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I talked with a NASA engineer in 1998 who was working on the planned Europa probe, and hoping it would be funded enough to include a lander and not just a Europ
by bfe 13y ago
I talked with a NASA engineer in 1998 who was working on the planned Europa probe, and hoping it would be funded enough to include a lander and not just a Europa orbiter. Sad to see how little progress we've made since then, and how arbitrarily the cause advances.
Even more, it's continuously sad to see how arbitrarily NASA's space missions, and overarching goals and strategies, in both robotic exploration and human spaceflight, fluctuate almost randomly with the whims of incoming and outgoing congresspeople and presidents. Space exploration missions by their nature have a longer timeline than the terms and attention spans of elected officials. NASA has no real chief executive but a board of directors with 536 people on it, all of whom have dozens of more important priorities, none of whom has expertise in its operations, and almost all of whom don't have the qualifications to be a substitute science teacher in middle school.
Our space program would be light-years ahead (maybe even literally) if it were just given its annual funding in a single block grant with a simple mandate to further the exploration and settlement of space, period, full stop, overseen by a real board of unelected technocratic experts, and with any specific direction from Congress forbidden.
- Zigurd 13y agoAt least NASA is out from under Cold War hidden agendas and can be an actual science institution. It will take some time for that to fully shake out.
- mortenjorck 13y agoAlas, that was the only way it ever got serious funding.
- rbanffy 13y agoExplore space while you pretend to be in the military is not that bad. Space exploration has a lot of military implications, even if the military does not pay the bills.
- gaius 13y agoThat is the Captain Kirk model of space exploration.
- rbanffy 13y agoAs long as it works, I'm in.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoYou either feed your country's solders, or you gonna have to feed enemy solders. Same can happen with space I think.
- Zigurd 13y agoApart from reconnaissance and showing that you have ICBMs that work, space is overrated for militarization. Fear our threat from Mars!?
- logfromblammo 13y agoAbout everything that humans can use to reach a destination in space can also be weaponized. If nothing else, a simple space rock dropped down the planetary gravity well can make a huge boom when it hits the bottom.
- rbanffy 13y agoAlso, nukes are not very effective against spaceborne targets. There is no air to heat and no shockwave, therefore, space is prime real estate.
- lutorm 13y agoYeah, it's funny how getting $100k from NASA in research grants requires proposals and peer review, but super-expensive interplanetary probes happen, or not, without any scientist input whatsoever.
- drjesusphd 13y ago> super-expensive interplanetary probes happen, or not, without any scientist input whatsoever. I think that's an exaggeration, no?
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago>with any specific direction from Congress forbidden The only way for a present Congress to bind a future Congress like so would be by way of a Constitutional amendment. That seems like overkill. An alternative is giving NASA independence in the model of the Federal Reserve, FDA, or NIH. This is more workable. The problem is the public doesn't value space travel per se. There are sound economic reasons for maintaining an independent central bank. Voters understand the benefits of better medicine. But space travel is less accepted in itself. It is pitched as an article of national prestige, or as a way of encouraging other technological development. At its core, NASA suffers from an asset-liability mismatch. Its liabilities, missions, carry decade-long terms. Its asset, Congressional funding, comes in election cycles. A myopic NASA, considering only projects realisable in the current election cycle, would be disastrous. Moving to locking in, each year, NASA funding for the next N years seems like a good first step. It avoids the messiness of NASA's year-to-year budget variance. It also side-steps the politics of granting NASA independence.
- jordanb 13y agoA good way to fund NASA and the NSF would be to create a "technology trust fund" funded by a small tax on the sale of gadgets and software. This would operate like the National Highway Trust Fund, which helps maintain the interstate highway system and is funded through a fuel tax. Because the money comes from a tax dedicated to the purpose, congress doesn't get to change the funding formula every time they pass a budget. While a future congress could dissolve the fund, that's a lot bigger step than adding or deleting appropriations during the budgetary hog-trading process.
- bfe 13y ago> "An alternative is giving NASA independence in the model of the Federal Reserve, FDA, or NIH." This would almost certainly be the best way forward.
- JumpCrisscross 13y agoThe politics would be arduous. If NASA can choose which projects it pursues it can also choose where to base operations. NASA has facilities in states and Congressional districts which make no sense beyond politics. Those who stand to lose from a de-politicisation of NASA would bring a hard fight. That is the political reality.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoBureaucracy and politics are a bitch. Lately there's been the JWST overruns which have been screwing over a lot of the NASA space science budget (it's probably worth it but damn it's inconvenient). But things are looking up and the biggest change is in launch costs. SpaceX thinks they'll be able to operate a reusable Falcon 9 for $5-7 million per launch. That seems crazy but if you look at the math it's pretty sound. That sort of change, with a first generation reusable vehicle even, will revolutionize spaceflight, especially unmanned space science missions. It'll make it possible to fund small space science missions using crowd funding. It'll open up interplanetary science missions to a huge number of colleges, universities and research organizations. A lot of the cost of space missions comes about due to the high cost of launch carrying through to every aspect of the mission (if the launch costs $200 million then you can't just launch a $1 million spacecraft, that's a waste, you also need to have a very high (say >90%) chance of mission success so you engineer accordingly). Within the next few decades there will be fleets upon fleets of science spacecraft looking at the stars and roaming about the Solar System.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoYour wish sounds very romantic. I place my bet on commercial exploration. Private companies soon will have money that can be compared to government's income, and government will be only one among many possible investors.