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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Our hacks are nothing compared to the hacks of these old school nasa programmers :)

The amazing thing (to me) is that they developed the Voyager spacecraft in an era when space flight wasn't hugely popular and the budgets at NASA were being cut regularly. NASA went from a peak of $6bn a year in the mid-sixties under Johnson to almost half that under Ford and Nixon. The engineers were well-respected and they clearly felt the work was important, but they weren't particularly well paid. They did this for the love and the science.

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It's great, but hardly amazing. Most academic research is done by underpaid PhD and postdoc students for the love of science, and most of that is far less glamorous than SPACE.

> Most academic research is done by underpaid PhD and postdoc students for the love of science

I’d hardly call the graduate papers coming out of academia equivalent to the level of innovation & creativity of what the engineers above described. Perhaps they’re both underpaid, but one is certainly more amazing. Hardly the same.

You should read Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” if you want to understand what incredible engineering feats academic scientists are capable of — when the people are tightly focused on achieving a single goal. You should also read Rhodes’ book if you want to understand why unguided fundamental scientific research itself is so critical, even when it doesn’t immediately seem useful to you: without the discoveries of science, nuclear fission wouldn’t have been understood. (Of course, many will disagree that the development atomic bomb is a good outcome, but that’s a very different conversation.)

I love that book. It takes a while to read but it's worth it.

That's a pretty amazing comment to me. Perhaps I am biased because of all the blood sweat tears and life I spent publishing papers in academia. Generally, with the exception of certain low quality publication venues, certain fringe areas of humanities, and of course review papers, each academic paper is a new contribution to science that has never been made before. Heating and cooling something to unjam it? That's been done since the dawn of modern engineering. A neat story (and I mean it), but hardly an astounding level of innovation and creativity.

Are you seriously claiming almost every academic paper in a prestigious journal demonstrates more innovation and creativity than that displayed by the deployment of the Voyager spacecraft? I strongly disagree.

Remember also that a large fraction if not a majority of the Voyager team almost certainly had PhDs or even came from academia. I think we can appreciate innovation and creativity everywhere without having to make it into a genital measuring contest.

I was responding to a comment about a story that was specifically about the unjamming by heating/cooling; a phenomenon which everyone above the age of six knows about. My comment was not a genital measuring context, nor did it have anything to do with the innovation and creativity displayed by the deployment of the Voyager space craft.

This is clearly about more than just unjamming a part, but the work that was put into building the probe, sending it to the edge of the solar system, and the fact that it's still functional today.

The person I was replying to was very clearly not calling the result itself amazing, but the fact that it was achieved by people whose budgets had been cut in half and who were not well paid.

I believe the aspect of beauty and glamor is a matter of taste and hence very subjective. Maybe some projects may turn out to be less influential, but nevertheless it appeals to a particular community.

That sounds more amazing, and less great.

You can't just look at the NASA budget. Defense spending was also a huge part of our activities in space.

My grandfather built satellites at Lockheed in Sunnyvale all through the 60s and 70s and it was a glorious time for him. For reasons that I never quite understood, he hated Reagan for "destroying the industry" in the 80s (by which time he was in Denver at MM).

We spent more money under Nixon and Ford than we do now.

You’re not familiar with how much money as a percentage of GDP we spent in the 1960s? It’s noteworthy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget

We were building the Space Shuttle and exploring the planets.

I wish we could spend money on NASA like we did in the 1970’s

I wish that the problem were money alone.

In the 60s, they were pushing to get things out and accepted risk levels that today we would consider intolerable.

Today we've developed a cost-plus contracting approach plus insane safety and success standards that mean it is almost impossible to actually get anything done. With one notable exception - SpaceX.

Just throwing money into Boeing and Lockheed these days would generate profits for them, but not a lot of science for us. We need to change culture as well.

That’s why I’ve been arguing for over a decade that we should use more robotics and unmanned missions.

I remember someone on HN telling me several years ago that Virgin Galactic would be back quickly.

I wish we could spend money on NASA like we did in the 1970’s

I absolutely agree. It's far worse now. And, not at all coincidently, NASA is doing much less science now. A return to the 70s budget by GDP would be good, but a return to the 60s budget by GDP would be even better.

I don't see anything on that page given as a percentage of GDP, just percentage of federal budget, and inflation adjusted. And while the inflation adjusted numbers have been on the decrease since the early 90s (when shuttle production ramped down) they are still a little higher than they were in the 70s.

I'd love to see NASA's budget increased, but not now - it would just get funneled into dead-end pork projects like SLS. I'd much rather wait till Starship is successfully operating (New Glenn would be a plus), and it is political viable to end the SLS entirely, and redirect all that money and some into missions (both science and exploration) rather than hardware development.

Or to put it another way, it isn't worth it to me to spend 1960's era money if we are only going to get 1960's era results. If we ever want to move on to bigger things in space, like colonization, we can't just throw money at the problem, we need to find ways to bring the cost down first.

Nixon, yes, but not Ford - at least in inflation-adjusted dollar terms. %GDP spend was higher in that period, but 72-76 dollar spend was less.

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