I have heard a lot about how mis-guided and expensive NASA is. I wonder what the Straight Dope is. Certainly they spend a lot of money-and waste a lot of money. Just like many organizations I know. What I am curious about is can anyone do it better? We have all heard the the old adage (approximately): the best way to become an internet millionaire is to be an internet billionaire and invest in space exploration.
NASA may spend a lot of money, but the fact is that since the early 60’s NASA has been the first, and in many case the only, organization to conduct space travel. It is usually easier to do something once the method has been worked out. ESA and Russia do great work-but NASA was there first and showed them what not to do. Same for the rest of the world.
I have no professional attachment to NASA-I am an oceanographer working for the Navy, but am curious to understand the realities of a high-tech organizations like NASA.
I work at Stennis Space Center (not for NASA) and note the following:
NASA is developing an engine test stand-costing at least $200million, to test full-sized rocket engines in near-vacuum. Not for a second or two, but for the full 50 sec. burn-at sea level. Something about lots and lots of steam keeping the ambient pressure very low so that the engine operates in realistic conditions. Maybe this is useful, maybe not. (I am not a rocket scientist!). But I haven’t heard of anyone else conducting such a test. The rest of the world will just wait for NASA to do the research and make the necessary changes to their engines.
So my question is: if NASA didn’t spend all this money on engineering research, would anyone even try to go into space?
It depends upon what kind of engineering you’re talking about. On the manned side, we’d probably not have much research going on, if it hadn’t been for NASA and the space race n the 60s. On the unmanned side, things like weather satellites, communication satellites, and the like are so valuable to our society that someone would have eventually gotten into doing it, if NASA hadn’t first started in that area. Were it not for NASA, however, we probably wouldn’t have the unmanned probes being sent to the various planets, since most people wouldn’t see the value of it.
NASA’s budget for 2007 is $16.8 billion. (About six-tenths of one percent of the US budget.)
Congress just passed a supplemental, off-budget appropriation for the war in Irag of $120 billion, but that will last only until September. About a billion dollars a day. Nearly 22 times NASA’s budget.
Compared to such other government expenditures, NASA is far from “mis-guided and expensive”.
Look, space travel is hard. All those sf writers in the 1950s who had people build rocket ships in their back yards were about 10,00,000% too optimistic. Even using NASA’s castoff parts, all the private companies talking about going into space are really looking at suborbital flights. Putting people into orbit and getting them down again safely is incredibly difficult and dangerous. Until a private company does, they can scream about “space travel” all they want, but they haven’t accomplished anything.
If you think NASA was leading the Soviets, you don’t know the history. The Soviets dominated space exploration. The only milestone the US had was the first moon landing (which admittedly was a big one). But by pretty much any objective standard, NASA was virtually always second place.
The essential problem with NASA, like any government bureaucracy, is that it exists at the whims of politicians who will support it or not primarily based on how much work or favor it brings to their constituency. With this in mind, NASA’s primary perrogative is to make as much publicity over how valuable their current big project is and how critical it is to the continued development of spaceflight, even when it’s clearly not. A prime example is the Space Transportation System (Shuttle and boosters) and Space Station Alpha/Freedom Station/International Space Station. While the pre-Challenger disaster Shuttle program initially had several major roles, including delivering commerical and military payloads, polar orbit military missions, recovery and repair of orbiting satellites, short term orbital laboratory, et cetera, in addition to its role as a cargo truck for a permanent orbiting space platform, it has come to be defined as necessary based upon supporting the ISS, and indeed, this is all that keeps the program operating, to the point of actually neglecting other important missions. Is the ISS necessary? Highly questionable, especially given how delayed construction has been and how crippled the concept has become, to the point that it’ll never support a complement of full time scientists in addition to the working crew. It is also–space enthusiast and journalist claims to the contrary–not a viable assembly point or fuel depot for staging interplanetary missions. And it provides little in additional value in studying long term effects of free fall environments on humans as the Soviets/Russians already have a substantial body of data indicating the deleterious effects if that.
On the other hand, NASA has had some remarkable successes, aside from putting men on the Moon. The Gemini program was a fantastic success as a bargin basement price; it’s likely that Gemini hardware could have put men on the Moon, and such plans were being made in case Apollo was cancelled or had significant hangups. The STS, despite its inherent warts and lack of direction, has had the most successful launches of any single design manned vehicle and is to date the only reusable space orbit vehicle that has actually been flown operationally. And JPL has pulled rabbit after rabbit out of their hat with a succession of interplanetary probes and landers which have provided a wealth of information on embarassingly small budgets.
Without NASA, spaceflight would be in the hands of the military, which may or may not have decided that it was worth the effort, depending on how far the Soviets progressed. By establishing a civilian agency, the United States demonstrated that spaceflight could have commerical and scientific applications (mostly) independent of mlitary interest. But NASA, as currently constructed, is a relic of Apollo, transmorgified around the STS (when it became clear that funding for Apollo was at an end), and now centered on the Constallation program, which means they have to spin and showboat first, rather than emphasize science and valuable (unmanned) exploration. NASA probably should have been converted back into the research clearinghouse like NACA (from whence it came), and space exploration efforts semi-privatized in government-owned non-profit companies analogous to The Aerospace Corporation. But that’s not going to happen; nor, I suspect, is commercial manned spaceflight going to be a viable profit-making business in the foreseeable future (at least, not without massive improvements and cost reductions in propulsion).
So yes, it’s too expensive, and yes, at this point, it’s the only one that can.
Actually, this would be fantastic. Currently, we have to do static tests at as high an elevation as we can reasonably manage to minimize the effects of atmosphere on rocket performance, and then try to calculate out what the vacuum performance would be. This leads to all sorts of uncertainty. Is it worth $200M? Well it allows us to get much better data on what’s actually going on in the motor than trying to get telemetry and performance data in flight where there are all sorts of unconstrained variables. On the other hand, that’s a big chunk of change (though not, as previously indicated, very much compared to the bucketloads of money we’re dumping into the desert currently). Of course, much of this information will be publicized and other nations and private companies will benefit, too. Does it ultimately get us something worth the outlay? That’s up to propulsion engineers to figure out.
It’s true that the Soviets were far more on the ball than they’re typically given credit for, especially in the early days of manned spaceflight, and even today in the venue of permanent orbital platforms. The US, though, has had more significant successes in interplanetary exploration; save for Venus and the Venera and Vega programs, the Soviets didn’t have much luck in the way of interplanetary missions, and have never aspired to missions in the outsystem (Jupiter and beyond). And between competing reusable spaceflight programs it’s clear that the STS was more successful, albeit this probably had more to do with economic and political conditions in the waning years of the USSR; it can be argued that Buran was in many regards significantly better designed than the STS.
For my money, though, I’d look toward China, who appears to be in manned spaceflight for the long haul. While they’re spending a relative pittance, they seem to have an actual, reasonable development plan, and an impetus to demonstrate to the world their growing technology prowess. The ESA, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have a clue where they want to go, how they plan on getting there, and what resources they’re willing to put behind it. It seems like mostly a way for European nations to bicker with one another over who owes whom what.
It’s interesting to look at the space programs of the USA and the former USSR, because they both had sucesses and failures that sometimes - in a strange way - complimented each other. For example, the USSR was the first of the two (IIRC on all of this by the way) to use an earth-surface-equivalent nitrogen-oxygen mix in their life support systems. NASA’s 100% oxygen life support was predominantly to blame for the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, in which three astronauts were killed. On the other hand, Russia’s decision to do without ascent/descent pressure suits in the 1971 Salyut 1 mission lead to the deaths of the three cosmonauts on that flight, when their capsule depressurized.
In general, the USSR seemed to want to make a fair number of milestones for the sake of propaganda purposes (for example the flight of Valentina Tereshkova, which was intended as a publicity exercise instead of full integration of women into the space program), while at the same time suppressing anything remotely negative that may have happened in the process (such as a pad explosion that killed 160 people). So sometimes it’s hard to gauge just how well they were doing at any given moment. I suppose the USSR program can be described as “quick out of the gate, but fades in the stretch”. The highly-feared USSR moon booster, with its huge array of 20+ nozzles, was likely much less stable and reliable than the Saturn V rocket, which had only 5. Mir was kept in orbit a long time, but probably much longer than it should have been. It’s also quite true that economic troubles were to blame for some of the cutbacks in the Soviet/Russian program. Otherwise, we might have seen the Buran (which is hard to imagine NOT having been ripped mostly from the US STS design, albeit improved) actually carry crewed flights, and the Mir retired earlier for another orbital station.
and I think the operative word is dabble. Certainly they got an early start, but by the mid-60’s were no longer really in the “race”. They certainly did far more than anyone else except NASA.
well, I do know the history and I disagree. I understand where you are coming from-first manned launch, first launch of multiple crew vehicle, first MOL, etc., but I disagree that their ability was ever, past the first few years of the space age, equal to or even competitive with NASA. And I don’t mean fancy technology, it doesn’t matter whether there is a hand-turned valve (as in the Soviet moon lander design) or a switch. The point is that their lander, their multi-crew vehicles etc consistently were less capable than the NASA versions.
Well, the Soviets were often willing to tolerate a lot more risk than NASA, too. The Cosmonauts weren’t very valuable to the leadership as people, just as free advertising.
My argument here is that this is one of those things we had to pursue because we couldn’t say in advance what the result was going to be. Sure, some people predicted it would be a technological and logistical dead end, and they were right; but I strongly believe that the endeavor was so unique, and so complex, that it warranted a good-faith effort, even if there was a good chance it wasn’t going to pan out in the long run. I assert that we’ve learned a hell of a lot from the ISS experience: not about space physiology or zero-g construction or any of the other things touted as benefits, but about just how freakin’ hard this kind of thing really is, and how long it really takes, organizationally, financially, and bureaucratically. In other words, we really had to try it before we could concretely understand how and why there are better ways to do this kind of work. That’s one of those lessons that has to be hammered into our collective skull before we thoroughly grasp it, and there’s no way to learn the lesson except by practical experience. In other words, even if the ISS is, practically speaking, a dead end, it was hardly a waste.
To paraphrase a space-exploration maxim, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making progress.