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If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

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Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#131

Post by crdoconnor »

valuearb wrote: post #89
stupidcar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire". The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, any sane atte…

Calling this a republican problem is being willfully ignorant of the problems in our government structure. We didn’t get $21B in debt cause of republicans, or democrats, but because of congress. Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won’t be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch wil…

20 trillion, not billion.

Economically, this 20 trillion of debt reflects the private sector's desire to save as much as it does the US government's desire to spend.

It is economically damaging to remove treasury instruments as a savings vehicle. We have already seen what happens when the interest rates on them are plunged to zero - asset bubbles popping up all over the place.

There is no theoretical reason why local currency denominated debt instruments cannot keep being issued indefinitely. Only cretinous goldbugs and other people who do not understand how money works try to argue that there's a solvency risk.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#132

Post by mcguire »

Not a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs...

"NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency."

As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.

On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.

An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.

(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")

"Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..."

But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#133

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

frangipane wrote: post #85
sytelus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In inflation adjusted dollars? I would have still thought its 10X cheaper now because of all the learnings plus much lower cost computing and other engineering enhancements. Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion. By far the most expensive parts of the mission were the Apollo spacecraft (the Command Modules, the Lunar Modules) and the monstrous Saturn V launch vehicl…

Safety. Back then it was basically part of the Cold War. Today, what are you asking the people to risk their lives for? Making things civilian-safe is expensive.

People risk their lives all the time for sillier reasons than going to space, sometimes without even getting paid for it.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#134

Post by Verdex_3 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #129
ThomPete wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophically I agree 100% but they cost a fraction of what it would cost to create a base on the moon for instance. Someone has to pick up that bill. I am sure we will get a base on the moon with time but technologically we aren't there yet. Let's focus on build a solid and habitable space station then we can use some of that knowledge to establish a base on the moon. (once we have solved the resource issues)

Does your cost analysis account for the dividends in the form of new technology developed during the project?

If ThomPete is talking about the analysis that I had a look at, then yeah the dividends from new technology developed was taken into account and it still doesn't work out economically. The problem is money spent on a moon base isn't being spent on economic developments on earth which also result in technological developments.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#135

Post by crdoconnor »

johnminter wrote: post #75

The author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "It's all about the Benjamins". The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to p…

>The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T

That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained.

If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no.

If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter.

However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#136

Post by rurban »

jl6 wrote: post #34

You can’t put a man on the moon but your grandparents could.

The germans could. When the anglo-british bureaucracy took over the german Huntsville engineering management and forced them to Houston/California and switch to solid rockets it started failing. This was the inside view. The new type of management was called "destructive organizational culture". https://www.jstor.org/stable/25611289 [of course the new management blamed it on the germans]

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#137

Post by pjc50 »

valuearb wrote: post #91
pjc50 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether .. but not, as you pointed out, the biggest expense of all in the military. The way back to the moon is the same reason as America went to the moon in the first place: competition and colonialism. As soon as China or India look like they might go back to the moon, the space race will resume.

Social program spending is far higher than what is spent on the military. Unless you aren’t counting social security and medicare as “social programs” which would of course be silly.

Social security includes contributory pensions, though? In particular, if you're talking about US Federal debt, some of it is owed to the Social Security Trust Fund (mentioned upthread as "national debt of over $21T"), so either social security is part of government (and the internal debt should be deducted from that total) or it isn't (and doesn't count as government spending).

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#138

Post by polartx »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #58
jpatokal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic trams and modern light rail are different beasts. Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars…

Yes, that's a very good summary of what happened. I'm aware of those factors, but I still think we took a wrong turn. Maybe not in the US due to the population sparsity and sprawl, but in Spain and many other European countries, if we could connect every town or city of more than 10K people by either rail, light rail or tram (instead of having spent billions on highways), that would cover 80% of the population. A lar…

> that would cover 80% of the population. A large majority wouldn't need a car, and could instead use Uber-like services for the last mile

I'm sensing a bit of a Catch-22 in this hypothetical: How would the success of Uber-like services been impacted if 80% of the population no longer needed cars?

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#139

Post by Tiktaalik »

kalleboo wrote: post #59
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #50

This seems to happen to a lot of things. In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc. Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram…

I lived in a Swedish city of a similar size. They had a tram network that was dismantled bit by bit until it was completely shut down in 1973 because it was seen as unmodern. And now 40 years later they're all talking about building trams again since they're so modern...

What is interesting about the renaissance of light rail to me is that for many cities it's a restoration of how the city was originally designed.

Relatively modern cities, especially north american ones, would have grown along with the tram network, adding on "streetcar suburbs" as the city grew.

For example if a neighbourhood comprises of one major street lined with commercial with residential everywhere else, that was likely once a streetcar line.

At some point these cities threw out the trams and replaced them with buses and cars, but these cities weren't designed for that infrastructure.

Newer cities that are designed around cars are unwalkable stripmall deserts. It will be much more difficult to turn these into walkable transit oriented communities.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#140

Post by bigfcjjyfcg »

mcguire wrote: post #132

Not a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs... " NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency. " As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the pr…

I heard similar things from my ex-NASA roommate when I worked at SpaceX, do you think NASA can correct the problems you've outlined?
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