Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing • Hacker News Board

Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

#61

Post by krschultz » Fri, Sep 23, 2011, 9:50 PM UTC

jamesbritt wrote: post #48

krschultz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Members of congress != people who write the laws. A member of congress is the politician. He talks. He presses the flesh. He casts the actual votes. I recently saw that is it 70% lawyers, 15% career politicians, 10% businessmen, and 5% other.

But behind every congressman, every senator, and of course the President, is a group of experts. Every policy paper is written by a staffer. Nearly every political decision is made by a staffer. When they talk about a Congressman's staff, they are not talking about the intern getting coffee. Those guys are topical experts - usually based on what committee the guy sits on. Those guys are not dumb, and a lot more of them have econ degrees.

When I was figuring out what to do with my life it was become an engineer or become a staffer, I spoke to a couple guys in it. The typical road is go to Georgetown or George Washington University and get degrees in economics and political science or public policy, intern during college on a campaign or for a congressman, and then work your way up to a paid position. It's quite competitive.

Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

#62

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Sep 23, 2011, 10:22 PM UTC

hugh3 wrote: post #60

rbanffy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you should not underestimate the propaganda value. Generations were inspired by the Apollo program. The shuttle is a beautiful machine, but it really doesn't go anywhere interesting.

Is the Moon that interesting?

It's a real place. The ISS is not a "place" - it's something we put up there. It's the difference between going to the woods and camping on your mother's lawn.

Besides that, if we can manufacture spacecraft parts on the Moon, launching them is much easier than launching from Earth. You can even use a maglev rail to launch stuff from there - no reaction mass involved.

Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

#63

Post by jamesbritt » Fri, Sep 23, 2011, 10:41 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #61

jamesbritt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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…

Members of congress != people who write the laws. A member of congress is the politician. He talks. He presses the flesh. He casts the actual votes. I recently saw that is it 70% lawyers, 15% career politicians, 10% businessmen, and 5% other. But behind every congressman, every senator, and of course the President, is a group of experts. Every policy paper is written by a staffer. Nearly every political decision is m…

But behind every congressman, every senator, and of course the President, is a group of experts. Every policy paper is written by a staffer. Nearly every political decision is made by a staffer.

And yet numerous bone-headed, ill-conceived, laws are written and passed.

While politicians may have smart technical people on their team it appears that, in the end, they choose what laws are written (and passed) based on political expediency, not, technical merit.

I have to wonder then if politicians are willfully ignoring their experts, or if they discount their experts because they themselves still can't grasp what they are being told. Or they pick experts who agree with their foregone conclusions.

At the end of the day this country would be better served with more politicians with proper economic and scientific educations. (That would eliminate a good number of so-called Tea Party candidates for one thing.)

Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

#64

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Sep 23, 2011, 10:45 PM UTC

bradleyland wrote: post #49

rbanffy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

private enterprise is about competition. It's about getting somewhere first. It may inspire a generation of entrepreneurs, but, alone, it doesn't have the power to unite people like a huge project the scope of Apollo had. At that moment, it wasn't an American walking on the Moon - it was a human being and that made all the difference for the rest of mankind. That was a precious moment when the message "we can set aside our differences and work together" would be heard.

Still, private enterprise does not exclude projects like those - quite the contrary - most of Apollo was built by private enterprises. It doesn't make them less extraordinary.

Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

#65

Post by tryp » Fri, Sep 23, 2011, 10:53 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #58

mkn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

As someone who has been trained in the law (admittedly by a large prime defense contractor) it's not that hard to understand.

Perhaps not for you and your colleagues, but for the folks at the state department charged with enforcement, it often seems to depend on their personal interpretation on a given day.

Re: Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

#66

Post by mturmon » Sun, Sep 25, 2011, 6:30 AM UTC

riverlaw wrote: post #33

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #8

The shuttle was never flown the thousands of times it needed to have all the bugs worked out, NASA is an agency lost in middle-management hell, and you can't trust exploration to the politicians. That being said, Armstrong has a point: none of what I've just said is new or is satisfactory as an excuse. The failure to manage these facts and manage our access to space -- perhaps by a privatization push a decade earlier…

I strongly disagree with the notion that NASA is lost in middle management hell. Do you know how many successful missions they have running right now, that are to the benefit of all? Dawn, Chanda, Hubble, Messenger, Cassini, GRAIL, 2 current mars missions, one halfway to pluto, another on its way to jupiter. Not to mention all of the valuable earth research. Manned missions are important for inspiring and our long te…

Yep, there are a lot of strong opinions on this thread that identify NASA solely with human exploration. This is a mistake, and it's frustrating to see it made by so many bright people.

It's a historical fact that the human side of space exploration has always been subject to great political influence. Consequently, it goes through these unseemly convulsions from time to time.

The political involvement in engineering processes drives rationalists nuts. Even to the extreme of believing that the way to rationalize human space exploration is to put it in the private sector.