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NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

arstechnica.com

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Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#331

Post by Tepix »

Navigator wrote: post #268

Considering NASA costs next to nothing (about 0.5% of the US govt's total budget), and the studies I've seen referenced show its return on investment to be about $10 for every $1 used (granted, it's a difficult figure to calculate, but even if assuming a huge error margin that's still great ROI), it's no wonder you chose to post that anonymously.

A $10 return for $1 spent sounds nice.

As far as SLS is concerned, the numbers are probably not that great: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/new-report-nasa-spen...

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#334

Post by ceejayoz »

theseatoms wrote: post #323
ceejayoz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that disappointing? NASA today exists, in part, to do exactly that, and has benefitted tremendously from their SpaceX partnership.

Just thought SpaceX had other revenue sources, I guess.

They do?

http://www.spacex.com/missions

About half the missions on there are non-US government flights.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#335

Post by sqeaky »

valuearb wrote: post #312
sqeaky wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA is obligated to share their work with Americans. Many products ship with tech NASA invented that probably would not have been shared if a private enterprise came up with it.

Are you joking? The only point of doing private sector research is to build something out of it. We receive those advances as new products. And NASA doesn't gift it's advances to americans, it shares technologies with private companies that share them in the exact same way. You and I still had to pay for our Tang, it was never free. NASA is a huge inefficient bureaucracy hamstrung by a fickle and corrupt congress. As…

Tang isn't a NASA invention, it was invented by Kraft. It tastes terrible and no one bought it until NASA used it[0].

But lets run with that. If NASA had invented they wouldn't manufacture and give it away, they would give away the recipe and entrepreneuring businesses could make it to sell if they wanted.

This is exactly what happened with Memory Foam. A NASA contractor invented it as part of the contract so they couldn't keep it secret[1] and it worked its way into a ton of products.

I think you are correct that SLS is not ideal. But I don't think that is really applicable, their inefficiency as business is perhaps understandable because they are not a business. They take their direction from Congress and congress told them to make a ship out of parts they had laying around and that was the SLS.

If we wanted to look at their other missions, they have landed several things on mars and orbited distant planets. Feats no private enterprise has done (yet). All the research from that is available amateur astronomers routinely use to discover new things, like exoplanets in old data.

Designs for things they made like their rocket motors is made available, and that is how Space-X started, by looking at NASA plans for their rockets and picking and choosing the parts they thought most practical.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_(drink) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_foam

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#337

Post by gozur88 »

digikata wrote: post #288
gozur88 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's absolutely the latter. Congress has never really cared about spaceflight - to your Congressman it's just an opportunity to bring federal dollars to his district, because that will get him reelected.

But why not make real plans and actually get something accomplished, then you can point to something truly concrete during re-election, and even bump the funding even more.

The money you get from contractors for reelection is going to help more than anything you can actually point to. House seats are up every two years, and you don't accomplish much in aerospace in two years.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#338

Post by ethbro »

keenerd wrote: post #327
ethbro wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a more detailed way of putting what you're looking for. And I enjoy books like that as well (e.g. A Song of Ice of Fire). Incidentally, how'd you feel about KSR's Mars books, if you've read them? But I guess I forced myself to read enough Golden Age sci-fi that I developed a neurotic category for lazy... "deep worlds"? I'm looking at you and Foundation, Asimov. So much of that stuff is a splash of human-esque…

Mars was alright. I had a lot of trouble with one of the books. Took almost a year to read because it felt like there was nothing but political infighting in it. Foundation was actually what got me started on the "future histories" kick. The civilization is a more fleshed-out character than any human in the story. But I was eleven and didn't read any further than the original trilogy. My favorite golden-age sci-fi wo…

I love Heilein. To me, that's when sci-fi turned the corner and stopped being pulp and started being decent literature.

I haven't read any Burroughs though. Always meaning to.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#339

Post by skinnymuch »

bencollier49 wrote: post #261
skinnymuch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to outsource an incredibly ambitious space program to another country? That'll never happen and I don't know if it should either. Parts of it can be outsourced for sure, but that's it. Like Europe taking over parts of some space projects. Russia being paid for deliveries.

You didn't notice the sarcasm?

Hard to tell on HN. Much easier on places with less decorum than HN. Aka most of the web.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#340

Post by valuearb »

sqeaky wrote: post #335
valuearb wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you joking? The only point of doing private sector research is to build something out of it. We receive those advances as new products. And NASA doesn't gift it's advances to americans, it shares technologies with private companies that share them in the exact same way. You and I still had to pay for our Tang, it was never free. NASA is a huge inefficient bureaucracy hamstrung by a fickle and corrupt congress. As…

Tang isn't a NASA invention, it was invented by Kraft. It tastes terrible and no one bought it until NASA used it[0]. But lets run with that. If NASA had invented they wouldn't manufacture and give it away, they would give away the recipe and entrepreneuring businesses could make it to sell if they wanted. This is exactly what happened with Memory Foam. A NASA contractor invented it as part of the contract so they co…

Again, the inventor of memory foam isn't going to hide it, they are going to create products out of it or license it. So the idea that NASA "shares" is immaterial.

Calling the SLS "not ideal" is like saying a Tsunami will get you wet.

SpaceX benefited as much from NASA as NASA benefited from the Nazis, and as the Nazi's benefited from Goddard. Research marches on.

But currently the most important R&D in the space business is being done by SpaceX. The only way space travel becomes economically viable is through re-usablity, which NASA has not made any credible attempts at solving.

And NASA isn't inefficient because it's not a business. It's inefficient because it's being used to distribute pork barrel spending to specific congressional districts. If the most efficient way to build the SLS was to build it in Puerto Rico, it would never happen because Puerto Rico doesn't have any congressional votes. Instead NASA is forced to break up projects across a massive number of congressional districts and do each sub-task in the most costly way possible so the sub contractors in those districts get a big taste of excess profits to spread around the district.

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