I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment.
Which is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that were spawned as a result.
However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the little work that got done.
A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.
" I worked for 13 years in the public sector"-What does that mean in this context? You're implying that all public sector work is inefficient, shoddy, etc. For all we know, you worked at a DMV for 13 years programming COBOL mainframes.
Hierarchical management structures have nothing to do with government organizations. They exist in the private sector too as you described it.
Assuming the government is grossly inefficient in all aspects is strange. What if some organizations in the government are inefficient, while others are not?
Government is a classic example of a system where most members of the system can be good and efficient, yet the system as a whole can be clogged up by even a few crappy folks.
It's like traffic with limited lanes. Decisions have to go thru certain chokes, and if there's a slow driver (inefficient bureaucrat) or a traffic jam (overworked), or a crash (time critical emergency), or a malicious troll (a troll) then things stop or slow down.
Like a big road network, you get enough of these and flow becomes jerky, stop-start, non-linear, and efficiency drops. Meanwhile, nearly all drivers will report that they are good, rule abiding drivers (minus speeding (the occasional minor rule circumvention), which actually helps flow).
Sure, groups become more valuable the bigger they get, cause of the combinatorial link complexity, but they also get harder to get anything done in cause you've got to check all those links to make sure actions will be accepted.
Hierarchies just map this exponential complexity into something closer to an O(log(n)) tree with the caveat that you get flow constrictions as a tradeoff for not having to talk to everyone.
Your description of the work could describe a large corporation. I think its really difficult to separate the inefficiencies of government organizations and the inefficiencies of large organizations (public or private). And unfortunately, space projects are often large ventures with an added complicating factor of being funded by political budget whims.
While their are also massive inefficiencies in the private sector, the public sector does not have the same ability to fail. Those private companies need to be efficient enough to avoid bankruptcy.
Yes, but the private sector is more willing to restructure in order to become profitable; I never saw a single case of restructuring in 13 years. Instead people were promoted or moved to other roles in the few cases changes happened.
A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending.
I think much 3rd world corruption is a weird shadow/echo of Victorian era corruption. In the decades to come, this form of corruption in US governance will become equally quaint and exist in such echoes.
Yes, sort of. There were some salient points made here about needing to get over the initial barrier to entry, and needing also some prerequisite commercial goal which obviates the current "Why would anyone want to go there?" kinds of questions. But yes, sort of like Space-X. But Space-X is really just trying to make cheaper rockets. While that's fine, I suppose, I don't think the revolution will be chemically-fueled. I'm hoping something like a space elevator or magic antigravity machines that will let all the other "innovators" iterate on the shoulders of those first giants, opening up space as a platform for the commoner. I'm thinking of some very elementary replication of previous industries, like the internet: Some very smart people build a platform (or infrastructure, or manufacturing process) which lets people build on top of it. Like Twitter and Facebook on the internet.
It is extraordinarily unlikely that private investment would have backed the development and deployment of GPS. The effort spanned decades, cost fantastic sums, and was justified only on the basis that it could prevent nuclear annihilation.
Indeed, were it not for the ultra-secret classification, it's unlikely that anything this ambitions and uncertain would have gotten through a civilian agency that was subject to Congress. In other words, top secret military technology that takes taxpayer support for granted is not all bad. That's an inconvenient truth for some people.
> I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on investment.
So perhaps we shouldn't have done it? We know it is the right decision now, but only given knowledge that we didn't have at the time. If you play a lottery and win, that doesn't mean it was right to play it in the first place. It just means you were lucky.
But the universe isn't a zero-sum game, and R&D is like a lottery whose expected outcome is strongly positive: the majority of tickets still lose, but the winners far more than pay for the losers.
I am strongly in favor of boosting NASA's budget, but the US still spends more on space than every other nation combined so I think saying it has a dark future is a bit hyperbolic.
China's spending isn't very transparent, and their costs are much lower, so dollar-for-dollar they are accomplishing more than Nasa is. And they're not just screwing around. They're planning to put humans on the Moon in a few years, which implies a huge and well funded effort.
I am beginning to feel that Vox is more of a time-sink than a useful addition to my regular feed. This article is an example of why. It's long format, goes over well-trod ground, adds in some items that are politically interpreted a bit heavily, and ends up kicking off partisan discussions that don't go anywhere.
They're like Op-Ed columns presented in Wikipedia format. If we had a thesis and supporting arguments you would at least know what you're dealing with and engage it on its own terms. But as it is, you're left either accepting this huge hunk of text or going through half a dozen items to nitpick it to death. Either choice is suboptimal.
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I'm a huge supporter of the space program. NASA lost its way a while back, like the 1970s, and is not the right tool for the job we have. It's no fault of NASA's -- every new administration and every new Congress feels free to whipsaw it into a new direction.
We have some clear foundational science goals that NASA could supervise other competent organizations doing, like reducing cost-to-orbit 100-fold (mass-drivers, anybody?), creating a cheap, mass-production radioactive battery that can be used everywhere, or rewarding the first team to optically-image an earth-sized habitable exoplanet.
Writing NASA a check won't help much of anything, because five years from now the money will all be re-allocated various political ways. Yes, I grok the multi-year planning thing. Not germane.
So what kind of organization(s) do you see doing a better job than Nasa? I would agree that it's a political and rather inefficient organization, like any government-funded agency, but I'm curious how exactly we could improve.
Bear in mind that many of Nasa's best projects were undermined by politics. A new Administration comes into power vowing to re-prioritize spending, and Nasa's champions within the White House and Congress are suddenly without jobs. A recession hits and Nasa is an easy target for budget cutters. A Congressman threatens to withhold spending unless Nasa locates a facility in his district. You can't fix this stuff; it's part of the landscape.
The ideal would be for someone to figure out how to make money in space. Once you harness the mighty power of greed, nothing short of all-out war would be able to keep humans out of space. But that's proved to be a bit of a tall bar, unfortunately, which in itself sort of raises questions about the actual utility of space anew after 50 years. But before quite making that call let's see what knocking another order of magnitude off launch costs does for us.
But I find myself often thinking that space just isn't viable for very many uses without a still-higher level of technology than we have.
Agreed that we really need to knock a couple of more digits of cost-to-orbit before we can make any kind of informed decision one way or another. Also agreed that it's not looking good so far.
Mass drivers could send cargo into orbit cheaply -- perhaps given the right cargo/human ratio, you'd end up with a drastic decrease in cost overall, especially with reusable rockets.
Right now there's just no there there. Most of the great arguments for getting off the planet are 1) Science! and 2) We need to get the heck out of Dodge before we kill ourselves. These are very good reasons, but it's like pushing a rope -- you'll never make space exploration happen by lecturing people and taxing them for it. Instead put some greed into the mix. If you find a big enough pull, then you'll see the dynamics radically change.
The real missing part of this article is that NASA's budget is dominated by building launchers. If all NASA did was build payloads and buy launch services, it would get a lot more done for its dollar.
In the short term this is not feasible, but we are on track for it happening in the next 10-20 years. I think we'll have many years of SLS/Orion, but that is probably the last NASA launch system. Once NASA gets out of the launcher building business, the entire enterprise because much more viable. The cost of any particular mission is not terrible, and if any single mission fails it's not the end of the organization. If the launch program fails, NASA gets off track for a decade. Effectively the Space Shuttle was a slowly unfolding 30 year failure that pushed NASA off course for decades.
I think you are right that building launch vehicles consumes much of NASA's time, money, and focus, and that private launch systems will relieve NASA of this burden (if they accept the relief).
I do not think this is NASA's main problem, as they were able to create launch systems while performing exploration in the 1960s. It seems that they lost their way after Apollo, when NASA no longer had a clear priority. NASA is now dominated by internal politics, where each center tries to run its own projects, and there is no overarching goal. If NASA had one main program, it would be more visible to the public, and have a greater chance of success on a realistic timeline (5-10 years), though NASA would risk complete defunding if there were problems with the project.
Mars in the short term (5-10 years) is a realistic goal (under their current funding levels) which could get NASA started again, but it would require them to sacrifice a variety of smaller projects which have strong internal lobbies.
They didn't lose their way. In the Apollo years you're talking about, NASA enjoyed as much as FIVE PERCENT of the federal budget.[0] You can build all the Saturn V launch vehicles you want when the government is throwing bags of money at your particular problem.
Technology is more expensive. The projects themselves are more complex and machinery more expensive. You can build an antenna with pocket change that will let you talk to someone on the moon, but you need some serious hardware to talk to something on Mars, let alone further out. Plus the bureaucracy -- the oft-referenced bureaucracy -- is grinding more and more to a halt. It's more expensive from a bureaucratic standpoint, with more layers of management slapped on layers of management. The NASA of the 60s was an entirely different creature. We would do well to try to get that back, but honestly, really I think it's too late for that. I think honestly it's out of the American government's hands what happens in space over the next 50 years, barring another space race with China (fingers crossed). American commercial interests? Maybe. But our government just grinds to a halt when it needs to get anything done.
It seems that you agree with me that funding is not NASA's primary problem (I think I am actually more optimistic about NASA's competence). The point I disagree with is "Technology is more expensive". Technology has gotten dramatically cheaper (though I agree that current projects are more difficult). We have better materials, better manufacturing techniques, better computers and all of it more affordable than it was in the 1960's. Look at what SpaceX was able to do; in their first 10 years their total expenditures was only $1 billion, a small fraction of what it would have cost half a century ago.
ISS too. Its budget is more than double that of planetary exploration.
EDIT: Just the budget for getting crew and equipment to/from the ISS is roughly the same as the entire planetary science program. And ISS is also a program that just buys launchers.[1]
The real missing part of this article is that NASA's budget is dominated by building launchers. If all NASA did was build payloads and buy launch services, it would get a lot more done for its dollar.
It's a sign of corruption in the governance. As Shakespeare noted through Polonius, you can distinguish true craziness from the put-on by watching what people do with their money. Boondoggles, even partial ones, whose main purpose is to broker power through the distribution of fat contracts are a clear sign of failed governance.
> "The real missing part of this article is that NASA's budget is dominated by building launchers."
This is one of the reasons I am so excited for Russia's OPSEK, which is to be their successor to ISS and used for orbital assembly of interplanetary spacecraft. I think it is a much more straightforward plan than building ever-larger launchers to hoist interplanetary spacecraft all in one go.
Don't get me wrong, I like SLS and the BFR/MCT concept (what little we have actually seen of it anyway...) and think/hope NASA and SpaceX can pull those off, but if I were in charge of allocating funding, I'd throw my money at OPSEK.
Well, this author has a rather pessimistic view of things. In fact, we are a couple of years away from a major change of government in the U.S. and whoever succeeds the Obama Administration will have an opportunity to address the shortcomings of the space program.
The Obama Administration has focused on domestic social issues like jobs, education, and health care, and deemphasized longer term programs like Nasa.
Typically, the pendulum swings back and forth with space and science allocations, and I would expect an adjustment upward in the next couple of years even as the social spending is inevitably cut.
Also, as the U.S. economy comes out of the 2008-2010 recession and starts to generate more government revenue, it will become politically easier to re-fund some of these mothballed or back-burnered programs and get Big Space back on the front page.
Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their hearts.
I was a 10-year-old boy when men first walked on the moon, and my friends and I all had model rockets, Nasa posters on the wall, and dreamed of becoming astronauts some day. We all assumed that the country would just keep on funding more exploration until we had a massive rotating space station in orbit, a permanent base on the Moon, and probes reaching to every corner of the star system and beyond.
Very little of that has come to pass, and we are a poorer and less accomplished nation because of it. Nasa indeed should be getting more than $18.5B, in my opinion more like $50B or $60B. It's a great investment.
Sure, let private companies try to jump into the satellite launching business, more power to them. But the heavy lifting has got to come from Nasa, that great organization that has been neglected for too long.
> The Obama Administration has focused on domestic social issues like jobs, education, and health care, and deemphasized longer term programs like Nasa.
Which might be true in a touchy-feely subjective way, but the annual budget figures don't reflect that at all:
> Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their hearts.
The trouble is that people in the United States have literally no idea how much anything costs. People really think things like space and foreign aid are currently significant chunks of the budget. News that the military spent more moving fuel into Afghanistan in a year than NASA's entire budget is met with very strong disbelief in some quarters. It's very easy to sell such people on some very strange ideas, which is where we are now.
NASA's budget is one half of one percent of the US budget. Most people do not know this. I work on outreach programs through the Planetary Society to get people interested and informed about space research. Most people have not heard of Europa and most people are absolutely clueless about how much of our budget goes to space research.
So I'd like to believe that. But my conclusion based on studying the relevant history is that it was fear which motivated Americans to spend the money for space exploration.
When Sputnik launched in 1957, it threw Americans into a panic. Here was a Soviet god-knows-what that you could see from your house in Kansas. The Soviets beat us to nearly every milestone: first satellite, first animal in space, first man in space, first EVA, first probe on the moon. The Soviets' first manned lunar landing was scheduled for 1968, but the architect of the program died at an inopportune time in 1966. The need to keep up with or beat the Soviets is what drove the space program until 1969.
I don't think we would've gone to all that trouble if we didn't have the Red Empire breathing down our necks.
Obviously, it was international politics and Cold War thinking that woke a fire under the Americans in the late 1950s. But that has little to do with what I'm talking about.
The Boomers, who are the predominant generation today, grew up on Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Star Trek and 2001 and model rocketry. We lived and breathed space exploration.
There is a huge ready-made audience for more great achievements in space. We need national leaders who can inspire the voters to allocate the funding. The last few presidents haven't been very enthusiastic. G.W.Bush actually did have a vision of replacing the Shuttle, but unfortunately he didn't lock in the funding for the replacement Orion/Constellation systems before his term ended, so the U.S. ended up with no means to get humans into orbit, a rather embarrassing predicament for the world's erstwhile leader in space travel.
None of the presidents from that generation have invested in space exploration, nor has there been any public call for them to do so, so I'm doubtful very many boomers "lived and breathed space exploration" although many certainly did.
I'm sympathetic to your point. I majored in aerospace engineering in college because I grew up reading books that told me we'd be going to Mars any day now. But in the process, I became convinced that nothing would happen in that field for the foreseeable future, and probably nothing economically worthwhile in my lifetime.
I wonder if the love of cool space stuff is enough to sustain things in the long term. Maybe it is more like funding for the arts. People who love opera understand that arts funding is hugely important. But it is a niche that most will never really get excited about. We need to look beyond the mass appeal of the Apollo era and be supportive of things for more intellectual and even artistic reasons. Just think how many people support Nasa just because they love the Hubble images. It has to be more than just "because its there" to be sustained.
I'm beginning to suspect that the powers that be in American politics and in the military industrial complex simply lack long term vision.
In the next several decades following, continued US dominance is dependent on effective education and a strong economy supporting a healthy middle class. In the next several decades after that, whatever nation/culture succeeds in expanding the scope of human civilization is going to dominate through its progeny. (In much the same way that European and in particular WASP culture that originated in England became dominant through the ascendance of the United States.)
However, the system is set up to reward those who enter the financial sector, with its tendency towards rent seeking, and the realm of law/politics, which tends to engender a viewpoint somewhat distant from the first principles that govern reality.
China, with its largely technocratic leadership, and with its pent up desire to express its pride and prowess as a civilization-state may well have the means, knowledge, and impetus to engage in such an expansion of scope. This would be the smart strategic move -- instead of directly challenging the US for power on Earth, they would expand into an even larger context.
Another beauty of such a strategy: the entrenched short-term interests of the US military industrial complex might well assist them in gaining an insurmountable lead by staying fat and happy in their status quo.
Maybe it's the voters? I'm all for space exploration paid in advance, when the national debt is falling as well. Otherwise, no way. Why should my kids get only the bills? That would be rude. Let downvotes commence.
Oh I am quite sure the powers that be have long term vision, they just don't align with some of what we want. They are quite willing to promise the moon and the stars; not the celestial kind; because it works.
Space exploration does not garner votes, raw science does not garner voters, and neither do they garner blue collar jobs. Politicians route money to where it buys them most influence. They rely on this money and positioning people against each other to maintain their standard of living. See, they are safe and the masses will stay in their irrational world grousing about the lack of change they do little to change.
They count on the irrational decision, the rally behind a thousand page health bill no one reads, the three hundred page net neutrality bill no one is allowed to read, and they make sure you don't want to by portraying the challenge to such as an affront to privilege and intelligent and we want to be considered both. After all, if they tell us its not smart to do otherwise well those who say otherwise must be wrong.
So they play the people off each other while they keep their backroom deals and move along merrily laughing at an electorate whose current concern is their internet connection so they don't miss the latest streaming movie.
Who needs space exploration when Game of Thrones is on.
Well put. Of voters that have long term vision, I can't see them wanting space exploration over many better investments. We have so many huge problems to deal with that need funds before space exploration and its relatively small chance of payback for the average voter. Especially when it's all borrowed money.
Oh I am quite sure the powers that be have long term vision, they just don't align with some of what we want.
Everyone thinks they have "enough" long term vision. I'm sure many of the Roman emperors who we now think of as being short-sighted thought they had it all figured out in the way you outline above.
Space has never been a lucrative enterprise in the U.S., though, unless you were a senior executive at one of the few large contractors. Even in the Apollo era, I'm pretty sure bankers and lawyers tended to make more money than NASA engineers.
I agree with you about the essential importance of education and a strong economy. I also agree with you that China see space achievements as a good way (among many) to express its desire for leadership.
But China lags significantly behind the U.S. in areas of education, economy, and freedom of expression. The latter is important because it is an essential ingredient for long-term innovation.
I think we'll see China do some great things in the near term, perhaps even put people back on the moon. Americans will be freaked if that happens. (I'm sad to say--I wish people would take a broader view of humanity, but oh well.)
But in the long run I think we'll be doing big things in space too. It just looks shitty now because we're between big launch systems.
But China lags significantly behind the U.S. in areas of education, economy, and freedom of expression. The latter is important because it is an essential ingredient for long-term innovation.
We're at the point where China can simply use existing technology to gain a lead in space presence. More permissive societies are bound to appear, given a serious program of Chinese space settlement. Also, the Soviet experience shows that you can have technological innovation in aerospace without freedom of expression.
It's fine by me if a dictatorship takes the lead in space. Their people might suffer as a result. Our goal should always be to raise the average standard of living. If that means taking a back seat in some area, why not?
I explain this by the lack of competition. Rest of the world is not making anything comparable to what NASA does. Only Japan's Hayabusa is remotely close to a typical NASA mission. Nobody can say 'our nation is lagging behind in planetary missions' so politicians are happy and prefer to concentrate funding on more pricey things having less real scientific impact, like manned spaceflight, where there is really a lag to be fixed.
Maybe better to solve global warming before we chart out every square inch of our solar system. It's pretty clear that there is way more life on Earth than the other planets. Too bad because the life here is under extreme threat. You don't need to look far. Species going extinct. Rain forests converted into palm oil plantations. coral reefs bleached. And now the possibility of runaway climate change.
There are only so many brainy people on the earth. Better that they focus on these more immediate problems at hand.
Space exploration is probably just a distraction from the much more pressing problems of the day.
Or maybe the only possibility for the earth in the far future is to be destroyed naturally, and hopefully the only humans in the universe aren't stuck here when that happens.
We hardly spend anything on space exploration. Not to mention it has a lot of benefits and carryover to the rest of the economy. If we have to make cuts, there are many other places we can target instead of the .5% of the federal budget to NASA.
If the benefits and carryover paid for it, fine. But I doubt it, not now anyway. If it wasn't borrowed money, I'd say throw .5% at at it. But no way when it's borrowed, unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the outcome is net positive.
I really wish we could retire the word "borrowed" to describe the nature of sovereign debt. It makes it sound like we're borrowing dollars from the Chinese to pay NASA. That's not how it works. (United States currency is one of the few things that isn't made in China these days.)
That's why I said not now anyway. In the past, sure, it drove innovation to a great degree. But at this point we've wrung out the biggest gains. Almost anything NASA develops nowadays has little benefit to the public at large. It's entertainment mostly.
It can have huge consequences for us down the line. For example when Theodore Roosevelt decided to preserve national parks, it wasn't as big of a benefit to the public, mainly recreation. But in Yellowstone's hot springs a bacteria was discovered which now helps major biological processes through a technique called PCR.
We should consider the alternatives. We're borrowing $trillions annually, so we have to pick our battles carefully. Why spend $billions to maybe possibly discover something like that, when the same $$$ can definitely pay back on some other crucial item? For example, most NASA funding should already have been diverted to solving the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; that's a more critical need that's currently being ignored. And that's only one of many giant cleanup tasks left to be done.
Interesting that they don't mention SpaceX. One of the profound changes is that in 1962 it took the resources of a nation-state to send a probe to Mars, now someone in the 1% bracket could fund something equivalent without disturbing their kid's trust fund. That is pretty profound.
We will get on-orbit refueling. Once we get there you can launch pieces, assemble and fuel in orbit, and then head out to where ever you want to go.
The interesting question is what happens when it becomes clear that the space faring capability of a corporation exceeds that of the government. Over regulation I suspect.
This article skews towards trying to make a political point, but it does so at the cost of truthfulness. It lays an elaborate case before the reader, detailing the woeful state of NASA interplanetary science and the assumed perfidy of a stingy congress.
This is a narrative that has only the slimmest hold on reality. Congress has done reasonably well at keeping NASA funded, with some occasional road bumps here and there. And certainly at a lower level than what many of us who value planetary exploration particularly highly would like. But still not too bad all things considering.
The real cause for the pinch in planetary science is NASA itself. It has indulged in undisciplined budgetary behavior and project planning at the cost of diversity and robustness in its science missions.
The major cause of these problems is something that is not mentioned once, even in passing, in this entire article: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As of right now JWST is more than $7 billion over budget and 8 years behind schedule. That $7 billion compares to: 1 Curiosity rover ($2.5 billion) plus 2 Dawn double asteroid rendezvous missions (2x $500 million, 4 total asteroidal bodies visited) plus 1 Cassini mission ($1.4 billion) plus 1 New Horizons mission ($650 million) plus 1 Kepler mission ($550 million) plus an entire extra billion dollars. That's an exciting panoply of opportunities, and imagine those figures in the context of similar classes of missions. Ion engine powered comet-survey missions, planetary landers and rovers, Kuiper belt flyby missions, survey missions to Neptune and Uranus, exo-planet searches, and so forth. To say that NASA's space science missions have been sucked dry of funding is to ignore why and toward what end they have been.
Make no mistake, JWST is a remarkably ambitious mission that is likely to be as groundbreaking as Hubble was, but it is absolutely squeezing the life out of the rest of NASA right now. It would be nice if congress would provide even more funding for NASA so they could go forward with JWST as well as other missions, but to implicate congress as a villain depriving NASA space science of life is to ignore the reality of the situation. This is a self-inflicted wound.
P.S. Moreover, the doom and gloom tone of the article is unwarranted. Regardless of either NASA budget mismanagement or congressional stinginess the capabilities of NASA in regards to exploration are set to vastly balloon due to the incredible reductions in launch cost on the horizon (from SpaceX and others).
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadWhich is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that were spawned as a result.
However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the little work that got done.
A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.
Assuming the government is grossly inefficient in all aspects is strange. What if some organizations in the government are inefficient, while others are not?
It's like traffic with limited lanes. Decisions have to go thru certain chokes, and if there's a slow driver (inefficient bureaucrat) or a traffic jam (overworked), or a crash (time critical emergency), or a malicious troll (a troll) then things stop or slow down.
Like a big road network, you get enough of these and flow becomes jerky, stop-start, non-linear, and efficiency drops. Meanwhile, nearly all drivers will report that they are good, rule abiding drivers (minus speeding (the occasional minor rule circumvention), which actually helps flow).
Sure, groups become more valuable the bigger they get, cause of the combinatorial link complexity, but they also get harder to get anything done in cause you've got to check all those links to make sure actions will be accepted.
Hierarchies just map this exponential complexity into something closer to an O(log(n)) tree with the caveat that you get flow constrictions as a tradeoff for not having to talk to everyone.
While the root causes may be different, a badly managed organization is the same whether it is public or private.
I think much 3rd world corruption is a weird shadow/echo of Victorian era corruption. In the decades to come, this form of corruption in US governance will become equally quaint and exist in such echoes.
Indeed, were it not for the ultra-secret classification, it's unlikely that anything this ambitions and uncertain would have gotten through a civilian agency that was subject to Congress. In other words, top secret military technology that takes taxpayer support for granted is not all bad. That's an inconvenient truth for some people.
So perhaps we shouldn't have done it? We know it is the right decision now, but only given knowledge that we didn't have at the time. If you play a lottery and win, that doesn't mean it was right to play it in the first place. It just means you were lucky.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/t...
I am beginning to feel that Vox is more of a time-sink than a useful addition to my regular feed. This article is an example of why. It's long format, goes over well-trod ground, adds in some items that are politically interpreted a bit heavily, and ends up kicking off partisan discussions that don't go anywhere.
They're like Op-Ed columns presented in Wikipedia format. If we had a thesis and supporting arguments you would at least know what you're dealing with and engage it on its own terms. But as it is, you're left either accepting this huge hunk of text or going through half a dozen items to nitpick it to death. Either choice is suboptimal.
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I'm a huge supporter of the space program. NASA lost its way a while back, like the 1970s, and is not the right tool for the job we have. It's no fault of NASA's -- every new administration and every new Congress feels free to whipsaw it into a new direction.
We have some clear foundational science goals that NASA could supervise other competent organizations doing, like reducing cost-to-orbit 100-fold (mass-drivers, anybody?), creating a cheap, mass-production radioactive battery that can be used everywhere, or rewarding the first team to optically-image an earth-sized habitable exoplanet.
Writing NASA a check won't help much of anything, because five years from now the money will all be re-allocated various political ways. Yes, I grok the multi-year planning thing. Not germane.
Bear in mind that many of Nasa's best projects were undermined by politics. A new Administration comes into power vowing to re-prioritize spending, and Nasa's champions within the White House and Congress are suddenly without jobs. A recession hits and Nasa is an easy target for budget cutters. A Congressman threatens to withhold spending unless Nasa locates a facility in his district. You can't fix this stuff; it's part of the landscape.
But I find myself often thinking that space just isn't viable for very many uses without a still-higher level of technology than we have.
Mass drivers could send cargo into orbit cheaply -- perhaps given the right cargo/human ratio, you'd end up with a drastic decrease in cost overall, especially with reusable rockets.
Right now there's just no there there. Most of the great arguments for getting off the planet are 1) Science! and 2) We need to get the heck out of Dodge before we kill ourselves. These are very good reasons, but it's like pushing a rope -- you'll never make space exploration happen by lecturing people and taxing them for it. Instead put some greed into the mix. If you find a big enough pull, then you'll see the dynamics radically change.
Space needs an 1849 Gold Rush.
In the short term this is not feasible, but we are on track for it happening in the next 10-20 years. I think we'll have many years of SLS/Orion, but that is probably the last NASA launch system. Once NASA gets out of the launcher building business, the entire enterprise because much more viable. The cost of any particular mission is not terrible, and if any single mission fails it's not the end of the organization. If the launch program fails, NASA gets off track for a decade. Effectively the Space Shuttle was a slowly unfolding 30 year failure that pushed NASA off course for decades.
I do not think this is NASA's main problem, as they were able to create launch systems while performing exploration in the 1960s. It seems that they lost their way after Apollo, when NASA no longer had a clear priority. NASA is now dominated by internal politics, where each center tries to run its own projects, and there is no overarching goal. If NASA had one main program, it would be more visible to the public, and have a greater chance of success on a realistic timeline (5-10 years), though NASA would risk complete defunding if there were problems with the project.
Mars in the short term (5-10 years) is a realistic goal (under their current funding levels) which could get NASA started again, but it would require them to sacrifice a variety of smaller projects which have strong internal lobbies.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
EDIT: Just the budget for getting crew and equipment to/from the ISS is roughly the same as the entire planetary science program. And ISS is also a program that just buys launchers.[1]
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/NASA_FY_2016_B...
It's a sign of corruption in the governance. As Shakespeare noted through Polonius, you can distinguish true craziness from the put-on by watching what people do with their money. Boondoggles, even partial ones, whose main purpose is to broker power through the distribution of fat contracts are a clear sign of failed governance.
This is one of the reasons I am so excited for Russia's OPSEK, which is to be their successor to ISS and used for orbital assembly of interplanetary spacecraft. I think it is a much more straightforward plan than building ever-larger launchers to hoist interplanetary spacecraft all in one go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_Ex...
Don't get me wrong, I like SLS and the BFR/MCT concept (what little we have actually seen of it anyway...) and think/hope NASA and SpaceX can pull those off, but if I were in charge of allocating funding, I'd throw my money at OPSEK.
The Obama Administration has focused on domestic social issues like jobs, education, and health care, and deemphasized longer term programs like Nasa.
Typically, the pendulum swings back and forth with space and science allocations, and I would expect an adjustment upward in the next couple of years even as the social spending is inevitably cut.
Also, as the U.S. economy comes out of the 2008-2010 recession and starts to generate more government revenue, it will become politically easier to re-fund some of these mothballed or back-burnered programs and get Big Space back on the front page.
Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their hearts.
I was a 10-year-old boy when men first walked on the moon, and my friends and I all had model rockets, Nasa posters on the wall, and dreamed of becoming astronauts some day. We all assumed that the country would just keep on funding more exploration until we had a massive rotating space station in orbit, a permanent base on the Moon, and probes reaching to every corner of the star system and beyond.
Very little of that has come to pass, and we are a poorer and less accomplished nation because of it. Nasa indeed should be getting more than $18.5B, in my opinion more like $50B or $60B. It's a great investment.
Sure, let private companies try to jump into the satellite launching business, more power to them. But the heavy lifting has got to come from Nasa, that great organization that has been neglected for too long.
Which might be true in a touchy-feely subjective way, but the annual budget figures don't reflect that at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget.2C...
> Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their hearts.
The trouble is that people in the United States have literally no idea how much anything costs. People really think things like space and foreign aid are currently significant chunks of the budget. News that the military spent more moving fuel into Afghanistan in a year than NASA's entire budget is met with very strong disbelief in some quarters. It's very easy to sell such people on some very strange ideas, which is where we are now.
So I'd like to believe that. But my conclusion based on studying the relevant history is that it was fear which motivated Americans to spend the money for space exploration.
When Sputnik launched in 1957, it threw Americans into a panic. Here was a Soviet god-knows-what that you could see from your house in Kansas. The Soviets beat us to nearly every milestone: first satellite, first animal in space, first man in space, first EVA, first probe on the moon. The Soviets' first manned lunar landing was scheduled for 1968, but the architect of the program died at an inopportune time in 1966. The need to keep up with or beat the Soviets is what drove the space program until 1969.
I don't think we would've gone to all that trouble if we didn't have the Red Empire breathing down our necks.
So you are saying the terrorists need to start building space probes? /s
The Boomers, who are the predominant generation today, grew up on Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, Star Trek and 2001 and model rocketry. We lived and breathed space exploration.
There is a huge ready-made audience for more great achievements in space. We need national leaders who can inspire the voters to allocate the funding. The last few presidents haven't been very enthusiastic. G.W.Bush actually did have a vision of replacing the Shuttle, but unfortunately he didn't lock in the funding for the replacement Orion/Constellation systems before his term ended, so the U.S. ended up with no means to get humans into orbit, a rather embarrassing predicament for the world's erstwhile leader in space travel.
I'm sympathetic to your point. I majored in aerospace engineering in college because I grew up reading books that told me we'd be going to Mars any day now. But in the process, I became convinced that nothing would happen in that field for the foreseeable future, and probably nothing economically worthwhile in my lifetime.
In the next several decades following, continued US dominance is dependent on effective education and a strong economy supporting a healthy middle class. In the next several decades after that, whatever nation/culture succeeds in expanding the scope of human civilization is going to dominate through its progeny. (In much the same way that European and in particular WASP culture that originated in England became dominant through the ascendance of the United States.)
However, the system is set up to reward those who enter the financial sector, with its tendency towards rent seeking, and the realm of law/politics, which tends to engender a viewpoint somewhat distant from the first principles that govern reality.
China, with its largely technocratic leadership, and with its pent up desire to express its pride and prowess as a civilization-state may well have the means, knowledge, and impetus to engage in such an expansion of scope. This would be the smart strategic move -- instead of directly challenging the US for power on Earth, they would expand into an even larger context.
Another beauty of such a strategy: the entrenched short-term interests of the US military industrial complex might well assist them in gaining an insurmountable lead by staying fat and happy in their status quo.
Space exploration does not garner votes, raw science does not garner voters, and neither do they garner blue collar jobs. Politicians route money to where it buys them most influence. They rely on this money and positioning people against each other to maintain their standard of living. See, they are safe and the masses will stay in their irrational world grousing about the lack of change they do little to change.
They count on the irrational decision, the rally behind a thousand page health bill no one reads, the three hundred page net neutrality bill no one is allowed to read, and they make sure you don't want to by portraying the challenge to such as an affront to privilege and intelligent and we want to be considered both. After all, if they tell us its not smart to do otherwise well those who say otherwise must be wrong.
So they play the people off each other while they keep their backroom deals and move along merrily laughing at an electorate whose current concern is their internet connection so they don't miss the latest streaming movie.
Who needs space exploration when Game of Thrones is on.
Everyone thinks they have "enough" long term vision. I'm sure many of the Roman emperors who we now think of as being short-sighted thought they had it all figured out in the way you outline above.
I agree with you about the essential importance of education and a strong economy. I also agree with you that China see space achievements as a good way (among many) to express its desire for leadership.
But China lags significantly behind the U.S. in areas of education, economy, and freedom of expression. The latter is important because it is an essential ingredient for long-term innovation.
I think we'll see China do some great things in the near term, perhaps even put people back on the moon. Americans will be freaked if that happens. (I'm sad to say--I wish people would take a broader view of humanity, but oh well.)
But in the long run I think we'll be doing big things in space too. It just looks shitty now because we're between big launch systems.
We're at the point where China can simply use existing technology to gain a lead in space presence. More permissive societies are bound to appear, given a serious program of Chinese space settlement. Also, the Soviet experience shows that you can have technological innovation in aerospace without freedom of expression.
There are only so many brainy people on the earth. Better that they focus on these more immediate problems at hand.
Space exploration is probably just a distraction from the much more pressing problems of the day.
NASA's contributions are estimated to have a 2-3 to 1 fold revenue generation for NASA spending.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/no_20100827_1798.php
Investments in science can have huge payoffs.
We will get on-orbit refueling. Once we get there you can launch pieces, assemble and fuel in orbit, and then head out to where ever you want to go.
The interesting question is what happens when it becomes clear that the space faring capability of a corporation exceeds that of the government. Over regulation I suspect.
This is a narrative that has only the slimmest hold on reality. Congress has done reasonably well at keeping NASA funded, with some occasional road bumps here and there. And certainly at a lower level than what many of us who value planetary exploration particularly highly would like. But still not too bad all things considering.
The real cause for the pinch in planetary science is NASA itself. It has indulged in undisciplined budgetary behavior and project planning at the cost of diversity and robustness in its science missions.
The major cause of these problems is something that is not mentioned once, even in passing, in this entire article: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As of right now JWST is more than $7 billion over budget and 8 years behind schedule. That $7 billion compares to: 1 Curiosity rover ($2.5 billion) plus 2 Dawn double asteroid rendezvous missions (2x $500 million, 4 total asteroidal bodies visited) plus 1 Cassini mission ($1.4 billion) plus 1 New Horizons mission ($650 million) plus 1 Kepler mission ($550 million) plus an entire extra billion dollars. That's an exciting panoply of opportunities, and imagine those figures in the context of similar classes of missions. Ion engine powered comet-survey missions, planetary landers and rovers, Kuiper belt flyby missions, survey missions to Neptune and Uranus, exo-planet searches, and so forth. To say that NASA's space science missions have been sucked dry of funding is to ignore why and toward what end they have been.
Make no mistake, JWST is a remarkably ambitious mission that is likely to be as groundbreaking as Hubble was, but it is absolutely squeezing the life out of the rest of NASA right now. It would be nice if congress would provide even more funding for NASA so they could go forward with JWST as well as other missions, but to implicate congress as a villain depriving NASA space science of life is to ignore the reality of the situation. This is a self-inflicted wound.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aa...
http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-n...
P.S. Moreover, the doom and gloom tone of the article is unwarranted. Regardless of either NASA budget mismanagement or congressional stinginess the capabilities of NASA in regards to exploration are set to vastly balloon due to the incredible reductions in launch cost on the horizon (from SpaceX and others).