NASA Gives Up on LISA | Hacker News Reader

NASA Gives Up on LISA

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67 pointsturnersauce40 comments

This has been feared for a while in that community. There's quite a bit of animosity towards the JWST for soaking up NASA's budget in recent history, and JWST is trying to do some serious damage control because they're too far along and too big to fail. I saw John Mather (Nobel prize winner) give a talk recently that was basically "Look how far we are, and we're sorry for soaking up the budget."

More on the JWST overrun:

http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...

Canceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.

They're not proposing to cancel JWST.

It's just that its $6.5B price tag is overwhelming the whole astrophysics science effort. The original design was supposed to come in around 0.5B. See

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/71607/title/Star_...

Unfortunately, with JWST sitting out there as its own line-item in the NASA budget (as opposed to rolled in with the rest of Astrophysics), there's concern in the community that it will be a tempting target for a Congress anxious to cut anything that moves.

To be fair to the cutters in Congress, running a government that borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends is going to lead to a catastrophe.

Given the amount spent a launch failure would be pretty catastrophic for the JWST.

A launch failure is always catastrophic for the onboard instrument ;-)

Yes, this is true. But unfortunately, if LISA were allowed to be completed, LISA would be in the same situation soaking up all of the budget. LISA was expected to cost more than a billion dollars. As is true for any project of that size, there would be overages.

That's too bad. Gravity waves are one of the last unknowns in science that we also know how to study. (Most other unknowns we don't know how to study.)

I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?

Well, we've still got LIGO carefully looking for gravity waves. So far we haven't detected any. Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument.

There's no real hurry. Gravity waves will still be there in twenty years time if we feel like building LISA.

>Maybe it'd be a good idea to make one hundred percent sure that they actually exist (or else that they're definitely below the limits of LIGO) before building another expensive instrument.

Hmm. I'm not too familiar with that research area. Isn't the point of detectors like LIGO is that we don't know how big they are typically?

How do we make one hundred percent sure that gravity waves exist? What do you propose as a way that would convince ourselves that they do (or don't), and how do we estimate their size? Has the research community done this already?

experiment -> theory

rinse, repeat.

We have significant evidence to believe that gravitational waves do exist. By measuring the energy of Hulse-Taylor Binaries, we can show that the expected energy loss is there. This was the basis for the 1993 Nobel in physics.

I'd say more than significant evidence. They're predicted by General Relativity. If they don't exist, it would mean our understanding of the universe is seriously flawed. Not many theories of gravity can exist without gravity waves. I think the only one people take seriously is string theory. Though, string theory can exist with or without gravitational waves as it's one of the 'tunable' parameters.

It's not surprising that LIGO and VIRGO (the European analogue) haven't seen signals, given the expected sources. Both observatories are currently being upgraded to more sensitive versions which will begin operations ~2015. The Advanced versions should see sources.

However, LIGO/VIRGO aren't a replacement for LISA, as they look at gravity waves of different frequencies: the sources they'd expect to see are different.

"will still be there in twenty years time"

I'm impatient with space exploration and research obviously because the scales involved make it likely that many great achievements won't occur during my lifetime.

So that and your line remind me of:

"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."

To me (as an outsider) it looks as if the USA, en masse, doesn't believe in science anymore.

So many interesting research projects have been stopped lately, education is being crippled, and other avenues of education and research are being killed for religious reasons.

We owe so much to science in our daily lives, why are (common) people so reluctant to see that?

Or is the issue deeper. Do people hate the current, fast, technological era on some level and hope that stifling science will bring back older, more gentle times somehow?

I don't get it anymore, honestly.

People want immediate results. Investing in something that won't necessarily bring results for years or decades (or centuries in the case of space exploration) is rarely going to be popular.

At least here in Australia, a common comment on something like this is that we shouldn't spend money on this sort of thing when there are people starving and dying in the third world. Then the typical comments on, say an article about, the plight of the poor in the third world are critical of throwing money abroad when we have problems of our own at home. Then the typical comments on those problems (say, gap in life expectancy between that of the Aboriginal population and the average) find another excuse.

It frustrates me too. I'd love to see military budgets (as one example) plowed into aggressive space research and exploration (as well as third world problems) and uniting the planet.

Maybe the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox is just the tendency of the masses towards selfish, lazy, basic instinct-driven behaviour.

I wish Australia would spend some more money on space based projects, imagine if the US decided not to make any major investment into space, the planet as a whole would be getting nowhere on space based research projects.

Real sustainable expenditure on space projects can only be from the private sector. What governments do are generally boondoggles, which sometimes show pretty results.

The space shuttle, for instance, persisted not for the scientific or technical advances, but that it sent money to lots of political constituencies, which alone made it viable. The Hubble, while giving us spectacular images, was still horribly overpriced and NASA ended up paying for it twice over (once to send it up and twice to send the shuttle after it).

There wasn't a lot of opposition to the shuttle and the ISS from within NASA (for 'eating up the budget') because they were aware that budget only existed because of these high-value items. They might have liked to have the money for other things, perhaps, but political money doesn't work that way.

> I'd love to see military budgets (as one example) plowed into aggressive space research and exploration

Interesting example - because they are. The military is responsible for a lot more research than is immediately obvious. All you have to do is come up with some plausible military use (offense or defense), and you have a chance for funding.

I've seen projects with just the barest hit of possibly being militarily related get funded by the military.

I get the feeling the military knows they are overfunded, and they try to make up for the lack of funding in other places.

Or perhaps the military likes being over funded - so when they need it, they have it. But the rest of the time they can fund other things (and presumably cancel them in an emergency).

I'm talking about the 'fighting' part of the budget more than anything else. How much money and effort around the world is spent on destructive or defensive behavior rather than constructive or exploratory action?

Very little. Most of the military budget goes to research of one kind or another. The rest goes to pay salaries for all the military employees.

Are you just making that up? R&D is around 10% of the US military budget (and the US military budget is roughly 50% of the world budget).

If the construction, deployment, staffing, etc was pointed towards space research and exploration, we'd be able to push forward all sorts of projects.

It's only temporary. During boom times America funded a lot of science and other worthwhile things.

Right now there is a massive pullback, but when the economy recovers things will restart.

Take a longer view.

I gave up on believing this is temporary some time ago. We're stuck in a negative feedback loop.

The current crippling of science and education will only hurt the economy more. The economy is not like the weather something that just happens, and that will improve if we just "wait it out".

If anything, it would be helped by massive investments in science and space projects. It injects money in the constructive and innovative parts of society. The focus is too much on Wall Street which are basically toll takers.

How long ago?

Around when Bush was re-elected, I think. Although it accelerated in the last recession, this is not something new.

I don't think it's about "the economy" at all. A lot of research has been done during periods of much bleaker economy than there is now. Maybe it was the cold war (and earlier country-level competition) keeping people sharp.

So 6 years? That's not a long time as these things go.

In my question I was going to add that if it's less than 5 years you are not waiting long enough, and 10 is more realistic. (But decided to just leave it as a question.)

The last internet bubble was 10 years ago, and only now are we are starting to talk about about an upswing again. Economic cycles are measured in decades.

Look at this graph: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp?...

Notice the downturn right before you gave up? Even today we are still not higher than we were in 06. When you start to see the graph look like it does in 88 to 99 then things will turn around.

Maybe you're right, we'll see. A good climate for long-term science would be a sustained, growing economy, instead of the bipolar downswings/upswings that we're seeing the last decade.

Otherwise: There is a new upswing, all new projects, talk about going to Mars. Then a new crash, it's all cancelled again.. and so on.

I agree about a stable economy, it's hard to do long term science if available resources keep changing.

I found this graph: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real+Gross+Domestic+Pro... (Switch it to logscale.) The most obvious thing I notice about it is the totally flat result after 2000, then improvement (but not as fast as before), and now back where we started.

It appears to me that the dent is really small (especially in log scale). What's all the fuss really about? Seems just that politicians are making a big issue out of this and using it as a rationalization to make cuts that they already wanted to do anyway.

The problem with this idea is that when things are defunded, people leave the field and do other things. And they don't come back. It's not like science is a spigot you can just turn on when you want and then turn off again.

Look at the situation with nuclear energy, over the past two decades noone in their right mind (without tenure) would have gone into nuclear energy research. The result is that now, when people are once again talking about the need for new reactors and whatnot, the field is a pale shadow of what it was 30 years ago.

This is why long-term efforts like research can't be subject to the year-by-year fluctuations. "Disinvesting in the University of California is like eating our seed corn," is what the UC researchers said about the cuts to the UC budget, which applies equally well anywhere else.

> To me (as an outsider) it looks as if the USA, en masse, doesn't believe in science anymore.

I'm also an outsider, but I think this is really a money problem. The same thing happened in the USSR in the late '80s, suddenly there was no money for science anymore, it didn't matter that the Soviet scientists had helped produce great things.

Is that true, though? Is the USA really running out of money?

I simply don't believe it. The USA is still the biggest economy of the world, which makes this a resource allocation issue instead of a resource issue.

The USA is a huge economy, but debt can't just be swept under the rug forever -- interest payments are huge and getting bigger. Everyone is starting to realize we can't keep borrowing forever -- we're nearing the end of that way of living.

You're thinking about this too pessimistically. In this situation canceling LISA was unfortunately the appropriate response. 1) James Webb is currently costing 12 times the expected construction costs.

2)The astronomy community unfortunately can't pay for LISA, JWST, and all of the other smaller projects at the same time. The other solution, as opposed to keeping lisa, would be to cancel the small stuff. But, I think it is more appropriate to go after this large cost item first before the smaller items.

3)You're forgetting that science isn't just composed of these huge projects, there are still tons of smaller projects that have money poured into them. Radio astronomy still receives money and builds nice telescopes (I think the MWA is the most recent). And let's not forget that for Gravitational Waves, LIGO is still being upgraded to LIGO advanced and is expected to directly observe some gravitational waves. Since its arms are much shorter than LISA's, it studies different frequency waves. LISA is expected to study waves from merging black holes while LIGO studies those from merging neutron stars and supernovas.

Like others have said, this is just a low point in the fluctuations of a large budget. It's not the first time we've had to cancel expensive projects, and cool science can still be done.

A question to all the billionaires watching this thread:

Why would you give away money to charity while you could sponsor LISA?

Many (most?) ground-based telescopes are funded by private donors: e.g., the Keck Telescopes, the Allan Telescope Array, etc. Space missions, not so much. My guesses for why: the costs are significantly higher, and NASA isn't set up bureaucratically to work with private capital.

That said, private money for technology development efforts or data analysis could likely be well-used.

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