Comment by JDulin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JDulin | Hacker News Reader

The lack of government funding for a space exploration program makes me as sad and angry as anyone. However, I find Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan's argument against commercialized space-flight lame.

They say it would be less safe than a NASA program and that "To be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature..." Note though that some of their argument was directed at the cancellation of NASA's planned moon missions.

With that in mind, let's consider the shuttle program. In 135 missions, it had an abysmal safety record that claimed the lives of 14 astronauts, making it the deadliest spaceflight program in history. It's budget cost $196 billion dollars over the craft's lifetime instead of the estimated $43 billion (adjusted for inflation), while making around half of the promised flights. The shuttle was an important (for both good and bad) craft that helped accomplish great things, like build the ISS and Hubble space telescope. But nationalist pride shouldn't make us blind to the fact that NASA's last program probably set progress in spaceflight backwards, or at least slowed it, and never attempted to leave low-Earth orbit. Those astronauts may not like it, but Elon Musk has a clearer vision and more ambition than NASA (or the politicians) have had for a very long time.

"The lack of government funding for a space exploration program makes me as sad and angry as anyone."

Other points are good, but I'd just comment that as with all government spending, where is the justification for the spending. You can be a space loving person, who wants to see more people reach for the stars, but still think that the entire space program should be eliminated. I cannot in good faith justify (legally or morally) any government spending on space exploration, yet I am rooting for Space X and others 100%!

Considering NASA's recent performance record and what the motivation for spaceflight was in the 20th century (Russia), I understand your reasoning. But government sponsored space programs pursue valuable goals private organizations never can.

If you believe in the value of science and the importance of humanity becoming a multi-planetary species, I think you have to support government funded spaceflight. No private company would have had the incentive to make the Hubble or Spitzer telescopes a reality, and they have given us unparalleled insight into the nature of the universe. Because companies have to operate with budgets that demand profit or death within a small amount of time, they will never send probes to investigate other planets, the outer reaches of space, and invest in experiments that may not prove their value for decades. The exploration of space is going to be a long journey, and it requires organizations that can handle long-term goals.

It's also naive to think that SpaceX and other private space companies would even exist without NASA. Their largest contracts are with NASA right now because there is no profit in spaceflight outside of government contracts, space tourism, and satellite launches. And SpaceX engineers say themselves that they owe their success to the designs and knowledge of the early NASA programs which they copy (Very well designed spacecraft with lessons NASA has forgotten). Many designs on Falcon 9 are taken directly from the old Apollo missions, with improvements [1]. In most technical revolutions, large-scale accessibility comes only after a path is paved by a central power. Computers and the internet came to the masses after decades of investment by the military. The only reason jets became the new standard so quickly after WWII was because of development in the war. And when SpaceX goes to Mars, it will be thanks to the wealth of knowledge NASA exploration missions created over decades.

[1] http://www.gizmag.com/date-set-for-spacex-dragon-launch/208

>The lack of government funding for a space exploration program makes me as sad and angry as anyone

Lack of funding??? NASA gets 17 Billion a year and typically around 10 billion is for manned space flight - 2011 has 9 billion.

How much more does NASA need?

The United States Federal Budget is $3.8 trillion dollars. The Apollo program has been the best taxpayer expenditure dollar for dollar of any government program. Computers, fuel cells, CNC machines,... We are tragically underinvesting in space.

I refer you to this: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137277/neil-degrasse-...

  > NASA gets 17 Billion a year

To put things into perspective: that's less than the US military budget for air conditioning in Iraq.

No, it's not. That budget is zero, there are no longer US military forces in Iraq, they left at the end of 2011.

Why the downvotes? It's one thing to say that NASA should have more money than it does. However, the idea that $10 billion isn't enough is ridiculous. That's a crap-ton of money, and the ROI of NASA manned spaceflight in recent years has been abysmal.

They are doing mother fucking rocket science.

I say give them what they say they need, not what internet armchair economists say they need. None of the alternative uses for that money that the US government is finding are as important.

NASA manned spaceflight has been almost exclusively an unmitigated boondoggle from the time of the end of the Apollo program to today. The Shuttle program was a bill of goods that never lived up to any of the claims it was sold on. Not only was it one of the most dangerous orbital launch systems in history it was far and away the most expensive heavily used launch vehicle in history. It came very close to dooming all spaceflight, manned and unmanned, in the US on at least three separate occasions. But the one thing it did better than ever was funnel billions of dollars a year to high paying aerospace jobs in key congressional districts.

And now we have the so-called Space Launch System. Another boondoggle jobs program that is so ridiculous that fundamentals of its design have been specified by the Senate itself. The Planetary Society, Space Access Society, and the Space Frontier Foundation have all called for the SLS to be cancelled. It's a poorly designed rocket, a huge waste of money, and overall a project that is not likely to succeed.

I love space exploration. I love rocket engineers. But I cannot abide either being abused to serve as pawns in congressional pork-barrel spending games.

This is not a question about what NASA manned spaceflight "needs", it's a question about where the Senate wants to funnel money.

NASA manned spaceflight has spent a quarter of a trillion dollars over the last 4 decades.

A quarter of a trillion dollars.

That is the cost of the Shuttle legacy and the ISS. Does anyone think that we, the American taxpayers, actually got a pretty good return on that money? Before you answer keep in mind that we could have easily paid for 150+ Saturn V rockets as well as the appropriate payloads and spacecraft for them for less money.

Meanwhile, companies like SpaceX have managed to build entire orbital launchers from scratch for less than the cost of a single Shuttle flight.

None of the alternative uses for that money are as important? How about using that $10 billion a year to buy commercial flights on Boeing, LockMart, or SpaceX rockets? Right now only a fraction of NASA's funding is actually serving the purpose of advancing the state of the art or improving access to space.

There is an argument about whether the amount of money governments spend on various activities could be better spent on spaceflight.

This is not that argument and has no bearing here. This is an argument about whether NASA is a good conduit for spending money on manned spaceflight activities. And there is overwhelming evidence that despite a handful of successes it has not been. Over time it has gotten less efficient, less safety conscious, and less capable. There is every indication that with Apollo era budgets in place the NASA of today would not be able to get back to the Moon in 10 years or even 20 years.

The unmanned spaceflight portion of NASA still does some pretty good work, but the manned spaceflight portion has become a bureaucratic infused pork-barrel shell of its former glory. There are lots of reasons for that, a lot of them due to consistent political meddling from without, but it's still the truth.

You'll have no argument from me that the agency could be better managed, and that politicians need to stay the hell away from it.

And indeed, other arms of the space industry need much more funding. They will ultimately do all the common varieties of manned spaceflight better, that is inevitable.

The question is, will problems be solved by reducing NASA's budget? I think that is incredibly fucking unlikely. Instead as far as I am concerned we should be shoveling money at all of them like coal into a locomotive. Don't reduce NASAs budget so you can give more to Boeing and SpaceX.. give more to Boeing and SpaceX in spite of NASA's budget.

One half of a penny of every dollar you pay in (federal) taxes goes to science^. That is appalling. For as shitty and expensive as those shuttles were though, that money got us more return than pretty much the rest of that dollar.

If you look at how we budget for science and think "NASA is getting too much" instead of "Science is not getting enough", then you are missing the bigger picture.

^(ie, NASA. the money spent on the NSF isn't even worth bothering to include...)

Or we could take all that money and dump it directly into R&D.

If the government shit canned NASA tomorrow, and took that money and pumped it into the project Google is doing on self-driving cars wouldn't the world be a better place? Space is great, but how many lives could be saved by implementing self-driving cars nationwide?

Or took all that money and pumped it into computer science R&D. Or biotech R&D. Or nanotech R&D.

The argument for NASA often boils down to an argument for R&D, and there are a lot of more efficient ways to fund R&D than spending a bunch of it on non-R&D type stuff.

Why is everyone so insistent on cannibalizing science to fund science? NASA's budget should be pretty damn near the end of the list of programs to take funding from, 1) because all the others are even worse than it is, and 2) because it gets such a fucking minuscule amount of funding compared to the other things.

Furthermore, shitcanning all the non-manned stuff NASA does is a fucking terrible idea. Science without study of the universe is crazy.

Because it's a moronic statement. The US military budget is 0.8 trillion dollars a year. As programmers we should know that no other budget items need be considered until this one is brought down drastically.

When people say "NASA should get more", they generally mean a relative "more" to... Well, just about everything. "If we're going to give money to Welfare..." "Is we're going to give money to fight in Iraq..." etc. I agree with you in that they could do more with what they get, but I certainly have more interest in it than many other things we fund. I think that's the justification of people wanting "more".

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