NASA appears no longer to be shooting for the stars

It's problem now is that 50% of it's budget is useful for subsidizing Boeing's competition with Airbus, but the other 50% is no longer needed to subsidize General Dynamics competition with the USSR.

That said, it seems to me that the safety culture is a symptom, not an underlying cause, of the troubles that NASA is facing. Fundamentally, the political nature of NASA planning and acquisition drive NASA-designed systems toward complexity and high-performance. It is the complexity and performance of (especially) launch vehicles, combined with their stringent requirements and catastrophic failure modes that drives the safety culture. If they didn't obsess over safety, these monstrosities would fail every time.

Take a typical aerospace quality part that has $700 worth of material and labor in it. Because it is engineered with a factor of safety of, 1.05-1.2, for example, there is a $25-30,000 paper trail that documents the mine where the ore was extracted, who did the refining, what the heat treatment process was, where it was performed, and so on and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam.

Take the (awful) STS, for example. Congress was promised "airline-style" operations for this "space pickup truck." Well, an airliner has 0 mission-critical parts. A wing spar can fail and the skin should hold the wing together. The STS has over 700 mission-critical parts. For example, if an O-ring fails on a booster, everybody dies. If some foam hits the leading edge of the wing, everybody dies. High-perf mission-critical parts seem to be a result of the political need for the appearance of technology leadership.

I can almost guarantee you that the O-rings and leading edge pieces were manufactured in different states. High part-count is an artifact of the procurement process.

Elon Musk has talked about what makes SpaceX's pricing possible. (Note that they're offering launch services at 1/5 the cost of the shuttle.) He has a vertically integrated rocket factory. In one state. NASA could not build the Falcon 9 if it wanted to simply because they could not vertically integrate in one state. Every state would get a piece of the pie.

Algorithmically, because that's the crowd, here, you pay an exponential administrative cost for each of the factors: performance, lateral integration, and complexity. We've done all three.

NASA treats the fact that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built as a point of pride, for political reasons. It's actually our national shame and folly, and has set space access back 30 years.

Pick subsidizing fruit growers, or the rural electrification commission, or studies of prostitutes in Hong Kong -- there are a zillion projects that you can pick which will provide that same WTF moment you want. Hell, just point out the freaking size of the federal budget in general and how it compares with NASA's budget. But the project you picked leads us off into another direction entirely.

Another commenter made a great point -- the closer NASA was to being another arm of DoD, the more funding and budget goodies it got. Perhaps if we could find some reason to fear an attack from outer space, NASA would kick into high gear again (and I'm only being slightly facetious)

With all the downvoting I'm getting, perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps most folks feel like the use of deadly force is more or less the same as any other expenditure: bomb an insurgent, watch some young kid die in an IED detonation, build a bridge, fund some research, build a space station, buy buses for a school system.

I am not one of those people.

And while I have strong moral feelings about this, it's not a question of morality. As a practical matter, the use of deadly force by the state should only be done in times of emergency, and in those cases funding for that use of force trumps everything else. Now we can argue whether or not Afghanistan holds up to that criteria, but that's a war discussion. You're dragging in another topic when there are plenty of examples of other funding that don't have the unique qualities of Afghanistan. Hell, entitlement spending alone counts for about 60% of current federal spending. http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/25/news-flash-entitlement-spe...

Without loss of generality, I will assume below that you are European.

The arms industry in Europe can be as corrupt as it wants - it still doesn't consume the incredible proportion of GDP ours does, and it still doesn't own your government outright. That corruption is utterly, utterly insignificant in terms of how European society is run and where the money actually goes. I'll grant you that arms corruption is a Bad Thing, and making money off killing people is even worse, but Europe ain't got nothing on America in that regard. (Note: right now. Clearly, in the past, this was not the case, but we're discussing current affairs.)

Public finances in many European countries are a mess, yeah. I give you Indiana. Or even better - I give you California, which has started selling its historical monuments and state parks in order to stave off bankruptcy.

Europe has nothing like immigration or social problems. They think they do. But they really, really don't. Large and growing Muslim minorities are, and let me make this perfectly clear, not a problem. They are a good thing.

The birth rate collapsing is a good thing. I don't care about retirement problems because they don't exist; the fact that they are actually planning for retirement at all is what makes Europe superior. And I'll draw your attention to the fact that those large, growing Muslim minorities are in fact paying into the retirement system. Just because it's not white, Christian money doesn't mean the system isn't working. And more importantly, Europe doesn't have (as many) thieves and brigands in power trying to get that social services lockbox open so their friends can buy more yachts - and the European media springs on that shit like rapid weasels when they do try it, because in Europe, they still report actual news, and the people, clearly remembering times when the government was demonstrably and openly against them, watch the government like a million hawks, and oddly enough, journalists there are OK with that.

And I'd like to state, just for the record, that if you think Europe is facing serious economic problems in the long term, I'd like to draw your attention back to America. The difference between Europe and America is that some people in Europe are at least planning management strategies; the corresponding people in America are mostly trying to figure out which part of Peru they're going to retreat to when things finally collapse.

But the point in your post that I really feel the most urgent need to address is this flabbergasting notion that the European Union is a failed project.

The European Union has been expensive, yeah. It's not even a tenth as expensive as the Iraq War, and here's the key: it isn't a failed project. There is no, no, no fucking way you can say the European Union has failed until you see an actual renewal of the centuries of warfare that ravaged this continent until the advent of the European Union.

I am, right now, sitting in Budapest, which joined the Union in 2005. To get here, I drove through Switzerland (part of the Union in all but name), Italy, and Slovenia, and then I drove back through Austria and Germany to return our rental car before flying back to Vienna (long story; one-way rentals are Not Cheap here). I've lived in Europe, and come to Europe, a lot over the last twenty years; my wife is Hungarian. So I know a lot about what I'm saying here. The advances I've seen this summer (it's been five years since I could afford to come) have blown my mind. Just the thought of driving across Slovenia in a single evening on their freaking new freeway system alone...

What I'm saying here, and above, is that Europe is prosperous. Oh, everybody's complaining about the Union right now - ever since Germans realized that a run on Greek banks affects them through the Euro zone. But the Union was inevitable, and the expansion of markets and lowering of trade barriers has been very profitable to Germany indeed. They're just really panicky about spreading inflation (something about that explosive inflation in the 30's really scarred the public psyche there).

But failed? No. The European Union is the greatest thing humanity has ever achieved - don't get me wrong, I love the American Constitution, and I'm all for ranking it right up there at the top of greatest innovations ever. But the history of Europe is one of blood and bombs, for the last couple of millennia, and now they're at each other's throats only at the rhetorical level.

The Union is a success.

If you've never been here, I encourage you to visit. If you've never left, I encourage you to examine some other parts of the world before thinking Europe is a failure.

(tl;dr: nyah, nyah, you're wrong, Europe rocks)

Does national defense trump food? Does national defense trump disaster preparedness or emergency response? Does it trump basic research? (Consider that last answer carefully.)

Cost-benefit ratios apply to everything, even including national defense. And it all has to be managed together. The idea that we have to put it all on the line every time some guy in a cave sneezes is the panic mode that let us spend off-budget for years on national defense, and it's the reason why entitlement spending doesn't actually account for 60% of federal dollars.

So this is the crux. National defense spending is considered holy, and yet it's an immense drain on our national resources that, if it were examined in any honest way, would be cut so fast your scissor fingers would be blistered. I could say the same for lots of things, but national defense is such a sacred cow you just can't say any other program comes even close in terms of the way it short-circuits discussion at every juncture.

You're 100% right in your plan to refund NASA, though. If we could just get Fox News to believe in alien terrorists, we'd be on Mars next week.