NASA appears no longer to be shooting for the stars
latimes.com
latimes.com
Fiscal scolds drive me crazy when they overlook mere elephants in the room - this is like a whole pod of blue whales.
(Note: figures from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html)
But yeah, in retrospect, it's flamewar material and I probably should keep my big mouth shut. It's just ...
I'm in Europe for the summer. And I know Europe has its own problems, but they're actually doing some stuff here that makes the place a better place to live, instead of taking huge piles of money and burning it. The roads are better, the cities prettier, the public services more helpful, the health system more efficient - it just kills me.
I live in Indiana, largely because the real estate market has crashed and it's so cheap (and yeah, I'm from there, but that's why I went back). Indiana really can't afford squat now, because all the money is being sucked out and spent on wars to profit the rich, or just plain being gift-wrapped for them because they're too big to fail.
And now we can't even go to the moon.
Unfortunately Europe has its own problems. The arms industry in Europe is even more corrupt than in the USA (the french company Thales/Thompson resorted to changing its name every 5 years to shake off the bad name).
The European Union is an extremely expensive and failed project and the public finances in many European countries is a huge mess (e.g. Portugal, Spain, Greece). They have big immigration problems and social problems (e.g. large and growing Muslim minorities in most countries). The birth rate has all but collapsed and they will have serious economic problems in the long term.
Without loss of generality, I will assume below that you are European.
The arms industry in Europe can be as corrupt as it wants - it still doesn't consume the incredible proportion of GDP ours does, and it still doesn't own your government outright. That corruption is utterly, utterly insignificant in terms of how European society is run and where the money actually goes. I'll grant you that arms corruption is a Bad Thing, and making money off killing people is even worse, but Europe ain't got nothing on America in that regard. (Note: right now. Clearly, in the past, this was not the case, but we're discussing current affairs.)
Public finances in many European countries are a mess, yeah. I give you Indiana. Or even better - I give you California, which has started selling its historical monuments and state parks in order to stave off bankruptcy.
Europe has nothing like immigration or social problems. They think they do. But they really, really don't. Large and growing Muslim minorities are, and let me make this perfectly clear, not a problem. They are a good thing.
The birth rate collapsing is a good thing. I don't care about retirement problems because they don't exist; the fact that they are actually planning for retirement at all is what makes Europe superior. And I'll draw your attention to the fact that those large, growing Muslim minorities are in fact paying into the retirement system. Just because it's not white, Christian money doesn't mean the system isn't working. And more importantly, Europe doesn't have (as many) thieves and brigands in power trying to get that social services lockbox open so their friends can buy more yachts - and the European media springs on that shit like rapid weasels when they do try it, because in Europe, they still report actual news, and the people, clearly remembering times when the government was demonstrably and openly against them, watch the government like a million hawks, and oddly enough, journalists there are OK with that.
And I'd like to state, just for the record, that if you think Europe is facing serious economic problems in the long term, I'd like to draw your attention back to America. The difference between Europe and America is that some people in Europe are at least planning management strategies; the corresponding people in America are mostly trying to figure out which part of Peru they're going to retreat to when things finally collapse.
But the point in your post that I really feel the most urgent need to address is this flabbergasting notion that the European Union is a failed project.
The European Union has been expensive, yeah. It's not even a tenth as expensive as the Iraq War, and here's the key: it isn't a failed project. There is no, no, no fucking way you can say the European Union has failed until you see an actual renewal of the centuries of warfare that ravaged this continent until the advent of the European Union.
I am, right now, sitting in Budapest, which joined the Union in 2005. To get here, I drove through Switzerland (part of the Union in all but name), Italy, and Slovenia, and then I drove back through Austria and Germany to return our rental car before flying back to Vienna (long story; one-way rentals are Not Cheap here). I've lived in Europe, and come to Europe, a lot over the last twenty years; my wife is Hungarian. So I know a lot about what I'm saying here. The advances I've seen this summer (it's been five years since I could afford to come) have blown my mind. Just the thought of driving across Slovenia in a single evening on their freaking new freeway system alone...
What I'm saying here, and above, is that Europe is prosperous. Oh, everybody's complaining about the Union right now - ever since Germans realized that a run on Greek banks affects them through the Euro zone. But the Union was inevitable, and the expansion of markets and lowering of trade barriers has been very profitable to Germany indeed. They're just really panicky about spreading inflation (something about that explosive inflation in the 30's really scarred the public psyche there).
But failed? No. The European Union is the greatest thing humanity has ever achieved - don't get me wrong, I love the American Constitution, and I'm all for ranking it right up there at the top of greatest innovations ever. But the history of Europe is one of blood and bombs, for the last couple of millennia, and now they're at each other's throats only at the rhetorical level.
The Union is a success.
If you've never been here, I encourage you to visit. If you've never left, I encourage you to examine some other parts of the world before thinking Europe is a failure.
(tl;dr: nyah, nyah, you're wrong, Europe rocks)
Neither.
> The arms industry in Europe can be as corrupt as it wants - it still doesn't consume the incredible proportion of GDP ours does, and it still doesn't own your government outright.
That may be true. But the European arms industry is extremely corrupt in other countries (with official sanction). The politicians are usually their bitches (e.g. BAE & Blair).
This is not just true for the arms industry – but for all major European companies. The best example of this is Siemens. Its whole business model is based on paying bribes in third world countries to get contracts. Without that, it is simply not competitive. The bribes that Siemens paid over the years ran into the billions (http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,462954,00.html).
The same goes for the French arms company Thompson CSF/Thales, that had an extremely large central slush fund to pay bribes with.
While it is true that it is better if the corruption is exported, the point that I wanted to make is that without bribery firms such as Siemens is simply not competitive.
> Europe has nothing like immigration or social problems. They think they do. But they really, really don't. Large and growing Muslim minorities are, and let me make this perfectly clear, not a problem. They are a good thing.
Large amount of crimes are committed by immigrants and it threatens European culture. There have been huge riots in countries such as France and Belgium. This is a serious and growing problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Brussels_riots
I agree with you that the USA also have serious problems (e.g. Mexican immigration). Yet it seems that European countries (such as Denmark) are more prepared to do something to solve the problem.
> The birth rate collapsing is a good thing.
No. It is extremely bad (and it is a naïve thing to say). How exactly will a country function if there are more retirees than people working? Or if non-integrating minority populations grow faster than the indigenous populations?
> growing Muslim minorities are in fact paying into the retirement system. Just because it's not white, Christian money doesn't mean the system isn't working.
You ignore the fact that a large percentage of immigrants do not finish school. In germany it is just for highschool (14% among immigrant populations).
> The difference between Europe and America is that some people in Europe are at least planning management strategies; the corresponding people in America are mostly trying to figure out which part of Peru they're going to retreat to when things finally collapse.
Many countries in the EU are a lot closer to collapse (e.g. Greece) than the USA.
> has failed until you see an actual renewal of the centuries of warfare that ravaged this continent until the advent of the European Union.
To claim that the main aim of the EU is the prevention of warfare is wrong. There are good reasons why there hasn’t been another world war (some of it to do with the fact that there was an external enemy and that, with nuclear weapons, no one wants to wage war).
Just because there hasn’t been war doesn’t mean that the EU is a success. And using such a yardstick is actually a big insult to the original aspirations of the EU. And just because the EU is cheaper than a big war, doesn’t mean that it is a bargain.
I now see that mentioning the war at all was foolish - it kills all debate about whether that much money is actually doing anything useful.
The only thing worse than this is if you made a big post about how "morally and intellectually bankrupt" we are.
Here's the problem with what you said.
The use of lethal force in the national interest is either justified or it is not. I mean, you can't half-kill somebody.
If it is justified, then whatever the cost, we have to pay it. It is a matter of survival and critical national interest. Compared to this, any other program doesn't make sense. We're doing what we have to do. It trumps everything else.
If it's not justified, then by definition we're wasting money doing something that involves killing people. Any other program would be better than than this. Everything else trumps it.
But we haven't gotten anywhere at all. It's either obvious and non-optional, or optional and totally unworthy compared to anything else. Neither of these two conditions tells us anything about the space program. It's just a way of commenting on the war -- a way that you can insert into any policy discussion about anything, without moving the discussion forward any. It's off-topic.
You want to talk funding, pick something everybody can agree is somewhat optional and discretionary -- keeping lots of military bases open, foreign aid, public financing of campaigns, entitlements, whatever. But picking something where we're actively trying to kill folks just takes the conversation to a place where logic and reason can't go. Whether the war is a good idea is probably a crazy-good topic of conversation somewhere, but it has fuck-all to do with NASA or funding.
It's problem now is that 50% of it's budget is useful for subsidizing Boeing's competition with Airbus, but the other 50% is no longer needed to subsidize General Dynamics competition with the USSR.
The military industrial complex causes us to spend more money on the military than we should.
It's definitely possible to support a military effort but at the same time not overspend on it. I'm not saying that we're spending too much on Iraq/Afghanistan, just disagreeing with the principle.
On the other hand, not so sure about those fighter jets. :(
EDIT: You guys read my comments and think I'm some kind of shill for the military-industrial complex. But that's not my point at all. What I'm trying to tell you is that comparing the high-level goals of national defense to the space program doesn't work. And if the high-level goals don't compare, it's not like you can pop down to some lower level and compare. You'll always get trumped at the higher level. This is a categorization and logic error -- nothing to do with politics. One B-2 bomber may be much less valuable to the nation than a new space system, but you can't compare bombers to rockets. Bombers always win.
Charuru is heading in the right direction. Instead of picking a war -- arguably the one thing that has to be "on" or "off", pick the entire national defense system. Does the X dollars spent on national defense compare favorably against the Y dollars on NASA? That's the high-level question. If you argue at this level, and then somebody tries to pull you down lower "Yeah but it's not like we can just stop fighting in Afghanistan" then _you_ get to pull the trump card: "we're not talking about using lethal force in the national interest. We're talking about total expenditures and how they match up against the national interest."
The moon program is an accounting error in terms of the military budget for either war, and I was irked by the Times' mention of "$9 million a day", implying that this is an unGodly amount of money to be flowing down the drain, while not mentioning the far, far, far larger daily sums we toss away on other projects.
Pick subsidizing fruit growers, or the rural electrification commission, or studies of prostitutes in Hong Kong -- there are a zillion projects that you can pick which will provide that same WTF moment you want. Hell, just point out the freaking size of the federal budget in general and how it compares with NASA's budget. But the project you picked leads us off into another direction entirely.
Another commenter made a great point -- the closer NASA was to being another arm of DoD, the more funding and budget goodies it got. Perhaps if we could find some reason to fear an attack from outer space, NASA would kick into high gear again (and I'm only being slightly facetious)
With all the downvoting I'm getting, perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps most folks feel like the use of deadly force is more or less the same as any other expenditure: bomb an insurgent, watch some young kid die in an IED detonation, build a bridge, fund some research, build a space station, buy buses for a school system.
I am not one of those people.
And while I have strong moral feelings about this, it's not a question of morality. As a practical matter, the use of deadly force by the state should only be done in times of emergency, and in those cases funding for that use of force trumps everything else. Now we can argue whether or not Afghanistan holds up to that criteria, but that's a war discussion. You're dragging in another topic when there are plenty of examples of other funding that don't have the unique qualities of Afghanistan. Hell, entitlement spending alone counts for about 60% of current federal spending. http://reason.com/blog/2010/01/25/news-flash-entitlement-spe...
Does national defense trump food? Does national defense trump disaster preparedness or emergency response? Does it trump basic research? (Consider that last answer carefully.)
Cost-benefit ratios apply to everything, even including national defense. And it all has to be managed together. The idea that we have to put it all on the line every time some guy in a cave sneezes is the panic mode that let us spend off-budget for years on national defense, and it's the reason why entitlement spending doesn't actually account for 60% of federal dollars.
So this is the crux. National defense spending is considered holy, and yet it's an immense drain on our national resources that, if it were examined in any honest way, would be cut so fast your scissor fingers would be blistered. I could say the same for lots of things, but national defense is such a sacred cow you just can't say any other program comes even close in terms of the way it short-circuits discussion at every juncture.
You're 100% right in your plan to refund NASA, though. If we could just get Fox News to believe in alien terrorists, we'd be on Mars next week.
This thread is why NASA is not funded. Our discussion is an example of the political discourse at large.
You're mad about DoD and war spending. So when NASA comes up, you're loaded and ready for bear to protest the war. Hell, you'll talk at length about spending priorities -- all inside the DoD. Look how stupidly we spent that money!
But where's the emotion when it comes to NASA? Just a throw away war barb involving your feelings and that's it. I kept trying to bring it back to NASA pointing out how pointless this line of reasoning was. Next week it will be oil cleanup in the Gulf -- how can we spend $2 Billion on a bomber and not have solar power perfected? The week after it will be otters, or seals, or whatever. Whatever you want money to be spent on, it will be compared to Afghanistan and the waste going on there. It's a pattern of argument. Recognize the pattern.
There's no positive commitment to NASA -- it's all negative feelings towards defense spending. And negative feelings take people to the polls, not positive ones. This means it is in politicians best interests for you to continue feel angry about something, not happy about something -- as long as you're mad at somebody besides them. So you'll continue ranting against the war, and continue voting, and politicians will continue to get elected, and NASA will continue not to be funded.
Looking at it this way, it's in politicians best interests not to fund NASA, as they can always make the argument that war spending took the money NASA could have had. This lets them off the hook from making tough choices, keeps you mad both about NASA and DoD, and life goes on. All is good. After all, who are you going to vote out of office because NASA is not funded? NASA and all those four thousand other pet projects are just all so much background noise. Tomorrow you'll be bitching about some other expenditure -- and how the cost of a nuclear submarine would have paid for it long ago.
And space exploration deserves better than that.
I'm done here.
Essentially, NASA has lacked any concrete direction since the 70s, and projects like Constellation are stupid because they waste a lot of NASA money on developing NASA's own launch capacity. When NASA should just buy (or pay to upgrade) existing capacity such as the Delta IV Heavy or Falcon 9 to fit its needs.
Most importantly, with development of launch capacity moved out of NASA, NASA will have to specify the ends, not the means. Being the party that sets the budget, makes the design, and implements the design is a very bad position to be in.
It is sad to see the American Dream squashed because of politics but I think a new chapter is around the corner written by the citizens and not bureaucrats.
Thinking like that is what led the EPA to allow BP to neglect to install an acoustic trigger that could have prevented this whole debacle in the gulf. Harsh regulation is essential if you want safety.
The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight.
There's only a few things that people are willing to pay $1000 a pound to send into space. One of them is communications relays. Another is cameras. The third is themselves.
I'm hopeful that space tourism will be the killer app for human spaceflight, because the current model of "let's fucken just send people up to see what happens" has pretty much reached its endpoint: we know what happens.
It's interesting to see that they have ramped up testing; IIRC, all the problems they've had were tied to manufacturing mistakes, not design flaws. This makes me think safety would be best served by more rigorous Q&A to prevent flaws, rather than testing runs to find them.
That said, it seems to me that the safety culture is a symptom, not an underlying cause, of the troubles that NASA is facing. Fundamentally, the political nature of NASA planning and acquisition drive NASA-designed systems toward complexity and high-performance. It is the complexity and performance of (especially) launch vehicles, combined with their stringent requirements and catastrophic failure modes that drives the safety culture. If they didn't obsess over safety, these monstrosities would fail every time.
Take a typical aerospace quality part that has $700 worth of material and labor in it. Because it is engineered with a factor of safety of, 1.05-1.2, for example, there is a $25-30,000 paper trail that documents the mine where the ore was extracted, who did the refining, what the heat treatment process was, where it was performed, and so on and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam.
Take the (awful) STS, for example. Congress was promised "airline-style" operations for this "space pickup truck." Well, an airliner has 0 mission-critical parts. A wing spar can fail and the skin should hold the wing together. The STS has over 700 mission-critical parts. For example, if an O-ring fails on a booster, everybody dies. If some foam hits the leading edge of the wing, everybody dies. High-perf mission-critical parts seem to be a result of the political need for the appearance of technology leadership.
I can almost guarantee you that the O-rings and leading edge pieces were manufactured in different states. High part-count is an artifact of the procurement process.
Elon Musk has talked about what makes SpaceX's pricing possible. (Note that they're offering launch services at 1/5 the cost of the shuttle.) He has a vertically integrated rocket factory. In one state. NASA could not build the Falcon 9 if it wanted to simply because they could not vertically integrate in one state. Every state would get a piece of the pie.
Algorithmically, because that's the crowd, here, you pay an exponential administrative cost for each of the factors: performance, lateral integration, and complexity. We've done all three.
NASA treats the fact that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built as a point of pride, for political reasons. It's actually our national shame and folly, and has set space access back 30 years.
Do I understand you right?
Do you have any sources? I am not an aerospace engineer, and I hate to pull that card after your long and thoughtful comment, but that seems like a pretty sensationalist claim, it'd be nice to have a little supporting evidence. Among other things, you'd figure if a spacecraft could be made as simple as a plane, it'd already have been done.
Also, does an airplane really have no single point of failure? I could swear everything does have at least one. I can't imagine how you could solve all of the single points of failure even on something as simple as a bicycle or a motorcycle. And with the problem with the O-ring failing- wasn't that the failsafe O-ring? I seem to remember hearing something about how there were two seals, and the first one was never supposed to go, but there was a second seal just in case. The first seal did go, but the operators just said 'hey, it's ok, we have a second seal'.
As to mission-critical parts, there is some leeway in the definition of the term that may explain the confusion. "Mission-critical" means, necessary for the survival of the crew and passengers. The "mission" is, get to the desired location if you can, but abort safely if you can't. For passenger planes, this means that if one engine goes out, the plan can land on the other one (or two or three). If the ailerons go out, the pilot can achieve roll control with rudder and throttle. If the INS goes out, the GPS can get you to a visual on a landing strip. In each of these cases, there is a single failure and nobody dies. Hence, these systems are not "mission-critical" where the "mission" is transporting crew and passengers without loss of life. That the plane goes somewhere specific is a fringe benefit, so to speak.
IIRC, the O-ring disaster had to do with the poor design and decision-making regarding temperature limits of the inadequate O-rings. Once hot combustion products get past an O-ring, there will be a failure. On a system where those hot gases can impinge on a fuel tank, there will be a catastrophic failure. On the STS, that makes those O-rings mission-critical.
Interestingly, some have said that the choice of Thiokol is the ultimate cause of that disaster, for precisely the reasons I talked about in my original comment. The SRBs reportedly had to be able to be shipped over the road from Thiokol's plant. In order to do so (instead of building a plant near the launch site), the boosters had to be segmented. Segments -> O-rings. That's pure rumor, afaik.