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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

The USAF's and CIA's use of drones in the Middle East has sparked the imagination across all kinds of projects such as this one. But the reality is that military-style drones that can stay aloft for days are extremely expensive to purchase and to operate. The well-known Predator drone, for example, costs $4 million per airplane, and it requires a classified global satellite network, an uplink station manned with three operators, and a deployment crew with a forward operating station. It is only cheap when compared to the absurdly high cost of manned fighter jets and spy planes.

Comparing them to what is available for civilian use is a joke. Normally what you see are shaky line-of-sight quad-copters that can stay up for 20 minutes.

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The government isn't exactly known for procuring things at an economical price or designing for efficiency. I mean just look at the cost difference between a space shuttle launch vs SpaceX.

SpaceX's 2010 technology sure kicks NASA's 1975 technology's butt. Look, I love Elon Musk and SpaceX as much as the next guy but probably most of the cost advantage has to do with improved technology (especially materials science).

According to Elon Musk the biggest single difference is the economic incentives of fixed priced bids (SpaceX) versus cost+ bids (traditional aerospace).

With traditional NASA bidding procedures there are very few to no incentives to contains costs. Military procurement has the same issue, combined with stringent requirements that preclude off the shelf for virtually anything. (Off the shelf is not, of course, an option for SpaceX. But if it was, they would likely consider it!)

NASA's definitely hampered both by organizational and political issues that SpaceX isn't, but as other posters have pointed out NASA has also managed to do some amazing things on a comparative shoestring budget in recent years and -- unlike SpaceX -- these are things no-one has ever done before with relatively few failures.

But then one has to wonder why NASA's technology has not improved during the 37 years that came after 1975 despite a budget of over 10 billion dollars a year.

NASA does not get 10 billion a year just to explore the moon. They had and have other priorities. Why would they develop a new-and-improved shuttle when space exploration was basically canceled?

Because NASA has no incentive to become more efficient. When you are a national organization the incentive is to keep your budget as high as possible and spend as much as you can to prove that you need the money, every year. That is precisely why such businesses are ripe for disruption, because they were never built for achieving a lot while spending less. If we ever see Space Tourism develop, it will not be through NASA operations, that is for sure.

NASA's mission is not to efficiently commercialize space technology. That's the sort of thing best left to the private sector.

I guess its really trivial to point this out which is why it isn't being said, but they did send rovers to the Mars, and they kept the ISS manned with the shuttle program, all the while under orders to move away from manned missions.

This isn't a comprehensive list by any means.

~~Also - the cold war ended, the symbols are now eroding.~~

That doesn't explain why other companies still have much more expensive rockets, though. As far as I know, SpaceX has the cheapest ones by far.

The other companies are in general legacy NASA contractors or partnerships of the same. They are probably stuck in there ways they are essentially offering the same technology that NASA paid them to develop all these years.

Well yeah, NASA is a research agency and SpaceX is a company trying to commercialize space technology. That's like saying the Human Genome Project cost billions of dollars but you can get your genome sequenced for $99 from 23andMe, so obviously the Human Genome Project was a waste of money.

You have no clue what you are talking about.

Human Genome project is an example of complete DNA sequencing while 23andMe only tests for specific variations at specific loci. 23andMe and similar companies use commercially available solutions like DNA microarrays [1] with probes preprogrammed [2] for specific target variations and they cannot "read" arbitrary DNAs.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_microarray

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybridization_probe

NASA sent men to the moon, robots to Mars, and space stations into orbit. SpaceX sends unmanned rockets to low earth orbit. So there you go.

For what it's worth, whole genome sequencing is also commercially available for much less than the Human Genome Project cost.

Much of the cost of a Predator is because it's a weapon. That's not to say there is an abundance of excellent drones for civilian purchase, but I don't think they would need to be terribly expensive.

My point is that any drone that can stay up in the air for long periods of time and is controlled via a real-time satellite network is going to be expensive. And that type of drone is just not available commercially.

Those two requirements are because the Predator is a weapon. It can't land or be controlled from existing networks because it's in enemy territory.

There is a huge abundance of civilian drone tech available in the hobby world. Don't forget that the whole feasability of drones in the first place was demonstrated in the hobby crowd. Many military drones do in fact derive their designs from RC/hobby realms ..

Its quite possible to build a drone using off the shelf parts that can stay up for a few hours, at least. The rcgroups.com forums are full of such things, and whats interesting is that the pace of drone technology is really represented in such forums as rcgroups.com .. I myself have the parts available to build a flying spy platform that I could field over my lake and surrounding orchard for probably a few hours. Its not that far-fetched, and frankly with all the extraordinary designs for micro foam builds available on the Internet, I'd be surprised if African nations don't suddenly find themselves inundated with drone tech from the slums. They've got all the old CD-ROM drives they need to boot up a small fleet, anyway ..

The limitations of the stuff available to civilians have more to do with airspace regulations: commercial use of UAVs is simply not allowed[1]. Regulators are trying to figure out a better policy[2][3].

[1] http://mi6films.com/2011/rc-helicopter-mikrokopter-hexa-heli...

[2] https://www.aiaa.org/CAuav/

[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328506.200-civilian-...

>line-of-sight quad-copters that can stay up for 20 minutes

10 minutes is the median, but they don't have to be line of sight, except as bound by regulation such as in the UK [0]. Still short-range though, and certainly not suitable for this use-case.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Person_View

Maybe to protect rhinos, a bunch of balloons would do? Or satellites if they get ever more cheap?

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