'NASA's $100 Billion Moon Mission Is Going Nowhere' (bloomberg.com) 45
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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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:2)
One could argue that football should go shortly after the dei crap.
Really? (Score:1)
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I complained about that too.
Every bureaucracy reaches a point where it can no longer succeed in spite of itself.
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what does accountable mean? (Score:1, Troll)
"And the next president should be held accountable for answers."
In what way? And how would that be different than for answers to other questions? And why the next president any more than the current one or previous ones?
This is merely another way to throw pro-republican talking points into the public sphere before an election. Too much waste, too much spending, lather, rinse repeat. I bet the contractors who received that $100 billion don't think it's waste. I bet money given to Michael Bloomberg doesn'
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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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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.)
The Case for Mars (Score:1)
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:3)
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Testing always is done on Earth first. That doesn't make anything proven.
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:2)
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.
Jobs Program (Score:4, 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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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:2)
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.)
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.
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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NASA is a government Agency, so ..... (Score:2)
Agendas for everyone (Score:4, 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.
Two reasons: (Score:4, 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:2)
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
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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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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 pr
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.
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:3)
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.
The real question: (Score:2)
..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
Eric Berger - How to Save Artemis (Score:2)
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.