Actual Costs for the Space Station 780
Cujo writes "This article in space.com discusses what the actual costs of the space station have been since it was first proposed by President Reagan in 1984. Depending on how you account for the cost of shuttle launches, the number is well over $40 billion in the U.S. alone. It begs the question of what else could have been done with the same money and far superior management."
Begging the question (Score:4, Informative)
Educate [skepdic.com] yourself [intrepidsoftware.com] regarding idioms.
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Re:Holy fuck that's a lot of money. (Score:1, Informative)
It takes 2.71 Standard assloads to make a metric assload. (those English are tightasses)
Why the high cost (Score:2, Informative)
The word from the NASA engineers was this: in order to save the space station from getting axed by Congress, work was spread across many NASA sites nationwide. Why? reps wouldn't likely cut a program that provided jobs in their own backyard. Unfortunately, this created a management nightmare that naturally led to cost overruns.
Sure, the project could have been centralized more and run more efficiently... but then funding whould have likely been cut.
Doncha just love this country?!
Let's be rational (Score:4, Informative)
The Russians have been useless in getting any part of it done, so in order to maintain our own timetable and keep expenditures reasonable, we've had to either help them or replace their efforts, so that cadres of NASA employees weren't being bankrolled to sit on their hands waiting for the Russians.
If the ISS weren't so stifled by a lack of support from countries who previously voiced their desire to be involved, then it'd not only have cost us less but have been bigger and more capable of sustaining a maintenance crew AND a scientific staff. Instead, they're limited to a maintenance crew who dabble in science, so the returns have been limited.
Given that we spent almost 1 billion [hartfordadvocate.com] to blow up the dirt in Afghanistan for a month, I think 4 billion a year in space development is only fair.
The only question that remains is could the 4 billion (or for that matter, the 1 billion from the DoD as well) be spent on more important domestic issues, like the economy, healthcare, education, and building Krispy Kreme's in Boston, Mass...
The answer is of course, a resounding yes. I'm sure every teacher in America would like a 100% pay increase. Our kids would be the smartest around and in 15 years, they'd come up with fiscal savings plans to outdo even the tightest of Swiss banks. But the likelihood that something so radical would occur is miniscule, so instead of worrying about where 40 billion dollars over 20 years could have gone, worry about how to get American AIDS victims to give Bill Gates an 8 ft condom instead of the Indians AIDS victims. Get money that doesn't have to funnel through the government into the hands of those causes you find justify their cost. NASA will keep getting top dollar projects along with the DoD for the forseeable future. The short-term goal must lie in monies garnered from someone else's pockets.
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Re:NASA should benchmark other organizations, (Score:3, Informative)
Just not true. See the post below about component-level versus system-level reliability. The shuttle track record puts the individual parts well above the five-9 mark, probably overengineered.
The worst part about the program, though, is the overengineered nature of the design process as a whole. Too much testing, too much debate, too much bureacracy, too many signatures on a design change. These over-efficiencies add up to way more expense than the component manufacturing.
There's another comment below that discusses the need to preserve lives for altruistic as well as political reasons. I would note that every worthwhile exploration in the history of man cost many lives and suffering before the fruits of exploration could be reaped. We need to allow privatized, courageous explorers to risk untimely death if we're going to achieve the kinds of leaps we all write about here.
Re:Holy fuck that's a lot of money. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, I think they would. If their Adjusted Gross Income was more than the unbelievable sum of $26,415 last year, they are in the top 50% (for the US anyway). More [taxfoundation.org]