Right. So I’m asking: when you’re saying that people will remember these things, does that mean anything aside from the obvious? Does the fact that people will remember it make it important or worthwhile?
Knock yourself out. But once you remove human spaceflight from NASA you’ll have to justify about $6 billion spent on space sciences. Remember the Nation Science Foundation only gets $5 billion a year. If you believe space sciences will maintain exclusive hold on $6 billion in funding you’re a much bigger optimist than I am. 
There is nothing inherently useless about learning how to put humans in space, but it’s not primarily a science program. And there’s the problem. Spaceflight is framed in the context of exploring or science or some such and really it’s not. It’s about learning to deal with a brand new environment for humans. There’s no need to place spaceflight and space science in opposition. Learning about where you’re going is as important as figuring out how to get there.
Well said, Sam. I was going to pop in and post something similar, but you said it so well there’s no need.
I’ll just add that curiosity and a urge toward exploration seem to me be to key human traits that have been–and remain–necessary aspects of our evolutionary survival.
Shoot. I meant to add this - a link to NASA Tech Briefs - the official publication of the NASA research agencies. A wonderful publication about the discoveries of the NASA research facilities.
Trust me, you get a room full of top-notch astonomers, planetary scientists, and cosmologists together, and they’ll blow through $6 billion/year in worthwhile science endeavors so fast it’d make your head spin. I see absolutely nothing wrong with diverting funds thusly, and the only reason “justification” is necessary is because too many people equate planting a flag in a rock with “accomplishment”.
Posted by SentientMeat:
No, not by Clinton; by the 103rd Congress. Clinton was in favor of the SSC.
I think we’ve got a basic philosophical difference here. I really don’t understand a viewpoint in which spaceflight isn’t worthwhile. It makes me imagine somebody spending his life in a small valley, not knowing what’s on the other side of the hill, and never taking a hike to find out.
Incidentally, do you know what we’ll find out when we get to really explore the Moon? Neither do I; nobody does. Isn’t that kind of exciting in itself? One problem with a lot of pro-space literature I see is that it talks about the future as if it were all mapped out; the truth is we’ll encounter both problems and discoveries that simply cannot be predicted. When we built the most complex machine in the world and used it to cross a quarter million miles of vacuum to land on the Moon, it was the greatest adventure our species has ever undertaken; I think it’s just the beginning of a new stage in our species’ existence. I want that voyage into the unknown to continue.
Loopydude you’re missing my point. I doubt very much you’d get a new Space Science department with a budget of $6 billion. You’d likely get the NSF’s budget doubled and then the space science community would have to compete for those funds with the stem cell guys, protien researchers etc. The moon pie would quickly be eaten up by others.
I’m confused by this statement, maybe because something has happened that I don’t know about. My understanding of the present state of the Hubble program is that engineers have figured out how to keep it running potentially until '08 using only two gyros. If a servicing mission was ever in the cards, that’s likely no longer an option, as continued delays in the Shuttle program due to persistant safety concerns have meant all the allowable time is to be used up finishing what can be finished of the ISS. So, although the Hubble could be refurbished in orbit, it won’t be, and probably in '08 it will be scuttled.
Then at least it wouldn’t be wasted.
False analogy. There are methods available to us to discover what’s over the hill other than sending a guy to climb the thing.
I do; NASA does. Rocks and dust; regolith.
Well it’s not going to waste now either. It’s going to space science. I’d image you could get a lot of people with cancer lined up complaining that putting up space based arrays to map an extra-solar planet’s continents is a waste of funding that could better go to medical research. It’s a mugs game playing who’s more valuable.
It comes down to what should NASA be? You’d like it to be a department dedicated to space science. I’d like it to focus on space exploitation. It tries to do both.
I don’t mean to put a damper on your enthusiasm, but a Moon-based observatory doesn’t make a lot of sense. First, there’s the distance you have to go to get there–three days there, three days back in a modified Hohman orbit. Then you have to (gently!) descend your equipment to the surface, install it in place. Servicing missions–inevitable for a long-term application–require repeated journeys. And for all of this you get a satellite that is tied to a quake-prone moon, perturbed by tidal forces, in sunlight for approximately two weeks out of four, and restricted in observation range, the orientation of which changes continuously through a 29.5 day cycle.
An Earth-orbital satellite observatory has a free range of rotation and observation (except where eclipsed by the Earth, Moon, Sun, and other astronomical bodies), can be reoriented at will, is free of vibration and suffers only minimal tidal effects, can be readily serviced as part of a regular orbital mission, and will be generally cheaper and more productive than one based on the Moon. There wasn’t any danger of Hubble “falling out of orbit” as you allude to during its expected operational lifetime (which it has presently far exceeded), and if the Shuttle were running at anything like the rate that it was originally specified there would be no problem in regularly readjusting the orbit during servicing missions. Indeed, if Hubble had been placed in a higher, Mid Earth Orbit rather than the 600km orbit it currently languishs in (thanks to the altitude limitations of the STS) then atmospheric drag due to increased solar activity would be negligable; an object in a 10000km circular orbit would remain in that orbit for thousands of years without significant adjustment.
There’s no particular need to return men to the Moon (claims of preparing for a manned Mars mission notwithstanding), and the claim that we need 13 years and over a hundred billion dollars is an embarassment that indicates just how bloated and unfocused NASA has become. As RTFirefly states, he have the legacy information from past programs, albeit we’ve lost the direct experience involved in those programs. A Return to Moon program should be something more like 5-6 years and 10-15 billion dollars, maximum, with concurrent efforts to incrementally improve habitation and propulsion capabilites such that further space exploration (whether an ill-advised mission to put footprints on Mars or a better considered mission to a near Earth asteroid) is continually supported. No manned mission to Mars should depend on minimum-energy chemical fired motors for propulsion; if we can’t (or won’t) develop man-rated nuclear propulsion then we need to wait for manned transplanetary exploration until that technology is developed. (Meanwhile, unmanned probes and satellites continue to serve economically, safely, and with astonishing effectiveness in increasing our scientific knowledge.)
The best thing to do at this point would be to abolish NASA, split the different centers (KSC, JSC, JPL, Langley, et cetera) off as publically-held and -sponsored private or semi-private corporations, and create a new directorate similar to NACA (NASA’s predecessor) or the Russian Space Agency which acts as a clearinghouse and development coordinator but that does not have a massive budget or bureaucratic stake in any one aspect of a total space program; think of NIST or NSF as a model, rather than the current hierarchial structure built primarially around one program and one transportation system. Doing so could increase the headcount of scientists, engineers, and others working on the space program(s) (thus preserving our technical advantage and expertiese) while reducing the emphesis on any one program.
As for the notion that we could and should redirect space program monies to social spending: even a cursory assessment of social and education programs indicates that it isn’t fiscal limitations which prevent improvement, but inertia, grift, incompetence, ignorantly authoritarian policies (coughNochildleftbehindcough), and entrenched bureacracy. Throwing yet more money at those problems won’t make them go away. I’ve no objection to spending more on education, but the goal needs to be to improve the system (higher pay for teachers, more opportunities for students) rather than just a numerical increase in the number of computers per classroom or more dollars per student. Cutting other programs, be they space, transportation, or even the bloaded defense budget isn’t going to make the fundamental problems with social and educational programs go away.
Stranger
If you’re really worried about jobs moving overseas, I encourage you to think about how many quality, American jobs would be created by the proposed project. People talk about the money as if it’s going to be put in a barrel and shot into space, but of course, the money will mainly go to salaries.
I have no interest in reducing the government’s responsibility to the less fortunate. But the bleeding-heart argument against the space program seems to boil down to: Give people $100 billion to do nothing, instead of giving them a chance to earn $100 billion in exchange for doing something.
You’re really stuck on the idea that science is the only valid reason to do anything in space. OK. Undoubtedly, there is an infinite supply of interesting problems in planetary science that we don’t even know about because we haven’t been out of Earth orbit in 30 years. Robots can only see what they were designed to see. The difference between robotic exploration and human exploration is the difference between reading about Rome in a book and talking about Rome with someone who has actually been there. Books (and robots) have their role, but they are no substitute for direct observation.
Origially in the FY2006 budget were money for a deorbit program for Hubble. (Hubble is stout enough that some parts of the structure are likely to survive re-entry, so you want a controlled deorbit into the Ocean rather than letting it crash in downtown Omaha or Bangledesh.) That program was cut with the stated intent of keeping Hubble alive with another servicing mission and remote life extension. However, while some small funding was extended for ground maintainence of HST (i.e. paying the saleries of engineers and the electric bills for ground control), no specific funding has been put together for a Shuttle servicing mission, and with the problems during the Return-To-Flight STS-121 mission, a Hubble service mission is up in the air.
In other words, NASA and Congress are sitting on their collective thumb. Meanwhile in international news, Generalissimo Ferdinand Franco is still dead.
Stranger
What I meant by saving the Hubble was that it’s not currently scheduled to be scuttled. It probably will in a few years, if things continue as they are now, but we’ve at least managed to get it those few years.
Would that be $10-15 billion in HW or HW + workforce? I’d guess that the loaded labour rate for a NASA employee is $150k. 5000 people @ $150k for 5 years is about $4 billion. Regardless, it’s still well under $100 billion.
Neat idea. Has anyone seriously made a push for this?
Err, that should have been STS-114. STS-121 is the subsequent (and now delayed) mission.
Stranger
That could easily be far more than what a human can see, depending on he robot. We’re only sensitive to a narrow band of the EM spectrum; we can’t sniff or taste the atomosphere of Titan without dying; we can’t hear or feel subsonic seismic tremors; we can’t resolve the microscopic. The vast majority of what’s out there would kill us if our unprotected bodies were exposed to it for even an instant. The balance would take longer and be more painful.
Actually, I could send a robot to Mars, have it drive around to many different places, climb hills, dig holes, take pictures and movies, perform sophisticated spectroscopic analysis, measure meteorogical phenomena, and more, and have it last for over a year. Which is already being done. Anyone on the planet with a connection to the internet can view at least some of the raw data almost as soon as it’s been transmitted. I fail to see any additional benefit I’d get from having somebody provide me, at best, given human frailties, essentially the same information plus some eye-witness testimony. Subjective human impressions of the experience of actually being on Mars are not terribly relevant to the mission of collecting scientific data. So if it’s Mars Rover, or (Everything You’d Get With a Mars Rover + $100 billion extra in costs + “Holy cow, I’m on Mars!!”), I’ll take the former, thanks.
That’s a off-the-cuff estimate of full-up cost, from concept to completion. That assumes that NASA hires a prime contractor who doesn’t pump the budget full of unnecessary development costs and uses or adapts existing hardware. As others have pointed out, we’ve already done this mission; Apollo was verging on economies of scale (to the extent that one can mass produce the Saturn V), and a large part of the cost is in developing the expertiese that we lost when we cancelled Apollo Plus/Apollo Applications. Hardware costs based on the “Simple Safe Soon” concept are probably in the hundreds of millions, rather than multi-billions of dollars…if adequately controlled. The major components to such a program would be upscaling an Apollo-type capsule to sustain a four-man crew and designing a larger and more capable landing module–in fact the ELEM is probably the single most development-intensive part of such a program.
Mars is another story. You can do a simple Zubin-style Mars Direct program for tens of billions (say, somewhere between $40B and $100B), but it’s going to be a single shot stunt mission that lacks sufficient contingency in the case of a major accident. Sending articulated bags of protoplasm to another planet with a large probability of success is stretching our technology at this point, nor is it likely to return any value that can’t be had from unmanned missions at a fraction of the cost. Not that I’m opposed to manned exploration–it should be the ultimate goal–but it should be done as a program of continued development and with the goal of economic and logistic sufficiency, if indeed, not profitability. Nothing I’ve seen with regard to a NASA-led manned Mars program has indicated this as a goal.
Are you kidding? NASA is a political animal, and privatizing operations, requiring accountability from contractors, and devoting money by program necessity rather than Congressional districts would step on so many toes that Washington would become a podiatrist’s nightmare. It’s not a suggestion that has any degree of political realism to it. But t’were I king…
Stranger
Return to Moon in 2018. Is it worth it? No. If private citizens think it’s “neat” or a “new frontier”, or will “satiate man’s curiousity”, then they can privately fund the space program. Let’s disband NASA and let it reform as a charity, any of those people that think it’s relevent can pitch their money into the space basket and see what they get in return.
As for better ideas of what to do with the $108bn? Let the people keep their own money and decide for themselves.