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You're half right. I worked for NASA on Hubble. I guarantee you we were not living high on the hog. Holiday inn for 6 weeks at a time, cheapest flights for trav

You're half right. I worked for NASA on Hubble. I guarantee you we were not living high on the hog. Holiday inn for 6 weeks at a time, cheapest flights for travel, cheapest everything. They balked at a $12 meal once when It was within an hour or so of a flight home once. We had trouble buying $300 hard drives at times (to run $100k software on). My engineer's salary was modest at best. But yes, Congress makes all that "sacrifice" irrelevant due to the absurdity of their whims. Another project I workded on: Al Gore literally had a dream one night, resulting in a colossal clusterfuck called Triana - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite). That's $100 million, wasted on a politician's fantasy of being able to see the whole sunlit side of the Earth. What would Musk have done with that money?

3am 14y ago
Even sadder, Triana costed only 1/3 of what is spent on the war in Afganistan each day. I would prefer to see people in NASA enjoying wide arrays of 15K drives, competitive salaries, and business class seats...
- MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
  Perhaps we can even splurge on SSDs with that kind of money. Spinning disks are so obsolete when we're talking that much cash.
  - ars 14y ago
    Not when you are talking about storing Petabytes, which NASA does routinely.
joering2 14y ago
"The satellite's original purpose was to provide a near-continuous view of the entire Earth and make that live image available via the Internet." Don't believe a word this scumbag is saying. Yeah, they would give you one per day 10x zoomed photo, while giving NSA/TSA/CIA 24/7 life-feed of what you and 3 other billion people living on this side of Earth are doing.
mangodrunk 14y ago
I think your characterization is wrong. It seems that you Bush canned the project. According to the asked the National Academy of Sciences whether the mission was "strong and scientifically vital." What information do you have that they didn't?
- damoncali 14y ago
  I was there. It was a political sales job from day one, with people searching high and low for scientific justification for Gore's folly. I don't mean to disproportionately abuse Gore - he was just the main character in this plot and did a lot to make it easy political pickings. Republicans were obviously very keen on killing it once they caught wind of it. I do recall they eventually found some instruments to put on the thing, but it was bass-ackwards. You don't launch a satellite into a very specific orbit that allows for a pretty picture, and then go looking for science to justify it. You come up with the science, and try to sell your way into the proper orbit. The bottom line is that a presidential hopeful said "I want this stupid thing", and NASA said, "How high, sir?" Then, after much handwaving and scrounging of scientific merit, the victorious politicians (Bush, et al) said, "never mind - scrap it." Insanely wasteful.
jerf 14y ago
By no means did I mean to imply anyone was living high on the hog or that NASA is rolling in money. I just don't think the solution to that problem is more money. My personal hope is that partnership with private space companies will allow NASA to be more NASA than they can be today. If they are able to refocus into a stronger research role and not be singly responsible for a complete space infrastructure I think it should free up a bunch of funds, and while nothing can change the fact that it is by its very nature a creature of Congress, a lot of the more obvious pork opportunities will be eliminated. And should NASA be forced to abandon a project, having at least the choice of having it picked up by industry is a good thing. This is far more likely to solve the core problems than more money, and once the problems are solved, if the whole system starts clicking along better and making better progress, then I'd be relatively happy as a tax payer to give them more money.

3am 14y ago

Even sadder, Triana costed only 1/3 of what is spent on the war in Afganistan each day. I would prefer to see people in NASA enjoying wide arrays of 15K drives, competitive salaries, and business class seats...

MiguelHudnandez 14y ago
Perhaps we can even splurge on SSDs with that kind of money. Spinning disks are so obsolete when we're talking that much cash.
- ars 14y ago
  Not when you are talking about storing Petabytes, which NASA does routinely.

joering2 14y ago

"The satellite's original purpose was to provide a near-continuous view of the entire Earth and make that live image available via the Internet." Don't believe a word this scumbag is saying. Yeah, they would give you one per day 10x zoomed photo, while giving NSA/TSA/CIA 24/7 life-feed of what you and 3 other billion people living on this side of Earth are doing.

mangodrunk 14y ago

I think your characterization is wrong. It seems that you Bush canned the project. According to the asked the National Academy of Sciences whether the mission was "strong and scientifically vital." What information do you have that they didn't?

damoncali 14y ago
I was there. It was a political sales job from day one, with people searching high and low for scientific justification for Gore's folly. I don't mean to disproportionately abuse Gore - he was just the main character in this plot and did a lot to make it easy political pickings. Republicans were obviously very keen on killing it once they caught wind of it. I do recall they eventually found some instruments to put on the thing, but it was bass-ackwards. You don't launch a satellite into a very specific orbit that allows for a pretty picture, and then go looking for science to justify it. You come up with the science, and try to sell your way into the proper orbit. The bottom line is that a presidential hopeful said "I want this stupid thing", and NASA said, "How high, sir?" Then, after much handwaving and scrounging of scientific merit, the victorious politicians (Bush, et al) said, "never mind - scrap it." Insanely wasteful.

jerf 14y ago

By no means did I mean to imply anyone was living high on the hog or that NASA is rolling in money. I just don't think the solution to that problem is more money. My personal hope is that partnership with private space companies will allow NASA to be more NASA than they can be today. If they are able to refocus into a stronger research role and not be singly responsible for a complete space infrastructure I think it should free up a bunch of funds, and while nothing can change the fact that it is by its very nature a creature of Congress, a lot of the more obvious pork opportunities will be eliminated. And should NASA be forced to abandon a project, having at least the choice of having it picked up by industry is a good thing. This is far more likely to solve the core problems than more money, and once the problems are solved, if the whole system starts clicking along better and making better progress, then I'd be relatively happy as a tax payer to give them more money.