Spirit is successfully on Mars

Great Debates
81

Those words will come back to haunt you in future threads.:slight_smile:

Sam:

Seriously, though, why Space and not Biology? I’m talking: fundamental, let’s understand every biochemical detail of life, reasearch. I’m talking: let’s create life in the laboratory research. I’m talking: let’s be able to recreate extinct species research.

Are you saying it doesn’t so much matter as long as we pick at least one?

I may be a space-science junkie, but nothing gets me Jonesin’ more than the desire to answer those questions about Biology. I don’t believe that space exploration can hold a candle to that.

82

If you can show me some biology that can’t be done by anyone but the government, I’ll support government research in biology. I’m all about pushing the frontiers of knowledge, no matter what the direction.

The big difference with space is that it is so hard to do that it really does take the resources of a nation, at least up until this point. Most other forms of research don’t, and in fact when government gets involved it usually just screws things up by wrapping research in politics and red tape.

None of this means that I don’t support private space initiatives, or that I think NASA has been an unmitigated good. I’ve already said that I think the U.S. government should offer ‘prizes’ for space achievements, so that we can unlock the power of private enterprise. This also gets around part of the problem of business not being able to finance it - make the prize big enough, and businesses will work together to win it. If we offer 20 billion dollars for the first private manned Mars landing, maybe Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, Rockwell, Lucent, and a few others will share the risk and have a go at it. And we don’t have to worry about waste, fraud and abuse, or overcharging, or competitive bidding, or anything else. Management and execution is THEIR problem, because if it costs 30 billion the money comes out of their pocket, and if it fails the U.S. taxpayer isn’t out a nickel.

Offer an escalating range of prizes so that companies large and small can get involved. The X-prize is a good start - 10 million bucks to the first private launch to put a man into suborbital space, then turn around and do it 2 more times within a couple of weeks. That will almost certainly be won next year. It would be a great gesture if Bush announced a new prize - the Challenger prize, perhaps, or the Columbia prize, for the first private manned flight to achieve at least two orbits, land, and do it again within two weeks with the same vehicle. This time, make it 100 million. Or maybe 200 million - enough to make it worthwhile for people who are willing to take some risks. A drop in the bucket for government.

Then let’s set up a prize of 1 billion for the first manned lunar landing. 200 million for the first private space flight to last longer than one month. Etc.

Identify the areas of space development that will lead to a sustainable, private space fleet, and set up prizes that can realistically be achieved at a profit.

For the life of me, I don’t know why we haven’t done this. It’s a no-risk, low-cost way for the government to increase money invested in space and keep it ‘off budget’. I don’t see any real downside, and a huge potential upside.

83

Sam:
The gov’t is probably highly motivated to keep aspects of space technology classified. If a private entity could send a mission to Mars, that entity could sell the technology to Kim Jong Il or, even worse, to Jacques Chriac. OK, that last remark was a joke, but the classified issue would be, I’m sure, a prohibitive impediment to your plan.

Why not organize a consortium of billionaires to offer the prize? That will keep Lib and me happy, too.

84

Well, given that they keep computer technology classified, or at least out of the hands of “certain” foreign nations, they could probably do the same with a private space technology.
Also, I understand about the fical nature of public support. I think Libertarian said it best that we cannot know how much the public would support space exploration because the system is not set up that way. Anyone wishing to set up a private space research organization has to effectively compete against NASA. This also means that no one is marketing space research to the public. Well, ok, NASA is some, but not very well.

85

Perhaps because no single company can justify investing hundreds of millions of dollars on such a project. When Boeing spends $3 billion to develop a new airliner, they are expecting to sell several hundred of them at >$200 million apiece. I don’t think they would spend $1 billion to win a $1 billion cash prize. They might spend $500 million to win a $1 billion prize, but that’s hardly an efficient use of government funds.

There is already a lot of competition for government contracts. Spacecraft really are built by the lowest bidder. I don’t think there is much room for improving efficiency, at least not quite as much as you seem to think.

86

It doesn’t have to be one company. I could see a consortium going after it. Or someone like Scaled Composites. Perhaps Paul Allen and John Carmack would pool resources to go after a big prize, if they thought winning it would get them their money back with a small profit.

And I disagree that there are no efficiency gains to be had. Maybe if you stay with the current launch methods, but with some innovative new launch programs that can cut the cost to orbit by 80% or more, you can do innovative things. And NASA is too risk averse with its manned missions, which drives the cost way up. Test flight is supposed to be dangerous, and the pilots know that and accept it. But NASA is a political organization, and can’t withstand accidents. But Burt Rutan can, so he can send leaner, less complex aircraft into space by cutting some of the redundancy and over-design of the shuttle. You can also take more risks with the design of the craft when the design doesn’t represent ten years and ten billion dollars worth of research.

For comparison, look at how fast the air force was progessing with its X-planes. If the funding rug hadn’t been pulled out from under them, they could have had a shuttle orbiter by 1969. But then, they killed a lot of test pilots in the process.

87

There’s a lot of historical precedent for cash prizes stimulating spending in excess of the actual prize, particularly when Europe was exploring the New World. The idea was that the prize would be used to offset the investment, which would pay off many times over down the road. You can easily spend $5B to win $1B if there’s a decent shot at being the first to make $50B out of it.* All the prize (or the structured program, if there are several prizes) does is get the ball rolling and stimulate people’s interest. I have somewhere around here a list of historical examples, for comparison. I just need to dig it up…
*Consider a program to mine helium from the outer gas giants. Principles are understood; engineering is straightforward; investment would be massive. But with a large and reliable source of helium, which is kind of a pain to manufacture in huge quantites here on Earth, you could begin developing a fusion rocket, which provides an improvement in transit times over conventional chemical rockets by many times over. Fast intrasystem rockets not only increase the speed and efficiency of the helium operation, they also allow you to get to and retrieve asteroids on a realistic time scale. The tens and hundreds of thousands of rocks spread around our solar system contain vast amounts of valuable metals; they’re just sitting out there waiting for somebody to pick them up. If there were a $1B prize for an operation to retrieve a few thousand cubic feet of helium from Neptune, and $5B invested toward pursuing this new resource provided the gateway for the development of a fast fusion rocket, the which was the means for picking up an unclaimed rock containing tens of billions of dollars worth of nickel and iron and so on, wouldn’t you rather be the one to claim the $1B to offset the initial investment and get unspeakably rich twenty years down the line than see somebody else do it?

88

You don’t have to look back very far. The X-prize is 10 million dollars, and I’m guessing that there are five or six teams that have all spent more than that. I think Rutan’s team is into it for something like 17 million so far, as of three or four months ago. By the time they launch, they’ll probably have more than 20 million invested.

But as Cervaise said, they are doing this now not to profit from the prize, but because winning the prize helps offset the cost of learning how to fly in space. Once they can do that, they can start commercializing it.

89

**
Do you have a cite for this? I didn’t think funding information was released for the SpaceshipOne project.

Anyway I would cite the X-prize as the reason why prizes are a bad idea. By setting a specific short-term goal, you end up with a kludge designed only to win that prize. So you have a reusable sub-orbital spacecraft capable of carrying two people; what are you going to do with that? There is very little to be done on sub-orbital flights, and the challenges involved in an orbital flight are so diferent that you might as well start over from scratch. It would, at best, be a publicity stunt.

Another example is the $25,000 Raymond Orteig prize for a non-stop trans-Atlantic flight, won by Lindburgh. It didn’t anything to advance aircraft design. Lindurgh found someone who was willing to invest exactly $25,000, then spent the money to convert a commercial aircraft for the flight.

I do want to see more of space development done by private companies. For example, SpaceX seems to be a well thought-out public venture, and the Air Force agreeing to become the first customer is IMHO a very effective use of government funds to stimulate public development. Beal Aerospace blames their demise on competition from the government, and I think there is some truth to it. But I just can’t see how you can fund specific goals, like NASA’s scientific missions, as prizes.

90

Why not government produced pornography, then? Why should only space geeks have their drooling subsidized?

Yes, and your point? Libertarianly speaking, goverment IS a private entity. It is nothing more than the manifestation of willful and voluntary consent.

91

Well, just don’t come whining to us when the Moon becomes a focal point for Maoist propaganda! And keep in mind that there is no proof, none whatsoever, that vast warehouses of nuclear anthrax are not buried there.

As well, all right thinking Americans should be deeply ashamed of the anti-semitic propaganda being leveled at our brave engineers at NASA, as they struggle in our defense. Where do you want to face the anal-probing aliens? On the moon or in your bedroom?! What will it take to wake America up? Will you slumber in ignorance until “In Klaatu We Trust” is added to our coinage?!

Look to the skies! Look to the skies!

(yes, I will say anything. No, I have no shame. What’s your point?)

92

One more comment about the “prize” idea. When NASA says they spent $800 million to launch two rovers on Mars, they are not talking about pure hardware costs. It’s the total cost for the project, and includes a substantial budget for scientists who operate the instrument and analyze the results. The photos we are getting from Spirit is not the final product of the mission; it’s just the raw data. The final product is the numerous analysis results published in refereed journals, and data sets made available to planetary scientists all over the world. The cost of the “science” phase includes such necessities as international conferences where scientists from all over the world are invited, often at NASA’s expense, to discuss the results. Without this there is no science, just pretty pictures.

Now if you fund a science mission as a prize, what do you give out the prize for? The first project whose results appear in 100 refereed journals?

93

I personally class space exploration as education, which would fall squarely within the remit of government funding even were I not at all socialist.

These pictures force us to look out at night and see each star as a sun like our own rather than a point in the sky. Incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial life would be a hammer on all but the most anvil-like head, begging the question like a violently insistent pan-handler: How did we get here?

These pictures stimulate and educate every mind, from the physics professor to the WWF fan in elasticated trousers who dropped out of school, and even if most people have no interest whatsoever, one would not withdraw them from school just because they had no interest in anything.

The education budget is enormous. I consider this few hundred million to be amongst its most efficiently spent in terms of its educational benefit.

94

Few hundred million? What happened to the billions?

95

I was referring to the Spirit probe in particular. If you wish to speak of NASA’s budget in toto then yes, I still feel it is money well spent educationally alone regardless of the money it effectively recoups in terms of US industry.

96

Personally, I don’t hold money-type issues to be “right” or “wrong” too often.

Let me ask you, at the risk of hijack: You’re against public funding of universities. You’re in favor of public funding of the military. Are you in favor of the government paying for college educations of veterans?

Well, yes and no. Or more precisely no and yes, in my opinion. I absolutely agree that there is something very fundamental about space exploration and exploration in general that excites the human psyche. But I don’t know that it’s any more fundamental than the effect of music or art. I’d say that such a visceral reaction is one that has a non-rational element to it. And I don’t mean “non-rational” to be a negative-- certainly my feelings toward my wife have some non-rational elements to them. :slight_smile:

Wow. Did your dog get run over by Pioneer 11 or something when you were a kid? Or is this intended for the posters who hold views closer to yours save for the space program?

97

Sam

You very much misunderstand industrial research. I was in Bell Labs for 15 years, starting with the good old monopoly days. I wasn’t in Area 11 (the basic research area) but I did get some funding from research, and even ran a research program.

First, real basic research in industry only comes from monopolies, that can afford to do it for the public good. Bell Labs basic research was coerced from the public, in a sense, by the way rates were set in the old monopoly days. Microsoft research is coerced from the Windows monopoly. IBM had a lot more research when it was a monopoly.

Forget about Lucent basic research today. Almost all the people I knew in A11 got laid off. There might be a tiny bit left.

The R&D numbers you gave are correct, but they don’t mean what you think they mean. There is a government R&D tax credit, which covers product development. All microprocessor design projects, for instance, are counted as R&D. Those number are not basic research numbers. Most of Bell Labs did product development, by the way, not research, even in the good old days.

There are two reasons why non-monopoly companies are not going to sponsor a lot of basic research. The first is the risk, which people have mentioned already. The second is the difficulty of productization. Just because a company’s research center invents something doesn’t mean they are going to benefit from it. Xerox PARC, which invented the mouse, ethernet, and most of personal computing, is a classic example. Xerox, through blunders, never made money off of this stuff. Government funding makes the results open to all - which they basically are anyway, since you can’t hire high powered researchers and tell them not to publish. Why would a company spend money on basic research unless you get PR benefits from it?

98

Look, libertarians, the benefits of publically funded research are so self-evident you should go spank yourselves for an hour with a laptop computer. Then give it a FUCKING REST. Ever heard of quantum mechanics? In the 1920s a bunch of university eggheads sat around and discovered physical principles that are now estimated to contribute directly to at least 25% of the US GDP. None of these guys, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, etc., had the foggiest clue about transistors and semiconductors, but by the late 1940s, Feynman, Tomonaga, and Schwinger put the finishing touches on a theoretical framework that adequately describes about 99.9% of all phenomena we can detect in the universe today (outside of gravitational attraction). These guys absolutely depended on measurements of things like electron mass and magnetic moment, the electromagnetic coupling constant, etc. that were accurate to at least the seventh decimal place. No private interest had the cash or the interest in probing the constants of nature to this level of precision, but without this data modern quantum field theory wouldn’t exist. Believe it or not, places like Fermilab, Lawrence Livermore, CERN, SLAC, and on and on, give us the data that we absolutely need to build smaller electric circuits, fusion reactors, efficient solar cells, and on and on. These facilities cost tens of billions of build, but the returns we’ve already gotten from the finalizatio of QED in the 1950s pays back in TRILLIONS every YEAR.

Nobody had the foggiest clue what their fiddling could possibly produce in terms of practical payoff, at first, but they did it anyway, because they loved their area of research. The public pays for this research, via govt. grants, for the patently obvious reason that basic research has always provided enormous returns on the investment. I suppose people who can’t see beyond the tip of their nose might fail to appreciate the richly profound contribution basic reasearch has made to virtually every technological advance one can possibly imagine. Or really stupid people. The time-tested paradigm is that industry does best attacking specific problems, and basic science does best discovering things none of us even dreampt were possible. In this paradigm, you can’t know beforehand what some particular basic research interest may be good for, but you are guaranteed that if it is done in a rigorous manner, it will be VERY good for all someday. Private interests do contribute prodigously to basic research, but the great bulk of the funding is public. Take this public funding away, and you deny future generations the opportunity to enjoy, at the very least, the technological advances that make things like this message board possible. Killing public funding for research is a recommendation only an absolute fool would make if he/she had the slightest appreciation of the role science has played in shaping our lives.

99

Voyager: I do not misunderstand corporate research. In fact, I have worked in research for one of the biggest corporations in the world. I’m well aware that the bulk of it is research directed at a specific commercial goal, and I never said otherwise.

The fact remains, corporations do a lot of basic research still. That was my point about how commercial concerns and basic research are converging. Many high-tech firms believe that nanotech will have commercial payoffs in the future, and they are investing in it now. But nanotech is so close to fundamental limits that much of that research is ‘basic’ stuff. The carbon nanotube was not discovered in a university or a government think tank - it was discovered by NEC.

This goes double for areas like genetics and materials science. And let’s not forget that a private company beat the human genome project in mapping the human genome.
Besides, the dividing line is very, very narrow between what constitutes ‘basic’ research and what constitutes research designed for commercial exploitation. How much research done in universities is ‘basic’? The university I went to had a whole pile of patents that were commercially exploitable, and lots of their research was in things like materials science that would be indistinguishable from what Dow chemical does. A friend of mine was a graduate chemist who went straight from university into industry, doing exactly the same research. He was hired by industry specifically because of his research projects. Go look at how much basic AI research is still being done in places like Xerox PARC. The leaders in autonomous walking robots right now are not universities, but Sony and Honda. Honda started working on its walking robot designs decades ago, and it knew there would be no commercial payoffs for decades, if ever.

100

If paying for college is part of the compensation package necessary to attract the appropriate people to the military, then so be it. Most private companies I’ve worked for would finance college, too.

But you’re right. Let’s not hijack this thread for further discussions along those lines.

Loopydude:

Leaving aside for a monent whether I agree with your explanation about the discovery of QM, you need to understand something about libertarian philosophy. And that is that it puts freedom (you know: liberty) as the primary and overriding goal of government. Not prosperity (per se), not grandiosity, but plain old run-of-mill freedom. Now, personally, I think a free society aslo produces a prosperous society, but that’s just icing on the cake. It’s a consequence of freedom, not a justification for it. Freedom is an end in itself and does not require a justification.

BTW, look at the various universities started approx 100 yrs ago when the paradigm was not as it is today concerning government financing of research. I’m talking about the Stanfords and the Carnegie Melons. Once the government steps in to fund research, the “market” for that “commodity” is distorted. Why do you suppose that a Stanford University has not been started in the last 25 years or so? Have the brain patterns of philanthopists been altered somehow? No, the social climate has been altered.