121–130 of 248 posts
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NSF funds tons of underpaid grad students who are the source of US research productivity per dollar.
Not everything is about productivity per dollar. It's also the source of a pipeline of well trained research scientists who go into cutting edge fields with good pay.
I hope they manage to do something similar for the NSF. The proposed cuts there are crushing. The NSF funds great science in all parts of the country, and subsequently tons of jobs to the area.
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Where did you read this?
(Not OP) They're from this .csv table of cancelled NSF grants posted on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959129#43959536 ( "The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia (sigarch.org)" —65 days ago, 150 comments)
https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil...
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As someone who's friends with multiple grad students who are funded by the NSF ... this is not the opinion I've heard from them. They're all working on awesome research that could actually help people, and yet they struggle to get by.
Sounds like cutting the budget will make things worse.
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Except SLS/Orion should be cancelled. The SLS is pejoratively called the Senate Launch System, because it has no real place in the market yet is continuing to consume tens of billions of dollars. It was mostly obsoleted by Falcon Heavy years ago (SLS has been a black hole of funding since 2011), and its costs are completely ridiculous. You're looking at billions of dollars per launch if it ever is confidently flight…
>> Senate Launch System A name also thrown around for shuttle. Do a little digging and a surprising number of shuttle crews had ties to the US congress, either as relatives or who themselves would later become representatives. They even flew a handful of serving reps (ie John Glenn, aged 77). Nasa has always known how to foster relations with political power families.
That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.
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In partial reuse mode, you get 57k kg from Falcon Heavy vs 95k kg from SLS, with the catch that you can launch 25 Falcon Heavies for the same cost as 1 SLS. And that's exclusively the recurring (and likely greatly low-balled) per-launch costs, ignoring the tens of billions of dollars that have (and are) being dumped into its development. In reality those also need to be aggregated into its cost per launch.
Orion's mass far exceeds Heavy's payload to TLI. It simply can't be used for the Artemis manned lunar program unless you want to completely reengineer the entire thing.
Everything NASA does is trying to shoehorn in Boeing one way or another because they have tremendous political influence, but there's really no reason for them to be involved at all from a technical point of view. And in fact if they weren't, then we indeed probably would have long since already put boots on the Moon again. But because they are involved, I suspect an appropriate timeline for success is: never, with a whole lot of money spent getting there.
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/nasa-chief-says-a-fa...
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Manned space flight in generally is a hugely wasteful money sink. It eats up about 50% of NASA's budget, and there's no real reason for it other than "we're putting people into space because we want to put people into space." People vigorously defend these boondoggles, then finally admit they were a huge waste years after the fact (as we've seen with the space shuttle, and as we're now starting to see with the SLS).
Putting a man on the Moon is something many view as humanity's greatest achievement, ever. Even if we ignore absolutely everything else, I think this alone makes it worth it. People need to be inspired. It's the spice of life. But if we look the future, the possibilities are even more enticing. Richard Nixon effectively cancelled human space flight after a series of Moon landings. Had he not, we could very well have…
Well, that's an interesting take. Fantasial, but interesting.
It's refreshing that given everything else happening, Congress is still at least functional at this level. Should be noted that many of NASA's programs are situated in predominantly conservative areas of the country. Brings lots of jobs and resources to the local economies.
If there is something Congress will always be functional for is increasing spending.
Happy to hear about this. Actually, budget should be increased not reduced. From purely ROI terms, NASA has a stellar return on investment. Immense contribution to human civilisation beyond US. Just a reminder from 2012: [Neil deGrasse Tyson: Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy]( https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degr... )
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>> Senate Launch System A name also thrown around for shuttle. Do a little digging and a surprising number of shuttle crews had ties to the US congress, either as relatives or who themselves would later become representatives. They even flew a handful of serving reps (ie John Glenn, aged 77). Nasa has always known how to foster relations with political power families.
> or who themselves would later become representatives. That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.