Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
- Undergrad education breaks even
- Research operates at a loss
- Master's and professional programs makes a modest profit because most students pay full tuition.
- Interest income off the endowment barely covers operating expenses
- The remaining balance comes from donations.
YMMV, but at the end of the day, what keeps many universities afloat is providing good experiences to students in their formative years so that when they get older and make money, they just give a portion of it back to their alma mater due to good vibes and nostalgia. That's the business model, not bilking grad students.
2. NSF's operating model is based on low-paid graduate students and postdocs.
3. Universities (at least until recently?) took a significant cut (for example 50%) off the top of NSF (and other) grants as overhead, but their overhead rate is significantly lower than typical government contractors in industry.
4. If you are a grad student and ever want to become (more) depressed (for both present and future prospects), read an NSF (or similar) grant for the project you are doing all the work for, and see how the funds are allocated.
5. Universities also underpay their professional athletes in "money" sports such as football and basketball.
6. Administration growth has outpaced enrollment growth (and faculty expansion etc.) for decades. So undergraduate education may "break even", but it's still paying an army of non-teaching administrators.[1] (Universities defend themselves by saying that regulatory compliance is more expensive now, etc.)
[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double...
2. NSF operating model is based on maximizing the number of supported graduate students, not maximizing support per student. As someone who was a low-paid graduate student, I have sympathy for the perspective they are low-paid. But I also support graduate students now and I understand how expensive it really is.
3. Yes, but at least at my university, the overhead they get from grant funding isn't enough to actually cover research overhead. So research operates at a loss despite the negotiated overhead rate. Research is very expensive.
4. In my experience, graduate students are often involved in writing grant proposals. They also tend to lack the depth of experience necessary to really interpret budgets.
5. Sure, but I didn't really talk about sports programs in relation to academic funding, because sports usually funds itself and proceeds don't go over to pay for academics.
6. Sure, but you say "non-teaching administrators" as if they don't serve the academic mission. For example, in my department we have a non-teaching administrator who helps with advising. In our college, we have an office of tutoring which is very popular with students, and includes many non-teaching administrators. Access to resources like these lead to better student outcomes, but they do cost money.
It was not something one could live on long-term (no chance to save money whatsoever, could never buy a home or decent car, etc). But, I wasn't starving and I wasn't taking on debt.
At the same time, it is a sacrifice. Most of my friends the same age were making "real" money, buying homes, going on nice vacations, saving for retirement, etc. So, I get extra irritated and defensive when I hear people who have no idea what they're talking about repeat conspiracy theories about science and academia. If I wanted to be a rich scam artist, I'm pretty sure there were better options than a science PhD...
Tuition coverage for grad students is a way for universities to take money from grants and pay it to themselves. (And for undergrads they often limit the amount that external scholarships can reduce the expected student and parental contribution, in order to pocket as much money as possible.)
It's still important to realize that grad students are cheap labor for research (e.g. from NSF's perspective if they are the funding agency) and teaching purposes (e.g. from the university's perspective.)
Even though I've seen military bases in the middle of nowhere, I've certainly seen some bases and defense contractors (Raytheon, Lockheed, etc) in non-rural areas.
I'm cynically, and pessimistically, kind of assuming that it's really just about what's being funded in this case. Military spending is pretty much always supported by both politicians and the public, whereas there is a VERY strong anti-science and anti-academia wave in our culture at the moment (even more so than I always used to think there was...).
Should be noted that many of NASA's programs are situated in predominantly conservative areas of the country. Brings lots of jobs and resources to the local economies.
I think at least some of them are so fearful of being primaried that they do whatever they're told. For them, it is about bravery, or the lack thereof.
With level of debt and borrowing, cannot afford more spending
Pushing the cost burden on subsequent generations is a cowardly way to deal with our financial problems. When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars).
The #4 cost currently is paying off interest (not principle) on old debt.
I agree we are spending too much now, but the solution should not be to stop all spending.
The problem is deeper than just a deficit.
If the economy is in the shitter you are perfectly entitled to run a deficit.
Doing good? Pay down debts. Need a boost? Invest and incur debt. Where is the flaw?
Yeah, and the USSR would have won.
>When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars).
Well, guess who won the Cold War? Who pushed the USSR to bankrupt itself?
It would be like saying "no private company should ever raise capital".
If one wants to make a nuanced argument about NASA or fiscal responsibility despite the current political environment, it is perfectly possible to do so! But you need to work much harder to tease out the nuance and distance yourself from the fascists, lest your effort of espousing your lofty ideals just end up as fuel supporting them. Fascists don't respect ideals beyond power - the open hypocrisy is the point.
The one who lacks nuance is not the one who thinks NASA could stand to shave a couple billions but the one who's making everything a partisan fight.
And no, the comment I responded to had absolutely no specific criticism about what from NASA should be "shaved". Notice how I didn't respond to the one about SLS?
Did you call for Biden's impeachment when he coordinated with social media companies to violate American 1A rights?
Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?
Unless you too add these boiler plates on your messages you are full of it.
Yes, unequivocally.
> Did you call for his impeachment then or now?
I didn't call for his impeachment because it didn't seem like a political possibility to effect change. I did not vote for him in the first place, and there did not appear to be a differing alternative in the cards.
> Did you call for Biden's impeachment when he coordinated with social media companies to violate American 1A rights?
My view is I do not see what is significant about "Biden" or the government here, apart from people trying to tenuously connect the palpable infringement upon their freedom to the 1st amendment as written. The larger topic, advocating for the right of free speech with the rise of corporate government is one of my pet issues. But yet again, there has been no political option on the table to actually change anything about this.
> Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?
Honestly, it seemed like Biden was doing the best he could given the Israel lobby. But I'll admit to not really being invested in that situation any longer.
... but what I most certainly did not do is post on any of these topics cheerleading for power. Especially with paltry appeals to values that when scrutinized, are being hypocritically used by power as justifications. It's not a matter of "boilerplate", it's a matter of expressing enough nuance to make it so that your opinion isn't simply contributing to the chorus cheerleading for power. There's a time and a place to call for good-faith reform of American institutions, but it's decidedly not when fascists are at the helm.
>> Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?
> Honestly, it seemed like Biden was doing the best he could given the Israel lobby. But I'll admit to not really being invested in that situation any longer.
I responded to your question in the context of being about Biden's policies, in line with the thrust of your other questions.
Regarding what was and is going on in Gaza (regardless which US politicians and policies may be enabling it) ? Yes, I certainly condemn that! It's fucking genocide.
As I said, I'm not super invested in the situation any more, growing older and not seeing any real angle to personally affect it. I had a few weeks after Oct 7 of writing off the situation as FAFO (but still realizing that this was unfair to the Palestinians who did not support that attack), but Israel burnt through that goodwill quick. I'm old enough to have become more conservative such that if Israel had occupied Gaza and implemented martial law with the (stated and apparent) goal of keeping the peace until a civil non-Hamas government could be sustained, I just might have accepted that. But they didn't. What they are actually doing is straight up take-no-responsibility genocide.
It’s a policy choice that these returns are not taxed at comparable rates to income. The trend of nation-wide capital returns vs income is telling.
Instead of looking at where the tax revenues can come from, which I don't necessarily disagree consider what proportion of the nations economic activity is government spending.
I consider govt spending/GDP a much better indicator of economic health. In fact, tertiary_sector/GDP is better still.
The US government has too much presence in the economy and can't even provide health care and free tuition.
Have you considered who the narrative of wasteful spending benefits? Even our narratives of tax increases never discuss tax increases on what is now the bulk of personal monetary gain.
> After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes
It's hard to say the federal government has been cost cutting for 50 years when the budgets have been growing at exponential rates.
Is the proposal to cut large contracts or replace them with civil service? How do you reclaim these expenditures? My anecdotal observation is that many of these contracts are fundamentally difficult to do correctly. For example, Aircraft Carrier manufacturing has both a monopoly, and a monopsomy. There is only one seller and one buyer. That seller is increasingly having execution challenges due to the overall decline in US ship building but the only real solution would be to either re-shore commercial ship building in the United States, nationalize the seller and see if the government can run it better, or stop buying aircraft carriers.
Unfortunately, a 100% cut to all government defense and discretionary expenditures would only save 1.8 Trillion or roughly ~23% of the Federal budget. Obviously, this would yield problems. The only means available to truly cut the Federal budget at the rate of trillions per year would be a change of entitlement benefits.
It would be expected that the government budget grows as our population ages with current benefit programs. The same programs that the beneficiaries "paid into" for decades.
Human nature, I guess
"It’s almost taken as a tautology that the government is wasteful. After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes," These cuts are not reflected in government spending vs GDP is mostly flat for the last 40 years
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Note that in the 1970s the US was paying for moonshots and Vietnam (both filthy expensive)
"I tend to find it fanciful that individuals paid 1/4 of their private sector compensation to work on core civil infrastructure, national research priorities, and policy are somehow a bad deal for the American taxpayer at large. "
Ya, that's not a thing. I worked in government, I still work on government projects and no one outside the NSA is getting paid a 1/4 of their private sector compensation. Maybe a 20% hit which they chose to accept since, in my experience, most start as contractors and move to become feds for the job sec + benefits.
Frankly, Id say half of the government employees I worked with are unemployable. And they most of them had at least a STEM masters.
"If anything, I’d imagine that the government could incentivize greater productivity by normalizing the pay scales. At a minimum, maintaining a public capability can often neutralize monopolistic pricing practices."
I don't necessarily disagree.
"Have you considered who the narrative of wasteful spending benefits? Even our narratives of tax increases never discuss tax increases on what is now the bulk of personal monetary gain."
Ive considered it a lot in fact. One of the main beneficiaries appears to be the DC area which was the only region of the country not to have a recession in 2008 and has been outpacing most of the country in growth for thirty years.
The main beneficiaries, thus, are the laptop-class (and their billionaire masters) which is a new way of saying mandarins.
with interests payment reaching 1.2trln? And 5trln more to the debt pile? No
It doesn't matter how much debt you have if taking on the debt raises your revenue by more than serving the interest payments.
Imagine telling a corporation they can't borrow money at 3% to grow 15% because "debt is bad." Or telling someone who needs a car to get to work that they should go without a car (and thus not become employed) rather than taking on a car payment because "debt is bad."
And on this front, the US has been doing great (but is currently shooting itself in the foot under the new administration)
* Not cut taxes on the very wealthy by $4,000,000,000,000 over ten years
* Not give $500,000,000,000 to military and police expansion in the immediate future
* Not have one person dictating global trade policy with the US that impacts our relationships and competitiveness for the next 30 years
The president only has the power (allegedly) to do the tariffs moves he is doing based on a 1970s emergency powers act.
Anyway, that was just one example of "ways to be fiscally responsible that don't involve cutting science research"
BBB was proposed by freshly elected president to a freshly elected Congress, and it was passed and signed. I don't like it much, but people (yes, millions of americans) had spoken
I'm not arguing anything about its popularity, I'm arguing its wisdom. My point is that there are other ways to pretend to be fiscally responsible than to cut NASA funding.
Their wealth grow unchecked depressing yours.
but instead we're giving a massive tax break to rich people and increasing the military budget by $150B
And mind you it's not some amazing technological marvel that's driving these ridiculous costs. It's essentially a really expensive refactoring of the Space Shuttle program to the point that it will be using the literally exact same rs-25 engines.
And you already hit exactly on why they're not being cancelled - there's going to be a very short degree of separation between Congressmen and the people charging absurd costs for simple tech that's being used in this project. To me, this is perhaps the purest embodiment (and reason) for governmental dysfunction, at all levels. It's simple pork and corruption.
Also, not to say it isn't a time to start acting, if we are another decade out still adding funding to SLS with the current balance sheet, we have major issues.
But $30B over 10Y isn't that crazy when we spend ~$900B a year (with much more in 2026) on defense.
That's for a system that is aiming for an initial payload of 95k kg (to LEO). By contrast the Falcon Heavy costs $0.097 billion per launch and can send 57k kg to orbit. So in other words, 1 SLS launch will costs more than 25 Falcon Heavy launches, with a payload capacity that's 67% greater.
I don't believe that likely, but it does seem like something similar is a good reason to keep options open.
The two main stated aims of fostering competition are contingencies for any single provider and hopes that funding competition lowers cost in the long term (which is separate from preventing cost from going up). I used to be much more supportive of this policy... but nowadays I find myself on the fence. It's hard for me to believe however many billions of dollars we funnel into SLS per launch will ever result in cheap alternatives being developed. It may even have the opposite effect of "SLS got funded through all of its overruns on this policy, we should have no problems doing it again". On the contingency side it's a bit harder to navigate... but it's starting to feel like programs like SLS don't produce realistic alternatives anyways so how much of a contingency is it really providing to fund things like that.
Money is powerful, but never under-estimate the power of having the coercive apparatus of state at someone's hand.
Both from the Republican base, to whom government is anathema and private industry the best.
And to corporate interests supporting the Republican Party.
Want to see where the real power is? Follow the political money.
The Republican base doesn’t actually care about the things they claim to.
What’s being said now is more important than what someone historically said, as long as the current messaging is consistent. (And opponents have been eliminated)
From time to time, it is very well known that a group of vultures organizes themselves to capture the State and royally fuck another vulture using the State's power and legitimacy.
Yeah, money have a lot of power, but a lot of money's power is contingent on the existence of the repressive apparatus of State. Don't discount the power of a charismatic populist leader (And I am not talking about Trump) or a political genius.
People thought that the oligarchs in Russia would overthrow Putin as soon as they felt the bite of sanctions on their backs. The only thing that got thrown were the oligarchs who didn't with the program, and didn't dance to the tune Mr. Putin was playing. And when I say thrown, I meant it literally, as in defenestrated from a high rise window.
There is absolutely no company that is actually "too big to fail".
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/spacex-to-invest-2-billion-into-elo...
If there was a genuine possibility of SLS being competitive, that's one thing. It's another when it's worse in basically every way.
In view of the launch economics, this argument still doesn’t make sense of SLS.
How do you know that they can feasibly be launched separately? Do you think NASA would have asked for a launch vehicle the size of SLS if could have done a manned lunar mission with something less then half its size?
Saturn V was less powerful than SLS - but it could send an entire mission in a single launch. Capsule, lander and all.
A lot of what NASA has been doing with SLS is just trying to... rationalize its existence. This is what gave us NRHO, Gateway and others.
Reportedly, some of the people at NASA just believe that having an inefficient, wasteful and corrupt space program is better than not having it.
That's just not true. Saturn V had a paylod of 43,500kg to TLI. Only the largest configuration of SLS(Block 2) exceeds that with 46000kg. A Falcon Heavy is far below that.
My point stands though: no Artemis mission has plans to launch a full Apollo style capsule + lander stack. Artemis HLS, SpaceX and Blue Origin versions both, flies entirely on its own. So what's required of both SLS and any would-be SLS replacement is a far less demanding mission than what Saturn V has done in the past.
Which calls into question: what SLS is even for? Does it add value to the mission, or is the mission subtracted from to justify adding SLS to it?
I think the current administration puts it at $4B, but those estimates seem to include current and future development costs.
IMO, there are plenty of subsystems of SLS that weren't a waste to develop, and it surely fostered a generation of talented individuals, bolstered other companies, etc.
I doubt the Artemis program (as planned) survives a full four years of this administration anyway. The majority of "good work" for SLS seems to be completed, and hopefully, the talent, knowledge, resources, and so on will (has?) spread elsewhere.
The idea we need to compete against ourselves is something that came straight from Boeing after they lost their bid for commercial crew, leading to them to use their connections to Congress to force NASA to make an unprecedented decision to give bids to 2 different companies. SpaceX succeeded at commercial crew putting astronauts on the ISS in 2020. Boeing, by contrast, was allowed to skip parts of the testing phase (for Commercial Crew), failed others, and was still greenlit because of corruption. And that's precisely how you ended up with the two astronauts put on their first human launch stranded on the ISS for months, only to end up getting rescued by SpaceX.
It's a nonsensical argument - we didn't create two Apollo programs, because there's no justification. And in any case, Boeing is clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a "horse" for this race. Instead we get a 3-legged mule sold at 5-time Kentucky Derby winner thoroughbred prices.
You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.
Everything NASA does is trying to shoehorn in Boeing one way or another because they have tremendous political influence, but there's really no reason for them to be involved at all from a technical point of view. And in fact if they weren't, then we indeed probably would have long since already put boots on the Moon again. But because they are involved, I suspect an appropriate timeline for success is: never, with a whole lot of money spent getting there.
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/nasa-chief-says-a-fa...
But Isaacman? Well he's already a billionaire, and highly ideological towards progress in space. Yeah 0 chance he gets appointed.
That craft was not even remotely fit for humans and there was far too high a chance that their 'test pilots' lost their lives in something that never should have been allowed to have a human in it to start with. And that all happened under Bridenstine.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-...
It does if you actually look into at the facts instead of just taking a PR listicle at face value.
For instance, the very first thing mentioned on that list is Alzheimer's. Go ahead and look into what the ISS actually did with regards to Alzheimer's, and you see a lot of "this has the potential to teach us more about the disease," without any evidence that anything was ever learned. There's a reason why you don't hear researcher's working on these diseases go "well, we expect a huge breakthrough once this ISS experiment is done!"
This is the problem every time this gets discussed. People just run a Gish Gallop of copying and pasting a big list of vague claims from the NASA PR department, without bothering to look at the actual claims to see if they're accurate. When you do, they're invariably far less than they're made out to be.
It used to be that in the 1960s we were spending about 4.4% of the total federal budget on the space program.
Since the 1970s, it's gone down to around 0.71%.
Since the 2010s, it's gone down even further to 0.3% - 0.4%.
We've also not pushed much for talent in the federal government by way of salary and perks.
Despite these challenges, there are a whole host of technologies, medical treatments, navigational advancements, etc. we would not have without simply being in space. Even accounting for inflation adjusted dollars, the amount total spent in the history of NASA, across all programs, is absolutely miniscule to the technological and economic advancements that have come from it.
There are around 1,600 published papers with data from the ISS, and those have been collectively cited over 14,000 times by other papers.
That is a significant impact and can only be done by having people there.
What are these? If you say "integrated circuits" I'll point out that's largely a lie, unless by "space program" you mean "Minuteman II ICBMs".
"Comes from NASA" ends up meaning "NASA was tagentially involved early on". And really, how could it ever be concluded NASA was essential? You'd need to argue the counterfactual that a technology would not have been developed otherwise, and how can one do that?
There are many arguments that the space shuttle program's side effects helped win the cold war, foster modern communications, inspire generations to study science, ...
Those are good things, without stating its known direct accomplishments.
In 2025 dollars, the cost for the Human Brain Project is just under $2 billion. In 2025 dollars, the Space Shuttle total cost is $311 billion. NASA spends about $3 billion every year on the ISS - more than the entire Human Brain Project.
The problem is that people are able to look at the Human Brain Project, and say that despite important research coming out of it, it might not have been a good idea (again, this gets debated). But people act as if some research coming out of NASA's endeavors entirely justifies them. When people refuse to look at things critically, resources almost invariably end up misallocated.
Those are definitely not money wasted - for waste look at things in ballpark of trillions like meaningless wars for made up reasons that destabilized whole parts of world and killed millions of civilians, look at various ways ultra rich and their companies avoid paying even bare minimum taxes and contributing back to societies form which they siphoned those vast amounts of cash.
These are peanuts which keep giving back to whole mankind and our future, instead of destroying it.
Because resources are limited? Any money going to, say, SLS is money that can't go to another project. This would be true even if NASA's budget were 10x bigger.
I'm not sure what it is about NASA that leads people to pretending that we have infinite budgets. In just about any other area, we can have a discussion about whether or not this is a good allocation of resources (for instance, the Human Brain Project I mentioned before). But when NASA comes up, this goes out the window and we're supposed to believe projects like the SLS are tantamount to being free, and that they aren't diverting resources from other potential NASA projects.
But if we look the future, the possibilities are even more enticing. Richard Nixon effectively cancelled human space flight after a series of Moon landings. Had he not, we could very well have a civilization on Mars today, industry in space, and who knows what else. I mean there's no realistic argument for why these things should be impossible given what we know today - they're certainly far less to strive for than putting a man on the Moon when starting from effectively nothing.
And these achievements are no longer just flag poling, but stand to genuinely revolutionize humanity - to say nothing how inspiring such achievements will be. Perhaps we might live in a world where our grandchildren will again want to be scientists and astronauts, instead of YouTubers.
Because the Americans have such an amazing propaganda department and had to rub it in to the Soviets even after flunking every other “space race”.
As for canceling the space programs, if it wasn’t Nixon, it would’ve been done by any of the politicians following Hayek/Friedman economic policies - basically everyone after Nixon.
It's similar to how we still marvel at how people managed to build the pyramids. There, at least, there can be no doubt that they truly exist - but people have been debating, and aweing, at them for literally thousands of years. The Greeks, no amateurs to construction themselves, were debating how they such a thing could have been constructed all the way back in the 5th century BC!
These great achievements are what define humanity. In the blink of an eye on the scale of time, most of every company, person, and thing you know of today will be gone and completely forgotten. The very few things that will stay with us are these grand achievements that define not only an era of humanity, but humanity itself.
Well, that's an interesting take. Fantasial, but interesting.
Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and viewed the Moon as little more than a step on the way to his vision of colonizing Mars, for which he'd already been working on technical plans with the planned first landings to be in the early 1980s. In fact this is precisely where the Space Shuttle, and to a lesser degree the ISS, came from. They were meant to be tools, with the ISS a very small scale version of the supporting stations planned to come with the Space Shuttle working as a beast of burden during their construction.
He retired from NASA once it became clear the politicians were no longer interested in space after winning the space race. As an amusing anecdote, well before he was the head of Apollo, he also wrote a sci-fi book, "Project Mars: A Technical Tale." In it there was an advanced civilization living on Mars headed by a group of ten individuals who were, themselves, headed by "The Elon."
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Those who lack the ability to think big will, unsurprisingly, never have anything big. Because there's no technological point where colonizing another planet, much like landing on the Moon, will ever be easy or simple. Because you're doing something that's never been done before which means there are a basically infinite number of things that might go wrong, and you simply cannot account for all of them. And this always has and always will be the same story. Technology doesn't simply come to us - we make it happen, and without pushing forward we will stagnate.
It's one of the reasons I support manned spaceflight - sending robots is easy but limited, sending people allows for way more flexibility but needs a lot more knowledge and engineering. We'll never develop that knowledge and engineering without actually sending people into space.
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way. It isn't the event itself, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is the same reason that more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. It's something you simply don't prepare for. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
If there's any argument you found particularly compelling from the book, please do share. I have a copy if you simply want to reference the page number or whatever.
Your scenario would indeed be a "backup" for the species, but only in the very, very long term. It only works if we have a self-sustaining off-planet presence large enough to survive a complete separation from Earth. Most of the book goes into detail about what we still need to develop even to have a permanent presence in space (as in, you don't rotate people out every few months), much less a self-sustaining one.
We haven't done large-scale agriculture in space. We haven't developed methods of processing extra-terrestrial resources. We haven't seen what different gravity conditions does to children or pregnant women. We don't have solutions for the conditions people develop in zero-g, and we don't know if 1/3g or 1/6g causes those same conditions. We can't completely recycle our waste into food, water, and air without a steady supply of consumables from Earth. We don't know how to effectively deal with lunar regolith and we haven't done the engineering to keep the poisons in Martian soil out of the habitat. We haven't even developed the habitat!
The book speaks to me because I work for an engineering company and I know how much time and money it takes for even simple projects when there are lives on the line. The book doesn't say we can't colonize space, only that we have a lot of work ahead of us before we can successfully pull it off.
I think an important thing to consider is that in contemporary times most institutions are 100% risk averse outside of war. With Mars that will always be an impossible initial threshold. Because not only are there known unknowns, but also a practically infinite number of unknown unknowns. When we landed on the Moon internal estimates at NASA gave us about a 50% chance of success, which is why the public obituary for the astronauts was written before they'd even left Earth. Early on in the Apollo program NASA even ended up scrapping mathematical risk modeling because the numbers were always coming back so grim that they found it impossible to move forward with them.
Of course that doesn't been they were just suicidally YOLOing it. There was (and will be) extensive planning and preparation, but you have to strike a balance between achieving things and working to create an acceptable perceived risk factor. So for a practical example - the long-term effects of low g, as opposed to 0 g, can be relatively safely ignored. There's every reason to think that low g will be much closer to 'normal' gravity than 0g in terms of effects, and predictable bone/muscle deterioration can be mitigated with exercise or even weight suits much more easily than on the ISS.
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An even more general issue is that the best place to test things with relation to Mars is Mars itself, because Mars is far closer to the Earth in just about every way than it is to the Moon, let alone the ISS. So we have things like the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, or AMADEE-18 that was carried out in Oman. But at the end of the day it's Earth - we know the conclusion of these simulations, and there's limitations on what we can simulate.
And that's just one single issue out of thousands that needs to be resolved before we can start having people live off-Earth. Most of it is stuff we just don't know how to do. You're trying to build a rail network with iron-age know-how. We can't even get to the moon right now, much less build a Mars outpost.
And while it's true that testing stuff on Mars would be ideal, Mars is too far away. You can't respond to emergencies. You can't quickly iterate designs for systems. You can't easily commercialize tourism. If we build bases on the moon first, we can be much better prepared to take that larger step to Mars. Sure, send a couple Apollo-style "plant a flag, take pictures, hit a golf ball, go home" missions using professional astronauts, then maybe a few missions where you have a lab on the ground and you stay for a month. But if you're sending people to stay, you need to be very sure they aren't going to die on you. Dead astronauts are heroes. Dead colonists are a tragedy, and an excuse that will be used to justify never going there again. If we can keep a permanent settlement alive on the moon, Mars will be that much easier.
Either way, there's still a lot that needs figured out first. The book outlines just a small fraction of what needs to be done. A good chunk of that will happen here on Earth. Some will happen in orbit. Some will happen on the moon. And eventually, some will happen on Mars. And it'll be fucking cool! Seriously, space stuff is fun to geek out on. Lots of interesting problems to solve. If it was easy, it'd be boring.
And the Moon is a complete hell hole that shares essentially nothing in common with Mars. You're looking at 2 week long day/night cycles that oscillate between absurd extremes of temperature of something like -300f at night to +200f during the day. And there's also no atmosphere which is why the Moon's surface looks like a teen with chronic acne. Even the smallest pebble will pound into the surface and often at quite a high level of energy. Similarly this is a big part of the reason that Moon dust is some seriously nasty stuff. Mars has a similar issue, but orders of magnitude less severe owing to the nature of where its dust came from, which is more similar to terrestrial dust sans composition.
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As for the specific issue you mentioned - bone/muscle loss is not some unsolved mystery as the book implies. Your bones/muscles strengthen in accordance to the stresses they're under. In space there are 0 stresses so they deteriorate. The normal solution to this is weights, but in 0g that obviously doesn't work so astronauts are left doing largely ineffective and awkward elastic based exercises, which they have to spend 2+ hours a day doing. None of these are issues in low g where weights do work, and the bone/muscle loss will already be far less. These sort of arguments are like saying "Ok, we know this ship floats in 20 ft deep water, but how do we know it'll float in 50 ft deep?" Technically you don't, and you won't until you try it in 50ft of water, but ultimately there's no reason to think it won't.
Sending a huge amount of your budget to send people into space because "people need to be inspired" leans a lot closer to YouTuber than science. You're sacrificing the scientific budget for the sake of giving people a spectacle. This comes at the cost of actual technological advancements. Look at the development costs for Falcon and Falcon Heavy, for example, or Starship, and then look at what NASA's spent on the Space Shuttle, SLS, ISS, etc.
The actual science, as I wrote in another reply, ends up being far less important than how NASA frames it (and often doesn't end up being used at all). And even in those cases, it's not at all clear that humans in space are actually needed to get the job done.
Falcon Heavy: Claimed payload to LEO (though it has never done anything like this): 63 tonnes.
SLS: 95t, 105t or 130t depending on version.
These are quite different capabilities.
This is why the congressional porkmeisters have been so adamant about NASA not developing in-space propellant storage and transfer.
Getting mass to orbit is one thing. The real game is "get masses into orbit and back to Earth", with the "mass" in question being either some sort of explosive, troops, ammunition or tanks.
When you don't need to have troops and vehicles distributed across the globe (which is very expensive to maintain) but can just go and ship them off with heavy rockets, the math on warfare shifts drastically.
As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1].
> And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.
Not for SLS... but for SpaceX with Starship. The USSF plans a demo flight for 2026 [2]. And militarily, this capacity is definitely worth it. 100 tons of cargo, delivered to any place in the world that has a suitable landing facility in one hour of flight time. There's absolutely nothing that can come close to this kind of logistic capability, and there is no competitor in sight. It would be an absolute edge over Russia, China or anyone else who thinks they can wage war against the US or whomever the US thinks is worthy enough of its protection.
[1] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-...
For proxy and "we're not involved in this war, honest" type stuff, that might be acceptable so long as target is nowhere near peer. But in any war against a peer military power including Russia/China, they'd have about as much use as aircraft carriers - which is to say, basically none. This, btw, is the major problem with war logistics in general. It's not the speed, because throughput matters much more than latency anyhow, but vulnerability.
They constantly care about cost, even if it doesn't seem to you that they do.
A name also thrown around for shuttle. Do a little digging and a surprising number of shuttle crews had ties to the US congress, either as relatives or who themselves would later become representatives. They even flew a handful of serving reps (ie John Glenn, aged 77). Nasa has always known how to foster relations with political power families.
That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.
His thesis was "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous, the dedication of which read: "In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!"
He then began work as an engineer on Project Gemini. He then applied to become an astronaut and was rejected because he had not passed test pilot qualifications. He sought a waiver, and was rejected. Fortuitously for him, the next round of astronauts NASA sought required being a test pilot or having at least 1000 hours of flying time in a jet. He had more than 2,200 hours in jets alone. And at that point, he applied again, and was accepted.
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McCain [2] - prep school (where he at least wrestled), graduated from the US Naval Academy ranked 894 of 899 students. Completed flight school where he was regarded as careless and reckless, having crashed his craft multiple times. He then requested a combat assignment. The first carrier he was on caught fire killing hundreds shortly after he arrived. He moved to another carrier and was shot down and captured a couple of months later. Not exactly "The Right Stuff."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_edu...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_edu...
So as much as I like the idea of NASA, something needs to be done there.
The starship refueling in LEO requiring multiple fuel starships is not advantages from a mass perspective...
Quite frankly, 15 launches should have never been submitted let alone approved. That it was approved and billions burned already is an obvious sign that something is wrong at NASA.
If the American congress is blocking this, it’s a glimmer of hope for the US and the rest of the planet.
Just a reminder from 2012: [Neil deGrasse Tyson: Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degr...)
Obviously, this is no longer the case. However, It’s arguably because of these nation-sponsored programs that made companies like SpaceX commercializable in the first place since they’re piggybacking on a lot of the science done by the governments.
My impression is that it's happened maybe twice in the last 15 years, but I am open to correction.
This is the most basic duty of Congress, and they've been incapable of fulfilling it lately. (If you wonder why the president rules so much by executive order, it's because Congress can't or won't do its job.) So it will be interesting to see if the current Congress is more functional than recent ones.
There's over a dozen! They're blatantly ripping off SpaceX, which is very smart and what everyone else should have been doing. It's absolutely insane that the US is going to throw another $10 or $30 billion at SLS. Our leaders will go on TV with a straight face and say "China competes unfairly, everything is state run!" but China is probably doing FIFTEEN reusable rocket projects for less than the amount of gov't money we're lighting on fire with SLS rocket to nowhere.
Exactly the opposite of what they should be funding..
If robots are developed to be able to perform the most undesirable jobs, then they will also be developed to perform the most desirable jobs. If humans don’t work, they have no money. Humans without money cannot buy things. Humans can’t buy things, companies can’t exist.
The US government has pivoted to animal husbandry of the populace through techno police state, and handing sycophants to power their own title, land and serfs
Your ex workers goto work whistling Star Trek TNG theme song?
Come on… the shit people believe? Some people just “believe” to make money but so many many more believe in American civil religion, or whatever stream of consciousness they simmered in early on.
I’m not hating. I’m saying direct experience is truth not our visual syntax. Still waiting for my nuclear powered… everything. Where’s my mini commuter helo and …etc etc etc
It’s a government job with extra steps. No hate. Good grift if you can get it.
I never hear anyone speak of the radiation outside of our atmosphere very often when it comes to 'moonshot' ideas like this, and how we would be incapable of preventing it or surviving it once we arrive, in our current biological form.
How much would it cost to get all the lead or H20 you would need to generate a barrier against it into orbit? Do we need to have a moon base extracting materials for us to even think about transferring orbits?
Its all pie in the sky, and that is great because the sky is a pie that we should long to eat, but lets not fool ourselves that in ours or our childrens childrens lifetimes we will have a human on a planet that is not Earth.
Eh, it's not that out of the realm of possible. It's about twice what ISS astronauts experience, without any mitigation efforts like shielding. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia04258-comparison-of-marti...
> How much would it cost to get all the lead or H20 you would need to generate a barrier against it into orbit? Do we need to have a moon base extracting materials for us to even think about transferring orbits?
The astronauts will need water either way. Might as well have it be useful in transit.
Some dried goo in a meteor or some poetic notion of consciousness being the innate physical interaction of electromagnetism and matter such that consciousness is everywhere and imagining the potential is as good as humans will ever get.
Given time and will, it is a guarantee that humans could colonize Mars. Heck, even terraforming is possible at large timescales and an enormous concerted effort.
But there's nothing for us there. The cost in both resources, opportunity, and human lives would be enormous and there's almost no payback at the end but saying "neat".
We're struggling politically to keep our own planet from boiling us alive, at even giving food and water and shelter and healthcare to the citizens within our country - let alone the planet - let alone another. THAT is why it will never happen, not because we didn't evolve for space travel.
Any manned trip to Mars is a guaranteed suicide mission, if they even get there at all.
And that's without even discussing the politics of a system like that. We can't even agree children should have food in this country. Our population is getting poorer, less healthcare, losing hope and gaining debt. And somehow we're ready to create a colony that is entirely dependent on us that can never be abandoned that requires resupplies so expensive that they could feed every child in America multiple times over for no known benefit?
That deadline is never going to hold - too many things are just nowhere near ready. By now, I expect NET 2030.
The Senate Launch System strikes again.
Now, it seems like even that might end up not happening. What a shitshow.
Where else can you pay someone 50k a year and get PhD-level productivity?
Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is.
> Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is.
The government is not a company. It has three coequal branches. The President is often not legally entitled to fire employees, let alone shutter entire agencies whose existence and function is mandated by law.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48432
"In the 1970s, however, President Richard Nixon asserted the authority to act on his own to withhold funds or curtail programs he opposed. This assertion was challenged in the courts in a number of suits to compel the release of impounded funds or require the Administration to carry out statutory duties that would result in the expenditure of funds. Congress ultimately responded by enacting impoundment control legislation as Title X of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974."
Want to get paid, by the US Federal Government, for pursuing science or technology?
From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
This sounds like a joke, but it's 90+% real.
For years early in my career in applied math and computing, far and away the best parts, funding, technically advanced work, growth in expertise, and working conditions were on US military work, e.g.:
(1) The FFT (fast Fourier transform) and power spectral estimation (as in the book by Blackman and Tukey) for analyzing ocean audio, close to parts of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Also, the movie uses magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), and the specialty of the guy I was working for was MHD.
(2) Some optimization using Lagrangian relaxation for nuclear war.
(3) Given many ships at sea, some Red, some Blue, and some Blue submarines, war breaks out, and how long will the ships last, in particular, the Blue submarines? Sounds impossible or nearly so, but in WWII there were some cute derivations on search at sea and some Poisson process math by a guy Koopmans, and I did a little more on the math, in assembler wrote a random number generator starting with an Oak Ridge formula, and wrote some Monte Carlo code for the whole thing -- yes, used the speeds of the ships, their detection radii, and for each Red-Blue pair the probabilities of none die, one dies, the other dies, both die.
Surprisingly, a famous probability prof was flown in for a fast review. His remark was: "No way can your Monte Carlo fathom the huge sample space tree." Well, maybe, but so what?
"After some days, say 5, let X be the number of Blue submarines still alive. Then X is a random variable and is bounded, that is, is >= 0 and <= the finite number at the start. Then the law of large numbers applies, and can do 500 independent and identically distributed sample paths, add, divide by 500, and get the expected value for the 5 days, and each of the (times) days, within a gnats ass nearly all the time." The prof agreed but was offended by the gnats remark!
Sure, it was simple, but maybe not fully too simple -- was liked, passed the review, and helped my wife and I get our Ph.D degrees.
Also the military funding let me sit alone for some days learning PL/I that later, with a tricky feature of PL/I calling back into the stack of routines called but not yet returned, used to save IBM's AI product YES/L1! Ah, military worked again!
Ah, the military may (still) be interested in computer and communications security and reliability, system design and development methodology, system monitoring, and management, and now in AI, drones, etc. A commercial server farm or network doesn't expect to be attacked by long range missiles, but DOD systems have to be robust in a war!
Once I was at the David Taylor Model Basin (big tank of water to tow candidate ship hull designs), and they were seriously interested in the Navier-Stokes equations -- maybe they still are! Uh, do they have good solutions yet?
Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.
Then Garwin and Tukey talked, and we got the FFT (fast Fourier transform), talked about the test ban treaty and detecting underground tests.
GPS is nice, but the first version, with the relativity considerations, was done at the JHUAPL for the US Navy missile firing submarines.
Then, as I recall, some people in the US concluded
"Never again will US science operate independently of the US military"
or that since WWII nearly all the reason for all the science funding -- Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence-Berkeley, Stanford Linear Accelerator, Fermi, Brookhaven, Hanford, JHUAPL, NASA, along with DOE and NSF funding of academic research in the STEM fields at Berkeley, U. Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, etc. -- was intended for US leadership in the STEM fields and, thus, US national security.
Bluntly put.
Right, Simons funds a lot. And Hopkins has the Whiting School of Engineering from the widow of Whiting of Whiting-Turner Construction, etc.
Sorry about war, but I do like the science.
The vacuum diode detectors used in radios before WWII did not work at the high frequencies required in radars. Most of the work for semiconductor technologies had been done at Bell Labs, which after the war used this for developing other semiconductor devices.
The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not.
As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
But we tend to cut taxes, not substantive spending. Which is going to saddle my kids with a mess.
Tariffs will not make up for this because tariffs are, beyond specific circumstances, a failed policy that harms your own economy and disproportionately targets your lower class. It threatens US exports, makes many US businesses non-viable (thus losing jobs), slows down economy by increasing the prices of even domestic goods. Combine that with a looming recession and Trump's insistence to take over the fed fiscal policy and enforce a political bond policy...
Crashing your economy does not help reconcile debts.
We really haven't. The effective tax rate on the wealthiest Americans has dropped from nearly 60% to about 20% since the 1960s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...
> Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.
The Laffer curve is a wildly simplistic concept that's widely disputed, and every practical test of it (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment) has demonstrated that it fails. It's the right's equivalent of "let's try Communism again!"
My household runs a very nice budget surplus if I don't pay the mortgage, student loans, credit card bills, electricity, gas, insurance, etc. too. Huge balance in the account!
It's a few months later that the chickens come home to roost.
Cutting for the sake of cutting ignores what you are cutting. Cutting healthcare and education gets very expensive in the long run, for example, if you do enough damage. It is premature to declare victory when the knock-on effects are years or decades down the line. (As with not paying your mortgage; it'll be a little while before the pain hits.)