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NASA, like the post office, is such a public benefit that we should be funding it well.
I don’t think people understand how much value we get from NASA… Like, $7 for every dollar spent, or more, in economic benefit and technological advancements. So many solutions they have to come up with to make space flight possible are incredibly useful here on Earth too
Value that we won’t get if we’re paying a private company to do it
NASA does research. They push the boundaries corporations can’t.
Depends where the funding goes! And then musk can take a cut.
Corporations cannot carry the risk involved. Because else it would be similar to the medicine industry, but there is no large market to sell to.
We’re going to Mars is not something you can sell in a boardroom, because why? What is the ROI?
What I’m saying is musk wants to divert all of the government funding from NASA to spacex. Roi is all the funding from the government, every year for decades. It’s not a sell a price and profit model in the regular sense. And this way musk can personally take a cut of all that funding.
He doesn’t even need to take a cut. If more money is regularly flowing to SpaceX, the value of the company goes up, which means more money for Musk.
SpaceX has been a huge success for NASA. For much less funding than NASA doing it themselves or a fraction of the cost of ULA, NASA has a very reliable and much cheaper medium launch vehicle launching much more frequently, and a heavy launcher pretty far in development.
This is great, turning “routine” space operations over to cheaper private companies, while focussing on research and stretching the envelope
Easy to do when you pay people shit and don’t care about things blowing up. And when you get to build on the already established knowledge and use their facilities. Government on the other hand could never allow anything to fail and had to forge the path.
Not with that attitude…and probably will be able to change that with the upcoming administration deregulating everything. Or did you mean won’t instead of can’t?
Deregulation means private businesses won’t research anything that doesn’t make their quarterly numbers look better. Accelerated capitalism, woohoo!
Yes, so it’s won’t and not can’t. Words matter.
Okay. Explain how his point changed now that you’ve been overly pedantic?
I wasn’t being pedantic for its own sake, but because the Corp has the capability yet refuse to use it for people’s benefit as they value shareholder profit more. They absolutely could, but won’t. To me, this is worse than not having the ability (won’t).
We get it Corp, you would if you could. Good effort. Wait, you actually can but won’t?
That’s not worse to you?
Not always. There is some research that they could not do without going broke because up-front costs are too high, and there’s no tangible return on investment. In these cases, it makes sense to fund publicly because there is still value to society at large. Accelerators, for example. It doesn’t always have to be some conspiracy.
Remember when on Interstellar there’s this whole prologue about the collapse of the US, the dismantling of NASA and the family getting on an argument with the school because the official stance now is that the moon landing never happened and mankind never went to space (despite there being still people alive who went there)?
So, anyway, life imitates art …
Recently there was a rerun of interstellar in IMAX at our local IMAX theatre. Rewatched it and had some pretty shocking revelations that I did not think of when I watched it for the first time. The rewriting of history being prime amongst them
One of Trumps supporters even got punched by Buzz.
I remember when that movie came out people argued with me that the Democrats were the party that was going to create the world of Interstellar and the Republicans were “standing up for science”.
It was obviously nonsense then so i have little illusions that those people have changed their view on it–or if they have, they’ve simply changed to believe the moon landing was faked.
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God, I love how the incoming cabinet has zero redeeming qualities amongst them.
They are predictable
I think I would rather be pleasantly surprised.
Convenient? That was the whole plan with buying X all along, to get into politics, and this guy is still there keeping it relevant.
Doesn’t that fat fuck get lots of money from NASA?
He’s cutting out the middleman. See? Efficiency! /s
Name a more efficient structure than a monopoly!
When has that stopped them when they have the Congress and the courts?
Hey now… it’s not like it’s something heinous like a peanut farm.
The challenging thing here is that NASA does have deep, systemic problems and is in need of some overhaul. SLS is a breathtakingly expensive boondoggle, lunar gateway has no reason to exist, Orion is underpowered and overweight, Mars Sample Return’s entire mission is in question, JWST was a decade behind schedule and an order of magnitude over budget, and the list goes on. Extreme risk-aversion and congressional meddling have resulted in a bureaucratic quagmire of an organization. It’s hard to find nasa projects that are going well.
Of course I don’t think a gorilla with a sledgehammer as we’re sadly going to see from Trump will make things any better, we need a surgeon with a scalpel.
SLS should definitely be on the chopping block. It was a good idea to fund two possibilities for heavy lift rockets but SLS is clearly going nowhere. At this point, Bozo’s rocket seems like a better choice despite being so much farther behind in development.
But lunar gateway would be pretty useful if we really are going to establish a long term presence. It would allow:
- having the lander and the transportation be different vehicles
- keeping a backup lander convenient
- having a secure place to store extra supplies until a base can be built
- having a possible backup place for astronauts in case the lunar base has problems
Any sort of problem on lunar base would go bad real fast if the nearest help is two weeks away.
Having a place to park and transfer lets them not only use different vehicles for traveling and landing but also differently sized vehicles
…. But it’s only worthwhile if we’re establishing a long term presence
Most of the things you listed are directly related to Congressionally mandated specifics for funding those programs. The money is only there if NASA does it the way Congress dictates, not necessarily the way it should be done.
The entire SLS program is essentially a Congressional jobs and legacy aerospace grifting program post-Shuttle.
If Congress would. Keep their hands off, and just allocate budget, most of the issues would likely disappear since the people that actually know what’s going on could make the decisions instead of a Congress critter that is an imbecile.
The way I’ve heard it described is a lot of the NASA funding is intentionally spread out across many states, funding many jobs in those states, to get the support of many representatives to vote for the funding. This also means that trying to optimize costs would get a lot of push back, since it will cause jobs to be lost in many states. And these are states which voted for Trump: Alabama, Texas, Florida, etc.
It’s the whole reason SLS is the train wreck it is. Congress wouldn’t let them not keep shoveling money to the same people who made Space Shuttle parts. So instead of the best design possible, we got the best design using old parts.
It’s always depressing to me that there are pretty obvious ways to fix problems but absolutely no way to enact solutions.
Publicly funded elections (so corporations cannot buy their way in), and a ban on post-career employment for politicians fixes it immediately. But fat chance of that.
You’re absolutely right, though the extreme risk aversion is harder to blame on congress.
You kill a half dozen people in a space ship explosion that could have been avoided and you will reasonably get a cautious culture.
Honestly I think lunar gateway is a decent idea, Its the easiest thing to do thats new as far as space is concerned and thus potentially the cheapest way to gain international co-operation, public interest, and potentially ignite another space race. Looking forward it can can potentially act as a life raft for any future lunar colonies in the event of a mishap. And while a moon colony isn’t as impressive as a mars one its much safer to practice on given that emergency re-supply can actually get there before the crew are already skeletonized. A moon base itself can then act as support for moon based telescopes (which have significant advantages, and disadvantages of course) and if you can get some kind of manufacturing going its far easier to launch from the moon than it is from earth, even if the moon just ends up as a glorified space gas station.
Moon base on the surface is a great idea, I’m 1000% in favor.
Lunar gateway is in NRHO, which means rendezvous windows are a week apart. This makes it pretty useless for any kind of emergency. It’s in this crazy orbit because Orion is a pig that can’t transport a crew to low lunar orbit and back.
NASA budget shouldn’t matter on the scale that it does. It is <2% of the US military spendings
This is such a common theme.
There are huge systemic problems which the “establishment” will demonstratably not address and Trump appears to be the answer to many voters… but him effectively addressing them is a wild fantasy.
You’re absolutely right, which is why I don’t want the left get tricked into defending a status quo that doesn’t deserve it.
They did not get tricked, they chose to defend the status quo.
That being said much of the messaging about change did not get through because, well, they campaigned conventionally… keeping the status quo.
We are about a decade plus into the current political theme of “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. It’s scary. These people have no plan. It’s the levellers and the diggers all over again.
“Sure is a nice publicly funded and scientifically minded space program you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”
President Musk is just there to be less inconvenienced and to revel in finding an easily manipulated orange loophole to being the president of the United States.
I guess that makes us all Musks workers now. What could go wrong?
What sucks the most is NASA fights tooth and nail for funding as it is. Imagine gutting it, and then coming back 4 years later to ask just for their existing budgets back.
Step 1) hurt other manufacturers more than Tesla
Step 2) benefit SpaceX by gutting NASA
Step 3) no regulations for digging tunnels?
No regulations for digging tunnels is the boring part
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Please come to europe and lets make the european space agency get their shit together.
ESA is a pork barrel like NASA, Euro style. Airbus does great because it’s now a traded company. ESA is simply an agency designed to maintain Europe’s minor relevance in space. Ariane rockets are a decade behind Space X, 5 years behind china and ISRO.
Rocket Lab is where I lay my hopes. SpaceX without the giant douchebag. Innovation, incremental, sensible growth, without Billions behind.
This is what losing a space race looks like.
And absolutely no one paying attention was shocked.
