Chris Kraft Talks About The Decline of NASA 262
schwit1 writes in with a link to a recent interview with Chris Kraft, founder of Mission Control, discussing the impracticality of the SLS, and why the best and brightest are slowing leaving NASA. From the article: "The problem with the SLS is that it's so big that makes it very expensive. It's very expensive to design, it's very expensive to develop. When they actually begin to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They're going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up. Then there are the operating costs of that beast, which will eat NASA alive if they get there. ... You go talk to the guys who were doing Constellation (NASA's now-scuttled plan to return to the moon), and the reason they came to NASA was to go back to the moon. They're all leaving now. The leaders are leaving for a lot of other reasons also, but they're leaving because there's no future that they want to be involved in. And that's unfortunate."
Can't fund NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't you hear? There are brown people on the other side of the world!
We need to invest in killing them before they kill each other, because if they kill each other and we don't save them from killing each other by killing them then
And we've also got to invest in storing everyone's email, because
And, you know, the IRS needs to buy more ammo so they're ready to
Did I mention they're Muslim? The brown people!
Doesn't surprise me at all (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, I'm surprised this didn't happen a lot sooner. The way the politicos screw around with NASA's budget and direction year after year, how is NASA supposed to get anything done? One can only take so much before you throw your hands up in the air and say "screw this".
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't surprise me at all (Score:4, Insightful)
They should start working towards building better space stations that have artificial gravity, radiation shielding and all the stuff that makes it possible to actually live in space, rather than die faster than normal.
Talking about sending humans to Mars without doing this first is like trying to jump far before even being able to stand.
Re:But but but...... (Score:5, Insightful)
The government provides the mission and funding, the private sector does what it does best.
Bribe senators & congressmen for contracts, inflate the costs to double or triple original estimates, deliver 20 years after spec while milking every dollar they can from the government? So, you want to turn NASA into the Defense Industry II?
Re:nasa as an institution: it hasnt evolved. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironic that this spin-authored piece claims that NASA was "just about propaganda".
Each of the points made here could have been written by a TASS staff writer. Not sure if tendentious, or just ignorant?
"...Nasa (was to) advance american scientific achievements and progress in the face of a scientific juggarnaut (sic) (the Soviets)..." Yes, the Soviets had the lead in space in just about every category one could imagine...in the 1960s. And since then (really, even then) Russia has turned into a barely-first-world country?
"... almost every commercial satellite, from Iridium to XM, has been launched by a former soviet launch site...(and/or on Soviet/Russian hardware)" This would be because NASA has been nearly SHUT DOWN since the Columbia crash in 2003.
To compare US (private) space business to Russia's is laughable. Why does Russia even have a allegedly-commercial launch system? Because the Russian government imploded and some opportunist pretty much found it sitting there with the keys in it. This wasn't a "policy choice" any more than a car crash is. The reason the Russian system is commercialized is because IT HAD TO BE to continue functioning.
Arguably, such would be a healthier future for NASA as well (privatization). But it's one thing to completely inherit a space program cost-free, and another thing to build one from scratch.
To point out the health of the Soviet/Russian launch organizations today vs NASA is as shallow (and misleading) as asking "why are all the German factories and infrastructure so much newer than the US's?". I'm not sure a lot of people would argue that what Germany went through in 1945 was worth it to have a more advanced industrial infrastructure today?
I wouldn't even disagree with some of your criticisms that NASA is overpolitical, schizoid, and overexpensive (although the "Jesus" comment is...bizarre?). Then again, I'd ask how many Russian programs have gone past Earth orbit lately? Meanwhile a massive, magnificent orbiter continues to generate terrific data from Saturn, probes are all over, and NASA rovers are trundling all over and above Mars. Heck, a US-private launched satellite is leaving an entirely new launch site in Virginia headed for the moon this week.
50 years ago THE SOVIETS 'did science'. 40-30-20-10 they were busy trying not to become a 3rd world country. Congrats? Your mom certainly used to be the prettiest decades ago, but now she just invites strange men to stay overnight so she can pay the electrical bill.
Re:But but but...... (Score:4, Insightful)
Neil deGrasse Tyson says only the government can do Space.
NdGT is neither a politician or a businessman. He's a wonderful speaker and an astrophysicist.
Its an error to attribute to him greater insight than those bring. (And, FWIW, I'm a BIG fan of his... but his statements there start tiptoeing pretty close to the line where really smart and successful people in one field start thinking that holds true in others.)
Re:But but but...... (Score:4, Insightful)
Also the sort of games you describe were the direct cause of the Challenger disaster - a part introduced due to a design change to spread around the pork failed and killed seven.
Re:Can't fund NASA (Score:3, Insightful)
There are brown people on the other side of the world!
Brown people, pfft. that's nothing. We've got dangerous middle and lower classes right here at home. Things were fine for a while but they began to be a serious problem in the 16th century and by the 1700's, they'd become a big enough threat that we actually lost France and the most important of the Colonies. Fortunately, they've completely fallen for the "parliamentary system" that we (at least "officially") have replaced ourselves with; most of them tend to be too dumb to realize that their "elected representatives" are our frontmen.
Nonetheless, this wasn't a scourge we could stamp out overnight; long-term planning was in order. We've finally stripped them of their wealth and weapons (plans that required over a hundreds years) and we periodically send vast numbers of them against each other to cull the most dangerous ones (and generally just keep them off-balance).
True, we actually had our own data network used against us (we didn't see that coming); they used it to share with each other what they know about us and that was a bit more than we'd realized. We had to institute some rather unprecendented damage control (including admitting the existence of some of our organizations while redirecting attention elsewhere) but we now fully control the network and don't anticipate any additional problems; in fact, we now know everything about each and everyone one of them.
Re:But but but...... (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize that the rockets and the moon landers were built with government, i.e., NASA, money, don't you? Do you think Rockwell, Boeing, North American, Grumman, or the myriad other contractors would have built the things they did without the fire hose of money coming from Kennedy's space program? There certainly were things built that had other, commercial use that might have been funded and built anyway, maybe, but most of that technology had a single purpose and probably would never have be funded internally.