it is unclear if having somewhat deeper engineering expertise among NASA employees (as opposed to US private sector space firms) is important enough to justify a procurement approach which costs billions over and above its commercial alternative > 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US This doesn't seem relevant for the same reasons as (3)
docdendrite 4y ago
Yes, many did feel that way and you can hear this for yourself in a small part of the documentary “Summer of Soul” by Questlove. In the film they show archival footage shot at the Harlem Culture Festival on the day of the Apollo 11 landing. The interviewees are resoundly unimpressed with the achievement. They cite the expense of the program, especially in lieu of the lacking services and dire maintenance of Harlem, NYC as a key reason for their lack of support.
- recuter 4y ago
  And what does Ja Rule think of all this? Edit: Questlove is a DJ. Origin of my question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc
  - BucketsMcG 4y ago
    Questlove does a lot of things, and invariably does them very well. But it's not about what he thinks.
- johnny22 4y ago
  i think of "Whitey on the moon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
- manigandham 4y ago
  Here's a classic letter by Ernst Stuhlinger to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration: "Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa" - https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/ https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
  - recuter 4y ago
    Additional food for thought about another sister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa#Relationship_to_colonialism_and_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa#Rel... https://web.archive.org/web/20181012074427/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181012074427/http://www.slate....
dools 4y ago
Whatever we can do, we can afford. Why are you concerned about commercial viability of a public good?
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Is it fair to categorise Space-X as "the winner of the competition designed by NASA to find a way to build rockets without having Senators interfere?" As in, SpaceX hired the engineers from NASA, got paid by NASA and basically built the rockets that were in fetal at NASA? I am not saying nothing innovative happened, I am asking is the difference taking the same engineers out of NASA or is there something else?
- mayama 4y ago
  What about lockheed martin, boeing and blue origin then. They also recruit from the same pool of engineers. LM/ULA gets paid even better with their cost+ contracts. LM/ULA even after getting paid handsomely are way behind in terms of cost/kg or human launchers.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    That's fair - but I suspect the same bureaucracy exists in Lockheed et al, as do the incentives to please senators / government that feed the next round of spending. The simple answer is to prevent small numbers of people having outsize influence on massive spending. So for example, billionaires... This is a thing I have been noodling on for ages but have no answers other than "you need a clear mission and people at the top focused on that mission even if they are not clear their retirement packages are secure" (or maybe their retirement packages were secure some way in ...)
failuser 4y ago
- piokoch 4y ago
  Why? Because he bought Twitter and said that he does not like censorship?
  - paparush 4y ago
    Because Twitter is a huge distraction as apparently Musk has made himself moderator in chief. Besides Tom Mueller actually makes the rockets go brrrrrr.
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    Emphasis on said versus acts like
- MPSimmons 4y ago
  Honestly, SpaceX has been delivering results steadily and with seemingly no change in rate or quality since he was distracted by Twitter. The recent news [1] that he isn't doing the lead engineering at Starbase means this likely won't be felt there either. I suppose it really boils down to whether the organization was succeeding _because_ of him or _in spite_ of him. Maybe he was necessary to get it where it is and can step back and have the company continue to perform well. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/spacex-shakes-up-starbase-leadership-in-starship-push.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/spacex-shakes-up-starbase-le...
  - jedberg 4y ago
    I think the concern is not their output but the fact that Musk could one day just decide he will no longer provide rockets when $political_party is in power.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  > getting less and less reliable option for space launches By what metric, other than "I hate Musk so I slander his enterprises"?
risyachka 4y ago
With mindset like this, Apollo would never have happened.
- iso1631 4y ago
  And what would have been lost?
  - Maken 4y ago
    Several hundred kilograms of lunar rocks.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Lunar samples could have been returned by unmanned vehicles at a fraction of the cost of Apollo. The Russians did just that! Maybe not hundreds of kilograms, but enough to get the major science results (moon is evolved not primitive, oxygen isotopes, volatile depletion, europium anomaly). Unmanned vehicles could even have reached the polar regions, which Apollo never could do.
  - zanderwohl 4y ago
    There are a lot of technologies that advanced tremendously due to developing things the Apollo Program needed: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS....
ISL 4y ago
People definitely protested the Apollo program. The primary objections of which I am aware focused on Apollo's prioritization above addressing poverty: https://www.ajc.com/news/why-civil-rights-activists-protested-apollo-and-the-space-program/Va6enom7PoL89mtuxFRmOK/ https://www.ajc.com/news/why-civil-rights-activists-proteste... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
mcdonje 4y ago
Money spent on NASA is not a boondoggle. Much of the money goes to paying talented scientists and engineers well. Their R&D is vital to our economy. You may be interested in this: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/ https://spinoff.nasa.gov/
- dantheman 4y ago
  Building a rocket that is hard to launch and costs a fortune is a boondoggle. Talented scientists and engineers can waste their time building the wrong thing.
  - mcdonje 4y ago
    What other current rocket system matches the specs of the SLS, or has the same goals? The only thing comparable is Starship, which isn't ready yet. There are legitimate complaints to be made about things like cost plus accounting, but the project itself isn't a boondoggle. Like, the people who greenlit it aren't idiots. If you want to complain about boondoggles, look at the military.
- jovial_cavalier 4y ago
  If all talented scientists and engineers do is work on boondoggles, maybe it is not so vital to pay them?
  - mcdonje 4y ago
    Who is the boondoggle decider?
    - jovial_cavalier 4y ago
      I'm just saying, you can't say "It's not a boondoggle because a lot of talented engineers got paid!" That's not, a priori, a good thing.
- thisisbrians 4y ago
  Much of it goes to enrich contractors. Lockheed Martin as a usual suspect here, for example.
lizknope 4y ago
> I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model. The public started to lose interest in Apollo after a couple of years. There was supposed to be an Apollo 18, 19, and 20. They were cancelled. One of them turned into Skylab. The others are in museums. You can walk under a Saturn V in Florida and see the other in Houston.
Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
The big thing that's missing from this discussion is the primary reason for the US manned space mission program and it's ultimate goal per JFK in 1961, 4 months into his presidency, of "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The previous president Eisenhower allowed the Soviets to get ahead of us starting with Sputnik to avoid them whining forever about overflights of others' territory. To the point Wernher von Braun's team had to put ballast in their rocket payloads to make sure they wouldn't "accidentally" put something into orbit. This resulted a massive shock in the US which you can see in for example a whole bunch of science education programs spawned after Sputnik, and to the rest of the world put into doubt our technological superiority. After the Soviets were the first to put a man in orbit a month before JFK's speech and a few weeks before our first manned suborbital fight, the next spectacle was obviously a manned moon mission. Which we had a chance to beat them at although back in 1961 that was no sure thing. This would also fit in with the JFK campaign's fictitious "missile gap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
reaperducer 4y ago
boondoggles You should know that using words like that taints the rest of your comment. While you are welcome to your opinion, and expressing it is perfectly fine, you should be aware that other people may not take the remainder of what you write seriously. $1,000,000,000/launch A microwave oven used to cost more than a car. We learn, we innovate, we iterate, and eventually the cost comes down. But we have to start somewhere.
Aloha 4y ago
Each Apollo launch cost on the order of 3 billion dollars inflation adjusted, 1 billion seems like a bargain.
- Tepix 4y ago
  It will be much, much higher if you take into account the entire programy
  - Aloha 4y ago
    Yeah, I was comparing vehicle cost to vehicle cost, So yeah, Apollo was much higher, because of the costs to operate the tracking network, etc - which isnt rolled into this new program today.
mhh__ 4y ago
> And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Tom Lehrer
robomartin 4y ago
> I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago. We did some work on a camera system for the Artemis project. It will hopefully make it to the moon's surface by the third mission. Also worked on spacecraft going to the ISS. I don't think people --including most engineers-- have a good grasp of just how difficult it is to make anything going to space, much less anything that involves people. The simplest statement I can make is: Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time. Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse. Designing safe and reliable systems to go to the Moon or Mars is complex and hard to nail down to a schedule. This isn't like a software startup where you can deliver half a product and iterate (or even execute a full pivot) over time. You have to get it right or things fail in spectacular ways and people die. Imagine having to deliver your Social Media, online commerce or SaaS product with a full 100% working set of required features, non-trivial failure tolerance and uptime guarantee, or (to be dramatic) your entire family dies. A bit out there? Not so sure.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  "Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time. I was appalled when I learned about LEO atomic oxygen. "Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse." Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Or is this another Apollo Program timed with the solar cycle (which due to delays cut the latter short)?
  - robomartin 4y ago
    > Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Well, GCR's (Galactic Cosmic Rays) will go through just-about anything. I think I remember an experiment that measured penetration in water to over half a mile (800 meters). As such, all you can do is manage exposure...you are not going to stop them. On the moon one of the ideas is to pile-up regolith (moon dirt) to create better protection. Without that you would need to transport more material out there than might be possible. I am not aware of what long-term plans might look like today. I guess is that the ideal habitat will likely take the form of repurposing the rocket to become living quarters and bury it under as much regolith as it might be able to support. Of course, that implies suitable construction equipment to be available. I doubt astronauts are going to shovel the stuff at that scale. In terms of electronics, you try to keep things powered down to the extent possible. Circuits can self-destruct very quickly if powered-up. An unpowered circuit is less likely to suffer the same kind of damage. Beyond that, critical systems are typically designed to a fault-tolerance (FT) level. A single fault tolerant system can have one failure and still operate within mission parameters. You could have 2FT systems that will run after two failure. Because mass is important in going to space, FT doesn't necessarily fully duplicate a system (for example, triplicate copies of a system to be able to survive two failures). These days deeper analysis is possible and enhanced fault tolerance can be applied to selected functional units. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to test, test, test. NASA has a lot of publicly-available resources about this and more. Chapter 3 of this one has an overview of protection from space radiation: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sf_radiation_stu_bob.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sf_radi...
rswail 4y ago
NASA is a way to channel money to the US Military Industrial Complex. Rockets of the form of SLS are relevant not only to space exploration, but obviously to missile and ICBM/equivalent design. Boeing is maintained as a competitor for Airbus for national competitive reasons. As are the other contractors for NASA and the general MIC itself. The MIC is the biggest socialist redistribution of wealth in existence, it takes $800B/year from taxpayers and redistributes it to the relevant companies, which in return, commit to providing employment and general wealth distribution. The MIC even beats out the US Department of Agriculture, which is the most "socialist" of all the US departments. NASA does great stuff, it's science is unparalleled in the space world, but the projects and systems that are developed, particularly for space as opposed to aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) use space as the excuse for the wealth distribution. There's actually nothing wrong with that. EU has had national "champions" as companies for centuries. It just doesn't fit with the conventional view that the US is a "free capitalist market".

by n8cpdx 4y ago

eesmith 4y ago

> I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? Yes. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moondoggle-the-forgotten-opposition-to-the-apollo-program/262254/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond... ] For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceﬂight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.

squarefoot 4y ago
Space missions are not worth their cost only if one thinks about them as tight closed black boxes that don't produce any advancements in their own and other fields.
- eesmith 4y ago
  If I hear the spinoff argument one more time, I'm going to gag. That's all a Panglossian argument that there was no other better way to have spent the money. In any case, several of Etzioni's arguments were clearly NOT thinking about tight closed black boxes. Here are three: > It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors. ... > We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. ... > the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves The quote from the LA Sentinel flips your black box argument around, pointing out the benefits come with a people cost: > .. argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)." The linked-to M.A. thesis has more direct quotes, like protestors who want some of the money diverted from the space program to feed some tens of thousands of people who don't have adequate food, nor comfortable homes from which to watch the Moon landing. These are issues we still delay facing.
- philistine 4y ago
  Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first. The moon is an interesting destination for its Helium-3. We will run out at some point on Earth (Helium literally floats away), and going to the Moon for this resource could very well be our first extra-terrestrial mining operation.
  - bnralt 4y ago
    > Having TV blasted from space, GPS to know to turn at this intersection, and pictures of every roof on the planet is useful. None of those technologies could have happened if we didn't send people in tin cans first. The first geopositioning satellite[1], first satellite that broadcast of a human voice from space[2], and the first photos taken from orbit[3] all predate the first human in space[4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_6 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1
GolfPopper 4y ago
My family has copy of Mr. President[1], a 1967 game that simulates a US presidential election in fairly detailed fashion. As part of the game, the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates will have positions on a number of controversial issues, one of which is Space exploration, right up there with things like entitlement programs and Vietnam. As a kid in the 80s, most of the issues made sense as "yeah, people still debate this", but seeing space exploration there as a big, controversial thing while living through the heyday of the pre-Challenger shuttle program always gave me this strong sense of cognitive dissonance. 1. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/476/mr-president https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/476/mr-president

kube-system 4y ago

> A successful launch doesn’t actually change the reality that it was and still is largely politically viable only as a jobs/pork program. This is sometimes seen as wasteful, on the surface, but there are very real benefits to doing things like this, even when it is much more expensive than alternatives: 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability 2. having backup launch capability 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US These are all generally good for furthering science and technology, and our economy, but it is critical in times of war (and as a deterrent to war) The romantic nature of space is definitely the best way to sell these programs, but there are much more pragmatic reasons to be doing them.

touch_abs 4y ago
Im not sure you actually achieve any of this with the SLS, and NASA in general. 1 and 2 are irrelevant if the cost is too high for anything that isnt a political stunt, to be a real alternative it needs to be something that a commercial payload might plausibly choose. 3 and 4, are compromised by the political nature of NASA spending, I dont believe the current institution is capable of innovation. The talent of the people is uncertain, not due to the individuals, but the way work can become visible (also the hiring, promotion, and leadership determination is based on politics not merit) Apart from long range experiments, nasa is really the cutting edge at the moment. 5 is just another way tax money evaporates.
- yazantapuz 4y ago
  > I dont believe the current institution is capable of innovation But leaving aside the SLS, there are missions like the mars rovers and the james webb telescope, that I think show innovation and scientific success (but I do not live on the us, so i have an incomplete view).
skissane 4y ago
> 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability SpaceX suddenly going out of business (as in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) seems rather unlikely. The same is true of ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. Absolute worse case scenario would be Chapter 11, in which the business continues to operate under new ownership, and the current owners lose everything – but even that doesn't seem that likely. Anyway, the chapter 11 scenario is still a risk with the cost-plus procurement SLS model – Boeing (or Aerojet Rocketdyne, or Lockheed Martin) going through chapter 11 might not have doomed SLS/Orion, but it likely would have caused delays. In fact, it is open to doubt whether SLS/Orion-style cost-plus contracting has any real advantage over commercial from a bankruptcy risk perspective, for two competing commercial providers must have less bankruptcy risk than a single non-commercial government contractor > 2. having backup launch capability Multiple commercial providers, like they've pursued for commercial cargo and crew to ISS, and are still planning to pursue for Artemis HLS, would meet that just as well as an SLS-style program could. Given they likely could have afforded at least two commercial systems for the cost of SLS+Orion, it seems this actually gives worse backup than commercial does. > 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US This doesn't seem relevant, given that the most likely firms to have provided NASA with a commercial SLS alternative – SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, etc – are all US firms anyway. In fact, IIRC, the NASA procurement documents for commercial crew and cargo, and Artemis HLS, all said only US firms could respond. ITAR makes it a lot harder for US space firms to offshore jobs than most other industries. > 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech While it is true that NASA doesn't own the engineering for the commercial programs, in the way they own SLS engineering, NASA engineers are still heavily involved in the commercial programs, for review/advice/consulting/sign-off/etc. This factor is the most plausible of all those you've mentioned, but it is unclear if having somewhat deeper engineering expertise among NASA employees (as opposed to US private sector space firms) is important enough to justify a procurement approach which costs billions over and above its commercial alternative > 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US This doesn't seem relevant for the same reasons as (3)

docdendrite 4y ago

Yes, many did feel that way and you can hear this for yourself in a small part of the documentary “Summer of Soul” by Questlove. In the film they show archival footage shot at the Harlem Culture Festival on the day of the Apollo 11 landing. The interviewees are resoundly unimpressed with the achievement. They cite the expense of the program, especially in lieu of the lacking services and dire maintenance of Harlem, NYC as a key reason for their lack of support.

recuter 4y ago
And what does Ja Rule think of all this? Edit: Questlove is a DJ. Origin of my question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc
- BucketsMcG 4y ago
  Questlove does a lot of things, and invariably does them very well. But it's not about what he thinks.
johnny22 4y ago
i think of "Whitey on the moon" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
manigandham 4y ago
Here's a classic letter by Ernst Stuhlinger to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration: "Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa" - https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-a-1970-letter-to-a-nun-in-africa/ https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
- recuter 4y ago
  Additional food for thought about another sister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa#Relationship_to_colonialism_and_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa#Rel... https://web.archive.org/web/20181012074427/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181012074427/http://www.slate....

dools 4y ago

Whatever we can do, we can afford. Why are you concerned about commercial viability of a public good?

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

Is it fair to categorise Space-X as "the winner of the competition designed by NASA to find a way to build rockets without having Senators interfere?" As in, SpaceX hired the engineers from NASA, got paid by NASA and basically built the rockets that were in fetal at NASA? I am not saying nothing innovative happened, I am asking is the difference taking the same engineers out of NASA or is there something else?

mayama 4y ago
What about lockheed martin, boeing and blue origin then. They also recruit from the same pool of engineers. LM/ULA gets paid even better with their cost+ contracts. LM/ULA even after getting paid handsomely are way behind in terms of cost/kg or human launchers.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  That's fair - but I suspect the same bureaucracy exists in Lockheed et al, as do the incentives to please senators / government that feed the next round of spending. The simple answer is to prevent small numbers of people having outsize influence on massive spending. So for example, billionaires... This is a thing I have been noodling on for ages but have no answers other than "you need a clear mission and people at the top focused on that mission even if they are not clear their retirement packages are secure" (or maybe their retirement packages were secure some way in ...)

failuser 4y ago

piokoch 4y ago
Why? Because he bought Twitter and said that he does not like censorship?
- paparush 4y ago
  Because Twitter is a huge distraction as apparently Musk has made himself moderator in chief. Besides Tom Mueller actually makes the rockets go brrrrrr.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Emphasis on said versus acts like
MPSimmons 4y ago
Honestly, SpaceX has been delivering results steadily and with seemingly no change in rate or quality since he was distracted by Twitter. The recent news [1] that he isn't doing the lead engineering at Starbase means this likely won't be felt there either. I suppose it really boils down to whether the organization was succeeding _because_ of him or _in spite_ of him. Maybe he was necessary to get it where it is and can step back and have the company continue to perform well. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/spacex-shakes-up-starbase-leadership-in-starship-push.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/spacex-shakes-up-starbase-le...
- jedberg 4y ago
  I think the concern is not their output but the fact that Musk could one day just decide he will no longer provide rockets when $political_party is in power.
dotancohen 4y ago
> getting less and less reliable option for space launches By what metric, other than "I hate Musk so I slander his enterprises"?

risyachka 4y ago

With mindset like this, Apollo would never have happened.

iso1631 4y ago
And what would have been lost?
- Maken 4y ago
  Several hundred kilograms of lunar rocks.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Lunar samples could have been returned by unmanned vehicles at a fraction of the cost of Apollo. The Russians did just that! Maybe not hundreds of kilograms, but enough to get the major science results (moon is evolved not primitive, oxygen isotopes, volatile depletion, europium anomaly). Unmanned vehicles could even have reached the polar regions, which Apollo never could do.
- zanderwohl 4y ago
  There are a lot of technologies that advanced tremendously due to developing things the Apollo Program needed: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS....

ISL 4y ago

People definitely protested the Apollo program. The primary objections of which I am aware focused on Apollo's prioritization above addressing poverty: https://www.ajc.com/news/why-civil-rights-activists-protested-apollo-and-the-space-program/Va6enom7PoL89mtuxFRmOK/ https://www.ajc.com/news/why-civil-rights-activists-proteste... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon

mcdonje 4y ago

Money spent on NASA is not a boondoggle. Much of the money goes to paying talented scientists and engineers well. Their R&D is vital to our economy. You may be interested in this: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/ https://spinoff.nasa.gov/

dantheman 4y ago
Building a rocket that is hard to launch and costs a fortune is a boondoggle. Talented scientists and engineers can waste their time building the wrong thing.
- mcdonje 4y ago
  What other current rocket system matches the specs of the SLS, or has the same goals? The only thing comparable is Starship, which isn't ready yet. There are legitimate complaints to be made about things like cost plus accounting, but the project itself isn't a boondoggle. Like, the people who greenlit it aren't idiots. If you want to complain about boondoggles, look at the military.
jovial_cavalier 4y ago
If all talented scientists and engineers do is work on boondoggles, maybe it is not so vital to pay them?
- mcdonje 4y ago
  Who is the boondoggle decider?
  - jovial_cavalier 4y ago
    I'm just saying, you can't say "It's not a boondoggle because a lot of talented engineers got paid!" That's not, a priori, a good thing.
thisisbrians 4y ago
Much of it goes to enrich contractors. Lockheed Martin as a usual suspect here, for example.

lizknope 4y ago

> I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model. The public started to lose interest in Apollo after a couple of years. There was supposed to be an Apollo 18, 19, and 20. They were cancelled. One of them turned into Skylab. The others are in museums. You can walk under a Saturn V in Florida and see the other in Houston.

Throwawayaerlei 4y ago

The big thing that's missing from this discussion is the primary reason for the US manned space mission program and it's ultimate goal per JFK in 1961, 4 months into his presidency, of "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The previous president Eisenhower allowed the Soviets to get ahead of us starting with Sputnik to avoid them whining forever about overflights of others' territory. To the point Wernher von Braun's team had to put ballast in their rocket payloads to make sure they wouldn't "accidentally" put something into orbit. This resulted a massive shock in the US which you can see in for example a whole bunch of science education programs spawned after Sputnik, and to the rest of the world put into doubt our technological superiority. After the Soviets were the first to put a man in orbit a month before JFK's speech and a few weeks before our first manned suborbital fight, the next spectacle was obviously a manned moon mission. Which we had a chance to beat them at although back in 1961 that was no sure thing. This would also fit in with the JFK campaign's fictitious "missile gap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

reaperducer 4y ago

boondoggles You should know that using words like that taints the rest of your comment. While you are welcome to your opinion, and expressing it is perfectly fine, you should be aware that other people may not take the remainder of what you write seriously. $1,000,000,000/launch A microwave oven used to cost more than a car. We learn, we innovate, we iterate, and eventually the cost comes down. But we have to start somewhere.

Aloha 4y ago

Each Apollo launch cost on the order of 3 billion dollars inflation adjusted, 1 billion seems like a bargain.

Tepix 4y ago
It will be much, much higher if you take into account the entire programy
- Aloha 4y ago
  Yeah, I was comparing vehicle cost to vehicle cost, So yeah, Apollo was much higher, because of the costs to operate the tracking network, etc - which isnt rolled into this new program today.

mhh__ 4y ago

> And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Tom Lehrer

robomartin 4y ago

> I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago. We did some work on a camera system for the Artemis project. It will hopefully make it to the moon's surface by the third mission. Also worked on spacecraft going to the ISS. I don't think people --including most engineers-- have a good grasp of just how difficult it is to make anything going to space, much less anything that involves people. The simplest statement I can make is: Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time. Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse. Designing safe and reliable systems to go to the Moon or Mars is complex and hard to nail down to a schedule. This isn't like a software startup where you can deliver half a product and iterate (or even execute a full pivot) over time. You have to get it right or things fail in spectacular ways and people die. Imagine having to deliver your Social Media, online commerce or SaaS product with a full 100% working set of required features, non-trivial failure tolerance and uptime guarantee, or (to be dramatic) your entire family dies. A bit out there? Not so sure.

Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
"Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time. I was appalled when I learned about LEO atomic oxygen. "Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse." Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Or is this another Apollo Program timed with the solar cycle (which due to delays cut the latter short)?
- robomartin 4y ago
  > Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Well, GCR's (Galactic Cosmic Rays) will go through just-about anything. I think I remember an experiment that measured penetration in water to over half a mile (800 meters). As such, all you can do is manage exposure...you are not going to stop them. On the moon one of the ideas is to pile-up regolith (moon dirt) to create better protection. Without that you would need to transport more material out there than might be possible. I am not aware of what long-term plans might look like today. I guess is that the ideal habitat will likely take the form of repurposing the rocket to become living quarters and bury it under as much regolith as it might be able to support. Of course, that implies suitable construction equipment to be available. I doubt astronauts are going to shovel the stuff at that scale. In terms of electronics, you try to keep things powered down to the extent possible. Circuits can self-destruct very quickly if powered-up. An unpowered circuit is less likely to suffer the same kind of damage. Beyond that, critical systems are typically designed to a fault-tolerance (FT) level. A single fault tolerant system can have one failure and still operate within mission parameters. You could have 2FT systems that will run after two failure. Because mass is important in going to space, FT doesn't necessarily fully duplicate a system (for example, triplicate copies of a system to be able to survive two failures). These days deeper analysis is possible and enhanced fault tolerance can be applied to selected functional units. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to test, test, test. NASA has a lot of publicly-available resources about this and more. Chapter 3 of this one has an overview of protection from space radiation: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sf_radiation_stu_bob.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sf_radi...

rswail 4y ago

NASA is a way to channel money to the US Military Industrial Complex. Rockets of the form of SLS are relevant not only to space exploration, but obviously to missile and ICBM/equivalent design. Boeing is maintained as a competitor for Airbus for national competitive reasons. As are the other contractors for NASA and the general MIC itself. The MIC is the biggest socialist redistribution of wealth in existence, it takes $800B/year from taxpayers and redistributes it to the relevant companies, which in return, commit to providing employment and general wealth distribution. The MIC even beats out the US Department of Agriculture, which is the most "socialist" of all the US departments. NASA does great stuff, it's science is unparalleled in the space world, but the projects and systems that are developed, particularly for space as opposed to aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) use space as the excuse for the wealth distribution. There's actually nothing wrong with that. EU has had national "champions" as companies for centuries. It just doesn't fit with the conventional view that the US is a "free capitalist market".