'NASA's $100 Billion Moon Mission Is Going Nowhere' (bloomberg.com) 94
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety. As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. [...]
A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.
A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.
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Feel free to click on Employees and sign in.
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If only football were threatened rather than marginalized groups.
Don't marginalized groups send us all the best football players?
Economic efficiency (Score:2)
The amount of unproductive GDP sucked out of the economy be spending on government programs is directly related to citizens average wages, citizens ability to buy a house, food, cars, etc.
Since WW2, the entire discussion has been
- We need a BOLD new expensive program to achieve narrative goal X
- We need to microoptomize, add complexity to obscure, and expand overall government spending via baseline budgeting (automatic 4% increase per year without a legislative vote)
- We need to always have a thousand ways
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This is all abstract ideological BS. Its especially useless in response to this article which is advocating a specific government program that should be abandoned. Its the same distraction where politicians talk about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse without any plan to actually accomplish it. Its all talk and no action because most government programs provide services many people want and are willing to pay for and the ones that don't serve some powerful interests who fund campaigns.
It ignores the bigges
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Or you could look at the budget. Every level of government: state, local, and federal, publishes its budget. Its fine if you want to do your own research, but that should come with actually doing your own research, right?
Re: Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
One could argue that football should go shortly after the dei crap.
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But it's ok to cut math, just not football! Chist!
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I complained about that too.
Every bureaucracy reaches a point where it can no longer succeed in spite of itself.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Really? (Score:3)
lol, government transparency, business honesty.
Next youâ(TM)re gonna say we should fund a real Santa clause who will live in the North Pole and come down our chimney every year and eat cookies at everyoneâ(TM)s house.
Corruption is human nature. We are incapable of avoiding it at organizations of substantial size.
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You guys are wrong about the F-35. When and if the day passes that we can build, in quantity, a fighter-attack plane that is CLEARLY superior to anything else on the planet, we are all going to miss it - direly. It's the backbone of air dominance and that is what prevents us from having to face the prospect of a war of attrition like Ukraine is slugging out with Russia today. Even just the F35's already in the hands of our allies in Europe are a big part of why they could handle Russia in a conventional war relatively easily even without our direct assistance, should the political winds blow that way.
Is anybody within thirty years of catching up? If not, fund it in thirty years. In the meantime, spend that budget on funding a standing policy of immediately bombing the s**t out of any country that attacks its neighbor, without exception, no matter what country that might be, be it an enemy or an ally, be it big or small, be it nuclear or non-nuclear, without regards to the consequences. Use our resources to serve as the world's police force, bombing aggressive countries back into the stone age, and br
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standing policy of immediately bombing the s**t out of any country that attacks its neighbor, without exception, no matter what country that might be, be it an enemy or an ally, be it big or small, be it nuclear or non-nuclear, without regards to the consequences.
So when we attacked Serbia, Iraq, Libya and Syria we would bomb ourselves in retaliation? I guess those weren't our neighbors. The consequences of bombing the shit out of Russia would be virtually the same. Because they would bomb the shit our of us and they have more shit to bomb with than we do. But people with that adolescent mentality are currently running the country. They are unwilling to accept that they may still be the "biggest kid on the block" but the other kids are getting tired of being pushed
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standing policy of immediately bombing the s**t out of any country that attacks its neighbor, without exception, no matter what country that might be, be it an enemy or an ally, be it big or small, be it nuclear or non-nuclear, without regards to the consequences.
So when we attacked Serbia, Iraq, Libya and Syria we would bomb ourselves in retaliation?
In a manner of speaking the U.S. was acting like the policemen of the world in those situations, just somewhat incompetently in many cases.
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In a manner of speaking the U.S. was acting like the policemen of the world in those situations, just somewhat incompetently in many cases.
Lets be clear if Russia attacked Israel and claimed it was acting on the basis of its violation of UN resolutions the United States would not accept that rationale. Nor should it.
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You guys are wrong about the F-35. When and if the day passes that we can build, in quantity, a fighter-attack plane that is CLEARLY superior to anything else on the planet, we are all going to miss it - direly. It's the backbone of air dominance and that is what prevents us from having to face the prospect of a war of attrition like Ukraine is slugging out with Russia today. Even just the F35's already in the hands of our allies in Europe are a big part of why they could handle Russia in a conventional war relatively easily even without our direct assistance, should the political winds blow that way.
What? Fat Amy is a shit plane, not only horribly overpriced... we're getting fewer planes because of the awful expense, coming nowhere near a 1-1 replacement ratio for the F-16, but also we're basically gambling a bunch of AMRAAM's not missing when fired from BVR space, because even F-35 pilots admit that they'd be in trouble when it's time for the merge. Fat Amy is an overpriced bomber, not a fighter.
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You do know Bloomberg is a Democrat, right? He also has a history of spouting off on topics he knows nothing about, firearms and how simple farming is being two.
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You do know Bloomberg is a Democrat, right?
Could have fooled me [ny1.com]. Next you'll tell me that Donald Trump is a Republican [npr.org]. [rofl]
In practice, the ultra-wealthy aren't ever Democrats or Republicans. They're for whoever will help them the most.
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In practice, the ultra-wealthy aren't ever Democrats or Republicans. They're for whoever will help them the most.
We'd probably see better outcomes if everyone stopped viewing politics like a team sport, to be fair.
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The Artemis program was grossly mismanaged, but most of the blame should go to congress rather than to the president. (OTOH, the presidents should get a fair share, for going along with the graft quietly.)
That said, *should* there be a line item veto? Clearly the massive "throw all the pork into a must-pass bill" legislative process is severely broken, but how it should be fixed is less clear. (Not that there's any real change of someone attempting to fix it.)
Re:what does accountable mean? (Score:4, Informative)
The Artemis program was grossly mismanaged, but most of the blame should go to congress rather than to the president.
I'd say almost entirely on congress. When I see less than a billion being spent on spacex for multiple missions, and over a hundred billion going to artemis for just one, it reminds me of something... If you've ever heard of the $500 hammer, some people say it's a myth, but it's really not. Sure, overstated, and missing some context, but by and large this happens often in the government. Rockets in particular have a lot of expensive parts that come from very few suppliers that charge an arm and a leg.
Here's a governmentism:
NASA: We need a hammer with X specifications, let's take some bids on it.
Bernie and AOC: It needs to be made with union labor
Defense committees: In that case, let's give General Dynamics a no-bid contract and write it into the next bill because our constituents need jobs
President: Whatever, let's just get it done... *signs bill*
Here's a SpaceXism:
Elon: That costs how much? Screw that, it's basically $5 worth of steel. Let's just figure out how to build our own to the same specs and kick that supplier to the curb.
rsilvergun and drinkypoo: Fuck you Elon! That supplier employs the united brotherhood of hammer smiths guild!
(OTOH, the presidents should get a fair share, for going along with the graft quietly.)
The president can really only sign or veto. He can spend a bit of political capital in shaping it, but ultimately has zero authority over what gets sent to him. If they send him shit, then the best he can do is something like this:
https://twistedsifter.com/2015... [twistedsifter.com]
Honestly people invest way too many of their brain cells into POTUS for no good reason. And when I say no good reason, I mean to say it's just because they want to see their own party in the white house. It's just a load of shit.
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Do unions get attached to government projects, sure, and where do you think they spend the money they earn? It's not in China, if you need a clue. Personally I'd rather someone
The Case for Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
You need to look no further than the 1990s book The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin to see what a shit show NASA is. In their mars proposal to George H W Bush it was so bad that the mars rover and lunar rovers were made by two completely different companies with no reuse of design. The whole thing was full of 1-use equipment with no inter-op.
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That's no issue. If that was talked about in capitalist terms they would just be saying they are competing designs.
There needs to be something proven before saying lets standardise on particular designs.
Re: The Case for Mars (Score:5, Interesting)
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Testing always is done on Earth first. That doesn't make anything proven.
Re: The Case for Mars (Score:2)
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Dev environments never match production exactly. :(
During solar storms, Mars can experience as much as 2 rads per day [phys.org]. That's the equivalent of:
To say that the dev environments don't match production is something of an understatement. There's almost nowhere on Earth that is anywhere near that
Staying in space (Score:2)
I see it not as the next moon mission but rather the next step in construction for living in space.
The moon is the obvious base for it. Both in terms of large low-gravity launch and construction facilities and also for extracting raw building materials.
Re: Staying in space (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes we should go to the moon. But not on the abortion that is Artemis.
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Hey, I'm all for keeping the science missions running too.
However, the big stuff always has overruns. I can't see that ever changing no matter how much hand-ringing happens.
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That was the old cost-plus reality. But at least one company has made the new fixed-price contract thing work out. Others will figure it out.
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Jobs Program (Score:3, Interesting)
The main purpose of NASA is to sound good and take money from average Americans and give it to special interests in the districts of favored Congressmen.
Science is secondary or tertiary.
Bloomberg is very confused, as usual.
It would be cool if Starship could land on the moon but that's not at all clear. Regolith would be blown everywhere. Building a regolith to concrete machine and building a huge landing pad or tower for a Starship would be great.
Bootstrapping is always a feat.
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Relying on SpaceX comes with some risks, particularly if you consider a Space Race with China to be important. SpaceX is already behind NASA's original timeline which had them landing humans on the moon and then returning them to orbit next year. They need to get Starship man-rated, master refuelling in orbit, get to the moon, and then probably demonstrate landing on it and returning to orbit since they intend to do that by novel means.
If they also have to add transporting people to lunar orbit as well, and
Re: Jobs Program (Score:2)
I agree in general that itâ(TM)s risky, and you make a lot of good points. Itâ(TM)s kinda harsh to say âoetheyâ(TM)re behind NASAâ(TM)s scheduleâ though when NASAâ(TM)s schedule was set to give a single year to develop the entire lander because they didnâ(TM)t receive funding for it until it was too late.
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SpaceX claims they could have done the Starship 5 test flight back in August but were delayed by FAA review because of a change in the flight plan. So that's potentially up to 2 months of delays caused by regulatory oversight. At the very least, they've slowed SpaceX's ability to iterate. I think at this point SpaceX has one ship basically ready for flight from the block 1 design (S31), another ship that was under contruction for block 1 that may never be completed because of issues with the flap design
Re:Jobs Program (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, NASA has a ton of people doing amazing technical and scientific work. We're going to frickin' Europa! Even the stuff that's a dead end, I blame management (Congress) much more than anyone at NASA.
As for landing on the Moon's regolith, that's why they're putting the landing rockets way up on the sides of Starship. So the "only" tricky part is making sure the legs are robust enough to handle a dusty, not perfectly flat surface.
Re: Jobs Program (Score:3)
Why would regolith be blown everywhere? The HLS starship design involves mounting moon landing motors 50m above the surface, specifically to avoid that.
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You *do* know that Starship landing on the moon is NASA's official plan for Artemis, right?
Orion is supposed to rendezvous with an uncrewed Starship in lunar orbit, then the crew transfers to Starship and lands in it.
It's idiotic, but it's the Plan Of Record.
(Lunar Starship will have landing engines up near the top, firing at an angle, to avoid "blowing regolith everywhere". Plan Of Record.)
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You *do* know that Starship landing on the moon is NASA's official plan for Artemis, right?
Orion is supposed to rendezvous with an uncrewed Starship in lunar orbit, then the crew transfers to Starship and lands in it.
It's idiotic, but it's the Plan Of Record.
(Lunar Starship will have landing engines up near the top, firing at an angle, to avoid "blowing regolith everywhere". Plan Of Record.)
To be pedantic, that's Starship HLS, which is not the same thing as Starship. The Raptor engines on a Starship capsule would send too much regolith flying [fandom.com]. Starship HLS is a version of Starship modified for moon landings, with a different type of RCS engines with a lower output.
So the original poster is technically correct — the best kind of correct — in saying that Starship would be a disaster, even though the HLS variant of Starship is part of the plan of record for the Artemis moon landing.
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Wrong perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a space program; it's a political pork barrelling program.
The space stuff is what NASA manages to get done despite this.
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This is so true. If we actually funded NASA, and just gave them a budget of appropriate amounts and **kept the budget there year after year** then they'd absolutely be making progress on things. But every year we redo their budget and what they're tasked with doing randomly based on who has a point to prove in congress this year, and are then surprised that nothing gets to the end? Well of course nothing gets completed.
Re:Wrong perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Congress: "Can you get to the Moon again with a budget of [x]?"
NASA: "It's possible"
Congress: "OK, now do it using the following vendors and repurpose their older tech so they don't have to do too much retooling, and ignore that we know they always have ridiculous cost overruns and doing it this way is inefficient."
NASA: "We'll try, but there's almost no way to make that work"
Congress: "You're wasting money and not getting anything done, so we're going to cut your budget and cripple the program... except keep it going anyway so that what's left still goes to those vendors and we get our votes."
NASA: "Fucking politicians..."
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SpaceX cannot do it alone (Score:2)
SpaceX cannot do it alone and it is not.
The plan Mr. Michael R. Bloomberg was always for them to work together.
Michael R. Bloomberg does not even know what the plan is, only the money.
No one is going to the Moon or Mars for a very long time.
Not on Starship and not with with NASA alone.
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"But if you have working Starship"
What exactly is that Mr. Bloomberg?
Its imagination land and thats not money in the pocket.
SpaceX hasnt killed anyone yet, but that's only a matter of time.
We are talking about qualifications and experience here but I digress.
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Bloomberg has a point there with the mission plan. Artemis requires a working Starship as a lander. But if you have working Starship, then SLS, Gateway, and high lunar orbit rendezvous are all unnecessary.
You actually need two working Starship capsules. The Starship HLS capsule is not capable of landing on Earth, because it does not have the heat shielding required to survive reentry. The standard Starship capsule is not safe to land on the Moon, because it does not have the lower-power engines designed to avoid stirring up rocks when landing on the moon, and would likely weigh too much for those engines to land the craft safely on the moon without a significant redesign (more engines higher up on the body
NASA is a government Agency, so ..... (Score:2)
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SpaceX very much needs government contracts and subsidies to keep operating, and let's not forget the government could turn around tomorrow and declare all space launches must go through NASA if they wanted, and SpaceX would be screwed.
Agendas for everyone (Score:5, Interesting)
The "government interferes with everything, we need corporations to save us from inefficiency" story-line has been running for a few decades. It's part of the general campaign by billionaires to squeeze everyone else:
It's probably tempting to think of this in terms of competing economic systems from the 20th century (also a convenient distraction to keep normal people bickering so we don't deal with the real issue), but this is really about the checks and balances that were supposed to ensure citizens rights. Our constitution didn't anticipate the rise of multi-national corporations as a major political force. As a result, the checks and balances that were supposed to keep things working in our favor have been thrown off, and billionaires keep using that imbalance to tilt things further and further in their favor.
This is why Micheal Bloomberg can write an op-end in Boomberg news and we treat it as actually newsworthy. His opinion counts and ours basically don't. It's not a "is government good or bad" problem. It's a checks-and-balances have been thoroughly thrown out of whack problem.
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In a way, we are fortunate that there is a new, dominant private space company with a caricature of a CEO. Instead of New Space quietly amassing power over the next few decades, Musk has done it quickly and very noisily, which means more people will be pressuring the government to guarantee competition and establish accountability.
Re:Agendas for everyone (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why people keep repeating this...
Our constitution didn't anticipate the rise of multi-national corporations as a major political force.
You mean like this one?
https://www.britannica.com/top... [britannica.com]
Yeah they only had a trade monopoly on AN ENTIRE HEMISPHERE 100 years before the Constitution was written.
Or what about this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Though admittedly they turned into Enron about 250 years before Enron was ever heard of, and at a much larger scale. Nevertheless they were the second largest corporation to ever exist, second only to the one linked earlier.
How about this one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The corporations we have today are small potatoes in comparison to the ones that existed 300 years ago.
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I don't know why people keep repeating this...
Our constitution didn't anticipate the rise of multi-national corporations as a major political force.
You mean like this one? ....
Sure. Like those ones. Because it doesn't matter whether or not people knew corporations could become powerful - the design of the constitution doesn't solve the problem. People repeat it because recognizing that corporations are too powerful today is important if we want to get to a solution.
Now you do know why people keep repeating it. Because they want to address the problem, not engage in some variation of a fantasy-football league pitting the Dutch East India Company against Exxon or whatever it is yo
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Some governments actually do do some things well. Most things they do not do well. (How they do do the voodoo that they do do so well, I'm not sure.)
If you have a problem with Bloomberg being an authoritative source, consider that no congressthing gives two shits about what you have to say unless you are a billionaire or run an organization that has millions of either customers or members, or somehow has millions to give them.
So, what Bloomberg has to say is perhaps irrelevant as to technical anything, bu
Two reasons: (Score:5, Interesting)
Two, it’s a jobs program for the space engineers and scientists. Spacex is so cheap because it’s a small number of people accomplishing a big job. A business bro or economist would say to lay everyone else off in the name of efficiency/profit. Fair enough, but that that would put many thousands of extremely highly trained technical people out of work, and the aerospace sector isn’t exactly crawling with alternative jobs. So, they leave the field and find other careers. So far so good. I’m generally not a fan of make-believe work.
Unless we suddenly need those scientists and engineers. Re-training them from scratch would probably cost twice what was spent on the Artemis program. And take a decade or two. Good scientists and engineers are VERY hard to come by. Business bros think everyone is fungible. Not always.
Artemis has been around for 7 years. So, around 10 billion a year. That’s not actually a lot of money compared to other stuff we waste dollars on.
I’m old enough to remember what happened to Russia’s tech when the USSR collapsed. They had a world-class, equal-to-US science and engineering establishment. They yanked the funding, closed most of their labs, and laid off thousands of technical people with decades of knowledge. A lot of them had to drive taxis and work in restaurants to survive while they figured out how to leave the country. Most of them had defense-relevant knowledge. The US got worried that desperate Russian rocket and nuclear scientists were going to move to Pakistan and start making bombs. So, we coughed up the $$$ to fly over there and recruit thousands of them to the US. We created jobs for them in our labs.
It took them two generations to build a world-class science and engineering ecosystem, and all it took was 5 years of neglect to kill it. Russian science and engineering never recovered.
Do you really want to lay off several thousand people who could potentially design and build ICBMs? China would welcome them with open arms. If we want to re-purpose them because we trust that spacex is stable and successful, fine with me. But that won’t save money unless we eliminate their jobs and lay them off, which is a colossally bad idea.
Better Ways to Achieve It (Score:3)
One, it’s an insurance policy just in case spacex collapses.
Really? That would be like keeping horses and carts around at the turn of the last century in case Ford collapses. A far better insurance policy would be partnering with companies, like SpaceX, who clearly have technology well beyond what NASA has. That way they are less likely to collapse and, if they do, you already have experience with the technnology and can buy it up and develop it yourself.
Two, it’s a jobs program for the space engineers and scientists.
Your point is a good one but it can be implemented far more efficiently. If you took the $100 billion and simpl
Re:Better Ways to Achieve It (Score:5, Insightful)
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Artemis uses shuttle solid rocket boosters, which are made by Northrop Grumman. They also make solid rocket boosters known as the Minuteman and Trident missiles that don't get ordered much these days, but might become in high demand again at some point.
NASA's apparent penchant for very expensive rockets isn't just a jobs program, it's a quiet way of keeping the actual factories going too.
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Those factories are being kept plenty busy by the upgrade from Minuteman to Sentinel [sentinelmission.org], so there is no need to give them make work.
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NASAs use of military contractors to build expensive rockets isn't a new thing.
Re:Two reasons: (Score:4, Insightful)
Two, it’s a jobs program for the space engineers and scientists. Spacex is so cheap because it’s a small number of people accomplishing a big job. A business bro or economist would say to lay everyone else off in the name of efficiency/profit. Fair enough, but that that would put many thousands of extremely highly trained technical people out of work, and the aerospace sector isn’t exactly crawling with alternative jobs. So, they leave the field and find other careers. So far so good. I’m generally not a fan of make-believe work. Unless we suddenly need those scientists and engineers. Re-training them from scratch would probably cost twice what was spent on the Artemis program. And take a decade or two. Good scientists and engineers are VERY hard to come by. Business bros think everyone is fungible. Not always.
This. SO much this. I have been extremely lucky in my career in that I found myself, through sheer luck, employed by a company that has a huge R&D component to it. The jobs that I got and training the I received in doing those jobs is indispensable and teaches you how to actually accomplish things, how to take calculated risks and how to deal with failure. And, more importantly, how NOT to deal with failure. Because if your doing anything important that is pushing the boundaries of what has been done previously, your going to fail now and then. And instead of looking around and trying to find someone to blame, you look around and get to work finding how to fix the problem.
But yes. Supporting programs such as this creates a huge pool of extremely qualified scientists and engineers that can be put to immediate use for projects/objectives not even dreamed up yet.
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Two, it’s a jobs program for the space engineers and scientists. Spacex is so cheap because it’s a small number of people accomplishing a big job. A business bro or economist would say to lay everyone else off in the name of efficiency/profit. Fair enough, but that that would put many thousands of extremely highly trained technical people out of work, and the aerospace sector isn’t exactly crawling with alternative jobs. So, they leave the field and find other careers. So far so good. I’m generally not a fan of make-believe work. Unless we suddenly need those scientists and engineers. Re-training them from scratch would probably cost twice what was spent on the Artemis program. And take a decade or two. Good scientists and engineers are VERY hard to come by. Business bros think everyone is fungible. Not always.
This. SO much this. I have been extremely lucky in my career in that I found myself, through sheer luck, employed by a company that has a huge R&D component to it. The jobs that I got and training the I received in doing those jobs is indispensable and teaches you how to actually accomplish things, how to take calculated risks and how to deal with failure. And, more importantly, how NOT to deal with failure. Because if your doing anything important that is pushing the boundaries of what has been done previously, your going to fail now and then. And instead of looking around and trying to find someone to blame, you look around and get to work finding how to fix the problem.
But yes. Supporting programs such as this creates a huge pool of extremely qualified scientists and engineers that can be put to immediate use for projects/objectives not even dreamed up yet.
The problem is, we have lots of projects we can dream up, but we can't have those people work on them, because they're wasting their time designing Block 1B that will carry only half of Starship's payload at a much higher cost, and the latter is available today, while the former isn't expected to be ready until 2027.
A jobs program would be fine if there weren't useful tasks that aerospace engineers could be doing, but there are Mars habitats to be designed, orbital refueling depots to be designed, habitat a
What about Musk? (Score:2)
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Democrats are certainly going to sideline him
The Democrats have held the Executive for 4 years, and had a trifecta during the 117th Congress while continuing to award contracts to SpaceX, but subsidize Tesla as well. Don't invent false excuses for scumbags. Musk's shift to open pro-Nazi is his own decision, not one somehow "forced" on him.
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You're looking for reasoning? It's the same reasoning as when he said "funding secured" when he didn't have any, or when he called a man trying save children trapped in a cave "pedo guy" for no reason other than personal pique.
Musk just says stuff because he wants to. There's no real point in assuming there's some link to truth buried in his words - in fact, it's probably safer to assume it's just more of his verbal diarrhea.
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The good news is that unlike someone else whom that description resembles, we don't have to worry about Musk running for President.
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BTW why has Musk so firmly shifted Republican
The switch happened around the time Ds in California wouldn't let him keep his factory open (due to COVID). Trump supported Musk [latimes.com], the dems turned against Musk, and Musk turned to the R team.
Time to ditch Boeing... (Score:2)
Given how badly the whole thing has been screwed up by Boeing, its time to ditch them completely and give all that money to whichever of the new-generation competitors to SpaceX is the most likely to be able to produce the "alternative option" that NASA says they need,
Space is (still) hard (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of criticism can be leveled at NASA but Michael Bloomberg is not the most eminent space expert there is.
Gateway is not just there to go to the Moon, it's to get to Deep Space (well, at least Mars). On a side, orbiting the Moon is likely safer than orbiting Earth at LEO (space debris, anyone).
The US government does not want a sole source provider (SpaceX). We can certainly talk about SLS, Block 1B, ML-2 here.
NASA is an interesting agency. Lots of smart people there, but still a bureaucracy. People really like working there (more than basically any other government entity). But bureaucracies tend to allow the meek to hide and can easily stifle the bold. Let's also not forget that the politicians burden NASA with more than they can handle for the money all the time.
One of NASA's problems is undoubtedly accountability and their risk culture (of course, they screwed up with the shuttle, where a lot of this comes from). It's hard to move stuff forward within NASA, common sense does not necessarily apply, and there is too much bureaucracy and not enough (1970's) spirit left. Which is what SpaceX captured But that spirit also gets beaten out of you when failure is not an option. And space remains hard. Just ask all those commercial enterprises that sell the fact that their lander did not completely disintegrate on impact as successful landing. They will succeed, but it ain't easy.
I have never been a big fan of the manned program precisely because of the reason Bloomberg gripes about: cost. Cost / benefit, if you must. However, there are things that can and/or should be done on the Moon, and there are things where sending people is the right answer right now. For example, establish lunar based to assemble large radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon. As long as in situ humans can react to changing circumstances better than in situ robots, that may remain the case. And there are things worthwhile doing that can only be done on the Moon for the forseeable future.
Re: (Score:2)
The US government does not want a sole source provider (SpaceX). We can certainly talk about SLS, Block 1B, ML-2 here.
So fund someone else to design something that can compete with what SpaceX is doing instead of funding someone else to design something that can't possibly compete with what SpaceX is doing.
Having a second provider isn't the problem. Having a second provider that is going to deliver a non-reusable launch system that can carry 38 metric tons to Mars for $2.5 billion when the first provider is delivering a potentially reusable launch system that can carry up to 100 metric tons to Mars for under $100 million,
The real question: (Score:3)
..as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.
That's not the question the average taxpayer asks about this subject; the question they ask is: "why are we spending ANY money at all throwing rockets into space, when we SHOULD be spending it on people here on Earth in the United States?" -- which, by the way, is the question they always ask.
They also ask the same question about spending ANY money that goes outside the U.S.
I and others believe that space exploration and development of space-based technologies is vital, but no one ever said it was 'cost effective', it's expensive.
That being said: I agree that there must be money being wasted right now and things should be streamlined.
I also think that inevitably the space industry must largely turned over to the private sector -- with one caveat: if it's going to be 'profit above all else', then space industry will, for all intents and purposes that matter, go nowhere, because it's just not profitable, not at this point in time at least.
We do need to go back to the Moon, however. We need to build a permanent human presence there, and move towards a permanent, self-sustaining colony there, and we need to do it before some country like China does so, because if we allow that to happen, then some country like China will be the ones dictating how the Moon is used by humans, and I can't see that as being a good thing for the rest of our species. The Moon will, I think, become a 'jumping-off' point for the rest of our solar system, therefore whoever is writing the rules for the Moon is going to have a huge influence over how the rest happens.
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I also think that inevitably the space industry must largely turned over to the private sector -- with one caveat: if it's going to be 'profit above all else', then space industry will, for all intents and purposes that matter, go nowhere, because it's just not profitable, not at this point in time at least.
On the contrary, SpaceX built a series of rockets because it was way more cost effective than using what was out there to launch their Starlink constellation. They're quite profitable, and they have the potential to be incredibly profitable with Starlink. The fact that it can also be used to build Elon's Mars colony or a lunar base is largely a happy coincidence.
I'm being slightly sarcastic here, in that Mars was always one of Musk's goals, but he pretty clearly came up with a way to make reaching that go
Eric Berger - How to Save Artemis (Score:5, Interesting)
TL;DR:
* Cancel the Lunar Gateway
* Cancel the Block 1B upgrade of the SLS rocket
* Designate Centaur V as the new upper stage for the SLS rocket.
How the space argument has changed! (Score:3)
I remember the Apollo-era argument that because space programs were so costly that only major-country national governments could afford them, the "priorities" argument would make space programs unaffordable forever. We would never return to the Moon, let alone anywhere else in the solar system. What nobody questioned at teh time was whether there was alternative to the cost-plus military test and build paradigm.
Now that DD Harriman lives, and has brought costs down with private innovation and the Silicon Valley build-and-test model, the whole argument has become: is the military procurement model still applicable to anything today, let alone space programs?
NASA's job should be science, not delivery (Score:2)
SpaceX can do the delivery jobs. It's become a commodity.
Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs — including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids — as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget.
It's a jobs program (Score:2)
The SLS and Artemis are jobs programs. They they funnel money to domestic manufacturing, engineering, and science. I don't think anyone in Congress is too concerned if it gets off the ground or not.
In a competitive market some will lose (Score:2)
and NASA may end up the loser. This is trial-and-error using market-driven approaches. Musk et. al. believe they can make space profitable beyond scientific sample gathering. How exactly, nobody knows yet. They might be wrong, but the mega-rich want to take the gamble; it's not any more foolish than nuclear-powered AI [nytimes.com]; and if we can surf off plutocrat gables, that's good!...I think. The crystal balls are working overtime on this. Shit does happen, so enjoy market-driven joy ride roller coaster.
It's fun to w
Did Elon write this? (Score:1)