Two recent articles in the NYT and the journal Science suggest that our current budget gridlock will cause major problems for science, including one of the President’s better policy proposals. Announced during his 2006 State of the Union address, the American Competitiveness Initiative proposed to double the American spending on the physical sciences over the next 10 years. The ACI also proposed about $300 million for educational initiatives which garnered mixed reviews (judgments roughly tracked people’s opinions of NCLB), but the investment in physical sciences was long overdue.
You won’t hear a life scientist, me for example, say that the life sciences are overfunded (check the Science link if you want to hear someone else saying it, or at least implying it). On an emotional level it’s hard to argue with research that makes people live longer, cures a disease or makes a strawberry glow in the dark. Compared with the guys promoting massive particle-smashing installations whose purpose even many of us with advanced degrees only partially understand, our lobbyists just have an easier time of it. It is also a shame that even a crucial physical science projects like fusion energy often takes a huge investment and a very long development time before it changes the world. That’s a long horizon for the political process to support. Given how badly we need progress in energy and materials science, that is a problem and I’m glad the President moved to rectify it.
The President’s 2007 budget request included funds for the ACI proposal. Relevant agencies – NSF, DOE, NIST and NASA – made plans accordingly, which became a problem when the 109th Congress spiked 9 out of 11 necessary budget bills before it adjourned in December.
Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month.
Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare, the federal health-care program for the elderly and disabled.
[…] “There are individuals who want to blow up the tracks, and there are more of those individuals in the House,” said one Senate leadership aide.
The GOP’s bitter move stalls more than the President’s ACI plan. Stopgap bills held government budgets to 2006 levels, which amounts to a 3 to 4% cut after inflation. Unfortunately the details of research funding can make small funding cuts more painful than they sound. Not counting one-time ‘startup’ grants like the R03, funding cuts disproportionately shut young researchers out of the process since they lack the ‘pull’ of their more senior competition. A weak couple of years for funding is that much time when the most promising young talent leaves research and finds work somewhere else. Another disproportionate victim is collaborative projects which depend on precisely aligning the schedules of X number of very busy people. Both articles give several examples of those, including the Fermilab collider in Illinois and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven in New York.
Now, science won’t grind to a halt because research budgets aren’t increasing. Many of the setbacks will come from ACI-related proposals that are still only in the plannnig stage, which is annoying but not fatal. Other cuts might actually hurt. From the NYT:
Missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are also threatened, with $100 million in cuts. Paul Hertz, the chief scientist at NASA’s science mission directorate, said potential victims included programs to explore Mars, astrophysics and space weather
Right now NASA does some extremely cool things, for example robotic exploration of our neighbor planets. NASA also does some extremely useful things like understanding climate change through careful observation of the Earth. Unfortunately there is a third category, massive vanity projects that won’t happen and already suck resources from the useful missions. Hertz could mean that the budget shortfall will cut back the third kind of mission, which would be cool. Boots on Mars will not add any mission capabilities that robots can’t or won’t soon be able to do. But I suspect that Hertz is really talking about the former kind of Mars mission, which when you think that one of our robots just found evidence for running water near the surface of Mars strikes me as a small tragedy.
***
On a semi-related note, the Iraq war costs America roughly $600,000 6,000,000 per hour. FYI.
demimondian
Just being picky, Tim, but the Iraq war costs $6,000,000/hour.
To put things at scale, the entire ACI could be funded out of 50 hours of the Iraq war.
Tim F.
Huh. Some people stay anonymous to avoid real-life hassles from online activity. I stay anonymous so that my college calc teachers don’t find out what a math retard I’ve become.
Sojourner
Piffle. Scientific research is far less important than protecting W’s legacy. It’s far more important to keep the dollars (and blood) flowing for Iraq.
demimondian
I know how you feel. Imagine how G. Dubya Shrubya’s professors must feel, though. “I taught him calculus.” “Oh don’t feel bad, I taught him International Relations.”
SeesThroughIt
Zing!
The real question is what the budget is going to be for the department in charge of making sure science conforms with the Bible.
Zifnab
Yeah, call me a bit skeptical of ANY Shrub initative, but somehow I doubt any life science professor worth his salt who isn’t ass-up preparing to receive the Republican Party Science Agenda (and thus, no life science professor worth his salt, period) will ever see a dime of this funding.
I can definitely see it as a great place to funnel tax subsidies for Big Pharm. But if you really want to fund college level research, perhaps we should kick that $300 million back towards the Pell Grants the Republicans so wantonly hacked up by ratcheting regulations and cutting some 90000 students from the rolls.
Perhaps you didn’t have the memo stapled to your monitor while you were writing this, but Every. Bush. Initative. Is. Wrong. Period. I’m sure the US won’t suffer for the death of whatever hairbrained hand-out scheme the Admin’s lawyers cooked up when they designed this so-called program.
Joe1347
Sorry, but Scientist’s have a known liberal bent due to way too much thinking on their part which translates to little or no financial support (budget) from the Republicans. Either agree with the Republicans and immediately start questioning evolution and global warming or have your budget cut. Unfortunately, it’s that simple.
Honesty and scientific integrity just don’t pay – literally – any more. My advice is too start learning Chinese and fast since they will be about the only ones doing advanced research in the not too distant future. Otherwise, you whiny scientists better learn to sing (American Idol) or dance (Dancing with the Stars) if you want to earn any decent money in the future. Besides, what’s more important – if you’re an American nowadays, being an intelligent critical thinker and innovator – or looking good on TV?
lard lad
Money from Republicans for science?
You must be joking… after all, we’ve still got millions of Ay-rabs to kill.
Katie
A truer statement would be hard to find. We’ve been watching this happen at both the doc and post doc levels for probably the last 8-10 years and many of them really *are* leaving for greener pastures and better paying jobs. Contrary to what we read, most researchers don’t make a very good living and are really really good at stretching a grant as far as it goes and piggybacking onto other projects.
Lots of the ones we deal with (space physics) have seen their experiment opportunities decrease drastically. Often, if they don’t have an instrument ready within a given time period they may be shut out of another attempt for 2-3 years and then it’s usually dependent on more funding which is far from certain. So, projects that should be taking 2-3 years TOTAL are now taking 2-3 times that. Not many young researchers have that kind of patience. When you’re in your mid-20’s 8-10 years seems like forever.
At this point, it seems as though researchers have to be 1) resigned to living on top ramen for years, 2) be independently wealthy, or 3) do their research on the side while trying to make a living at a more lucrative job (like McDonalds)
CaseyL
It’s bad and it’s sad, but this, too, shall pass.
The USSR had Beria and Lysenko; and China had its Cultural Revolution. Both countries managed to get past their own versions of Know-Nothingism, and start educating and training real scientists. Granted, it took them 10 and 20 years, respectively, but still.
In fact, the USSR can be credited with spurring the US into a “great leap forward” into supporting hard science. Hard to imagine now, but until the early 60s the Soviets were outpacing us in scientific research, esp. the space sciences. Yes, it was all in the name of the Cold War; frankly, I don’t care.
Wait a generation. Wait until the best scientists and engineers are educated in, and doing their work for, China. And India. And maybe Europe. Wait until we fall behind in stuff that really matters, like alt.energy development, environmental remediation, and gene-based healthcare.
Then you’ll see the US government again decide that the sciences are worth funding.
craigie
Not to be pedantic, but it’s not the US Government that is against science, it’s the GOP. Thankfully, these are no longer the same thing.
Joe1347
Nice thought – but I suspect that it will be too late if we wait. Science is moving much faster now that in the 60’s. Plus advanced development nowadays requires a lot of funding – unlike what could be done in a basic lab by a couple of mad scientists with basic equipment in the past.
As an example, look at the display industry. While the US can be credited with most of the original innovation. The Asians are spending 10’s of billions (US Dollars) per year on development and manufacturing. If the US waits another decade to jump back in – we’ll be so far behind that any efforts (by US researchers) will be a joke at best.
Jimmy Mack
I’d just as soon see the government do no funding of the sciences. Why not leave it to the private sector? If an invention is sufficiently important, there’s a way to make a buck off it, and someone will fund its research.
Joe1347
For your scenario, what about a privately funded US company that is competing with a foreign company that is heavily subsidized by their local foreign Government? The US company will decide that they can’t compete (i.e., make a profit) and will just decide to get out of the business. This is exactly what is happening in the US high tech industry TODAY. Another decade and it (the US high tech industry) will be gone.
Second scenario, most investors (stock holders) in US companies expect short term gains (profits) – think months. Basic research is long-term. Think years or even a decade before any profits would materialize – If any. Most US companies have abandoned basic research and even applied research is fading. So how is anyone going to make a buck off something if they aren’t even looking into it.
Face it. Unless dramatic changes are made soon – the technical and scientific dominance that the US has taken for granted since WWII is rapidly coming to an end. This will have a profound effect on US policy in the not too distant future when are leaders wake up and realize that the US can no longer dominate the world economically. The inability to dominate militarily will rapidly follow once our current economic rivals surpass us technologically.
Jimmy Mack
But a lot of it doesn’t pan out. Remember all the money that got pumped into solar power research in the 80s? And how about that government-funded AIDs and cancer research that’s been blown out of the water by the pharmaceutical industry’s superior, privately funded efforts? I just don’t see why government should be in the business of something that should be a money-making proposition.
craigie
You mean like this internet thingy we’re using here?
Your faith in capitalism is touching, but naive.
Jimmy Mack
I thought that was invented by the old Xerox research lab in Palo Alto. Please enlighten me…
Mike
Without government support (and a lot of porn), the Internet would not be what it is today. And no, Al Gore did not really say he invented it, despite right wing continued belief in that. This does lead to a bad joke though.
“Why did Al Gore say he invented the Internet?”
“Because one of his advisors told him it was based on algorithms.”
craigie
There’s nothing worse than government porn. All those mustaches, for one thing…
craigie
No, they didn’t invent the internet there. They invented Apple.
RSA
Google ARPANET.
ImJohnGalt
Jesus Christ*, is there any topic about which a conservative’s ignorance is so great that it can overcome their massive incuriousity? Use the internet itself to discover its origins with basic Google Skills? Google “history of the internet”.
Get this link.
Read, and learn. Teh st00p1d is incroyable.
ImJohnGalt
* Of course, I don’t mean that, because I am a liberal, and we hate religion.
Jimmy Mack
Okay, you’re right. But I still maintain that it would have been invented sooner or later by private industry. But also, your point is well-taken.
demimondian
Ummm…the pharmaceutical industry’s superior AIDS meds? All of which were developed and tested, originally, at NIH? You know, on the government’s dime?
Sheesh. U R in our intertrons, wasting our electronz. U R in our Universe, wasting our C-14Z, in fact.
CaseyL
Private industry wants profitability. Today’s private industry wants profitability now.
While you’re researching the history of the Internet, take a look at how long it took to become ‘profitable.’
ImJohnGalt
I just don’t understand. If I hold a certain belief about something (Internet invented by Xerox, Plan B is a morning after abortion pill), and someone has made an assertion to the contrary, my first reaction isn’t to blindly assert my belief anyway without doing some rudimentary research. Granted, I’m a EE, but I don’t think you exactly need to be a rocket scientist to do a basic Google search to check your assumptions before broadcasting your ignorance.
Well, Darrell likes to mock us when we call ourselves the “reality-based community”. Does this give us license to mock your “faith-based” one?
craigie
Fantastic.
Translation: Ok, I was completely and totally wrong. But still, I might be right!
Faith is a lovely, blinding thing.
The Other Steve
The Internet wasn’t invented at Palo Alto, but an important aspect of it was.
Ethernet
The brainchild of Dr. Robert Metcalfe, who took the idea after Xerox said “this is useless” and co-founded 3com.
John Redworth
according to Bush, science should be regulated to making baking soda volcanoes and the styrofoam planets to hang in your room… cool!
The Other Steve
I doubt it. Had the government not gotten involved, we would not have an Internet. We would still have a combination of AOLnet, MSNnet, ProdigyNet, CompuserveNet, etc., etc. Just like the crap we have to put up with today from the cell phone providers.
Corporations don’t naturally decide to work together. They want to lock you in, prevent you from talking to the competition. That’s the natural order of things.
grumpy realist
I wish the “private sector at all costs” fundies would use a half-brain cell’s worth of thinking before spewing out their arguments.
First of all, as everyone points out, basic research has a long lead time. Heck, in some cases it’s taken over 100 years before the technology has developed enough to be a commercial product–look at fuel cells!
Second, a sizable percentage of basic research doesn’t pan out. That’s just the name of the game. I quote dear Albert: “if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.” Get used to it. Scientific breakthroughs can’t be scheduled and can’t be planned.
Third, any country which has its gov’t provide support for basic research is going to have an economic leg up on a country that doesn’t. Can we say comparative advantage?
(Goddamn libertarians. Could you idiots at least please THINK before opening your mouths?!)
ConservativelyLiberal
I am no economist, but I am pretty good at using common sense. The private sector exists for profit purposes. The goal is to enrich one or more people at the top. In some cases, it is at the expense of those at the bottom. I am a realist though, I know it is a tricky balance, but we need jobs and they want to make money.
Like it or not, Americans do like some socialization of the society. Look at electric co-ops, city water works and the price controls/regulation that used to be used for certain segments of the economy.
No, I do not hate capitalism. But I do not blindly support it either. Many of the advances in society have come from public/government investment, not from capitalism. At times, the government has had to step in and save us from raw captialism (child labor laws, workplace safety regulations, fair employment practices and so on) as it was plundering our society to line the pockets of a few (think robber railroad barons, Standard Oil and the like).
How about the drug Tamoxifen (if I have the name right). The government scientists developed an anti-cancer drug from it and capitalists stepped in to profit from it. Same with many other technologies. If we are not careful, the internet will be divvied up next.
Unregulated capitalism is not good for any nation. Again, it is a fine balancing act, and lately I think we have been failing miserably. Our production facilities have been boxed up and shipped overseas with the jobs they provided. We make less and less, and consume more and more. Houses are bought just so the seller can flip them for a quick profit, forcing housing costs ever higher and driving people further into debt.
Our nation has lost its self-sufficency, and if we were cut off from the markets we would be in an almost instant state of crisis. If we do not get our government spending in order and focus on FAIR trade, then we are toast. We can’t compete against labor that will work for pennies and governments who allow rampant pollution in the name of industry. That is not a level playing field. Screw this free trade crap, there is no such thing. It is a pretty sounding phrase that is designed to make those who are against it (as it is currently enshrined) sound like they are against freedom itself. How cute…
If we do not correct our course, we are going to hit the proverbial iceberg. I believe in fair profits for a business, but I do not believe in unrestricted profits for that business. CEO (and upper crust white collar) pay is flat out obscene compared to the pay of the people on whose backs those fat bastards have built their empires.
Every nation who takes the lead role/position on the world stage thinks it is all powerful. Nothing can defeat or compete with them, or so they think. I am sure the Romans felt that way, the same with many other leading nations throughout history. Guess what? They have ALL fallen by the wayside or vanished. Every single one of them. What makes us any different? Why are we impervious?
Sorry for the rant, and thanks for letting me do so. I just think we are in bad shape, and I do not see it getting any better any time soon.
OCSteve
I’d suggest that they make the missions more likely to happen. Manned missions just capture the public’s attention in a way that unmanned missions never will. That makes funding easier to get.
I’d also add that while robots are obviously getting more and more sophisticated, they’ll never replace good old first hand observation.
As far as a moon base goes, we’d better get cracking or we’re going to have to pay a fortune just for the real estate.
RSA
This is probably true, but there’s a coolness factor to robots as well. One of my friends with funding from NASA is working on reconfigurable robots: imagine a robot that’s a bunch of cubes that can be stuck together in different ways, that adapts its locomotion to the terrain and its own configuration. He has some very cool demos in which you can see the “same” robot moving like a snake (cubes in a single line), like a lizard (a five-point configuration), like a crippled something-or-other (a three-point configuration), and so forth. There’s a sort of NASA grand challenge, much more interesting than the DARPA grand challenges, that could potentially capture the public’s imagination. Robots aren’t just boxes on wheels any more.
Faux News
Hope springs eternal, but never underestimate the sheer ignorance of Jimmy Mack and his ilk.
Tim F.
OCSteve,
Let’s see if I can name the robots that have already explored Mars – Viking…Pathfinder…Sojourner…Spirit…Opportunity. Then there are the robots that failed en route, including Beagle and numerous Russian attempts. It seems to me that robotic missions to Mars scarcely need human cargo to go forward.
In fact just the reverse is true. If we had to wait for a manned mission before dispatching robots then the robots would have to wait a long, long time. There is the small problem that we simply can’t launch a manned spacecraft to Mars. When you add up the weight of equipment needed to house astronauts and their lander for the multiyear round trip plus the fuel to get them there (and back) you get a number that we simply cannot lift off this Earth, and we won’t get there soon. Propulsion tech doesn’t advance like microprocessors; in that regard the headlong technological revolution of the last 50 years can be a little misleading.
Then there is the problem of cosmic rays. Astrophysicists are more or less certain that any astronaut who spends years in an unshielded spacecraft will come back sterile at best, and more likely dead. Since proper shielding would take a foot of lead, a thick mantle of water or an ozone layer I don’t see that hurdle being crossed any time soon either.
Study the feasibility of manned missions, fine. In the meantime the important work will go on being done by robots.
Zifnab
Too much Sci-Fi and not enough common sense have lead a number of people into believing that Mars is the next great real estate market. Thus, “Putting a man on Mars” is really just the first step in colonization, which is the true goal of Martian exploration.
So far, I just don’t see the advantage to putting boats on Martian soil. Aside from the fact that we can’t seem to put rockets up in the air without a fair chance the explode before making a round trip, there is a limit to how much money I really do want NASA to spend just to show off the size of America’s space penis.
We’re not even finished with the ISS. Let’s stay focused.
Krista
Basing scientific research on market demands is a horrible idea. If it were all for profit, you’d have every scientific facility in the country working on a better Viagra and a better diet pill. Medications for rarer conditions would be left in the lurch, because it wouldn’t be financially viable.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — the health of a country’s citizens cannot be left up to those whose main motivation is profit.
The Other Steve
Back to the research argument.
See, I look at it differently. You look at the internet, and while there was some government funding, the end result was a economic blockbuster. It’s like spending $1 to make $1,000.
I see much govt research in the same way. No company will do it because it costs too much with little gain, but once done a whole economy can spring around the concept, benefiting many companies.
Zifnab
And on that note – private business handling all research – I’m left wondering what exactly the roll of Universities are supposed to be?
It’s the institutions of higher learning that receive a great deal of our research spending. In many ways Pell Grants and tuition subsidies are themselves forms of research grants. If Universities were to focus solely on the Corporate Agenda, who would be researching String Theory? Who would be studying environmental sciences?
Then you only have to take a look sideways at the CEI and the Discovery Institute to get a good look at the very negative consequences of privately funded “research”. Imagine the smoking industry in charge of cancer research. Or the oil industry handling all energy sciences. What a nightmare.
OCSteve
That’s a good point. But where is the incentive to develop more efficient propulsion systems if we don’t strive to leave orbit? Ditto with your point about shielding. Think of all the things that would not have been invented or improved if not for the desire to send men to the moon and bring them back safe.
And I don’t see a lot of public support for returning to the moon (old news) unless it is as a stepping stone to Mars.
BTW – I wouldn’t say manned missions instead of robots, but in addition to. It seems to me that robots should be the vanguard, always out in front, but humans should be following closely behind. While knowledge for the sake of knowledge is great, what is the point of learning about the surface of Mars if we don’t intend to go there?
RSA
The idea comes up pretty often that scientific research ought to be done entirely by industry, rather than through government funding. It just occurred to me that I’ve never seen scientific researchers working in industry (or for that matter, publicly funded researchers) propose this. Pie-in-the-sky libertarianism.
Zifnab
One other thought. Which major corporation would you trust to handle the Manhattan Project?
Punchy
Holy fucking crap…I’ve seen some bullshit before, and then I’ve seen this. Pharmaceutical companies don’t do basic research–THATS what the gov’t does, by and large. They then harvest that background, basic science info to make their drugs.
Your ignorance vis-a-vis the development and acquisition of basic science data and it’s relationship to drug development is beyond stunning.
Jake
In other science news, we may have pissed off the Martians.
Cyrus
I’m in one of the most unscientific fields there is (journalism! /rimshot), so maybe I’m the wrong person to comment on this, but that logic seems flawed. There’s refinements and engineering, and then there’s great leaps forward. Once you have people or things (for a given value of “things”) in Earth orbit, getting to the moon is just refinement as I understand it, just one more step. Once you have them there, getting them back is the next step from there. And so on. But if I understand Tim’s comments upthread correctly, the distance to Mars, and the greater gravity of it, mean you’d need a quantum leap for it.
One selling point I remember reading about NASA is all the unintended side effects it spawned. Velcro, pens that can write upside down, etc. It’s great that those serendipitious benefits popped up, but the thing is, they had nothing to do with actually getting people up and down again, just the logistical problems of living in space. Breakthroughs like that seem to be what you’re talking about, but they would be nibbling around the edges of a manned mission to Mars. As I understand it, the necessary kind of breakthrough is more likely to come from basic research, or applied research in any field at all, as it is from a massive project with a single-minded mission to put a man on Mars by 2020.
I really wish I came here more often not during work. I could happily spend hours Googling and following links at Wikipedia and other sources to figure out if my vague beliefs about the history of the space program — that getting to the moon was a problem of refining existing technology from the start, but getting much further wouldn’t be — were borne out by reality, but I couldn’t get away with that right here at my desk. If I’m lucky, either I’ll remember to do it tomorrow afternoon or some expert will chime in here with links. Hint, hint.
Jimmy Mack
There you go. And I imagine the research behind cost a fraction of what it woudl have cost the federal government to invent such a thing.
Tim F.
How about Ford? Heh.
I think that if you look at places like JPL you will see that propulsion research is cooking. Our unmanned missions have driven some very impressive projects including ion propulsion and weirder stuff like (not kidding) warp drive. The problem is that getting from Earth to orbit takes an explosive force that only good old-fashioned chemical boosters can provide.
Believe me, good minds are working on that problem. Like most people I think that manned interplanetary flight will one day be essential, but that hurdle just remains way, way over our heads for the forseeable future.
Yep, by my understanding that is what it’s for. I have no problem with the idea in principle, only that the NASA has other useful missions that don’t involve a completely unnecessary manned mission to another planet. If NASA seriously committed to that project the funding would more than eat up every other project that NASA has going on. But if NASA doesn’t take them seriously, then why do them? I don’t think the philosophical question of whether we should move people around space is nearly as important as the practical question of what we have to sacrifice in order to do it.
Jimmy Mack
It seems to me that a company could potentially make a lot of money on space tourism. How much would somebody like Donald Trump pay to fly to the moon, or even Mars? Billions, I’d guess. But as long as NASA serves a virtual monopoly, something like that is never going to happen.
ThymeZone
Sorry OC, but … it’s not 1969 any more.
Or even 1979. Or 1989.
When was the last time a manned mission “captured the public’s attention?”
And isn’t it time for NASA, and space advocates in general, to stop using human beings in space as a publicity stunt, when unmanned missions make a great deal more sense and cost a great deal less money?
Wouldn’t a coherent, practical, result-based space policy pretty much rule out most if not all manned space travel right now …. and isn’t that probably why we don’t have one?
demimondian
Um, Jimmy Crack?
Look up “Berkeley Standard Distribution” and “TCP/IP”
ImJohnGalt
There you go?
As though that proves your original point? Ethernet was preceded by (and loosely based on) ALOHAnet, which was developed AT A UNIVERSITY.
The stupid, it burns!
This fact actually proves the opposite of your point. Metcalfe, who developed the Ethernet technology based on his work at Xerox PARC, used TCP/IP as his transport protocol – again, the result of government funded research.
You’re a waste of oxygen.
Krista
Billions.
ImJohnGalt
The hits they just keep on coming.
People will apparently pay $200K a pop
Seriously, why do you even pretend to be curious about this stuff if you won’t do a simple google search for “commercial space travel”?
Jimmy Mack
That’s my point, that a google search for “commercial space travel” will generate few matches because the field has been crowded out by what is essentially a government monopoly in the form of NASA.
ImJohnGalt
Jimmy, please explain to me how NASA is a monopoly. What are the *global* legislative roadblocks to commercializing spaceflight?
If there is a demand for commercial spaceflight, what is preventing the free market from providing it? How does NASA shut out competition?
Seriously, I’d like to hear how you justify your use of the word monopoly.
TenguPhule
I think we can all agree that Jimmy Mack is peeing in the gene pool and needs to be kicked out.
Jimmy Mack
You’re right, I may be going too far. But what if space travel had developed organically, via private enterprise, instead of being funded by taxpayers? Then, I argue, that space travel would be more focused on money-making propositions like space tourism and less on boondoggles like looking for water on Mars.
TenguPhule
Because the startup costs and basic laws of physics have nothing to do with it.
Shorter Jimmy: There is a dense field of stupid and I’m in the middle of it.
TenguPhule
And what if the moon was made of green cheese?
Your stupid burns like bleach.
Basic research is not profitable, so corporations don’t do it. Nothing stops them from ‘space tourism’ except for the costs involved in doing it.
ImJohnGalt
What would be the incentive for any company to do all of the preliminary work required for *feasibility*, much less commercial viability of the space program? Before satellites (Sputnik), before Tang, why do you think any company at all would have invested the dollars?
I can’t believe that you don’t see the way Applied Science works. Government usually funds the basic research (into radiotelecommunications, basic cell research, etc), and when they’ve proven viability or made some basic breakthrough, industry then takes the findings and commercializes them. For a good long time, they did this with no benefit to the government at all (other than whatever taxes the government might make as a result of the commercialization). Now, at least, universities are getting smarter about filing patents and sharing in the proceeds of the fruits of their research.
That’s how it works. If business thought they could make more money by undertaking the basic research themselves, don’t you think they would have done it by now? According to libertarian free-market retards, it would be inevitable, were it true.
Punchy
Tim, your smackdown of this talking point was terrible. Let me try a practical, scientific one:
What in the hell would a moon landing do for a Mars landing? You do NOT use the moon as a “stepping stone”. That would require TWO blast-offs, and as we all know, the biggest weight of a launch vehicle is its fuel. One could not launch enough fuel for a Earth AND Moon blastoff (enough to get to Mars) off the Earth to begin with. And then one would require a THIRD blastoff of Mars, should the mission be round-trip (I think a Mars mission IS do-able, btw, if it’s planned for only one way….ethicists, let’s hear your bitching).
Truth is…there’s absolutely NOTHING about going to the moon for the nth time that has ANY basis, necessity, or scientific importance for a trip to Mars. If it’s to line the pockets of Boeing and Lockheed, then at least be upfront about it. But scientifically, missions to both/either are completely unrelated.
Tim F.
One of you jokers is trying to goad me into profanity. It won’t work.
RSA
This is the second time you’ve raised this idea. As another poster pointed out, we’re talking $200,000 a pop. How much of a market is there for such expensive vacations? Are there any good analogies currently? Do people who buy $200,000 cars buy enough of them, repeatedly, to make more than a blip in any economy, for example?
ImJohnGalt
According to Virgin (remember, Branson is the world’s greatest self-promoter), they’ve already collected 10m in deposits, and have 33,000 registered for a flight. That is (theoretically) $6,600,000,000, assuming everyone registered pays full fare, and that the fare doesn’t drop over time (neither of which is all that fair of an assumption).
This, for the first company to have what is arguably only nominally “commercial space travel”. It’s possible there is a large market, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens when it commercial space flight really gets rolling.
I’m left with the somewhat uncomfortable feeling that long term we’re going to end up with “white flight” that takes the wealthy white folk somewhat further from the hoi polloi than Stamford Connecticut is from the unwashed masses in Manhattan.
grumpy realist
Space tourism isn’t going to really get off the ground until we get a much lower cost to orbit.
Need space elevators. Need longer nanotubes. We’re getting there.
Actually, I predict that what’s going to be holding up the building of a space elevator within a few years is going to be insurance and legal issues, not technical ones. Once we have the material, we could build it for under $20B, which is much less than we’re going to piss away in Iraq this year.
I’m sort of looking forwards to either China or Japan building the thing. Result? Exit US as a space power. And serves us bloody well right.
Jimmy Mack
Space elevator? I’m intrigued.
Zifnab
My god, he’s absolutely right.
demimondian
Tim, Punchy nails it. You don’t use the moon as a stepping stone — you use it as a slingshot. (And if you wonder why *that’s* important, think “Apollo 13”.) You don’t land on it, you use it to throw you out towards the planets.
Tim F.
As I understand it the moon would be useful if it had raw materials that could be turned into the heavy parts of a ship, water or fuel. It makes no sense to set up a moonbase if all we’re going to do is ship things out there prefab. If things can be made there from scratch though, the energy of getting that to Mars would beat the hell out of moving it up from Terra Firma.
That’s how I see it anyhow. It goes without saying that most of that idea involves tech so far over the horizon that, as they say, you or I probably couldn’t distinguish it from magic. But it does take into account some things that will never change – for example, the difference in delta-vee between lifting a kilogram from Houston versus from the Sea of Tranquility.
None of this is meant to defend the current plan. I think that it’s stupid and a colossal waste of resources to boot. Only that one day, when it is either practical or necessary, that is what we probably will do.
Jimmy Mack
Didn’t someone once say that even if the moon were made of pure gold, it would not be economically viable to go to the moon to bring the gold back?
RSA
Interesting, and thanks for looking up the info. Now that I think about it, the hypothetical space tourism market might end up looking like the yacht or more-expensive-boat market, as long as there’s repeat business.
Zifnab
What does it take to put a kilo of mass in orbit?
~link
So unless the value of gold decides to spike rather drastically in the next few years, no it is not.
Punchy
Let’s do some more realistic math….what’s the ship carry? I’m guessing no more than 33 people tops. That’s ONE THOUSAND flights without one crash? With as much stress as the plane will take changing such abrupt altitude differences?
I’m here to predict he’ll pay a gazillion dollars in insurance, Branson’ll get maybe 193 successful flights before he has a near-crash, he’ll then lose about 15K “registered” idiots becuase of it, before causing a score of dirt naps at 90K miles up on flight #255 when the fuselage’s metal buckles and the ship Columbia’s in the mesosphere…
Jimmy Mack
So sending a man to the moon is a boondoggle as far as NASA goes. The only reason to go is for space tourism.
I guess there’s this much we can all agree on: it would be a tremendous waste of money for NASA to send a man to Mars.
Tim F.
That would make sense if the point was to bring it back, spoofy.
TenguPhule
Space tourism is a boondoogle.
Scientific Research ala Hubble and Commercial investments ala Satellites are not.
Zifnab
Face
As opposed to….uh….eating it? Tim, what the hell else could you do on the moon with pure gold? Build a house…maybe….have some kick-ass speaker wire for your Klipschs….surely.
I’m guessing the goal was to rail-road it back to Earth, so as to suddenly drop the cost of wedding bands by a tenth, thus causing everyone to get married and avoiding gay unions, making Evangelicals all wet themselves simultaneously in excitement.
Tim F.
No. He brought up the point in response to the idea that the moon could be used to refine raw materials into products useful for space travel. But since we’re not trying to bring the materials back to Earth, it is an apples to oranges comparison.
Jimmy Mack
What other point would sending men to the moon have? Presumably, robots can conduct all the scientific experiments that we need. From what I’ve heard, the only advantage of humans is that they can “fly” back to earth and bring samples and the like back with them.
Enlighten me: what is the scientific point of manned space travel, except possibly to bring things back from other planets?
Tim F.
You must have me mistaken for someone advocating manned space travel. My only interest in bringing up the moon is to say that if and when we do it that is why it will be involved, not that we ought to do it now or that it will require a manned mission. Considering the capabilities of robotic exploration I see no benefit whatsoever to pushing men and their enclosed habitats around space.
When the time comes that such plans do become relevant, I suspect that invention will have at least one parent in the mix.
Zifnab
Humans could do advanced space construction, building a highly sophisticated device that would be too big to launch as a whole, and too difficult to assemble remotely. See: International Space Station.
Alternately, microgravity has a variety of applications in industry and research.
~link
Such calibrations and experimentation would be much more difficult if we had to use remote devices to perform them. The performance lag of doing anything from earth to space is fairly tedious.
ImJohnGalt
For what it’s worth, count me as another vote for a space elevator. Although I’m revealing my SF geekdom here, I remember reading about it Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Fountains of Paradise”, although I do not believe he was the origin of the idea. [note to self: google it]
I’m a regular subscriber to MIT’s Technology Review (and their great website). I did a quick search of “space elevator”, and what d’ya know? NASA is actually trying to kickstart some research. To wit:
HyperIon
when the shuttle blew up.
RSA
Interesting! But I think this part is pure puffery:
Contra golden-age science fiction, I don’t think much in the way of high-tech physical science gets done in garages these days. Small-scale engineering, sure, but otherwise. . .
Perry Como
Maybe we can mine some red mercury from the moon.
demimondian
There are a number of problems with the space elevator concept. (Beyond the fact that we’re about an order of magnitude away from the tensile strength needed for the main cable. But, hey, what’s a factor of ten; that’s just Michael Moore’s law in action.) The most important of them is that it would take about two weeks to reach geo-synchronous orbit, most of that time spent within the biologically hostile van Allen belts. There are some fundamental physical lower bounds on the weight of shielding required to keep elevator riders alive through that — and they’re pretty big.
Doug H.
Zifnab covered the scientific points, but the larger point was said by a man with better speechwriters than me:
ThymeZone
Well, it was rhetorical bullshit then, and still is now.
It was about showing up the Russians. It was about being macho.
ThymeZone
Piffle. We only lose by giving up. Tell ’em to grab their balls and go. Are we men, or mice?
Zifnab
Queue bad Japanese accent
There is something to be said for a nation of “macho”. And I’m not so humble that I don’t take a great deal of pride in seeing the American Flag on lunar soil.
The Egyptians had the Sphinx, the Romans had the Colusieum, we’ve got NASA.
ThymeZone
Uh, do you have a really powerful telescope, or are you getting Wlagreens prints from your lunarian relatives?
demimondian
After a couple of weeks in the van Allen belts, it’s not going to be easy to tell the difference.
RSA
I am so out of touch that when I first read this quote, I thought, “Jerry Rice?” And then I thought, “Condi Rice?” And then I thought, “I’m a fucking idiot.”
ThymeZone
Snap.
Zifnab
Zifnab’s special secret: I have X-ray vision.
If asked how that lets me see the flag on the moon, my answer is simply SCIENCE!
grumpy realist
Actually, I wouldn’t take bets that we won’t have the requisite material for a space elevator within a few years. Some of the new technology for developing ultra-long nanotubes looks very promising. The question everyone is trying to figure out is whether it’s better to go for ultra-long tubes and weave them together, or modify the surface of nanotubes chemically so they’ll stick better to whatever matrix you’re using. (Right now especially with MWT they just slip out)
I dream of the day I waltz into 3M and convince them to produce 35,000 miles worth of nanotube ribbon. (Moving the bloody sucker will be interesting….)