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Space Government NASA The Almighty Buck United States

Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program? 287

Posted by Soulskill from the some-day-we'll-make-it-to-the-moon dept.
StartsWithABang writes: At its peak — the mid-1960s — the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today? That number is down to 3%, the lowest it's ever been. In an enraging talk at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, John M. Logsdon argued that astronomers, astrophysicists and space scientists should be happy, as a community, that we still get as much funding as we do. Professional scientists do not — and should not — take this lying down.
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Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program? More

Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?

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  • Oh wait, paltry. Damn I already pressed "submit". Sorry guys.

  • Yup (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anrego ( 830717 ) * on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @06:23AM (#48744057)

    Article hits the problem on the head, but doesn't do a great deal to address it, beyond a basic but kinda meaningless "lets show the world what we can do!".

    People perceive these as "troubled times", and unless the space nutters can come up with an actual tangible end benefit (beyond furthering humanities understanding of the universe) I think it's going to remain status quo. Vague statements about technological advances probably won't cut it either. Of the small percentage of people who actually care about general technological advanced, an even smaller percentage are convinced it's best done through dangerous and expensive space programs.

    The moon landing happened because the USA wanted to stick it to Russia's ass. Without a similar concrete end goal, I don't think we'll see much development. Sad as it sounds, I think the best hope is the eventual militarization of space.

    • Vague statements about technological advances probably won't cut it either. Of the small percentage of people who actually care about general technological advanced, an even smaller percentage are convinced it's best done through dangerous and expensive space programs.

      A friend of mine works for a contractor that produces NASA's "Spinoff" publication, which highlights the broad contributions from NASA research and programs: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]. Several of us were ribbing him about how NASA does a pretty bad job of publicizing the publication designed to showcase its public benefits.

    • Given that space telecommunications and weather monitoring are in serious needs of upgrades, zero G crystal growth could lead to far larger and more reliable computer chips, and that highly toxic chemical or the most dangerous biological research are far more safely handled in orbit or on a stable moon base, and given that large solar mirrors are the lowest cost source of low impact renewable energy in the Terawatt range without using a great deal of arable land, I think there are plenty of concrete benefit

      • Given that space telecommunications and weather monitoring are in serious needs of upgrades,

        Upgrading weather monitoring might give more evidence for climate change. Upgrading satellite-based telecommunications might lead to Comcast and its merry fellows to lose their captive audience, and of course better communications means faster spread of ideas, which is a bad thing from the conservative point of view. With Republicans now in control, do you think either of these are likely?

  • As a proportion of the budget... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NicBenjamin ( 2124018 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @06:39AM (#48744109)

    NASA's bound to shrink. Particularly if you start from a baseline of the "mid-60s." Medicare, which takes up a very large and ever-increasing proportion of the budget, was not even passed until '65. Social Security was much less expensive because in the mid-60s most baby Boomers were still in High School. If you add in the recent mania for balancing the budget solely by cutting that pesky non-defense discretionary spending (and nobody actually seriously proposes cutting either a) Social Security, b) Medicare, or c) the Defense Department), there is absolutely no way NASA's getting a $5 Billion a year budget increase. Given increased partisanship, the fact that the non-Presidential party almost always controls at least one House, that nobody in the other party wants the President to be able to take credit for a moon-shot, and that the American people hear NASA's in the $18 Billion range and think that is a lot of fucking money; the politics of getting increased NASA funding are hideous.

    Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.

    But if that happens it will almost certainly have to be a Republican President, because it's very difficult for Democrats to win the House, and it would have to be a truly great politician with a strong commitment to space exploration because the GOP base is a) more anti-tax then the Dems, b) more anti-deficit then the Dems, and c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle, and d) not that fond of scientists. You'd almost need a couple years of 5% economic growth because that would wipe out the deficit and let the President spend money without pissing off low taxes people or deficit hawks.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by gewalker ( 57809 )

      Maybe looking at percentage of Fed. budget or suchlike is not a good idea at all. How about constant dollars adjusted to 2014 from the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]

      This single highest year was 1966 spending 43.5 billion USD
      By 1970 this had dropped to 23.0 billion
      Bottomed out in 1980 at 14.3 billion
      2013 was at 17.2 billion

      Except for a few peak years at the height of the moon race, NASA budgets have been relatively consistent (usually between 15 and 20 billion 2014 dollars)

      • Exactly. Came here to post just this.

        The reason that the Space Exploration budget is shrinking as a percentage is simply because of the explosion in entitlement spending.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )
      Derision that opposition has the nerve to exist, check. Desire for a one-party system, check. Wants money out of the pockets of the people and into the government, check. I am hearing more and more of these fascist posts these days and it is starting to scare the hell out of me. What is wrong with people who want the voices of dissenters and gadflies silenced?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Malc ( 1751 )

        The moderators seem to want to silence you. Tut tut for encouraging dissent.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )

      c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle,

      Wrong. They give lip service to it, but pork projects abound with th GOP. Especially if it feeds spending/defense etc in their home state.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Malc ( 1751 )

        Or invading third-world countries and occupying them for a decade. The last Republican president did that with two countries. Moronic waste of money that hasn't made the world any safer but has brought death, untold misery and poverty to millions.

      • Well, not exactly lip service. Compared to their counterparts, even though they still spend excessively, Republican congressmen apparently propose far less spending. I can't find the reference, but a few years back I remember a story that compared the average Republican congressman to the average Democrat. The average Democrat was attached to proposed legislation (as in sponsor) with costs something like four times that of the Republican (if passed).
    • Not all repubs are anti-space, Newt had some interesting plans. Our manned space programs started under a Republican, specifically Project Mercury and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower, however, wouldn't even recognize his party today...he was pro Social Security, expanded the government, and even said ": "I have just one purpose ... and that is to build up a strong progressive Republican Party in this country." "Atoms for peace" instead of "bomb the Middle East". If the modern Republican Party still held

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khallow ( 566160 )

      Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.

      "Pay for nice things"? You had your chance in 2009-2011. They paid for a health care train wreck and some faux Keynesian spending. They couldn't muster the political will for any sort of space-oriented funding. Similarly, there's a really good chance you'll get another case of disappointment in 2017-2019 too from the other side of the US political system. If the US government weren't pure shit at spending money, you wouldn't have a problem with low taxes people or deficit hawks. But it is pure shit at spen

  • ROI (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @06:48AM (#48744127) Homepage Journal

    Maybe they should be aware of how much they got back from the investment. Just going to orbit, not landing elsewhere, the impact on everyone's life is all around, from weather/climate prediction to GPSs on phones. And maybe some activities that would have even more impact on our everyday life (zero-g manufacturing/alloys made from captured asteroids?) need more funds to be able to be done. And if well things in the space could give obvious returns, reaching other planets could get us unexpected yet (or only suspected) benefits.

    Landing elsewhere and planting a flag is nice as a symbol, but things that have economic return may sustain a complex space program a bit better.

    Of course, there are things that may end having infinite ROI, if by standing there we could avoid the end of mankind (detecting threats and avoiding them, or at least having a backup copy elsewhere). Delaying it till is too late will be much more expensive than doing it now.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @07:02AM (#48744155)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gmuslera ( 3436 )
        Not sure whats new will come, what new technologies will be enabled, what new discoveries will be made, whatever that comes from this that will be integral part of our future lives. But we know the past, the ROI of what already invested is still coming. That is the math that should be used, including the big part of it that impacted defense. How would be the world without any of it?

      • It is because research can never prove what the ROI will be.

        That's not really true. You can look at a research lab and measure the ROI retrospectively quite easily and use this to make forward looking decisions, and that's what a lot of companies do. They'll close research labs that haven't produced anything useful in the last 5-10 years, but they'll increase funding to ones that have.

        Google is one of the few companies that invests in products that might become useless.

        No it isn't, it's just one of the few that labels them products and trumpets them in the press. Apple is about the only tech company that spends less on blue-sky research than Googl

        • Re:ROI (Score:5, Insightful)

          by FireFury03 ( 653718 ) <slashdot&nexusuk,org> on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @09:34AM (#48744635) Homepage

          That's not really true. You can look at a research lab and measure the ROI retrospectively quite easily and use this to make forward looking decisions, and that's what a lot of companies do. They'll close research labs that haven't produced anything useful in the last 5-10 years, but they'll increase funding to ones that have.

          And what about research that takes longer than 5-10 years to come to fruition (which actually isn't very long)?

          Lets take fusion research as an example - that has spent decades sucking money out of governments and has produced very little return on that investment. It may never produce much return. But if we ever do crack fusion for commercial power generation, that would be a serious game changer - probably a big enough return to justify a couple of hundred years of otherwise fruitless investment.

          • Re:ROI (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @10:25AM (#48744901)

            > But if we ever do crack fusion for commercial power generation, that would be a serious game changer

            I'm afraid not, not unless we can fuse plain hydrogen. Deuterium and Tritium are actually quite rare and expensive to refine. (http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/the_trouble_with_tritium) They come mostly from fission sources, which would be far more efficient and economical to use directly: The only source of large enough quantities of deuterium and tritium to support world-wide fusion production is solar sails. And if you've got solar sails that large, they can be used far, far more efficiently as direct solar mirrors.

            The only effective fusion plant available, using plain hydrogen, is the Sun itself.

      • I am curious why so many people have such a negative attitude about the present. There are thousands of companies investing in products that might become useless. In fact, thousands of their products do end up being useless. They just aren't necessarily divisions of some large player.
  • If China were to put a man on the moon, that might be enough. If they also announce that was only the first step to eventually colonizing Mars, for themselves, the rubes would suddenly demand we get there first.
    • And to what end? What was that line from the Stargate SG1 tv series? Oh, yes:

      They said the something about the Apollo program, they brought back moon rocks. You may have noticed we haven't been to the moon in 25 years.

      To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing of value on the moon. Instead, it's full of razor sharp rocks and razor sharp dust. Why would anyone want to live there? Just to wave that flag you planted around every day?

  • If you look at the budget for Research in Software Engineering, which is more important to the economy and has as many scientific challenges, you'll find it's not paltry it's infinitesimal.

    After WWII the country believed Gov't worked and was good for people. We believed that the space program was a response to a Russian threat. We have somewhat the same motivations now, expect that a large number of people believe any money spent by the Gov't is bad. We muster much more money now for big machines becau

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dr. Tom ( 23206 )

      I once heard it estimated that during the same time period as the Apollo Space program, American women spent more on cosmetics than what it cost to put a man on the Moon. Obviously, if women would just give up makeup for 5 or 10 years, we could easily afford to build a Mars base.

  • As a former scientist: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by drolli ( 522659 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @07:14AM (#48744173) Journal

    The labs i worked in spent less than 200kDollar/Year and researcher. In average 10-15 impact points in publications per year for each lab. For the cost of the ISS or a moon shot you could finance my expriments a hunred thousand times over, so i really would appreciate if the decisions are made carefully.

    What i really love to see is automonous systems in orbit, i.e. telescopes. I would thing if you uses the money for the ISS on other things, maybe we would not have to built radiotelecope arrays on earth, but coul put them in space. Instead of rdeaming of a manned mars mission, we should send many probes to other planets and moons.

    The scientific achievement of the rovers on mars (and the comet mission!) are significant beyond anything we could have dreamt of.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "as a former scientist"... I hope your employers made you preview your work before posting it.

    • True to a point, but the knowledge gained from the ISS is nothing to sneeze at either. I do agree that a manned mars mission is a bit silly at this point though, we don't really have the technology yet to make it feasible. More research into alternate energy sources should be where most of the money should be going.

      • True to a point, but the knowledge gained from the ISS is nothing to sneeze at either. I do agree that a manned mars mission is a bit silly at this point though, we don't really have the technology yet to make it feasible. More research into alternate energy sources should be where most of the money should be going.

        I suspect a manned Mars mission will always be "a bit silly" at any point until people start actually doing it. And whilst I can't really point to much tangible return on the investment, "blue skies" project do have a habit of producing some quite unexpected returns.

        To my mind, governments seem to be mostly concerned with themselves at the moment, with nothing to unify those in power towards some common (non-selfish) goal. With the few top-richest people being as rich as they are now I wouldn't be surpris

    • Sometimes I think NASA should give up the SSL and Orion to some type of "privatized coalition" once the system is up and running. At this point, there are other entities that have the capacity to run those programs, freeing NASA up to do more science and less engineering. They should still own a large chunk of course. The best way would be to add up how much the SSL cost in total and then have a new non-profit formed; price the shares to the total costs of the programs transferred to it. Buy-in could be

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mothlos ( 832302 )

      The pro-space camp is a group, I presume, supports evidence-based policy making... except when it comes to their favorite pet projects, then they will concoct any argument they can to convince themselves that their programs have merit.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by phayes ( 202222 )

      Thanks for that! He said a LOT more, including the first details I've seen on a Mars Colonial Transporter or MCT which seems to be a MASSIVE reusable booster capable of 100 tons to Mars Orbit which he will officially announce before the end of the year.

      Back of the envelope calculations appear to get the MCT to about 3x the mass of a Saturn V...

  • Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?

    You've obviously already made up your mind, so why not just state so outright instead of prevaricating with a question?

    • I am outraged because fairness means our $SLICE of the $PIE should be what it was in $YEAR, because my $ARBITRARY $NUMBERS I decided are the $ONE_TRUE_WAY_OF_MEASURING_FAIRNESS.

      It would be nice to have a base of the moon, but it is difficult to know why we need or what we would do with it and getting there and back is dangerous. And going to Mars would be nice, but it has no useful atmosphere and the Martian soil is toxic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by halivar ( 535827 )

      But then you won't click. And the clicks are precioussss yesssss...

  • A manned space flight would inspire a generation of scientists and engineers. Isn't that worth something?

    That's without even counting the scientific knowledge gained from such effort. And without counting the fact that a person on Mars is able to do much more efficiently and quickly the work of remotely-controlled robots.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @09:03AM (#48744463)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I heard that in the 60's we went to the moon. Yet, we haven't gone back since. Why not?

    This is the 21st century. A moon mission is long overdue.

    NASA should have a mission to setup a webcam station on the moon for the public to view the moon for themselves.

    If they could send people and machines to the moon and have radio communication in the 60's, there is no reason in this day and age that they couldn't have a "moon cam" for public viewing.

  • Actually to be honest the size of that pisses me off as....too big.

    Now don't get me wrong, I would love a bigger space program. Hell, if they spent 20% of the military money on the space program I wouldn't mind, but 20% of the non-military discretionary? No wonder this country is so fucked up.....everything including the space program has to fight for the scraps left over after our ridiculously oversized military?

    No way 20% of whats left over should go to NASA. Cut the military and give it to NASA...tripple

  • My ox is being gored!

  • Is this a factor of science spending or, as the summary has to hint around, the fact that it spends SO MUCH on its military?

    In the 60's it was a different situation and getting satellites into the air was a military advantage. And, don't forget, the military is close to NASA.

    Once that advantage was secured / no longer relevant, quite why would they bother to keep dropping money into it? That's the problem you have - science got a boost because military needed it to happen. Once it happened, science took

  • I'll take these calls for funding increases seriously when they work on making existing NASA programs far more efficient than they currently are. As I see it, you already lose an order of magnitude in return on investment when you go NASA rather than with a private party that is actually interested in results and outcome. NASA doesn't get routinely embarrassed only because they spend more than an order of magnitude more than any private competition.

  • I don't know if it is a fair comparison to say 20% of discretionary spending back in the 1960s and only 3% today. It seems like we could possibly be comparing apples and oranges. Maybe a better statistic would be what was spent in the 1960s adjusted for inflation compared to what is spent today. Even that could be more refined and look at the costs only related to research then and now. I would hope that increases in technology make is so fewer researchers can do more than in the past.

    Of course one coul

  • ... to explore in the future, when we have paid our bills. Unless NASA can invent a time machine, Outer Space will still be there when we have the budget under control.

    I don't LIKE saying this. But I tell my kids, space was great, their great grandparents invested in space exploration, but they shouldn't expect space travel anytime soon because the bills are too high. We may not like that we have to pay bills for wars and entitlements, and should be concerned about the exponential growth of "end-of-

  • Our space exploration program is what's going to, eventually, save the human race from extinction when our planet becomes uninhabitable for ANY reason. That's our long-term goal. And it's a worthy one.

    However, we have a lot of other things that could lead to our extinction in the shorter term. Some of that stuff is environmental, yes. But a lot of the problems are social. This istuff that is NOT solved by leaving the planet behind. So going broke on a space program, and leaving other, more immediately

  • Engineering vs intractable problems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @11:55AM (#48745731)

    Whenever this debate comes up I'm reminded of two snippets from the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. In the first episode, there is a pre-meeting to discuss what to present to JFK. The head of the national science advisory, ironically played by Al Franken, scoffs at a manned moon mission saying that all we'd get for our 20 billion dollars are some rocks. Later in the series as they show actual historical footage of man-on-the-street interviews as Apollo 11 is making its landing. There's one beatnik who says, "It's a groovy trip but there are a lot more important things to do first." Usually, those folks spout off about eliminating world hunger or affecting world peace or eliminating poverty. Those things, while noble causes, are wholly intractable problems. Americans have spent trillions on trying to deal with them and all we've gotten are more Ship B people. The dreamers still believe that they can be solved by hiring more Ship B people and creating more government programs. These are not engineering problems that are solved by designing something tangible and making it function. Solving engineering problems has the added benefit of being able to apply the knowledge to other engineering problems. Devoting resources to intractable problems only results in increasing the parasitic economy.

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