I’m fairly sympathetic to the idea of long-term investment in space exploration. But the Apollo program is in some sense a counter-example. It was pretty much a “crash,” “get there and damn the cost” approach with a highly focused mission and a strong sense of national priority. The mission was accomplished; Apollo was a success.
You obviously can’t maintain a “crisis” approach indefinitely, so it’s probably inevitable that NASA wouldn’t have the same focus after Apollo. It’s also true that the main reason to go to the moon was “because it’s there” – prestige. We found nothing there that would make us want to pay the cost to go back, and no one has been back for quite some time (or is likely to go). Nor has anyone suggested another comparable mission capable of galvanizing the public (who have to put up the bucks) – Mars sounds neat to a small group of hardcore spacenuts, but the time and cost seem to put it far out of reach.
In the real world, lots of agencies compete for our tax billions, and an approach that says “give NASA anything it wants and look for results 25 years hence” isn’t realistic, in the sense that it’s a reliable way to secure a vast budget forever. When NASA’s “flagship” Shuttle is aging, expensive and of questionable reliability, it doesn’t help. If NASA engineers are found to have omitted sensible safety steps, that’ll really hurt. And no one is going to be pleased with an argument that says “See, this is what you get when you give us 15 billion a year instead of 25.”
Tell that to the Chinese, who’re planning a lunar mission.
So you’re saying that because the general population’s short sighted (never mind the fact that NASA’s website broke all internet records when folks could go look at Mars Sojourner pictures in real time), we should just abandon anything that doesn’t satisfy the public’s desire for “instant gratification?” As for NASA not being able to maintain focus, that’s partly NASA’s fault, but also partly the fault of those who didn’t care about what NASA was doing. We expect NASA to be in charge of not only manned flight, but unmanned as well, and unless NASA provides us with spectacular video no one seems to care. By the time of the Apollo 17 landing, the networks were uninterested in covering the event. Hell, people were calling and complaining that the scant coverage they were giving the mission (and the only one with an actual scientist onboard) was interrupting reruns of “I Love Lucy!” Reruns, for godsake! NASA could be focused on unmanned missions, but then they’d be damned for wasting money on sending robots, or they could focus on manned flight, but then they’d be damned for wasting money on sending humans. Either way, they’re damned, and if we let fools run the world, we’re all damned.
And that’s too damned bad. I’m sorry, but NASA’s given a mere pittance of a budget, and expected to produce results along the lines of Apollo (i.e. good TV [although IMHO, the results from Apollo are better than that, its just that’s all that most folks seem to understand]) even though that’s impossible. Even if NASA could generate spectacular results along the lines of Apollo every time it farted, there’d be people bitching. The simple fact of the matter is that we cannot allow something as important as scientific research to be left to the whims of those who understand little more than MTV.
Personally, I’d like to see every dollar spent at high schools and universities spent on atheletic programs diverted to educational purposes. That’s never going to happen, of course. I accept it, and the idiots out there need to accept the fact that money, which they think could go to something else, is going to go to the space program.
I don’t think that Tuckerfan’s use of gold as the measure is a good way to compute comparative costs. In 1805 the US total national product was in the range of $2 million. The Lewis and Clark expedition cost about 1.8% of that. In 1996 dollars the US GDP was about $9.4 trillion. Based on that, the expedition was equivalent to $174 billion. That is, the spending of $37 thousand on a single project in 1805 had the same impact as the spending of $174 billion on a single project would have today.
Now to get back to the foam insulation. My problem is that NASA seems to have done the same thing with this problem as was done with the “O” rings in the solid rocket boosters up to the Challenger accident. According to Richard Feynman in the book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, there had been quite a bit of evidence of gas leakage past the rings in previous flights. However, because they always “got away with it,” NASA managers didn’t take the incidents seriously. Now we find that there has been a lot of foam insulation breaking off but NASA again seems to have “gotten away with it” and the main effort seems to have been a post-event modeling of possible damage which always turned out to be not “dangerous.”
The insulation shouldn’t break off. When it does that would tell me that the design is marginal. Maybe there isn’t any better solution to insulating the fuel tank, but there is a question in my mind as to how hard the NASA managers looked since they had always managed to escape serious consequences.
I don’t see what you want them to do differently. You can’t make a 100% flawless system which nobody can complain about. We’re not making a Rolls Royce here, we’re trying to make a functional, practical system with limited budget and time constraints. So the foam falls off, and some people think it might pose a danger. The reasonable thing to do is to learn more about the problem and weigh the potential for danger against the cost of fixing the problem. If people agree that it’s a life-threatening problem then I’m sure they’d spare no expense to fix it. If most people think it’s not dangerous, then you spend that money on other places which is in more immediate need for a fix. Sometimes people make mistakes when assesing the danger, and there is no way to completely eliminate such incidences.
I agree with the general tone of your post, as you will notice if you read my other posts in threads on this same subject. There are some things that are at the very limit of the state of the art as it presently exists.
I’ll quote myself: “Maybe there isn’t any better solution to insulating the fuel tank, but there is a question in my mind as to how hard the NASA managers looked since they had always managed to escape serious consequences.”
What I think NASA should do, and the investigating commission might make it happen, is to question the mind-set of its managers in analysing and evaluating such possible design flaws to see if an adjustment in attitude is needed. I recall that one of the higher level engineers in the Challenger event was told by his superior to take off his “engineer’s hat” and put on his “management hat” when the advisability of launching in such cold weather was discussed.
David Simmons, I like your numbers better. I used gold as a basis since it was something I could find numbers on fairly quickly. A modern expedition to the wilderness would entail things vastly more complex than anything L&C took with them. No one would allow the group to leave without a satellite phone, and those things can be pretty pricey. Especially if the backers of the expedition required the explorers to beam back pictures of what they were seeing. Airtime for a satphone at speeds better than 14.4K can start out at $7.50/min. If you want to get into cable modem speeds or faster, you’re talking double that or more. Exploring has never been cheap, and it never will be.
It would be more accurate to say they’re planning a manned space program. A lot will have to happen before they arrive on the moon. One essential thing will be that they become convinced that sufficient prestige is available – there’s no other reason to go.
No, I’m saying that in the real world you do well to acknowledge that those who pony up your 15 billion dallar budget will take some interest in how effectively it’s spent.
Right – both are valuable, they have enough in common to make them fit under one agency, and NASA claims to be happy doing both (and receiving the allocated funds).
You can argue whether it’s as much as it should be, but I don’t think many would say that $15 billion/yr is a pittance. Nor do many feel we really need a moon landing a month (though in a nation of TV addicts, the occasional exotic video is probably a smart idea for a publically funded agency).
It will unless NASA acquires the reputation of being wasteful, arrogant or incompetent. That perception would likely affect funding.
I don’t blame you. I’m a little dubious myself. I found the number in a conservative web site about the growth of the federal debt and probably should have been a little suspicious. In any case, I think the estimated cost inflation based on the price of gold is invalid and I’ll see if I can find better number - not that it really makes a bit of difference.
**Oh, I don’t know. It’d make a cheap place to drop rocks from. Not to mention it’d make them only the third nation to launch people into space, and only the second to land men on the Moon. A lot of prestige there.
Except that they don’t, until something goes wrong. And then they start screaming that it’s a horrific waste of money and that they can’t understand why we’re spending so much money on it.
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Given that they budgetary ax is always hovering over NASA’s head, can you blame them for saying that they’re happy doing both? Splitting the agency in two puts both the manned and unmanned programs at risk. It can also mean that even if both of the new agencies get exactly half of the old budget, they’ll have less to spend on real science (since splitting the agency will most likely mean additional bureaucrats have to be hired on).
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Compared to the overall budget for the US Government, and many other government programs, it is a pittance.
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Dunno, I’d be willing to bet that the military’s still paying close to $500 for toilet seats.
That one doesn’t pass the smell test. The U.S. population in 1800 was 5.3 million people. If GDP were 2 million, it would mean the average person made 37 cents a year.
According to this cite, real GDP in 1805 in 1996 dollars was 9.08 billion, or $1,440 per capita.
Photo of the shuttle wing in orbit. This picture was taken from inside the shuttle and is located on the official Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s site.
And in an effort to find an answer to the hijack about how much a L&C expedition would cost in today’s money, I’ve emailed these folks who build full size replicas of L&C’s boat to see what one costs. I’ll post any response as soon as I get it.
That sounds a lot more reasonable, and with the 2002 GDP equal to just over 9 trillion in 1996 dollars that would make the expedition $37 million vs. $37,000 which looks a lot better.
I don’t know what the site was and I can’t find it any more, and it really isn’t worth more time. I’ll just slither off and try to forget this whole thing.
Got a response back from the folks who build the keel boats:
Bear in mind, that I imagine they build those suckers with modern power tools, so the man power requirements are less than would have been needed in L&C days.
Yes, and China was serious about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, too, were they not? How did that one turn out? I find it humorous and sad that you think China is a shining example of anything other than low cost, low quality, high volume shoddy manufactured materials.