The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security
It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything.
1. Shortage of funding
2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding
3. extremely low risk tolerance
4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high
5. projects are over engineered to reduce chance of failure
6. projects are over budget and over schedule
7. projects only make minor incremental progress
8. lack of fast/exciting progress drives decrease in funding
9. GOTO 1
NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money for each launch than it should. (almost two?)
This is so hilarious wrong I don't even know where to start.
> but the politics of its funding doesn't allow that.
The post that you are agreeing with says that "funding" is not the reason for their plan.
Anywhere at all would be better than nowhere. I worked for a defense contractor for a few years, so I'm basing my comment on my experience there.
> The post that you are agreeing with says that "funding" is not the reason for their plan.
Not sure what you are saying here.
You can't be swift and lean when you are given very limited, budgeted funding. You can't take risks or you risk putting people out of a job and killing the program.
That leads to an overly conservative culture that restricts any risk taking and over-engineers everything to the point failure is effectively impossible.
This slow movement, overly conservative, design by committee approach helps limit risk but it absolutely balloons costs in the long run and horrifically delays progress. Of course if they were a company they'd eventually run out of money but that's not really an option for gov orgs so when the overly conservative, limited run designs end up encountering production issues, the projects explode in cost with nearly no upper limit.
TLDR: The political climate is a direct consequence of the lack of budget and continued restriction of that budget only worsens the problem.
> NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
Why doesn't the political environment allow for it. What could happen. What could regulatory bodies do to NASA for taking a risk and failing. What sort of constricting change could political bodies do in such a situation.
Three astronauts were incinerated alive. That was when they started to take safety more seriously. Subsequent accidents have only reinforced this.
The entire point of my comment is that funding cuts happened. That is the reaction.
- Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton of inefficiency from poor communication and the need to constantly ship things around
- Public approval is the goal and failure is the worst possible option, so things tend to be optimized to take as few engineering risks as possible and have huge amounts of bureaucracy to spread the blame for any possible failure
There's a reason why SpaceX started landing rockets with a fraction of the money that NASA spent on building ridiculous boondoggles.
Ummm.. I thought remote work was no less efficient?
For another example from a different angle, the military has limitless supplies of funding but innovates even less than NASA.
Nasa develops nuclear reactors, landed on titan and has reached pluto. Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system.
They may not have the same accomplishments as NASA, but they're far from a "company that makes trucks".
Which scientific instruments does SpaceX make? I have never heard of a single one.
In contrast, curiosity rover has dozens.
Like, come on. I get shitting on Musk is the cool new thing, but this is genuinely the case where SpaceX is doing cool things in space, and at an extremely fast pace. Get over yourself if you can’t see through your Musk hate and only see them as “a company that builds trucks”.
"NASA makes precision scientific instruments and SpaceX makes precision scientific instruments that have higher tolerances with a higher focus on throughput, and there are rapidly diminishing returns in how much funding can be used to close the gap" is probably the right take if not as fun.
Also, spacex has launched outside of the earth-moon system. It was a roadster
Scientists also don't work for free. They arent mushrooms that grow by themselves
This seems like a gross mistake.
If we are going to avert a climate catastrophe we will need TW of power to "unburn" the carbon we put into the environment (ocean and atmosphere). Instead of barely hitting this target, we should over deliver since we are running out of wall-clock time.
Every project that meets a bar for feasibility, organizational/operational capabilities (if they dont have it, either fix it, or transfer design to capable team) should be given funding (50-100M). We should be dropping BILLIONS on this, if we can drop 50B+ on semiconductors we can do the same for fusion.
Money is fungible. Dropping $billions on this means not dropping those $billions on something that works already, works fantastically well, and would work even better with more money. We already know how to prevent (more) climate catastrophe. We just need to do more of it.
So, no. Each dollar diverted from building out solar to mining coal or fooling with nukes brings existential catastrophe nearer.
Surely if you have a non-satisfactory yield you shouldn't be building it. And that should be possible to estimate before we spend billions on it?
Fission reactors work really well and have been around for 50+ years. If we are going to go nuclear instead of renewable, we need to address the elephant in the room.
The elephant in the room is: why not just fission?
See https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/safety-in-fusion for more details
Let me put the question another way: suppose we get fusion that's equally as safe as fission like IAEA is saying here. Why would we switch to it if we were unwilling to switch to fission?
The entire reason why people are working on fusion IS the fact that it’s much much safer due to all of the key differences. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons from fission to transfer, just as lessons from ICE cars have gone to EVs.
My point stands though: we're not doing fusion at scale yet, so we'll see.
The softer the bed linen, the more rested the computer scientists will be and the more likely they are to come up with novel solutions that lead to faster computing.
I think what other commentors may be getting at is that in many cases the simple analogy of asking how 9 women can have a baby in 1 month is instructive here. You could throw trillions at that problem, a need to have a baby in 1 month. Sometimes there are hard limits that money has a hard time addressing.
A case could be made that with enough money put towards advanced technology, like gene therapy to force a fetus to maturity in 1 month vs 9, it could be done with horrendous side effects.
So to your point money does solve all problems, but I think diminishing returns is putting it very lightly.
This is big news but fusion will largely be a product of the people it attracts. The people can do the job attracting money and other talent if it's justified.
I've seen the Canadian gov try to throw money at trying to build a local tech scene and it all went to hucksters, old school finance suits with megacorp resumes, and administrators. While all the tech talent just kept going to SF where the capital was going into high risk ventures... not expensive buildings, events, 'entrepreneur/small business programs', and propping up old school D-round investors. Money is easily wasted even when the pursuit sounds noble and valuable on the surface.