Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

what's up with all the "what does it mean for the nation"? It's a huge step for the humanity, not only the US. And the actual rover is filled with instruments from all over the world. From wiki:

> ChemCam ... developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and French CESR

> Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer ... APXS was developed by Canadian Space agency.

> Sample analysis at Mars ... was developed by Goddard Space flight center, the Laboratoire Inter-Universitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques (LISA) (jointly operated by France's CNRS and some Parisian universities) and Honeybee Robotics, along with many additional external partners.

> Radiation assessment detector ... was developed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the extraterrestrial physics group at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany

> Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons ... provided by the Russian Federal Space Agency

> Rover environmental monitoring station ... provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science

The US deserves massive, massive kudos for this mission, and space exploration in general.

Granted, lots of other countries do excellent work, there's no doubt about that, but the commitment level is different by a huge margin.

Just take a look at what NASA is doing right this very second. They just landed a rover on Mars; they have 2 satellites around Mars; they have satellites around Saturn, Mercury, and Vesta; they have spacecraft on their way to Jupiter and Pluto; they have a planet hunting space telescope which has discovered hundreds of extra-solar planets already; they have Hubble; they have an X-ray telescope; they have a gamma-ray telescope which just recently provided potential confirmation on the origin and nature of dark matter. Oh, and they have another operational rover on Mars. And this isn't even everything, nor does it touch manned spaceflight.

The ESA has been doing some pretty amazing work in the past few years (with Mars Express, Huygens, Rosetta, Planck/Herschel, XMM, Cluster, SOHO, and their cooperation on NASA missions and others) and Japan and others have been doing good work as well, but the budgetary commitment as a percentage of GDP is just not comparable. We shouldn't take NASA's successes and say "oh, well, a bunch of other nations helped out some too, so, go world!" We should give NASA their due, and we should give other space agencies their due as well, and we should challenge the world to support space science missions to the level they deserve.

The US paid for the vast majority and are responsible for getting this to Mars. The crazy landing, and $2.5 billion at risk on a project with a 30% historic success rate, wase not shared. US total annual space spending is about $60 billion a year. The entire rest of the world combined is only about $22. The entire EU is under $6 billion.

This is an American achievement. If you aren't from the US, you should try to encourage your government to step up. If everyone committed at US levels by GDP, annual global space spending would be about $240 billion instead of $82 billion. Biomedical research is the same way.

NASA's budget is about 18B, not all of which is space related. Where does your other 42B come from?

The total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B, 83% of the spending for the rest of the world. The Air Force Space Command is the remainder, they run many projects, including GPS.

Thanks for the info, but shouldn't we be comparing civilian space budgets? Obviously dual use projects like GPS should be included but most of that 40B+ is purely military in nature.

It would be almost impossible to get a reliable estimate for other countries, most do not have separate civilian and military space programs like the US. For example, the ESA is building Galileo, a positioning system similar to GPS, primarily for strategic military needs. The Russians and the Chinese, who make up almost the entire remainder of global space spending after the EU, spend quite a bit on military space, but there is not reliable data. In fact, there is basically no data on Chinese spending at all, it's an industry estimate of their spending based on outside observations. In addition, there is some crossover each way. Hubble, in particular, received substantial benefit from military research into spy satellites, not to mention the recent gift of two space telescopes to NASA from NRO. At best it's unclear how to decouple the spending in the US, and nearly impossible internationally. I believe going with the totals is fair, as the approximate civilian to military ratio would be pretty close internationally, given the obvious military implications of space, like ICBM's and spying, the interchangeable nature of the fundamental research in each field (e.g. ICBM guidance systems research can be applied to landing on Mars, spy satellites are space telescopes if you turn them around), and the countries involved.

I see a company called Euroconsult publishes estimates of governmental space expenditures. Unfortunately it costs over 4000 euro! But a summery is available here:

http://www.geospatialworld.net/index.php?option=com_content&...

As much as anything, those guys were doing their bit to secure funding at a time when their budgets are under really huge pressure. A lot of that stuff is aimed at Senators who decide budgets. They respond well to this kind of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if Charles Bolden also has political ambitions, that was quite a 'statesman-like' speech he gave.

It also plays well to the people who don't know any better, the people who say 'why are we spending all this money on space when I can't get a job?'. You'll notice that the straighter and more senior heads - Pete Theisinger the PM, and John Grotzinger the chief scientist, did not go all Team America during the press conference, but did make similar points - 'The money isn't sent to Mars, it's spent here on Earth' - again speaking to the pressure that they're under.

I think the difference here is pretty clear: If you want the best instruments you should look around internationally. There is so much diversity there, so much specialities, that you will always be able to find some places in the world that are exceptionally good at building them besides just the US.

However, if you actually want to get those things to the surface of Mars and let them do meaningful work, the best option is the US. ESA didn’t even manage a (successful) landing yet, Russia is failing constantly.

> However, if you actually want to get those things to the surface of Mars and let them do meaningful work, the best option is the US. ESA didn’t even manage a (successful) landing yet, Russia is failing constantly.

Not on Mars no (Beagle 2 was a bit anomalous, having a budget that would barely cover Nasa's stationary costs each year and wasn't secure until about half way through the project anyway. Very embarrassing from a PM point of view). But don't discount Huygens! That was pretty spectacular, especially given how much less we know about Titan.

Asside: I asked a few people who worked on the Huygens landing system why that worked so well but why ESA hasn't been able to recreate that success. They said, quick as a flash, project management. ESA used to PM their projects with a small, powerful project office. Now the sub a lot of the PM out to the big contractors, who seem to just do MS Word documents about how they can't deliver anything and it's someone else's fault.

You need good PMs (we all know this anyway right?). The MSL PM is also the MER (spirit and opportunity) PM, Pete Theisinger. He is a great man. There's a fantastic talk he gave a few years ago, that should delight anyone into ambitious and cool engineering projects, about the development of MER. You can see that he's the kind of guy you'd like to work for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZBLklsUys

Edit: typo.

OK, but it's a pretty big deal for the U.S. Those are great contributions by other nations. However, if Canada had decided to produce an Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer, it's not as if NASA would not have been able to make this possible. The same can probably said for every other component. This doesn't diminish any of their contributions and they should all be proud but I don't think we should downplay what this means for the U.S. and simply say "Aw shucks, this is humanity." As well, all of those involved in the press conference I saw acknowledged their international partners.

I can safely say that I HATE a lot of the American agenda especially when it comes to foreign policy, but in this case I would only hope that American tax payers felt at least a shred of pride and sense of ownership in this amazing accomplishment if it had any influence in swaying the American government from their current investments and back to incredible projects like this.

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