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The dark future of American space exploration

62 points by mariusz79 12y ago

spiralpolitik 12y ago
I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment. Which is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that were spawned as a result.
- claar 12y ago
  This is a great point. However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the little work that got done. A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.
  - ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
    " I worked for 13 years in the public sector"-What does that mean in this context? You're implying that all public sector work is inefficient, shoddy, etc. For all we know, you worked at a DMV for 13 years programming COBOL mainframes.
    - shaftoe 12y ago
      It's all DMV COBOL mainframes.
  - mempko 12y ago
    Hierarchical management structures have nothing to do with government organizations. They exist in the private sector too as you described it. Assuming the government is grossly inefficient in all aspects is strange. What if some organizations in the government are inefficient, while others are not?
    - araes 12y ago
      Government is a classic example of a system where most members of the system can be good and efficient, yet the system as a whole can be clogged up by even a few crappy folks. It's like traffic with limited lanes. Decisions have to go thru certain chokes, and if there's a slow driver (inefficient bureaucrat) or a traffic jam (overworked), or a crash (time critical emergency), or a malicious troll (a troll) then things stop or slow down. Like a big road network, you get enough of these and flow becomes jerky, stop-start, non-linear, and efficiency drops. Meanwhile, nearly all drivers will report that they are good, rule abiding drivers (minus speeding (the occasional minor rule circumvention), which actually helps flow). Sure, groups become more valuable the bigger they get, cause of the combinatorial link complexity, but they also get harder to get anything done in cause you've got to check all those links to make sure actions will be accepted. Hierarchies just map this exponential complexity into something closer to an O(log(n)) tree with the caveat that you get flow constrictions as a tradeoff for not having to talk to everyone.
  - digikata 12y ago
    Your description of the work could describe a large corporation. I think its really difficult to separate the inefficiencies of government organizations and the inefficiencies of large organizations (public or private). And unfortunately, space projects are often large ventures with an added complicating factor of being funded by political budget whims.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - spiralpolitik 12y ago
    I've seen equal or worse inefficiencies in the private sector. While the root causes may be different, a badly managed organization is the same whether it is public or private.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      While their are also massive inefficiencies in the private sector, the public sector does not have the same ability to fail. Those private companies need to be efficient enough to avoid bankruptcy.
      - fargolime 12y ago
        Note that some of the private sector can't fail now either.
    - claar 12y ago
      Yes, but the private sector is more willing to restructure in order to become profitable; I never saw a single case of restructuring in 13 years. Instead people were promoted or moved to other roles in the few cases changes happened.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. I think much 3rd world corruption is a weird shadow/echo of Victorian era corruption. In the decades to come, this form of corruption in US governance will become equally quaint and exist in such echoes.
  - fapjacks 12y ago
    Truly, I think planetary science could really use a shit-hot startup.
    - Phlarp 12y ago
      So, like Space-x...?
      - fapjacks 12y ago
        Yes, sort of. There were some salient points made here about needing to get over the initial barrier to entry, and needing also some prerequisite commercial goal which obviates the current "Why would anyone want to go there?" kinds of questions. But yes, sort of like Space-X. But Space-X is really just trying to make cheaper rockets. While that's fine, I suppose, I don't think the revolution will be chemically-fueled. I'm hoping something like a space elevator or magic antigravity machines that will let all the other "innovators" iterate on the shoulders of those first giants, opening up space as a platform for the commoner. I'm thinking of some very elementary replication of previous industries, like the internet: Some very smart people build a platform (or infrastructure, or manufacturing process) which lets people build on top of it. Like Twitter and Facebook on the internet.
- alexqgb 12y ago
  It is extraordinarily unlikely that private investment would have backed the development and deployment of GPS. The effort spanned decades, cost fantastic sums, and was justified only on the basis that it could prevent nuclear annihilation. Indeed, were it not for the ultra-secret classification, it's unlikely that anything this ambitions and uncertain would have gotten through a civilian agency that was subject to Congress. In other words, top secret military technology that takes taxpayer support for granted is not all bad. That's an inconvenient truth for some people.
- savanaly 12y ago
  > I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment. So perhaps we shouldn't have done it? We know it is the right decision now, but only given knowledge that we didn't have at the time. If you play a lottery and win, that doesn't mean it was right to play it in the first place. It just means you were lucky.
  - rwallace 12y ago
    But the universe isn't a zero-sum game, and R&D is like a lottery whose expected outcome is strongly positive: the majority of tickets still lose, but the winners far more than pay for the losers.
happyscrappy 12y ago
I am strongly in favor of boosting NASA's budget, but the US still spends more on space than every other nation combined so I think saying it has a dark future is a bit hyperbolic. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/the-u-s-still-spends-more-on-space-than-every-other-country-combined/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/t...
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  China's spending isn't very transparent, and their costs are much lower, so dollar-for-dollar they are accomplishing more than Nasa is. And they're not just screwing around. They're planning to put humans on the Moon in a few years, which implies a huge and well funded effort.
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    That is a good thing, the US could use some credible competition.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
<meta> I am beginning to feel that Vox is more of a time-sink than a useful addition to my regular feed. This article is an example of why. It's long format, goes over well-trod ground, adds in some items that are politically interpreted a bit heavily, and ends up kicking off partisan discussions that don't go anywhere. They're like Op-Ed columns presented in Wikipedia format. If we had a thesis and supporting arguments you would at least know what you're dealing with and engage it on its own terms. But as it is, you're left either accepting this huge hunk of text or going through half a dozen items to nitpick it to death. Either choice is suboptimal. </meta> I'm a huge supporter of the space program. NASA lost its way a while back, like the 1970s, and is not the right tool for the job we have. It's no fault of NASA's -- every new administration and every new Congress feels free to whipsaw it into a new direction. We have some clear foundational science goals that NASA could supervise other competent organizations doing, like reducing cost-to-orbit 100-fold (mass-drivers, anybody?), creating a cheap, mass-production radioactive battery that can be used everywhere, or rewarding the first team to optically-image an earth-sized habitable exoplanet. Writing NASA a check won't help much of anything, because five years from now the money will all be re-allocated various political ways. Yes, I grok the multi-year planning thing. Not germane.
- blisterpeanuts 12y ago
  So what kind of organization(s) do you see doing a better job than Nasa? I would agree that it's a political and rather inefficient organization, like any government-funded agency, but I'm curious how exactly we could improve. Bear in mind that many of Nasa's best projects were undermined by politics. A new Administration comes into power vowing to re-prioritize spending, and Nasa's champions within the White House and Congress are suddenly without jobs. A recession hits and Nasa is an easy target for budget cutters. A Congressman threatens to withhold spending unless Nasa locates a facility in his district. You can't fix this stuff; it's part of the landscape.
  - jerf 12y ago
    The ideal would be for someone to figure out how to make money in space. Once you harness the mighty power of greed, nothing short of all-out war would be able to keep humans out of space. But that's proved to be a bit of a tall bar, unfortunately, which in itself sort of raises questions about the actual utility of space anew after 50 years. But before quite making that call let's see what knocking another order of magnitude off launch costs does for us. But I find myself often thinking that space just isn't viable for very many uses without a still-higher level of technology than we have.
krschultz 12y ago
The real missing part of this article is that NASA's budget is dominated by building launchers. If all NASA did was build payloads and buy launch services, it would get a lot more done for its dollar. In the short term this is not feasible, but we are on track for it happening in the next 10-20 years. I think we'll have many years of SLS/Orion, but that is probably the last NASA launch system. Once NASA gets out of the launcher building business, the entire enterprise because much more viable. The cost of any particular mission is not terrible, and if any single mission fails it's not the end of the organization. If the launch program fails, NASA gets off track for a decade. Effectively the Space Shuttle was a slowly unfolding 30 year failure that pushed NASA off course for decades.
- nickff 12y ago
  I think you are right that building launch vehicles consumes much of NASA's time, money, and focus, and that private launch systems will relieve NASA of this burden (if they accept the relief). I do not think this is NASA's main problem, as they were able to create launch systems while performing exploration in the 1960s. It seems that they lost their way after Apollo, when NASA no longer had a clear priority. NASA is now dominated by internal politics, where each center tries to run its own projects, and there is no overarching goal. If NASA had one main program, it would be more visible to the public, and have a greater chance of success on a realistic timeline (5-10 years), though NASA would risk complete defunding if there were problems with the project. Mars in the short term (5-10 years) is a realistic goal (under their current funding levels) which could get NASA started again, but it would require them to sacrifice a variety of smaller projects which have strong internal lobbies.
  - fapjacks 12y ago
    They didn't lose their way. In the Apollo years you're talking about, NASA enjoyed as much as FIVE PERCENT of the federal budget.[0] You can build all the Saturn V launch vehicles you want when the government is throwing bags of money at your particular problem. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
Well, this author has a rather pessimistic view of things. In fact, we are a couple of years away from a major change of government in the U.S. and whoever succeeds the Obama Administration will have an opportunity to address the shortcomings of the space program. The Obama Administration has focused on domestic social issues like jobs, education, and health care, and deemphasized longer term programs like Nasa. Typically, the pendulum swings back and forth with space and science allocations, and I would expect an adjustment upward in the next couple of years even as the social spending is inevitably cut. Also, as the U.S. economy comes out of the 2008-2010 recession and starts to generate more government revenue, it will become politically easier to re-fund some of these mothballed or back-burnered programs and get Big Space back on the front page. Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their hearts. I was a 10-year-old boy when men first walked on the moon, and my friends and I all had model rockets, Nasa posters on the wall, and dreamed of becoming astronauts some day. We all assumed that the country would just keep on funding more exploration until we had a massive rotating space station in orbit, a permanent base on the Moon, and probes reaching to every corner of the star system and beyond. Very little of that has come to pass, and we are a poorer and less accomplished nation because of it. Nasa indeed should be getting more than $18.5B, in my opinion more like $50B or $60B. It's a great investment. Sure, let private companies try to jump into the satellite launching business, more power to them. But the heavy lifting has got to come from Nasa, that great organization that has been neglected for too long.
- 7952 12y ago
  I wonder if the love of cool space stuff is enough to sustain things in the long term. Maybe it is more like funding for the arts. People who love opera understand that arts funding is hugely important. But it is a niche that most will never really get excited about. We need to look beyond the mass appeal of the Apollo era and be supportive of things for more intellectual and even artistic reasons. Just think how many people support Nasa just because they love the Hubble images. It has to be more than just "because its there" to be sustained.
- justin66 12y ago
stcredzero 12y ago
I'm beginning to suspect that the powers that be in American politics and in the military industrial complex simply lack long term vision. In the next several decades following, continued US dominance is dependent on effective education and a strong economy supporting a healthy middle class. In the next several decades after that, whatever nation/culture succeeds in expanding the scope of human civilization is going to dominate through its progeny. (In much the same way that European and in particular WASP culture that originated in England became dominant through the ascendance of the United States.) However, the system is set up to reward those who enter the financial sector, with its tendency towards rent seeking, and the realm of law/politics, which tends to engender a viewpoint somewhat distant from the first principles that govern reality. China, with its largely technocratic leadership, and with its pent up desire to express its pride and prowess as a civilization-state may well have the means, knowledge, and impetus to engage in such an expansion of scope. This would be the smart strategic move -- instead of directly challenging the US for power on Earth, they would expand into an even larger context. Another beauty of such a strategy: the entrenched short-term interests of the US military industrial complex might well assist them in gaining an insurmountable lead by staying fat and happy in their status quo.
- fargolime 12y ago
  Maybe it's the voters? I'm all for space exploration paid in advance, when the national debt is falling as well. Otherwise, no way. Why should my kids get only the bills? That would be rude. Let downvotes commence.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Oh I am quite sure the powers that be have long term vision, they just don't align with some of what we want. They are quite willing to promise the moon and the stars; not the celestial kind; because it works. Space exploration does not garner votes, raw science does not garner voters, and neither do they garner blue collar jobs. Politicians route money to where it buys them most influence. They rely on this money and positioning people against each other to maintain their standard of living. See, they are safe and the masses will stay in their irrational world grousing about the lack of change they do little to change. They count on the irrational decision, the rally behind a thousand page health bill no one reads, the three hundred page net neutrality bill no one is allowed to read, and they make sure you don't want to by portraying the challenge to such as an affront to privilege and intelligent and we want to be considered both. After all, if they tell us its not smart to do otherwise well those who say otherwise must be wrong. So they play the people off each other while they keep their backroom deals and move along merrily laughing at an electorate whose current concern is their internet connection so they don't miss the latest streaming movie. Who needs space exploration when Game of Thrones is on.
anovikov 12y ago
I explain this by the lack of competition. Rest of the world is not making anything comparable to what NASA does. Only Japan's Hayabusa is remotely close to a typical NASA mission. Nobody can say 'our nation is lagging behind in planetary missions' so politicians are happy and prefer to concentrate funding on more pricey things having less real scientific impact, like manned spaceflight, where there is really a lag to be fixed.
codecamper 12y ago
Maybe better to solve global warming before we chart out every square inch of our solar system. It's pretty clear that there is way more life on Earth than the other planets. Too bad because the life here is under extreme threat. You don't need to look far. Species going extinct. Rain forests converted into palm oil plantations. coral reefs bleached. And now the possibility of runaway climate change. There are only so many brainy people on the earth. Better that they focus on these more immediate problems at hand. Space exploration is probably just a distraction from the much more pressing problems of the day.
- forthefuture 12y ago
  Or maybe the only possibility for the earth in the far future is to be destroyed naturally, and hopefully the only humans in the universe aren't stuck here when that happens.
- marssaxman 12y ago
  There will always be more pressing problems than space exploration.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  We hardly spend anything on space exploration. Not to mention it has a lot of benefits and carryover to the rest of the economy. If we have to make cuts, there are many other places we can target instead of the .5% of the federal budget to NASA.
  - fargolime 12y ago
    If the benefits and carryover paid for it, fine. But I doubt it, not now anyway. If it wasn't borrowed money, I'd say throw .5% at at it. But no way when it's borrowed, unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the outcome is net positive.
    - caseydurfee 12y ago
      I really wish we could retire the word "borrowed" to describe the nature of sovereign debt. It makes it sound like we're borrowing dollars from the Chinese to pay NASA. That's not how it works. (United States currency is one of the few things that isn't made in China these days.)
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Interesting that they don't mention SpaceX. One of the profound changes is that in 1962 it took the resources of a nation-state to send a probe to Mars, now someone in the 1% bracket could fund something equivalent without disturbing their kid's trust fund. That is pretty profound. We will get on-orbit refueling. Once we get there you can launch pieces, assemble and fuel in orbit, and then head out to where ever you want to go. The interesting question is what happens when it becomes clear that the space faring capability of a corporation exceeds that of the government. Over regulation I suspect.
mikerichards 12y ago
NASA isn't the end-all organization for space exploration.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
This article skews towards trying to make a political point, but it does so at the cost of truthfulness. It lays an elaborate case before the reader, detailing the woeful state of NASA interplanetary science and the assumed perfidy of a stingy congress. This is a narrative that has only the slimmest hold on reality. Congress has done reasonably well at keeping NASA funded, with some occasional road bumps here and there. And certainly at a lower level than what many of us who value planetary exploration particularly highly would like. But still not too bad all things considering. The real cause for the pinch in planetary science is NASA itself. It has indulged in undisciplined budgetary behavior and project planning at the cost of diversity and robustness in its science missions. The major cause of these problems is something that is not mentioned once, even in passing, in this entire article: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As of right now JWST is more than $7 billion over budget and 8 years behind schedule. That $7 billion compares to: 1 Curiosity rover ($2.5 billion) plus 2 Dawn double asteroid rendezvous missions (2x $500 million, 4 total asteroidal bodies visited) plus 1 Cassini mission ($1.4 billion) plus 1 New Horizons mission ($650 million) plus 1 Kepler mission ($550 million) plus an entire extra billion dollars. That's an exciting panoply of opportunities, and imagine those figures in the context of similar classes of missions. Ion engine powered comet-survey missions, planetary landers and rovers, Kuiper belt flyby missions, survey missions to Neptune and Uranus, exo-planet searches, and so forth. To say that NASA's space science missions have been sucked dry of funding is to ignore why and toward what end they have been. Make no mistake, JWST is a remarkably ambitious mission that is likely to be as groundbreaking as Hubble was, but it is absolutely squeezing the life out of the rest of NASA right now. It would be nice if congress would provide even more funding for NASA so they could go forward with JWST as well as other missions, but to implicate congress as a villain depriving NASA space science of life is to ignore the reality of the situation. This is a self-inflicted wound. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aas-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-astrophysics-budget-20130108 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aa... http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-nasa-budget-cuts-mars-exploration-by226/ http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-n... P.S. Moreover, the doom and gloom tone of the article is unwarranted. Regardless of either NASA budget mismanagement or congressional stinginess the capabilities of NASA in regards to exploration are set to vastly balloon due to the incredible reductions in launch cost on the horizon (from SpaceX and others).

62 points by mariusz79 12y ago

I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment. Which is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that were spawned as a result.

claar 12y ago
This is a great point. However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the little work that got done. A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y ago
  " I worked for 13 years in the public sector"-What does that mean in this context? You're implying that all public sector work is inefficient, shoddy, etc. For all we know, you worked at a DMV for 13 years programming COBOL mainframes.
  - shaftoe 12y ago
    It's all DMV COBOL mainframes.
- mempko 12y ago
  Hierarchical management structures have nothing to do with government organizations. They exist in the private sector too as you described it. Assuming the government is grossly inefficient in all aspects is strange. What if some organizations in the government are inefficient, while others are not?
  - araes 12y ago
    Government is a classic example of a system where most members of the system can be good and efficient, yet the system as a whole can be clogged up by even a few crappy folks. It's like traffic with limited lanes. Decisions have to go thru certain chokes, and if there's a slow driver (inefficient bureaucrat) or a traffic jam (overworked), or a crash (time critical emergency), or a malicious troll (a troll) then things stop or slow down. Like a big road network, you get enough of these and flow becomes jerky, stop-start, non-linear, and efficiency drops. Meanwhile, nearly all drivers will report that they are good, rule abiding drivers (minus speeding (the occasional minor rule circumvention), which actually helps flow). Sure, groups become more valuable the bigger they get, cause of the combinatorial link complexity, but they also get harder to get anything done in cause you've got to check all those links to make sure actions will be accepted. Hierarchies just map this exponential complexity into something closer to an O(log(n)) tree with the caveat that you get flow constrictions as a tradeoff for not having to talk to everyone.
- digikata 12y ago
  Your description of the work could describe a large corporation. I think its really difficult to separate the inefficiencies of government organizations and the inefficiencies of large organizations (public or private). And unfortunately, space projects are often large ventures with an added complicating factor of being funded by political budget whims.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- spiralpolitik 12y ago
  I've seen equal or worse inefficiencies in the private sector. While the root causes may be different, a badly managed organization is the same whether it is public or private.
  - seanflyon 12y ago
    While their are also massive inefficiencies in the private sector, the public sector does not have the same ability to fail. Those private companies need to be efficient enough to avoid bankruptcy.
    - fargolime 12y ago
      Note that some of the private sector can't fail now either.
  - claar 12y ago
    Yes, but the private sector is more willing to restructure in order to become profitable; I never saw a single case of restructuring in 13 years. Instead people were promoted or moved to other roles in the few cases changes happened.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. I think much 3rd world corruption is a weird shadow/echo of Victorian era corruption. In the decades to come, this form of corruption in US governance will become equally quaint and exist in such echoes.
- fapjacks 12y ago
  Truly, I think planetary science could really use a shit-hot startup.
  - Phlarp 12y ago
    So, like Space-x...?
    - fapjacks 12y ago
      Yes, sort of. There were some salient points made here about needing to get over the initial barrier to entry, and needing also some prerequisite commercial goal which obviates the current "Why would anyone want to go there?" kinds of questions. But yes, sort of like Space-X. But Space-X is really just trying to make cheaper rockets. While that's fine, I suppose, I don't think the revolution will be chemically-fueled. I'm hoping something like a space elevator or magic antigravity machines that will let all the other "innovators" iterate on the shoulders of those first giants, opening up space as a platform for the commoner. I'm thinking of some very elementary replication of previous industries, like the internet: Some very smart people build a platform (or infrastructure, or manufacturing process) which lets people build on top of it. Like Twitter and Facebook on the internet.
alexqgb 12y ago
It is extraordinarily unlikely that private investment would have backed the development and deployment of GPS. The effort spanned decades, cost fantastic sums, and was justified only on the basis that it could prevent nuclear annihilation. Indeed, were it not for the ultra-secret classification, it's unlikely that anything this ambitions and uncertain would have gotten through a civilian agency that was subject to Congress. In other words, top secret military technology that takes taxpayer support for granted is not all bad. That's an inconvenient truth for some people.
savanaly 12y ago
> I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment. So perhaps we shouldn't have done it? We know it is the right decision now, but only given knowledge that we didn't have at the time. If you play a lottery and win, that doesn't mean it was right to play it in the first place. It just means you were lucky.
- rwallace 12y ago
  But the universe isn't a zero-sum game, and R&D is like a lottery whose expected outcome is strongly positive: the majority of tickets still lose, but the winners far more than pay for the losers.

happyscrappy 12y ago

I am strongly in favor of boosting NASA's budget, but the US still spends more on space than every other nation combined so I think saying it has a dark future is a bit hyperbolic. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/the-u-s-still-spends-more-on-space-than-every-other-country-combined/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/t...

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
China's spending isn't very transparent, and their costs are much lower, so dollar-for-dollar they are accomplishing more than Nasa is. And they're not just screwing around. They're planning to put humans on the Moon in a few years, which implies a huge and well funded effort.
- happyscrappy 12y ago
  That is a good thing, the US could use some credible competition.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

blisterpeanuts 12y ago
So what kind of organization(s) do you see doing a better job than Nasa? I would agree that it's a political and rather inefficient organization, like any government-funded agency, but I'm curious how exactly we could improve. Bear in mind that many of Nasa's best projects were undermined by politics. A new Administration comes into power vowing to re-prioritize spending, and Nasa's champions within the White House and Congress are suddenly without jobs. A recession hits and Nasa is an easy target for budget cutters. A Congressman threatens to withhold spending unless Nasa locates a facility in his district. You can't fix this stuff; it's part of the landscape.
- jerf 12y ago
  The ideal would be for someone to figure out how to make money in space. Once you harness the mighty power of greed, nothing short of all-out war would be able to keep humans out of space. But that's proved to be a bit of a tall bar, unfortunately, which in itself sort of raises questions about the actual utility of space anew after 50 years. But before quite making that call let's see what knocking another order of magnitude off launch costs does for us. But I find myself often thinking that space just isn't viable for very many uses without a still-higher level of technology than we have.

krschultz 12y ago

The real missing part of this article is that NASA's budget is dominated by building launchers. If all NASA did was build payloads and buy launch services, it would get a lot more done for its dollar. In the short term this is not feasible, but we are on track for it happening in the next 10-20 years. I think we'll have many years of SLS/Orion, but that is probably the last NASA launch system. Once NASA gets out of the launcher building business, the entire enterprise because much more viable. The cost of any particular mission is not terrible, and if any single mission fails it's not the end of the organization. If the launch program fails, NASA gets off track for a decade. Effectively the Space Shuttle was a slowly unfolding 30 year failure that pushed NASA off course for decades.

nickff 12y ago
I think you are right that building launch vehicles consumes much of NASA's time, money, and focus, and that private launch systems will relieve NASA of this burden (if they accept the relief). I do not think this is NASA's main problem, as they were able to create launch systems while performing exploration in the 1960s. It seems that they lost their way after Apollo, when NASA no longer had a clear priority. NASA is now dominated by internal politics, where each center tries to run its own projects, and there is no overarching goal. If NASA had one main program, it would be more visible to the public, and have a greater chance of success on a realistic timeline (5-10 years), though NASA would risk complete defunding if there were problems with the project. Mars in the short term (5-10 years) is a realistic goal (under their current funding levels) which could get NASA started again, but it would require them to sacrifice a variety of smaller projects which have strong internal lobbies.
- fapjacks 12y ago
  They didn't lose their way. In the Apollo years you're talking about, NASA enjoyed as much as FIVE PERCENT of the federal budget.[0] You can build all the Saturn V launch vehicles you want when the government is throwing bags of money at your particular problem. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

Well, this author has a rather pessimistic view of things. In fact, we are a couple of years away from a major change of government in the U.S. and whoever succeeds the Obama Administration will have an opportunity to address the shortcomings of the space program. The Obama Administration has focused on domestic social issues like jobs, education, and health care, and deemphasized longer term programs like Nasa. Typically, the pendulum swings back and forth with space and science allocations, and I would expect an adjustment upward in the next couple of years even as the social spending is inevitably cut. Also, as the U.S. economy comes out of the 2008-2010 recession and starts to generate more government revenue, it will become politically easier to re-fund some of these mothballed or back-burnered programs and get Big Space back on the front page. Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their hearts. I was a 10-year-old boy when men first walked on the moon, and my friends and I all had model rockets, Nasa posters on the wall, and dreamed of becoming astronauts some day. We all assumed that the country would just keep on funding more exploration until we had a massive rotating space station in orbit, a permanent base on the Moon, and probes reaching to every corner of the star system and beyond. Very little of that has come to pass, and we are a poorer and less accomplished nation because of it. Nasa indeed should be getting more than $18.5B, in my opinion more like $50B or $60B. It's a great investment. Sure, let private companies try to jump into the satellite launching business, more power to them. But the heavy lifting has got to come from Nasa, that great organization that has been neglected for too long.

7952 12y ago
I wonder if the love of cool space stuff is enough to sustain things in the long term. Maybe it is more like funding for the arts. People who love opera understand that arts funding is hugely important. But it is a niche that most will never really get excited about. We need to look beyond the mass appeal of the Apollo era and be supportive of things for more intellectual and even artistic reasons. Just think how many people support Nasa just because they love the Hubble images. It has to be more than just "because its there" to be sustained.
justin66 12y ago

stcredzero 12y ago

I'm beginning to suspect that the powers that be in American politics and in the military industrial complex simply lack long term vision. In the next several decades following, continued US dominance is dependent on effective education and a strong economy supporting a healthy middle class. In the next several decades after that, whatever nation/culture succeeds in expanding the scope of human civilization is going to dominate through its progeny. (In much the same way that European and in particular WASP culture that originated in England became dominant through the ascendance of the United States.) However, the system is set up to reward those who enter the financial sector, with its tendency towards rent seeking, and the realm of law/politics, which tends to engender a viewpoint somewhat distant from the first principles that govern reality. China, with its largely technocratic leadership, and with its pent up desire to express its pride and prowess as a civilization-state may well have the means, knowledge, and impetus to engage in such an expansion of scope. This would be the smart strategic move -- instead of directly challenging the US for power on Earth, they would expand into an even larger context. Another beauty of such a strategy: the entrenched short-term interests of the US military industrial complex might well assist them in gaining an insurmountable lead by staying fat and happy in their status quo.

fargolime 12y ago
Maybe it's the voters? I'm all for space exploration paid in advance, when the national debt is falling as well. Otherwise, no way. Why should my kids get only the bills? That would be rude. Let downvotes commence.
Shivetya 12y ago
Oh I am quite sure the powers that be have long term vision, they just don't align with some of what we want. They are quite willing to promise the moon and the stars; not the celestial kind; because it works. Space exploration does not garner votes, raw science does not garner voters, and neither do they garner blue collar jobs. Politicians route money to where it buys them most influence. They rely on this money and positioning people against each other to maintain their standard of living. See, they are safe and the masses will stay in their irrational world grousing about the lack of change they do little to change. They count on the irrational decision, the rally behind a thousand page health bill no one reads, the three hundred page net neutrality bill no one is allowed to read, and they make sure you don't want to by portraying the challenge to such as an affront to privilege and intelligent and we want to be considered both. After all, if they tell us its not smart to do otherwise well those who say otherwise must be wrong. So they play the people off each other while they keep their backroom deals and move along merrily laughing at an electorate whose current concern is their internet connection so they don't miss the latest streaming movie. Who needs space exploration when Game of Thrones is on.

anovikov 12y ago

I explain this by the lack of competition. Rest of the world is not making anything comparable to what NASA does. Only Japan's Hayabusa is remotely close to a typical NASA mission. Nobody can say 'our nation is lagging behind in planetary missions' so politicians are happy and prefer to concentrate funding on more pricey things having less real scientific impact, like manned spaceflight, where there is really a lag to be fixed.

codecamper 12y ago

Maybe better to solve global warming before we chart out every square inch of our solar system. It's pretty clear that there is way more life on Earth than the other planets. Too bad because the life here is under extreme threat. You don't need to look far. Species going extinct. Rain forests converted into palm oil plantations. coral reefs bleached. And now the possibility of runaway climate change. There are only so many brainy people on the earth. Better that they focus on these more immediate problems at hand. Space exploration is probably just a distraction from the much more pressing problems of the day.

forthefuture 12y ago
Or maybe the only possibility for the earth in the far future is to be destroyed naturally, and hopefully the only humans in the universe aren't stuck here when that happens.
marssaxman 12y ago
There will always be more pressing problems than space exploration.
IndianAstronaut 12y ago
We hardly spend anything on space exploration. Not to mention it has a lot of benefits and carryover to the rest of the economy. If we have to make cuts, there are many other places we can target instead of the .5% of the federal budget to NASA.
- fargolime 12y ago
  If the benefits and carryover paid for it, fine. But I doubt it, not now anyway. If it wasn't borrowed money, I'd say throw .5% at at it. But no way when it's borrowed, unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the outcome is net positive.
  - caseydurfee 12y ago
    I really wish we could retire the word "borrowed" to describe the nature of sovereign debt. It makes it sound like we're borrowing dollars from the Chinese to pay NASA. That's not how it works. (United States currency is one of the few things that isn't made in China these days.)

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Interesting that they don't mention SpaceX. One of the profound changes is that in 1962 it took the resources of a nation-state to send a probe to Mars, now someone in the 1% bracket could fund something equivalent without disturbing their kid's trust fund. That is pretty profound. We will get on-orbit refueling. Once we get there you can launch pieces, assemble and fuel in orbit, and then head out to where ever you want to go. The interesting question is what happens when it becomes clear that the space faring capability of a corporation exceeds that of the government. Over regulation I suspect.

mikerichards 12y ago

NASA isn't the end-all organization for space exploration.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

This article skews towards trying to make a political point, but it does so at the cost of truthfulness. It lays an elaborate case before the reader, detailing the woeful state of NASA interplanetary science and the assumed perfidy of a stingy congress. This is a narrative that has only the slimmest hold on reality. Congress has done reasonably well at keeping NASA funded, with some occasional road bumps here and there. And certainly at a lower level than what many of us who value planetary exploration particularly highly would like. But still not too bad all things considering. The real cause for the pinch in planetary science is NASA itself. It has indulged in undisciplined budgetary behavior and project planning at the cost of diversity and robustness in its science missions. The major cause of these problems is something that is not mentioned once, even in passing, in this entire article: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As of right now JWST is more than $7 billion over budget and 8 years behind schedule. That $7 billion compares to: 1 Curiosity rover ($2.5 billion) plus 2 Dawn double asteroid rendezvous missions (2x $500 million, 4 total asteroidal bodies visited) plus 1 Cassini mission ($1.4 billion) plus 1 New Horizons mission ($650 million) plus 1 Kepler mission ($550 million) plus an entire extra billion dollars. That's an exciting panoply of opportunities, and imagine those figures in the context of similar classes of missions. Ion engine powered comet-survey missions, planetary landers and rovers, Kuiper belt flyby missions, survey missions to Neptune and Uranus, exo-planet searches, and so forth. To say that NASA's space science missions have been sucked dry of funding is to ignore why and toward what end they have been. Make no mistake, JWST is a remarkably ambitious mission that is likely to be as groundbreaking as Hubble was, but it is absolutely squeezing the life out of the rest of NASA right now. It would be nice if congress would provide even more funding for NASA so they could go forward with JWST as well as other missions, but to implicate congress as a villain depriving NASA space science of life is to ignore the reality of the situation. This is a self-inflicted wound. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aas-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-astrophysics-budget-20130108 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aa... http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-nasa-budget-cuts-mars-exploration-by226/ http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-n... P.S. Moreover, the doom and gloom tone of the article is unwarranted. Regardless of either NASA budget mismanagement or congressional stinginess the capabilities of NASA in regards to exploration are set to vastly balloon due to the incredible reductions in launch cost on the horizon (from SpaceX and others).