NASA and the politics of the space program

[David Panzer]

One hundred pennies make a dollar.



My taxes going to support anything that doesn't benefit me will be something I complain about. My taxes going to support anything that could be done better is also something I complain about.



And yet Spaceship One didn't have the funding or the manpower that NASA does. Give that orange a shot of steroids. The private sector isn't a position to take them on because there isn't a profit in doing so. But, there is always the chance of profit when you take risks like the ones that drug companies take. I'd rather have those companies taking the risks and losing money (like drug companies do constantly) than have taxpayer dollars wasted.



That's all well and good, but I don't want my money going towards that, and I think that if a sizeable portion of the population were educated on the issue they wouldn't either. Very rarely does the media look past the rhetoric and take a hard stance on the space program.

We agree to disagree in regard to NASA.

[frulad]

As you can see above, I made the exact same assertions. Difference is, keeping a robust military is the government's duty. Sending spacemen to planets is not.

We should eliminate all non-military space programs immediately. There is a need -- and not just with the space (between their heads) program -- to eliminate a LOT of programs. It's just that NASA is a glaring one considering that a small group of people created something more advanced than the archaic space shuttle, putting NASA to shame.

There are numerous spinoff technologies from both the space program and the military. The R and D feed each other at times. In addition to various civilian satellite launches (paid for by the private sector, BTW) and government sponsored research staellites, the space shuttle has flown several military missions, delivering classified payloads to orbit.

It's a holistic world and I just don't think you can remove the space program without negatively impacting some aspects of the military.

[Harrdy]

LessonInMachismo: Well, nobody said that a good portion of military management shouldn't be handed over to the private sector.

And that does what? Because private Business wants to make money. If military management would be private they would use their projected power to... make money. I don't like that idea.
On the other hand there are atm a lot of mercenaries used in Iraq. The more I hear about that idea the more I get angry.

Lunan: not to mention a legit L5 station for comerece

Nice idea, but WHAT commerce? Selling nike shoes build in sweat shops on mars? Oh, right... no sweat there, how about Europa (the moon)? Well, joking aside, atm we don't have any commerce in space. Could change when some rich folks decide they want to go to the moon on holidays, but atm there are no humans outside lower earth orbit. Part of the reason is because it is so much cheaper to send unmanned probes into space (no storage needed for air, food and all the other things helping us survive. No storage means less weight, which is still a BIG factor). ATM I see only two ways of strengthening our progress, one is a functioning space elevator (but there are still some problems, beginning with the right materials going up to the problem of catastrophic failure (natural or human produced). The other idea is to shoot everything from air to food in a big cannon to the sky. If you don't take the fuel you need to orbit with you then less energy is used. Of course humans cannot withstand the pressure of such a launch, so we still need rockets for them.

LessonInMachismo: Look at Spaceship One.

I'm looking... still looking... still not looking better. They are atm even farther away from space than NASA was with the Mercury project. The same goes for the funny types who build a floating launch pad or similar aproaches. From my perspective the problem with these start ups is that they want to make MONEY, the more the better. So why shoot people into *SPACE* if they can shoot them up in a nice looking "space ship", let them fall for some seconds (hopefully they will get to minutes at least) and call the whole experience "space walk". Some rich dumba**es will pay for that, as they do atm for "astronaut training" in Russia.
Or with other words: Why sell what you should when the customer is paying for less?

LessonInMachismo: Thing is, is there an advantage to doing so?

Ok, sorry... should read the postings to the end before beginning to write. So you see the problem of MONEY.

LessonInMachismo: The market is usually right.

Well, "the market" says that it is better to cut a forest down, sell the wood, sell the land and put all the money on a bank account. Does that make *sense* to you? Because it does, from a money perspective.

LessonInMachismo: As long as we maintain the technological (read: military) superiority

Well, I am not sure. Up until some years ago the only reason for progress seemed to be war. But nowadays war is more... "complicated". So we cannot use our toys to kill each others children without risking killing each other (if somebody sees some kind of moral lesson here... so do I). So we search for other playgrounds, safer ones. The funny looking "turban people", they have no atomic bomb. So we can put up a fight with them, without risking loosing our lives (that is: from the perspective of a politican). If they burn inside with hatred afterwards and strife with every fiber of their being to gain access to advanced military hardware, and if there are companies willing to sell (of course with middle men. No sane company will sell *direct* to terrorists), well that can hardly be *our* problem. We make money, with the companies we own (suddently everybody seems to want to have weapons, nice...). Granted, some of our children die, but they are the bottom layer of society, the ones who don't have rich parents, the ones dreaming of a good education and a chance to live a better live. So who cares about them, back in homeland they would probably get into drugs anyway.
Sarcasm is helping me to live in this crazy world, where people just don't see what they DO.

LessonInMachismo: We should eliminate all non-military space programs immediately.

There is a difference - for me - watching a Saturn V rumbling and slowly taking of into the sky and watching a Poseidon or Trident doing the same. One launch is for the sake of knowledge, for finding answers and new questions, the other to kill people. One is showing how great humans can be, the potential, if you will, the other is showing how cruel humans can be, the "other potential", if you will. Does it make one "better" if he is able to kill? From an evolutionary point of view it does. Should we follow that line of thought? Well, the same line of thought shows that to many predators kill off the prey and die miserably. Maybe we need our government based killers, but having to many of them spoiles the cake.

LessonInMachismo: It's just that NASA is a glaring one considering that a small group of people created something more advanced than the archaic space shuttle, putting NASA to shame.

Who did? Did I miss some news reports? I HOPE you don't mean the funny lil space ship one... do you?!?
AH! I remember... you must mean China and India... yes, they are gaining a foodhold in space right now.

WorkerCaste: ...rooted for Spaceship One right along, but I think you're comparing apples and oranges with this statement.

Thank you. Now I can say I also applaud the guys, even more as they are geeks *g*
BUT it really is a small fish, compared what NASA (or the Russians, don't forget their space program) do.

WorkerCaste: Exploration has also proved to be generally profitable,...

Well, not always immediatly (THAT seems to be the problem nowadays). Why waste money on building ships, we could use that money for our poor (or to make me richer), why waste money on trade, we have everything we want. Well, trade turned out nice, I can have fancy clothing now, so ok, in hindsight it was nice to invest in those ships. What? You want to travel AROUND the world? But you will fall of! What a gargantum waste of money! Oh, you met some indians there? Well, good for you. Did you bring anything WORTH something? What are these? Looking like dirty apples? Potatoes? And these? Corn? Nice color, maybe we can use it as food for our horses. Well, we survived that winter with the help of these little Potatoes, who would have thought. They are USEFUL. Would never have found them if we would not have went to India. No? No India? What was it then? A new world? Well, that complicates matters. And so on and so on into the present.

LessonInMachismo: One hundred pennies make a dollar.

I'd guess if you shut down 1/10th of the military nuclear potential you could still destroy civilization several times, and the money revenue could be used to help NASA survive for some years...
I hope you don't think those rockets just sit there... they need service, you know? They need new materials (for the hydrogen based, at least).

LessonInMachismo: Give that orange a shot of steroids.

WHO should do this? Because, as you said yourself, there is no money to be made in space...
And true, they didn't have the funds that NASA did... but they RE-INVENTED something. It is much harder to invent something than to re-invent it...

LessonInMachismo: (like drug companies do constantly)
Oh, nice... earth to cloud nine? Do you copy cloud nine? Drug companies are one of the safest bets to invest your money atm. Sure, they take risks, but they take their power to shape the world into something that constantly gives them revenue. Just look at the stock markets, there you can see who gains money and who looses it.
By the way, maybe I have an information advantage, with my uncle being in the field of testing new medications... but I think I could see the dots and connect them without that knowledge, but I can't know.

PeAcE

[WorkerCaste]

And yet Spaceship One didn't have the funding or the manpower that NASA does. Give that orange a shot of steroids. The private sector isn't a position to take them on because there isn't a profit in doing so. But, there is always the chance of profit when you take risks like the ones that drug companies take. I'd rather have those companies taking the risks and losing money (like drug companies do constantly) than have taxpayer dollars wasted.

That's all well and good, but I don't want my money going towards that, and I think that if a sizeable portion of the population were educated on the issue they wouldn't either. Very rarely does the media look past the rhetoric and take a hard stance on the space program.

First, what makes you think that giving it a shot of steroids wouldn't just create NASA. One of the biggest complaints against NASA is the bureacracy and waste, and those comlaints can really stand out when comparing NASA to a company like Scaled Composites. The problem is, as soon as you expand the scope of something you increase the bureacracy and waste will be introduced. As you increase the number of workers you increase the legitimate need for management. As I'm sure all of us have encountered in life, increasing the number of managers guarantees that you will increase the number of ineffective managers. Projects with a huge number of sub projects and individual tasks increases concurrancy and scheduling conflict. In a moderate-sized project this can increase labor by 15 to 20 percent. Pushing the borders of known science will also increase waste. It's impossible to tread those grounds without making mistakes. Even if you manage to run six sigma across the board, a ten-million man-hour project will still yield more than 1000 hours of bad or flawed work. I don't think that the Spaceship One program is inherently better than NASA's programs -- just that they were working within a more manageable scope.

As far as prefering companies to take on these projects rather than government, I don't see how it could happen. Take the drug company model and think about what that might mean for space. First, getting a drug to market practically assures a profit since the company is given exclusivity for a number of years. When a drug is developed, there is a specific market inherent in that drug. Many drugs can be brought to market simultaneously, and the exclusivity granted to the manufacturer will not impact any other efforts in the vast majority of cases. In the case of space, there is no inherent market and if more than one company pursued, say, the exploration of Mars, exlusivity would wipe out any of the also ran companies. In order to offer a prize that would encourage private enterprise to pursue the goal, you'd have to offer exclusivity of the planet for half a century or more. Even then, a business that pursued that goal and lost can hardly be said to be safeguarding the investors interests.

There is a place in government for big scientific projects. Government is the only agency that can undertake these enterprises without a business plan showing exactly where the profit will come from. The side effects of these programs benefit all of us directly, though. From the Apollo program we have had advances in: textiles (velcro, cool suits, fire resistant cloth); tools (cordless tools, microlasers); manufacturing processes (vacume metallizing, blow molding; various metal coatings, synthetic lubricants); purification techniques (water, kidney dialysis; toxic gas sensors); weather forcasting; electronics (communications, computers); medicine (programmable pacemakes, automated urinalysis). There's a lot more, too. (Tang! ) None of these were foreseen when the commitment to Apollo was made. And, yes, as I said before, I realize that many of these could have come along without Apollo, but which ones and how much longer would it have taken? The challenge of space created a need for these things before such needs were identifiable in the market place, but the flowed into the market and raised everyone's standard of living.

[David Panzer]

And astronaut ice cream

[Harrdy]

And the microwave... god bless the microwave 8-)

PeAcE

[I love Lyta]

Nice idea, but WHAT commerce? Selling nike shoes build in sweat shops on mars?

How about little puppets of ambassadors and station personel?
No, wait. That was NOT such a good idea...

... the only reason for progress seemed to be war.

Now, WHERE did I hear that concept before...

Honestly, I consider it to be a crying shame that the Hubble telescope mission, something that gave us so much more insight into the universe and holds the potential to keep doing so for years, will be discontinued due to the lack of funding while billions are thrown out for new weaponry.

[Milkman]

I thought the hubble did get more funding, and is scheduled for maintainance in 2008? Sorry no linkage to back that up...

[Andrew_Swallow]

I thought the hubble did get more funding, and is scheduled for maintainance in 2008? Sorry no linkage to back that up...

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html

The Hubble space telescope is to be repaired.

Time to plan its replacement, possibly launched on an unmanned Aries I rocket.

[Dr Maturin]

I'm quite busy this week, but rest assured when I have enough time on my hands I will address these fallacies in a fashion whose excellence could only be expected of me.

[David Panzer]

I'm quite busy this week, but rest assured when I have enough time on my hands I will address these fallacies in a fashion whose excellence could only be expected of me.

[frulad]

I'm quite busy this week, but rest assured when I have enough time on my hands I will address these fallacies in a fashion whose excellence could only be expected of me.

Misspelled "arrogance."

[Harrdy]

http://images.google.at/images?svnum=10&hl=de&lr=&q=navel

[I love Lyta]

"The Hubble space telescope is to be repaired."

OH cool! My last info was that it wasn't. Been a bit busy lately so I didn't check.

[Milkman]

What has NASA done for you lately ?

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/164449main_spinoff_06.pdf

How NASA improves your quality of life.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54862main_hits.pdf

And the base site with tons of information on what NASA has given us besides just putting things in space.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/spinoffs_index.html