61–70 of 73 posts
Blame Nixon. Or OPEC.
(EDIT: for context, most of trouble NASA has gotten itself into stem from commitments made for political reasons to appease the Nixon administration and a Congress dealing with fallout from the OPEC oil embargo in '73--when Apollo was winding down and Shuttle revving up.)
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Thanks for that link. People should know that there's a lot of turmoil in the astrophysics community about JWST. In current plans, JWST overruns have resulted in elimination or long-term postponement of all other NASA astrophysics missions in the next decade. Even non-flight-project research is being cut significantly.
I am utterly incapable of intelligently commenting on the cost effectiveness of this telescope, but I will note that all of NASA's current money problems could be solved by allocating it just a tiny fraction of what we instead wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sorry to keep talking about these fucking wars, but it really does make me want to cry.
The Shuttle is inspiring, and compared to nothing it looks excellent. But on the whole it is not a good system. It has unique capabilities that it uses extremely rarely or not at all (such as the cross-range flight ability) but which impose tremendous compromises on the system's cost, reliability, and safety. All of this added up to the system falling far, far short of its design goals in payload cost and flight rate…
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I am utterly incapable of intelligently commenting on the cost effectiveness of this telescope, but I will note that all of NASA's current money problems could be solved by allocating it just a tiny fraction of what we instead wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sorry to keep talking about these fucking wars, but it really does make me want to cry.
Expanding NASA's budget by 2x or even 10x would not solve its problems. Parkinson's Law is as applicable to NASA as to any other organization. JWST and the other missions will overrun any amount of time and budget allocated to them.
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I agree, except for the fact that in the field of space exploration humans can now be largely substituted by machines, and will be more so as our machines advance. Philosophy and art do indeed require lots of human intervention. Thankfully, they are cheap, as is much of the basic science research that we should be prioritizing ahead of, say, super sexy space stations.
But if we do just robotic exploration, we miss out on the unintended side effects of putting people in space. Kidney dialysis machines for example. And basic research on bone loss which has been a huge help for Osteoperosis patients. I think the issue here isn't that we know that putting humans in space is expensive, it is, in time as well as resources. I think the issue is that if we don't put humans in space we'll…
Your two examples are instructive. I guarantee you that these medical advances would have been made in the absence of a space program. It's not a matter of if, but when. The best that be said about the scientific contribution of human bodies in orbit is that it has provided some acceleration of progress -- I know of no evidence to the contrary.
The crucial question is, what are we willing to pay for that acceleration?
The Shuttle is inspiring, and compared to nothing it looks excellent. But on the whole it is not a good system. It has unique capabilities that it uses extremely rarely or not at all (such as the cross-range flight ability) but which impose tremendous compromises on the system's cost, reliability, and safety. All of this added up to the system falling far, far short of its design goals in payload cost and flight rate…
The shuttle mission, which was to provide a safe, reusable, cheap spaceflight platform, failed on two of the three goals. It was reusable, but not cheap, and not safe. We need a better LEO platform, not more shuttle missions.
This is a major factor in why it is so expensive to operate the Shuttles. They are not truly reusable, and the refurbishment in between launches takes so long and requires such an extensive permanent staff and facilities that the per-launch cost is astronomical. If the Orbiters were truly reusable then they could easily quadruple or more the number of flights per year for little increased total cost.
Yes, when you pour money down the money hole, you do tend to get a few things in return. My real question, which we'll see answered hopefully over the next few years, isn't "Were the capabilities we got with the shuttle cool ?" but "Was the shuttle a cost-effective way to obtain those capabilities?" And it's really hard to look at the Shuttle program and say yes . In general, we really need to get over whining about…
And it's really hard to look at the Shuttle program and say yes. How effective/efficient would a tax-payer supported version of Xerox PARC or the Golden Age Bell Labs be? Something more pleasant than DARPA, for example.
NASA is a research and development organization. they products that are used in real life.
Usually development and deployment cost much more than pure research.
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I wonder how he comes to the conclusion of 9x return. I think that we ought to invest in dragons instead and that they would bring returns in orders of magnitude greater than any space program, plus they live longer. Source: http://blog.mises.org/6512/socialist-calculation-versus-magi...
Your link isn't even about NASA, it's just an ideological discussion (and not a particularly coherent one). For reference, here's a list of NASA spin-offs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off It's not hard to see the multiplier effect of our investment in NASA.
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The idea of Shuttle was good. The execution was flawed.
The shuttle reminds me of one of those awful software development projects which start with clear, simple goals, until all the "stakeholders" start wanting their pet feature and need to be appeased because they will bring more money to the table, and you end up with a bloated, over-engineered mess.
Or at least in the last forty years.
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When we did need it, we -needed- it. Hubble for example.
Wait, I'm sorry, I see what you mean. You're right; manned shuttle missions were the only way to keep Hubble from going to waste.