I agree with Armstrong. It is indeed very embarrassing the US has no human launch capability left at all, especially given our enormous lead. Hopefully that will be rectified with the work SpaceX is doing.
Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
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Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#42America has stopped dreaming. Remember all those futuristic visions of tomorrow and the optimism America had? That all stopped once we stopped going to the moon. We just need to make this a priority over say, two wars and a military presence in hundreds of countries.
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ISS is great and all, but the real value of the shuttle was that we could park next to Hubble or one of our spy satellites and do maintenance in place, so milking a lot of value out of orbiting platforms that would otherwise have to be shut down. I don't see what we have that replaces that right now.
Satellites are not designed for that - the Hubble sure wasn't. It is not a capability that needs to be replaced.
KRSchultz is basically correct, please don't downvote him. The last Hubble repair mission went way beyond the Hubble's expected service capabilities, which was an amazing accomplishment.
However, it's vastly more economically sound and safer to bring an aging device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do space walks for a repair and upgrade mission.
The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit, and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#44The title is completely misleading. Armstrong did not tell NASA "you're embarrassing". He told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the demise of NASA is embarrassing. And it is. Regardless of the other crap our government spends money on, NASA is a fantastic investment, and has always provided a positive return to our economy.
I'm sorry, but you have no way of knowing this. What would happen if you took a bunch of would-be rocket scientists and hadn't given them jobs at NASA?
Same thing that happens to the ones that don't end up at NASA: they work on incremental improvements to some quant trading platform to squeeze more "productivity" out of it. Sikorsky x2 don't fly and fuel themselves to west Hampton you know.
I kid, but no really.
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#45This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company t…
"It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen" For the military, that is a feature not a bug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investi... Realize anyone with the ability to get to orbit has the ability to dro…
"Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and control regulation are not bumbling idiots."
Actually, in the case of the export restriction laws in question, they were bumbling idiots. These laws were passed in haste after there was an accidental disclosure of technology from the U.S. to the Chinese during an investigation of a launch failure. The law is terribly vague, with industry leaders unable to tell even what is covered by it or isn't. Additionally, enforcement responsibility moved from the Commerce Department to the Defense Department, with a concomitant increase in red tape that really only a large prime defense contractor could have the resources to cope with.
It would not be too much of a stretch to say that this law would be like outlawing airline travel completely on the basis of security concerns arising out of 9/11.
Finally, the arguments that will bring about a much needed change to these regulations will not be economic in nature, they will be arguments about national security. Already there is an international market for technologies untainted by U.S. control. Unfortunately for the U.S., the need for that market is going away as U.S. companies have been isolated for so long, and other nations have been so free to cooperate for so long, that non-U.S. space technology is, for the most part, superior to U.S. technology on cost, reliability, and performance bases. We, the U.S., are losing the larger security war by winning every local security battle with senseless and callous efficiency.
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
"First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA? -Neil deGrasse Tyson" http://wp.me/p1bnM2-qW
Eventually the US government will sell back the banks and make some income, so its hardly comparable. Sweden in the early nineties did this and they recovered more than half their money. The bailouts were a necessary step to prevent severe economic crisis - they amounted to just 6% percent of GDP. Clearly worth it, when considering what is at stake here.
>Eventually the US government will sell back the banks and make some income, so its hardly comparable. Sweden in the early nineties did this and they recovered more than half their money.
Compared to what America got out of the space race, the bailout was a complete waste. America got something like 100X their ROI in going into space. Major investments in materials science, aerospace engineering, battery technology, computer technology, their probably isn't a product today on the market that isn't using some kind of "space age technology" that ultimately came about because of NASA's space race.
So the space race was clearly worth it. The bank bailout is still clearly debatable. I would argue that because the banks turned around and paid out bonuses, that we should have placed the banks into receivership and re-structured them. In our post-bailout system, the banks have grown even more concentrated and reform is pretty much a failure. We're set up to be "way too big to fail" next time around.
When that happens, we won't be talking about "getting half our money back" and saying it was a "good deal".
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#47The title is completely misleading. Armstrong did not tell NASA "you're embarrassing". He told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the demise of NASA is embarrassing. And it is. Regardless of the other crap our government spends money on, NASA is a fantastic investment, and has always provided a positive return to our economy.
I'm sorry, but you have no way of knowing this. What would happen if you took a bunch of would-be rocket scientists and hadn't given them jobs at NASA?
Well, this is just a guess, but you would probably get a bigger, meaner, more accurate V2 missile.
But that could be because the place for rocket scientists before NASA was the Nazi party -- back when they were out to pretty much dominate humanity.
Did that answer your question?
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#48This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company t…
"It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen" For the military, that is a feature not a bug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investi... Realize anyone with the ability to get to orbit has the ability to dro…
... and in fact a lot of them actually have economics degrees because it is a great background for that position. So they probably understand better than you or I roughly how many jobs are going to be killed by these tight regulations.
Maybe things have change a lot in the last three years, but:
"As Congress works on one of the most important pieces of economic legislation in a generation, a Washington research group has pointed out that more than 8 in 10 members of Congress don’t have a formal educational background in the business, economics, or finance fields."
"The research by the Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy, which aims to educate the general public about finance issues, showed that about 14% have degrees in economics-related fields and just 6.7% specifically have an economics degree. More than 30% of members have degrees in politics and government, while 18% majored in humanities. "
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/10/01/most-lawmakers-don...
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bingo. Armstrong and many of the other old Apollo-era astronauts are emotionally invested in manned space-flight. I think he romanticizes it to the point of being immune to arguments of cost-effectiveness.
What is space exploration? Is it sending robots to take pictures? Or is it sending people who can radio back a message saying how it feels to look at the Earth from afar? The information gathered through space probes is awesome, but what's the point of knowing something if we are never going to experience it? It's like comparing writing a travel guide from second-hand knowledge with making the journey yourself. You k…
To answer your first set of questions: it's both. I'm not sure how Nate got the feeling that I'm against maned space flight? There are plenty of private entities out there with the stated goal of manned space flight, so that's a bit of a straw-man.
"I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century."
Boy do we ever agree here. Reminds me of the ending of Watchmen. A world united in the effort to save us all from randomly-appearing psychic squid. Gaaaaaaah!
Here's the rub though. I think that private enterprise has a greater chance of leading the charge here. Governments are hamstrung by their constituencies. There's nothing stopping entrepreneurs from reaching out across political boundaries, except for pesky laws in some cases, but that just serves to reinforce my point. The face that the laws like that even exist shows that the government seeks to prevent what some individual may be prone to try. In this context, reaching out in unity with "forbidden" foreign nationals.
Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing
#50This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company t…
"It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen" For the military, that is a feature not a bug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investi... Realize anyone with the ability to get to orbit has the ability to dro…
I understand that I'm being an idealist and that there are real life complexities that prevent this naive world view, but I'm not really happy that our petty military concerns and human-wide in fighting is now keeping us and private industry from exploring our greater Universe.
I understand why it's done, but I still find it unfortunate and worthy of criticism.