Which works out to roughly $537,920 in contemporary money. Not cheap at all. (To calculate those numbers I used the price of gold in 1803 $19.20, with the price of gold in 2001 $271.36) Not to mention they ran into some pretty hefty “cost overruns.”
Eddie the Dane -
You see, there’s this complicated concept called long-term investment…
…and new frontiers have a habit of opening new markets and wealth-making opportunities. Have you seriously never heard enthusiasts talking about mining the solar system? Hence the L-C reference.
Of course, if you are advocating that the USA abandon it’s position in the space race so that Chinese flags can dominate all non-terrestrial resources in the solar system…
But that is simply one issue among many.
Actually, no - but if you think humanity’s long-term future remains solely on this planet then you are arguing a seemingly unique and strange position. Earth has many vulnerabilities and is a limited asset.
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. That’s unknown at this time. Let’s see what the investigation finds out. My guess is that we will never know for sure…
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I see… Then how about a little reminder from someone who was involved?
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/sts107_challenger_030224.html
Challenger panel members said they have no doubts about the integrity and the ability of the Gehman board. But** they recall NASA’s uncooperative approach in the early days of the Challenger investigation** and said board members had to push hard for information.
**
“There was a lot of obfuscation,” said Challenger board member Robert Hotz,** 88, former editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology.
I am nothing if not fair…
The last three paragraphs are of concern. An “Official of the Board” is critical of three pieces but also the 500 mph mentioned.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62056-2003Feb24.html
I think I do have an idea of this, which is part of why I question the extent to which the space program was responsible for the development of the computer industry.
Yet the point you bring up later works against using the latest, smallest, most powerful chips: designs must be “frozen” and debugged long before they’re launched, and the mandate for reliability generally outweighs the attaction of using the latest technology.
I think military applications were always large (usually exceeding NASA’s – check the relative budgets) and remain so today. Academic, scientific and business applications were important before the space program came along, and all the time it was in full swing. So I remain unconvinced that NASA played the vital role that you seem to be suggesting.
I’ll dissent – any government-initiated endeavor that can produce a tenth of what the Lewis and Clark expedition did for $540k in current dollars gets my vote as highly effective.
A shuttle mission costs about 1000 times this much, yet I think few would claim it matches L & C in significance.
Or not done at all. Where is it written that what the public wants must be done?
Perhaps if the astronauts ate dog…
Computers still filled a room and computing was down on the ground in Apollo. Gemini had an ASMD calculatordeveloped for on board the size of a paperback. (Perhaps that was so they could press buttons with a space suit on.)
“Space rated” 486’s fly on unmanned probes. They have to work from here to Pluto without repair. I’ve seen laptops on the shuttle, so I presume that astronauts use newer CPUs.
Good question! Hmmm. Well, the Constitution sort of says so. If not the public, then who do you suggest should determine what must be done? Out of interest, what do you call the type of government that logically develops from your choice (democracy obviously not being on your list)?
Not true through much of the 60’s:
http://www.acq.osd.mil/es/dut/ic/appa.htm
About Texas Instruments | TI.com
Apollo computers, the first to use IC’s.
The role of the Defense department’s contributions to IC design shouldn’t be underestimated here, however that path to commercialization has its own unique problems:
-Intel came out with the first commercial microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971.
I never claimed that the Lewis & Clark expedition wasn’t effective, merely that it wasn’t as cheap as Eddie claimed.
NASA’s budget has effectively remained static since Apollo, and yet people are expecting it to produce the same kinds of results as it did during Apollo, even though NASA has fewer real dollars to work with. That’s like handing a modern day Lewis and Clark $37,722.25 and expecting them to produce the same results as Lewis and Clark. An absurd proposition to say the least.
This is from the website of Economic History Resources, as part of an article about comparing the relative value of an amount of money between one time period and another. It’s an interesting discussion, although I don’t claim to understand it fully.
“There is no single “correct” measure, and economic historians use one or more different series depending on the context of the question.”
. . . .
“Putting a man on the moon. During March (1966): NASA told Congress the “run-out cost” of the Apollo program (to put men on the moon) would be an estimated $22.718 billion for the 13 year program that accomplished six successful missions of putting astronauts on the moon between July 1969 and December 1972. (http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4009/keyev4.htm) According the Steve Garber, NASA History Web Curator, the final cost was between $20 and $25 billion.
How much would that be today? If we used the CPI, it would be $124 billion, but this would not be a very good measure since the CPI does not reflect the cost of rockets and launch pads. Using the broader based GDP deflator gives a present cost of $101 billion. The alternative of using the wage series would be a rough measure of the labor cost in current terms and it would be $132 billion. By using the GDP per capita, we are measuring the cost in terms of average product and would get a number of $207 billion. Finally, a way to consider the “opportunity cost” to society, the best measure might be the cost as a percent of GDP, and that number would be $293 billion. This amount over thirteen years would be $22 billion per year. As a comparison, the NASA budget for the current fiscal year is $14.9 billion.”
Copyright © 2002 by EH.NET. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author.
Other examples given are the cost of building the Erie Canal and the annual salary of Babe Ruth in today’s dollars.
*Originally posted by Squink *
I thought that was one of my points – that there were non-spacetravel apps and markets sufficient to ensure a reasonable pace of development. IOW, NASA was useful but not vital.
Well, you didn’t really say that. Your statement was “… roughly $537,920 in contemporary money. Not cheap at all.” I believe that in view of what was accomplished, that is very cheap.
There may be some people who expect the equivalent of a moon landing every few years. But most of the rest of us would simply like some sense of value for money. The budget isn’t what it was during Apollo, but it certainly isn’t chump change either.
I think most democracies (including our republic) understand that there are limits on what the government should attempt. I believe the US Constitution clearly embraces this concept – it puts a far amount of emphasis on the limits of government.
I expect there are any number of things that the public can be shown to want that government has little or no business spending money in pursuit of: a pill that will make your spouse look like J. Lopez or B. Pitt, for example.
No, it isn’t but NASA hasn’t been allowed to have the focus that it had during the Apollo era, either. With people clamoring that NASA produce results now, when that’s not always possible, NASA has to be a hydra, with each head handling a different area and desperately hoping that one of the heads will produce enough of something to at least keep NASA’s budget from shrinking any farther. Besides, it’s absurd to expect that every dollar spent yield a useful result immediately, if ever. Many companies (Apple springs to mind at the moment along with 3M) come down hard on their R&D guys if their failure rate is low. Why? Because they know that the guys with the low failure rate aren’t pushing the envelope in their research. And yet, don’t many people hypocritically demand that NASA be on the cutting edge and be 100% successful?
There’s also how one determines the value of NASA’s research. Studying the weather on Mars or Venus, may not have an immediate technological benefit, but it does help us understand how climate and environment interact, which in turn benefits us in understanding the Earth’s weather system. Again, I go back to the example of the laser. I read an article written about the laser when it was first invented. The article billed the laser as the “world’s most expensive eraser” since the only use that had been discovered for it at that point in time was that it could be used to vaporize ink on paper. Today, some fifty or so years later, the damn things are everywhere. Hell, you can buy a laser for less that $20! I’m 34 years old and I can remember when the thought of being able to own a laser, much less buying one for less than a $1,000 was considered to be flights of fancy! We’ve sent a handful of canoes a few miles out into the ocean in the 51 years since Man first went into space, and have returned a bounty of knowledge, and yet people say that it’s not enough. Nearly three hundred years passed from when Columbus set sail and the birth of the United States. It took another 169 years for America to become the preeminent power on Earth and yet, in the merest eyeblink, the space program is asked to produce wonders every time it farts.
For a moment, let’s say that the space program has produced nothing of value whatsoever. Not in terms of technological innovation, not in terms of international prestige, not even in terms of inspiring people. It simply is something humanity has done. Now, out of all the nations on Earth, the US has poured more money and gone farther in space than any other nation. We’re also the technological leader in the world. Okay, so maybe other nations have taken what we’ve come up with and made it viable, but when you trace this history of things like VCRs and modern shipbuilding practices to name but two things, you see that they all began here. We, as a nation, have a desire to push the frontiers, and to deny us the frontier of space, for any reason, puts the rest of that at risk.
We didn’t need to expand westward from the eastern seaboard of the US, but we wanted to. No one, in 1803, could have predicted that the Lousiana purchase would have led to Hollywood or Microsoft or any of the other things that have arisen in the western part of the United States, but without them, we wouldn’t be the nation that we are today. To pass judgement on something in it’s infancy, as the space program most surely is, now, is akin to folks saying, “Who the hell cares what Lewis and Clark discovered?” Even the very purchase of the Lousiana Territory was questioned on Constitutional grounds when Jefferson bought it from the French (and he basically had to pull a fast one on Congress and the nation to do it), but today, if you were to say, “We should give it all back to the French!” you’d be hardpressed to find any sane person to agree with you.
If we’re going to give up on the space program now, or demand that everything that it does produce results of ‘X’ type, then we might as well say that the US never should have bought land from the French or the Russians! (And it took over a hundred years before we decided to pump oil out of Alaska.)
I’m not sure if the price of gold can be used as a baseline…after all, improved mining techniques (and, relative lack of demand due to not being used in monetary systems,) have made gold’s prices plummet relative to other goods and services.
I think that even vis a vis 1930’s prices, let alone 1830’s, $33,000 would be half a million or more. 1830’s much much more than half million.
Just to keep folks up to date, and to return to the original topic - this week’s issue of New Scientist reports that internal NASA e-mails have suggested the possibility that the object that hit the wing was not actually a 1.2kg block of foam - but instead a 29kg block of ice.
And apparently the people who assessed the safety of the situation had never done a shuttle safety assessment in their lives - the experienced Boeing boys who used to do it instead having been shifted to other engineering depts as a cost-cutting exercise.
Perhaps those who are calling for value-for-money shuttle missions actually got it - and with short-term thinking comes the inevitable long-term loss.
If true, that changes everything…