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Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. Orion is a multi-billion dollar

Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. Orion is a multi-billion dollar project. SLS (which will eventually be the launcher for Orion, should they ever plan a full design for a mission that uses it) is also a multi-billion dollar project. Orion has a budget of about $1 billion per year, SLS nearly $2 billion. So we're spending a crapton of money on these projects. But because of they way they are being managed and run they are hugely expensive compared to the work involved. Sadly, NASA manned spaceflight is mostly a jobs program now, and has been for a long time. The unmanned spaceflight part of NASA is still capable of executing on ambitious projects, the manned part more or less just sort of stumbles in the general direction of a goal with the hope that a lot of money will fall out of congress along the way (which it usually does).

deleted 12y ago
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ArtDev 12y ago
The Iraq war cost $1 billion per DAY. Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA. I recall when NASA needed to fix the Hubble telescope and the Air Force had TWO extra space telescopes in storage!
- danielweber 12y ago
  Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA. Imagine if all the money in a Monopoly box were real.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  The Air Force had two optical assemblies in storage, that's actually one of the cheapest parts of the entire system, though a very important part. Even if we could launch those "space telescopes" for free they'd be useless, they aren't complete units. And sure, it'd be nice if we spent more money on space, but that doesn't excuse the huge problems at NASA et al. There is a gap of perhaps an order of magnitude in capabilities between what we are doing and what would be possible if we gave space exploration a higher priority in terms of expenditures. But there is a gap of perhaps 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in capabilities between what NASA is doing and what would be possible if NASA manned spaceflight were run better and smarter. As an example, the Shuttle program spent around $5 billion a year consistently for nearly 30 years. In that time the major achievement of all that work was to put up the ISS. The ISS is nice now that the expense to put it up is just a sunk cost, but it was in no way worth how much it cost, nor was anything the Shuttle did worth the cost of the program. Ultimately every Shuttle launch ended up costing about as much as a Saturn V launch (and that's a Saturn V launch back at the start of the program, more likely later launches would have become cheaper due to various economies of scale and process improvements). So we had 30 years of operating a hugely expensive low Earth orbit spacecraft instead of 30 years and over 100 launches of a heavy lift rocket capable of sending payloads beyond Earth orbit. We could have had hundreds of people living and working in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars by now, but instead we got the Shuttle and ISS. Some of the fault there comes is due to congress, but there's no excusing the people at NASA from making and committing to these decisions.
  - Retric 12y ago
    The shuttle was a high fixed cost program, but the variable costs aka what you saved by scrapping a launch was fairly low. With 2x the budget they could have done something like 6x times as many launches and each launch could have sent 20-30 people to space. But there is simply little point in sending people to LEO which is the real issue.
  - hga 12y ago
    NASA started out as a public works project, one of its explicit goals was uplifting (my word) the South, and after Apollo it became almost entirely a public works project. So that $5 billion a year employing N zillion people became the real goal, not what it was ostensibly about.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  There was an IAMA on reddit a while back which was with JPL engineers. One of the engineers was asked what would happen if NASA had the funding of the pentagon. He said space colonies would be there and possibly an interstellar probe.
bsilvereagle 12y ago
> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. I've had several highly intelligent & competent friends opt to not work at NASA because the salary was 66% of competing offers where they would still be doing cools things. With some more money, NASA could have competitive salaries to attract more talent.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  NASA has a tremendous pool of talent, that's not the problem. The problem is the bureaucracy and the organization. Just compare the unmanned vs manned parts of NASA. On the unmanned side there is a huge diversity of projects, mission architectures, and destinations, and a lot of recent accomplishments across the Solar System. They take the effort to separate out technological development projects, they use incremental development processes, they build on what they've accomplished previously, they deal with budget constraints in sensible ways, etc. They still have huge problems from time to time and are still hugely bureaucracy heavy, but they get things done. On the manned side things are completely different. The average project is some huge multi-billion dollar venture of questionable value, with a reasonable chance the project will be cancelled partway through (X-33/VentureStar, Constellation, etc.) In large part a lot of the blame for that falls on LBJ and the way he pushed the Apollo program through congress. LBJ was a consummate politician and he used every political horse trading trick in the book to make Apollo happen, largely by siting manufacturing and staffing in powerful congressional districts, funneling funding to those areas. A situation that has continued to exist through the present day and is a huge driver for the shape of NASA manned spaceflight (it is the entire reason the SLS exists, for example).
  - bsilvereagle 12y ago
    > NASA has a tremendous pool of talent Yes, they're all retiring. All the up and coming talent is going elsewhere because they don't have to deal with mountains of paperwork to buy $50 worth of parts.
phkahler 12y ago
>> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. Exactly. NASA wasn't doing anything along these lines until they got their budget cut and some competition. I'm guessing mostly the budget cut because they were too busy spending lots of money in someones district to do anything different. Finally someone said "just stop that '70s stuff" and now we're getting somewhere. BTW I know the SLS makes a lot of reuse of shuttle launch hardware, but it is still a change.

deleted 12y ago

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ArtDev 12y ago

The Iraq war cost $1 billion per DAY. Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA. I recall when NASA needed to fix the Hubble telescope and the Air Force had TWO extra space telescopes in storage!

danielweber 12y ago
Imagine if a even small amount of money was shifted from the military to NASA. Imagine if all the money in a Monopoly box were real.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
The Air Force had two optical assemblies in storage, that's actually one of the cheapest parts of the entire system, though a very important part. Even if we could launch those "space telescopes" for free they'd be useless, they aren't complete units. And sure, it'd be nice if we spent more money on space, but that doesn't excuse the huge problems at NASA et al. There is a gap of perhaps an order of magnitude in capabilities between what we are doing and what would be possible if we gave space exploration a higher priority in terms of expenditures. But there is a gap of perhaps 1 to 2 orders of magnitude in capabilities between what NASA is doing and what would be possible if NASA manned spaceflight were run better and smarter. As an example, the Shuttle program spent around $5 billion a year consistently for nearly 30 years. In that time the major achievement of all that work was to put up the ISS. The ISS is nice now that the expense to put it up is just a sunk cost, but it was in no way worth how much it cost, nor was anything the Shuttle did worth the cost of the program. Ultimately every Shuttle launch ended up costing about as much as a Saturn V launch (and that's a Saturn V launch back at the start of the program, more likely later launches would have become cheaper due to various economies of scale and process improvements). So we had 30 years of operating a hugely expensive low Earth orbit spacecraft instead of 30 years and over 100 launches of a heavy lift rocket capable of sending payloads beyond Earth orbit. We could have had hundreds of people living and working in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars by now, but instead we got the Shuttle and ISS. Some of the fault there comes is due to congress, but there's no excusing the people at NASA from making and committing to these decisions.
- Retric 12y ago
  The shuttle was a high fixed cost program, but the variable costs aka what you saved by scrapping a launch was fairly low. With 2x the budget they could have done something like 6x times as many launches and each launch could have sent 20-30 people to space. But there is simply little point in sending people to LEO which is the real issue.
- hga 12y ago
  NASA started out as a public works project, one of its explicit goals was uplifting (my word) the South, and after Apollo it became almost entirely a public works project. So that $5 billion a year employing N zillion people became the real goal, not what it was ostensibly about.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
There was an IAMA on reddit a while back which was with JPL engineers. One of the engineers was asked what would happen if NASA had the funding of the pentagon. He said space colonies would be there and possibly an interstellar probe.

bsilvereagle 12y ago

> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. I've had several highly intelligent & competent friends opt to not work at NASA because the salary was 66% of competing offers where they would still be doing cools things. With some more money, NASA could have competitive salaries to attract more talent.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
NASA has a tremendous pool of talent, that's not the problem. The problem is the bureaucracy and the organization. Just compare the unmanned vs manned parts of NASA. On the unmanned side there is a huge diversity of projects, mission architectures, and destinations, and a lot of recent accomplishments across the Solar System. They take the effort to separate out technological development projects, they use incremental development processes, they build on what they've accomplished previously, they deal with budget constraints in sensible ways, etc. They still have huge problems from time to time and are still hugely bureaucracy heavy, but they get things done. On the manned side things are completely different. The average project is some huge multi-billion dollar venture of questionable value, with a reasonable chance the project will be cancelled partway through (X-33/VentureStar, Constellation, etc.) In large part a lot of the blame for that falls on LBJ and the way he pushed the Apollo program through congress. LBJ was a consummate politician and he used every political horse trading trick in the book to make Apollo happen, largely by siting manufacturing and staffing in powerful congressional districts, funneling funding to those areas. A situation that has continued to exist through the present day and is a huge driver for the shape of NASA manned spaceflight (it is the entire reason the SLS exists, for example).
- bsilvereagle 12y ago
  > NASA has a tremendous pool of talent Yes, they're all retiring. All the up and coming talent is going elsewhere because they don't have to deal with mountains of paperwork to buy $50 worth of parts.

phkahler 12y ago

>> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. Exactly. NASA wasn't doing anything along these lines until they got their budget cut and some competition. I'm guessing mostly the budget cut because they were too busy spending lots of money in someones district to do anything different. Finally someone said "just stop that '70s stuff" and now we're getting somewhere. BTW I know the SLS makes a lot of reuse of shuttle launch hardware, but it is still a change.