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Comment by brador | Hacker News Reader

Why does it take so long? I mean 8 years to send a V2? what's stopping them rolling it out in 1 year?

I don't understand the reason for such an extended timescale.

Are you an American? How much effort have you expended in campaigning to raise taxes and increase the percentage that NASA gets from ~0.4% to 0.6%? If you've spent less than a few years on the issue, that's the reason why they're going to take 8 years.

Most Americans think that NASA is 10-20% of the federal annual budget. Most Americans want NASA to have less funding, do fewer things, and take longer doing them. If you want to have NASA move faster, you have to spread the knowledge that NASA is cheap. Then NASA can move faster. See efforts like penny4nasa if you want to help!

Limited budget is certainly a big reason, and another is the lack of a pipeline. When Apple releases a new iPhone every other year, it's not like they started development on the next model only after the current one is released. Development is staggered so that there is always something at each stage of development.

As it says in the article, they will be leveraging proven technologies, but have not yet solicited proposals for instruments. This means they are still at the very beginning of the development process, and more money would only help so much. That's why the planetary.org post says that a higher budget would only move the launch date up 2 years. If they had started on a new rover 6 years ago with adequate funding, then we could be looking at a new rover in a year.

Circumstances often lead to NASA building fewer bigger things instead of more smaller things.

Which I disagree with as a result, because as soon as one of those few big things fails (which is inevitable no matter how smart NASA is), there are going to be massive Congressional investigations and talk about how NASA is wasting our money and how they need to be even more careful, which just means they have to build even bigger, even fewer, even more expensive things that just attract that much more attention when a failure happens.

On the other hand, they can lose a $300 million project entirely and no one blinks an eye.

This: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/20121204-the-202...

With what money?

With its annual budget of $18.724 billion maybe? Seriously, where does that money go?

For a start...

* Operating their current missions http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html

* Designing and building future missions http://www.nasa.gov/missions/future/index.html

* Public outreach/education

Thanks, that's a good list. However, one would be hard pressed to convince people to voluntarily fund this to the tune of 20 billion dollars a year.

But we have no problem spending trillions of dollars on wars and on bailouts. Awesome. Stu_pid meets mor_on.

I watched a talk by Peter Diamandis where he said that around 90% of the costs (for a NASA rocket) is in labor. By 2020, we should be sending people, not another robot.

http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

It costs a lot to engineer and operate things that work in space.

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