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NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

arstechnica.com

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Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#201

Post by adolph »

elcritch wrote: post #150
adolph wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A truer measure of the [Astan & Iraq] wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. [0] (2015 article) US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1] The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse. 0. http…

A quarter sounds about right, and that's a quarter of our debt that could've been used to rebuild decaying infrastructure, increase medical care, housing, etc. Aside from the monetary cost the country will loose out on the dividends those sort of investments would've yielded long term. Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better.…

The initial conjecture is that the US' "Adversaries see [wasteful profligacy] as weakness." We have established that the US seems to spend wildly with muted negative outcomes. To an adversary, should that be seen as a weakness or a strength?

Could things be better in the US if it did not spend the way it does? That is a difficult counterfactual. The well adapted US political system never voluntarily decreases taxes, so a safe assumption is that spending/deficit/debt would be the same.

A significant amount of war funding was spent on the MIC, which employs upper middle income US persons in engineering, logistics, HR. The rest is spent on consumables (also from the US) and bribery, which eventually finds safe harbor by holding large bricks of US $100 bills on the low end or US luxury dwellings on the high end.

In the counterfactual, what would have happened to all those white collar suburbs and Miami penthouses?

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#202

Post by kjkjadksj »

WWLink wrote: post #31
bnralt wrote: post #14

While true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics. Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place,…

I think you would have to be an incompetent principle investigator if you sent people to space and couldn't figure out a way to maximize scientific knowledge from it. We've been doing that for decades with the ISS and the moon trips and so on. I have no doubts - even a mars mission where you'd send people to interact with things in person and be able to react instantly and not 45 mins later with whatever the camera a…

Just curious, what is something we do on the ISS that actually needs a human hand vs a remotely operated or programmed one? Aside from perhaps studies on the effects of space flight on human health.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#203

Post by kjkjadksj »

unethical_ban wrote: post #96
bnralt wrote: post #14

While true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics. Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place,…

I see this argument enough that I will need to make a form response. Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when? We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight. The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorer…

Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine? Probably not when they were concerned with the source of the four humors or whatever it was, and had zero concept of germ theory much less cellular biology. We are spending too much money and effort on process that will no doubt be obviated with a future technology. We are still very far from having a sustainable method for human settlement and colonization, and having people poop in bags on the iss probably isn’t advancing much understanding in those technologies beyond what terrestrial experiments and simulation could do.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#205

Post by samhuk »

credit_guy wrote: post #172

SLS is actually very affordable if seen from the correct angle: a know-how preservation program. After the end of the Cold War, the US reduced drastically its military expenditure. The danger was that some day will come (like, you know, the 2020's) when the US will need to restart the missile assembly lines. How do you keep enough people trained at an affordable cost? Well, you keep them busy building a rocket that n…

Interesting, this was almost word-for-word how I was explaining it to a non-space-nerd friend of mine.

I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true.

If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?

To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house.

I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#206

Post by mannerheim »

Stranger43 wrote: post #153
rdtsc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the answer. It's keeping the jobs (i.e. voters) in orbit around the senators. They could care less about space, as long as they can say they brought "jobs" to their state. If it does that, it works as designed.

It's probably not that simple as they could do what the EU does and create those jobs in purely civilian industries. It's more about the political economy where funneling through certain well connected companies generate a lot of goodwill among the middlemen who then funds pac's and pay for advertisements then it's about a direct relationship between the senate and the employment status of their workers.

It is exactly that simple. Closing down a tank factory to build something in another state isn't going to help the representative in that district get elected.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#207

Post by tzs »

unethical_ban wrote: post #96
bnralt wrote: post #14

While true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics. Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place,…

I see this argument enough that I will need to make a form response. Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when? We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight. The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorer…

> Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

I'd go farther and say humans must gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably, and eventually out of this solar system, if humanity is to survive long term.

However, just because a problem must be solved for humanity to survive doesn't necessarily mean any effort should be spent now on it.

Sometimes a problem is so far beyond current technology and theory that instead of having your best people spend their lives trying to make tiny advances toward solving it you are better off if they work on things that can actually be solved now, and in a few decades or centuries our general level of technology and theory will have advanced enough that the work that took our best people their whole careers to accomplish will be something that would be a decent homework problem in college.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#208

Post by sidewndr46 »

chelical wrote: post #196
4gotunameagain wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National Security Archive at George Washington University: Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner You're welcome. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017... All of your comments are suspiciously related to US foreign policy issues btw ;)

I don't get why this line is repeated so much. Verbal agreements and reassurances in the realm of foreign policy are essentially worthless, especially when you're dealing with democratically elected leaders. Unless you have a formal agreement the next president or prime minister has to abide by, there is no continuity. This expansion argument also ignores that Eastern European countries are joining NATO of their own…

But the president of the US doesn't have the power to make treaties with another nation. See the league of nations for an important example of that. So that treaty is also worthless when it comes to the US.

So if a verbal agreement is worthless & a treaty is worthless, how does one negotiate with the US?

I'm unsure how France's presidential system works and what authority he may have.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#209

Post by sidewndr46 »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #195
4gotunameagain wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National Security Archive at George Washington University: Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner You're welcome. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017... All of your comments are suspiciously related to US foreign policy issues btw ;)

I want to see more countries join NATO. NATO is just a cool idea. Having the militaries from 31 countries all under one command structure. I genuinely would like to see them try.

I don't understand why people think this. NATO does not mandate a unified command structure. France pulled out in 1966. It didn't rejoin until the 21st century.

Re: NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

#210

Post by AnimalMuppet »

riffic wrote: post #127
plandis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but not as corrupt as the US I’m wondering how you determined this?

Lawrence Lessig has extensively talked about the concept of ‘institutional corruption’ in American politics, where the political system is not necessarily corrupt in an explicit, quid-pro-quo sense, but rather is compromised by the influence of money, lobbying, and other factors that misalign the interests of politicians with those of the public. First thing to pop in my mind with your question.

OK, but I'm not sure you can argue that the Taliban is more aligned with the interests of the population.
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