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Comment by gammarator | Hacker News Reader

I prefer the NASA vision statement from nasa.gov/about:

"NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery."

to Casey's "defend US interests on the civilian side of space."

SLS is an abject failure, indeed, but one whose faults are ultimately Congress's. I see no reason for human space flight to continue to "eat first" given that record of expensive failure. In contrast, astrophysics and planetary science remain--at least for now--world-leading.

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I agree that SLS sucks because of congressional meddling to award contracts in strategic districts. But you can't have something like NASA without that. Any large government agency is doomed to have to spread work around. Only a private company run by a fearsome CEO is able to say No, we're going to go with the best solution instead of the politically favored one.

All the contractors and pork districts could still be engaged in doing something more useful.

The SLS was very effective as a subsidy to large aerospace and defense contracting firms.

That's not sarcasm. We do a lot of things that are strictly wastes of money, in order to ensure that we have more than we need of something. It's why we subsidize agriculture: we don't want "just in time" food production. We want too much of it, even if it means wasting some of it.

I don't know if we want to continue to subsidize Boeing, but on the other hand, I think America would feel weird if we didn't have a domestic airline manufacturer. Sure, we could buy them elsewhere, but do we want to?

(Answer: not if it's from the company that keeps screwing it up. But we can't just conjure a new one from scratch, one that doesn't mess up.)

It's legalized graft, not a subsidy. The tens of billions flowing into SLS do not bolster productive capability in the civilian or military aviation sector, they tie up engineers in a nonsensical, dead-end project, and totally mess up incentives on top of that.

The key wording is the change from innovate to defend. Across the board, government policy is now about returning to a previous, largely imagined, state of affairs. If NASA proposed an Apollo 2.0, half the country and all of government would rally behind recreating the old program so long as it used the old blueprints. The longstanding fear of progress common amongst the old/rich is now manifest. NASA must therefore adapt. Words like "innovation" and "humanity" need to be replaced with "defend the status quo" and "repeat our past successes".

I'm not disagreeing, but just wanted to point out

> Words like "innovation"

I believe that the rhetoric, actions and results of "tech bro" style companies have managed to demonstrate to people that "innovation" is a thing to be feared, not a thing that improves lives. Widespread "fear of progress" is actually a relatively recent thing, and didn't come out of nowhere. It came from learned experience.

It's a terrible result, but one that tech companies largely don't seem too bothered by.

> SLS is an abject failure, indeed, but one whose faults are ultimately Congress's.

No NASA administrator could bring themselves to tell Congress that?

that a very vague vision; a bunch of words with no actual goals.

It used to be "land on the moon" - they've done that. A space telescope - they've done that many times. What is their goal now because I don't know and most Americans don't know but NASA certainly want us to pay millions for their toys. Set a goal, ask for funding. At this point, NASA shouldn't even be ran but the government. Run a patreon and have citizens pony up the money. Those who support NASA can fund NASA.

You've probably heard it before, but research and progress go hand in hand, and science is not synonymous with unpractical. For example, data from NASA missions that track water over the globe are used by climate scientists, yes, but also farmers, local water management agencies, and the military. These projects that account for less than half a penny of each dollar spent by the US govt. have a wide range of audiences and uses.

> A space telescope - they've done that many times.

This is like saying, "We've already built a few computers. What's the point of building any more of them?"

Every new space telescope does something that no previous space telescope has been able to do.

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