Troubles at NASA.
NASA devotes about $5.4 billion a year to its science program, divided among specialties like astrophysics, earth science and planetary exploration. To finance President Bush’s exploration initiative to return humans to the Moon, while also financing space shuttle operations and a shuttle replacement out of the agency’s approximately $16 billion annual budget, science program money is being held to about a 1 percent increase per year for four years.
Factoring in inflation and the loss of what had been anticipated financing increases, space experts say this amounts to a loss for NASA science of about $3 billion over that period. For Dr. Stern, that means doing more with less.
The bulk of the article describes “innovative” work by S. Alan Stern, the new director of the NASA space science division, to force the agency’s famously sprawling projects to do a better job of balancing their accounts. Is that really news? Agencies with reduced budgets always tighten up their accounting, among other things. Incentive-wise it’s just the flip side of the way that agencies loosen the belt a bit when the budget increases more than expected. The article doesn’t even make the case that Dr. Stern actually makes more with less. He is clearly making less with less; the good news is that without creative guidance from Dr. Stern the bleeding might be worse.
The meaningful point in this story is simply that a pointless moon project is stealing resources from the research budget at NASA. We already knew it would do that. The story is not news per se so much as another milestone on a path that smart observers mapped out the moment Bush announced his grand money pit of a space vision.
alphie
$5,400,000,000 a year?
That’s what we’re spending to defeat I.E.D.s in Iraq, too.
And to defeat cancer…
Bruce Moomaw
It’s not the ONLY money pit at NASA — so is Shuttle/Station. If anything, that manages the incredible feat of being more wasteful overall than Bush’s new “Vision for Space Exploration” (in which at least the development of a cheap, safe, simple “Orion” manned Earth-orbital craft and a big Ares 5 “heavy lifter booster are probably justifiable, even if the manned lunar part of Bush’s program isn’t).
Shuttle/Station, at this point, does literally no good — in fact, it’s become an exercise in the surrealistically absurd, with a majority in Congress now readily agreeing publicly that it will carry out virtually NO scientific research at all. Nevertheless — unlike the VSE, which the Democrats are just waiting to kill dead the moment one of them gets back into the White House (and which they’re already started hacking away at in a major way while Bush is still there) — there is no chance at all that this $90 billion orbiting outhouse and the winged flying deathtrap that serves it (which costs 100 times as much per flight as NASA solemnly assured Congress it would to get the program started in 1972) will be killed until 2010, if then. (Al Gore, by the way, personally persuaded Clinton not to kill Shuttle/Station in 1993, when he came into office and had a genuine window of opportunity to do so. The fact that Prince Albert’s scientific expertise is somewhat greater than that of the grunting hominids who infest the Bush Administration is not really all that big a compliment.)
The one remaining official reason for keeping Shuttle/Station going is now solemnly declared to be that “our international partners” (the European Space Agency and Japan) would be dreadfully offended if we cancelled the Station at this point without attaching their (virtually useless) lab modules to it — although we could simply pay the ESA and Japan the several billion dollars of compensation needed to cover their own costs in building the things, and still end up spending far less than if we actually send them into orbit on Shuttles, attach them to the Station, and maintain them.
The REAL reasons why Shuttle/Station won’t be shut down?
(1) Too many Congressmen of BOTH parties voted to maintain those two white elephants for too many years, and will never, ever dare to admit that they were mistaken — which isn’t the case (yet) with VSE. (Although, if Hillary Clinton is fool enough to retain that program, by the time she leaves office it too will have acquired the dead bipartisan political inertia that keeps useless government programs going forever.)
(2) The aerospace-industrial complex created as a result of that freakish international Muscle Beach contest known as the Moon Race has too much clout to allow the manned space program to be drastically shrunken, despite its near-total uselessness compared to both the unmanned space program and just about any other use of the taxpayers’ money. One way or another, they’ll keep at least $7 billion per year of our taxes going to maintain some kind of manned space program, even if it’s absolutely pointless and purposeless.
Asti
To the moon… again, for what the sixth time (considering it’s manned of course) really.. Does GW ever do anything ORIGINAL (oh, without considering signing statements and playing the christian card to the hilt, I mean)?
Iraq wasn’t original, his Daddy did that one too.
George Bush’s legacy? Always striving to do again what others before him have done already.
Can we get a Leader next time please?
Kav
Over on the other side of the Atlantic space research is having similar problems.
The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council that funds astronomy and space science (as well as nuclear and particle physics research) has a $160m dollar hole in its budget. It is not quite clear where said hole comes from but in order to safeguard brand new facilities (that are mostly for materials and life science applications) and Mars and moon missions the STFC is slashing and burning its way through astronomy and solar-terrestrial physics facilities and more importantly the research grants. A 25% cut on all research grants coupled with potential total cuts for those grants that rely on facilities that suddenly no longer exist. That is a massive reduction in capabilities and job losses across the scientific community. All for 80 million pounds, a tiny drop in the ocean as far as government is concerned. We UK scientists are attempting to fight this but I am not sure how effective we can be given we were ignored in the process up to now.
If you are a UK citizen reading this, then I encourage you to have a look at this petition at the 10 Downing Street website and if you agree please add your name (and I have not even mentioned the damage to particle physics).
Stoic
We are not going put a human on Mars. We are not going back to the Moon. But we will spend billions of dollars pretending we are so the corporations can sidle up to the Federal Teat one more time.
Jake
I get it, on the distant day when we do return humans to the moon, The Egomaniac in Chief will be able to take credit.
My only question is why is Bush being so coy? He’s not going to be in office during our next moon shot; he’s not going to be in office when we find a cure for cancer, HIV or the common cold; he won’t be around when we end illiteracy or crime. Why doesn’t that smirking chimp issue a proclamation a day telling us what he wants to do/fix/change and that way when it is done/fixed/changed he and his drooling sycophants can take credit.
Tim F.
Yup. By the time we even know how to have a stable human presence on the moon oil will cost $200 a barrel and the rampaging deficit will have long since caught up with us. Ego-stroking space jaunts will be the last thing on our minds.
myiq2xu
Well, now we know G-Dub’s plan for global warming – “Be somewhere else”
Pete C
The Moon / Mars shot is the single thing Bush has done in the past 7 years I was happy about although I admit its hard to justify on anything more than an emotional level. We need to keep pushing our boundaries and currently the US in the only country capable of doing it.
Catsy
It seems fashionable to scorn the space program these days, but let’s at least put this in perspective: NASA’s yearly budget is less than it costs to run the Iraq war for two months. There are far more deserving places to trim away the fat.
Whatever you may think of nationalistic dick-measuring contests, in this case they have at least served a purpose: the number of spin-off technologies that have come from the space program are numerous, important, and we take them largely for granted.
4tehlulz
Unintended benefits are a very weak foundation for an argument for space exploration.
myiq2xu
Not when those benefits alone have more than repaid the costs of our space program.
Faux News
To quote Dave Chapelle: “Mars, bitches!”
4tehlulz
You mean like the space shuttle?
Zifnab
But by cutting funding to all the physics labs and earth sciences programs and life sciences studies, the Moon / Mars program effectively knee-caps itself. Would you spend $100 billion to figure out how to get a horse and buggy across the Atlantic when the sciences involved in making lightweight metal compounds, engine technology, and aerodynamics studies would have given you an airplane at half the cost?
This is effectively what Bush is doing. He’s killed investment in solar power, sustainable earth projects, efficient engines, life sciences, climate sciences, and a host of other “science” sciences that would do a damn good job of making trips to Mars more feasible. What we’re getting in return is a NASA fairy tale. Mars technology just doesn’t exist yet and Bush refuses to invest in it.
This is why Republicans should never be allowed near science. Nothing good ever comes of it.
Grumpy Code Monkey
I grew up wanting to be an astronaut, but it’s time to kill off the manned program entirely. There is no basic exploration mission that cannot be accomplished as well or better by unmanned probes, and there aren’t going to be anything other than basic exploration missions for, well, ever.
There is no practical justification for a manned space program; none. The only justification is political.
Deorbit the ISS, retire the shuttle fleet, and don’t hire any more sky jockeys. For the cost of the manned program we could pepper Mars, the Moon, Europa, Titan, etc., with rovers and ground observatories, and retrieve a helluva lot more data.
STEVEinSC
In 1989 the estimated cost for a trip to Mars and back was about 1.2 trillion. Scaled with inflation that’s probably about 4 trillion now. Hopeless waste of money, and no, the spinoffs are bullshit and won’t pay one thousandth the cost. Developments that NASA uses generally come from the private sector, just following technology whereever it goes. The Moon-Mars thing was just an excuse to “get the govenment off the backs of industry” (AKA Global Warming) by starving the science budgets. Just a part of the Republic party’s general pattern of enbaling the money gangsters and pulling the cops (regulators) off the street.
Fe E
I’d like to tag along with Catsy for a moment. Space exploration is at leats the one activity that Bsh is for that isn’t desgned to, well, kill or hurt people. I know manned flight is pretty much impossible to justify i terms of dollars, and I seriously wish we would spend more and accomplish more with unmanned probes, but…but I look at the cosmos and know that at some point we are just gonna HAVE to go there.
The question is when and how.
Of course, on a practical level there is nothing that humans do that Republioans can’t figure out a good way to do worse, so maybe waiting a bit isn’t a bad idea.
Fe E
Jesus, I could type yesterday, wtf happened?
Sorry for that.
srv
No, he meant all those spinoffs from the ISS. Surely he can elaborate?
Andrew
The only thing the ISS is good for is as an employment program for Russian scientists with certain expertise in putting things into space and having them come back down in a particular place. That’s not a particularly bad goal, but I think we could do it a lot cheaper by setting them all up with a rich lifetime pension and a retirement villa in the Caribbean.
spud
You might want to Google “moon helium-3” before you call a moon project “pointless”.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Yeah, 3He is interesting stuff. Doesn’t do us much good on the Moon, though. The cost of extracting and transporting useful amounts back to Earth would likely outstrip its value.
STEVEinSC
Right, strip mine the moon for helium 3 that will be used in thermonuclear power systems which haven’t been demonstrated yet.
HyperIon
Pat Duggins has a book out (Final Countdown) and was flogging it on C-SPAN this weekend. Duggins is the NPR guy who covers the shuttle launches for WMFE in Orlando. He was very negative about the risks associated with each remaining shuttle flight, implying that NASA was living on borrowed time wrt safety and design issues. He actually said that if no disaster occurred before the cessation of flights in 2010, the bigwigs at NASA would be extremely relieved. Yikes.
Tax Analyst
About the only things a manned-Mars flight would guarantee are tremendous costs and the loss of human life at some point – requiring either more tremendous expenditures to correct or gerri-rig safety issues or the shit-canning of the project in the name of sanity; fiscal and otherwise. If humans manage to survive and keep earth in one piece long enough a manned-Mars project might be viable in the distant future. At this point in time I’d rather allocate our finite resources to initiatives that seem feasible, viable and beneficial in the forseeable future.
NeilS
Bush’s plan to move money from NASA Ames (California) and Goddard (Maryland?)and move it to Johnson Space center (Texas) takes money from Democratic strongholds and gives it to Republican strongholds.
It also takes money from satellite study of the Earth which was inconveniently demonstrating how quickly environmental change is occurring on the planet and transferred the money to building rocket engines, which are easily shifted to military purposes.
Anne Laurie
We need to keep pushing our boundaries and currently the US in the only country capable of doing it.
Nope, China really wants to get its footprints up there, for reasons of National Prestige if nothing else. They’re willing to spend the money to do it, they’re paying MIT and Stanford to train the scientists who will make it possible, and they’ve got a political oligarchy that makes it possible to run a decades-long program without having to beg for money just to keep going every year. Heck, thanks to our own C-Plus Augustus and his band of corporate thieves, within the next decade they’ll probably be have ‘acquired’ the best ex-NASA scientists the way America ‘acquired’ the best ex-Nazi scientists after WWII!
Ferris Valyn
The amount of ignorance concerning manned spaceflight on this board is incredible. I am a huge supporter of the manned program, but anyone who has an ounce of honesty and a good engineering background can tell you that the current plan is crap. And, in addition, NASA is due for serious re-organization. Should an agency that is flying a probe to Pluto also be doing studies on air safety? Should an agency that is tasked with space colonization also be in charge of providing data for global warming?
Nasa was in a fair amount of need of re-organization before Bush, and is now is practically screaming for it.
Manned spaceflight can have good, measurable benefits, above and beyond the spinoffs. Someone mentioned He3 mining on the moon – that is one example. Much more likely, IMHO, is things like space based solar power, and zero-g manufacturing.
Now, it is true that at this very moment, spaceflight is very expensive. But that does not need to be the case. Anyone who looks at what is happening in spaceflight, especially in the NewSpace companies (like XCOR, Scaled Composites, SpaceX to name a few) will see that the cost of spaceflight will fall through the floor in the next few years (probably less than 10).
This means we can utlize off-planet resources to help save the planet.
Its also worth pointing out that the best people these days are more likely to be attracted to NewSpace companies, rather than NASA or Boeing or Lockheed Martin
I want to take particular aim at Grumpy code monkey – first of all, not all exploration is science. I can think of multiple explorations that need humans, but have no scientific value. More to the point, Manned spaceflight and unmanned spaceflight serve 2 very different purposes – manned spaceflight is about utilization and colonization, while unmanned spaceflight provides basic data (Although its is debatable whether you get the same level of science from a robot that you do from a human). Cutting the manned program because it doesn’t provide the best sciene return is like cutting student loans because it doesn’t feed poor people.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Since when?
Colonization is a pipe dream; there’s no economic upside (which is what colonization is usually about). There’s no resource out there that justifies the cost in money and energy of extracting and flying it back.
What are you people picturing? Astronauts in space suits with pickaxes? Again, even if we did something like that, it would be better accomplished with an automated or remotely operated unmanned system. And again, how are you going to get commercially useful quantities of X back on Earth?
Again, why do these applications require a manned presence? Why can they not be done using unmanned systems?
dbrown
He3?
I believe that the only reason to get He3 is for nuclear fusion – last I checked, we have no fusion power plants-in fact, budgets for research into fusion have been cut, are still being cut, and the only non-military programs are dying off (with all the expertise involved). If you want cheap energy, fusion might be able to do it but it costs $ for research. Rather, people want to mine He3 on the moon!? Only a fool (nut case?) would support spending 10’s of billions of dollars looking for a fuel for a power plant that does not exist and will not for many, many years even if we invest a billion or so to get a proto-type power plant (possible if a will and money existed).
Ferris Valyn
Since day one. Ask anybody who supports manned spaceflight. NASA’s charter even includes discussions about colonization.
I know of multiple companies that disagree with you, and are backing up their disagreement with actual money and hardware.
We’ve already mentioned things like zero-g manufacturing (there is a lot of discussion about advanced composite manufacturing), and space based solar power, to name a few. There is other space based industries, like tourism, space sports, just to name a few.
There is something fundamental that will be gained, though, that I admit can’t be measured in dollars and sense (although that may change) and that is new perspectives. These perspectives tend to help to drive society forward, both sociologically, and just as important, technologically. Space colonization will drive both.
Well, with regards to mining He3, anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that we don’t have working fusion plants is asking for trouble. However, a more likely near term mineralogical resource is platinum metal, which has a lot of uses. As for what I am picturing, no not astronauts with pic-axes. In the next 10-20 years, I would think something like this (but you know, designed for off-world use), and in 20-40 years, maybe something like this, again, modified for off-planet usage.
While I have no doubt that there will be much use of automation, the problem is there is a lot that can’t be automated. Especially in the realm of identifying a problem with a machine, and repairing it. And anyone in the mining industry will tell you that repair work happens all the time, because of the dust released.
And now we get to the heart of the mis-understanding about space resources, the transportation costs. Yes, because of the shuttle, and Nasa, everyone thinks going to and from space must fundamentally be very expensive. More to the point, they think that rockets must be, by default insanely expensive. The fact is this doesnt’ need to be the case, and their is plenty of proof of this. Good rocket fuel (that I might also add can be enviromentally friendly) is actually fairly cheap (LOX I think is roughly the price of milk, per gallon, and things like alcohol and methane are cheap as well)
The reason for rockets being so incredibly expensive is because of the process of how they are operated. The expensive of the shuttle is more because of political decisions made that had severe and damage implications for the systems cost-effectiveness (Anyone who thinks its just the Bush administration who subverted science should read about the development of the space shuttle).
But if you look at the work coming out of companies and groups like SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, Masten Space Systems, just to name a few, you’ll see we are very close to affordable rocket craft. In ten years or less, I wouldn’t be surprized to see the cost to transport a person into orbit from 20-40 million dollars, down to $50,000. Look the technology being demonstrated, and you’ll see that Nasa has a very real possiblity of being left behind.
Because each of these projects are quite large, and we really haven’t automated large scale construction. Yes, we’ll automate as much as we can, but we can’t automate everything, especially trouble shooting. Having someone on hand to deal with problems, especially when constructing things bigger than ISS (and potentially much bigger – yes, thats what we are talking about) will be essential.