Report: NASA is broken and it's up to us to fix it
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This is my takeaway on this: Politicians are a lot like Seagull Management. The swoop in, squawk a lot, crap over everything, and fly on. In my opinion we need a strong space program. We need the technology, aeronautics, engineering, and science that NASA generates, for when it trickles out into other sectors we all win. Just give them a healthy budget that's not a moving target, back off, and let them do their jobs. Great things can happen.
Edit: Quote gaffe. Edit2: added y to heath
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The problems with NASA are the same as the rest of the US government. Too much money in politics means that politicians don't work for the people. They work for the people who pay them. That means nonsensical projects, more wars, and bankers walking away with our money. Until we get money out of politics expect nothing to change. See the Gilded Age for more information.
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Donkey Hotay":1p5tlwgs said:
Thing is, the fundamental research that allows those outside organizations to achieve their goals was performed by NASA and other nation's publically-funded space agencies decades ago.
Without the ability to pursue a goal that is years or decades in advance of the funding required for it (a feat damn few private organizations are willing to achieve, profit margins being as short-sighted as they've become) , manned space flight much in advance of current technology is dead, I am afraid.
Edit: for the U.S., at least
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NASA may have a bloated bureaucracy but at this point and time that is not the issue. It is the fact the the funding keeps getting changed, and projects get canned and started, and it is not always at the whims of NASA. Every time a new administration starts NASA funding and projects get modified. A bunch of that money gets flushed down the toilet, not because it was a failed project, but because someone with little knowledge of what NASA does or could do, or someone who is looking for leverage against someone who does decide to use NASA as a whiffle bat. If they have a bloated bureaucracy it would be because they need to out of self defence.
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NASA was built on the goal of a moon landing, a goal which couldn't be replaced, for primarily political reasons, by either of Kennedy's successors. It's hard to imagine what could fire the imaginations as consistently *and* survive the whims of the next president(s).
Which argues for giving NASA the means to choose its own goals - a position I sadly expect few politicians would support because it cedes power.
[Edit: semantic correction]
Which argues for giving NASA the means to choose its own goals - a position I sadly expect few politicians would support because it cedes power.
[Edit: semantic correction]
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lpeabody":11iz18bh said:
Not everything relates to pop culture.
shibboleth
adjective : a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning
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I've worked on a NASA related project before. NASA is a flashy but dubious entity. It's neat to see us send things into space, but my practical side wonders what we're really getting for our money, compared to shuttering the whole thing. (The horror! No NASA! bleah...) I'm unconvinced that NASA contributes to industry very much (or has historically, even).
If we're going to keep it, it really should drop any claim to modern air travel... That's a largely well understood area that is well handled by non-government bodies. There's no need to fund NASA for air reasons. Just change the acronym to NaSA: National Space Administration. Or, NASA: National Administration of Space Administration, if you prefer, given their penchant for redundancy.
I'd also hesitate to suggest that our international partners are more reliable than we are in funding situations. Could be, but I wonder.
If we're going to keep it, it really should drop any claim to modern air travel... That's a largely well understood area that is well handled by non-government bodies. There's no need to fund NASA for air reasons. Just change the acronym to NaSA: National Space Administration. Or, NASA: National Administration of Space Administration, if you prefer, given their penchant for redundancy.
I'd also hesitate to suggest that our international partners are more reliable than we are in funding situations. Could be, but I wonder.
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Because I'm a bad photographerws3":2gmwcz9p said:
The pic was snapped on the tour bus when my wife & I were at KSC as program guests for the STS-130 launch. The trees and stuff are on the other side of the bus, reflecting off the glass.
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I love NASA and everything they've accomplished over the last few decades, but it is clear things are changing. I begin to wonder if it's time to hand the reigns to a (hopefully) growing private space industry ala Space X, and let NASA be the guiding force behind this transition.
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How in science's name did they get that picture of Curiosity? There's no arm or anything visible that the camera would be mounted on. Did it discover the first extraterrestrial full length mirror?
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Insurgence":3bdl3if0 said:
NASA is partly to blame for this though. They have a tendency to grossly underestimate how much things will cost. JWST is a classic example. What was their original estimate, 1.6 billion? We're now at over 8 billion and counting. You can blame Congress for shifting around priorities, but stuff like this really damages NASA too. Congress feels like they can't trust anything NASA tells them, and once they start a project, they will be pressured to keep throwing good money after bad.
That's why as much as I think Bolden is a clown, I give Obama credit for cancelling Orion. It just had to be done, or it would become another funding black hole.
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NASA is constantly changing direction at the whim of the new Congress/Administration. NASA starts programs, partners with ESA/JAXA/ only then to back out because the funding has been eliminated by a new bauble. I have listened to members of ESA label NASA as an unreliable partner on several programs after the agency backed out leaving them with committed funds and half a program. More and more other space agencies are insisting that NASA be a junior partner because of past cancellations.
The funding problems are due to a dysfunctional relationship between the agency and Congress/The President. Congress won't fund any space exploration that is not within a "perceived cost window". All too often, when a mission is priced out, the price tag is too much to convince the politicians that it is worth the cost. So the mission is "low balled," that is, priced less than the engineering estimates. The mission is then sold to congress and within a few years, overruns begin to happen. So the choice is between low ball with overruns or no mission.
The solution should be misson funding rather than budgeted funding. The mission is priced and and the estimated price is audited by a NASA independent agency. Congress then funds the mission for however long it takes and however much it costs with a multiyear funding allocation.
The funding problems are due to a dysfunctional relationship between the agency and Congress/The President. Congress won't fund any space exploration that is not within a "perceived cost window". All too often, when a mission is priced out, the price tag is too much to convince the politicians that it is worth the cost. So the mission is "low balled," that is, priced less than the engineering estimates. The mission is then sold to congress and within a few years, overruns begin to happen. So the choice is between low ball with overruns or no mission.
The solution should be misson funding rather than budgeted funding. The mission is priced and and the estimated price is audited by a NASA independent agency. Congress then funds the mission for however long it takes and however much it costs with a multiyear funding allocation.
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cdclndc":13hekcgy said:
Why should we give the money to NASA and wait to it to trickle into other (useful) sectors? Why not give the funding directly where it's needed?
Having said this, I actually think NASA deserves more funding. Not because it does anything useful, but because it does something interesting. Interesting trumps useful when all other needs are met.
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NASA was born out of the cold war era. It's a highly secretive organization and always will be. Their public outreach is just an act to keep their public funding. If they dropped their guard a bit, I think you'd see more international partners help out. Instead they're using China as a reason to maintain their budget. The fact that the report doesn't address any of these concerns is a clear sign they intend to keep it as an arms race.
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You guys could always hand over most of NASA to the military and watch the budgets blow up by orders of magnitude.
But then again you could have space marines ;-)
We need another space arms race to kick things along.
But then again you could have space marines ;-)
We need another space arms race to kick things along.
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I've made my views on the manned program plain. But...
If we want a vigorous manned program, then we must set and commit to a goal of permanent settlement and colonization of bodies other than Earth. Every mission (manned and unmanned), every scrap of hardware, every bit of research has to somehow be tied to that goal. There has to be a larger context that people can grasp than just a random mission to the Moon or Mars or an asteroid.
And then you have to sell it as something worth doing, and that's going to be damned hard to do. I'm not convinced it is. Getting wiped out by asteroids? Invest in detection and deflection. Space-based mining? Not cost-effective for anything but the rarest metals, and even then it's iffy. Because it's there?
Please.
Now, if we hadn't spent the last 30-some-odd years redistributing wealth upwards to a privileged few and telling everyone else it's the gummint's fault, we maybe wouldn't be in this mess. Perhaps, if more Americans felt economically secure, we'd be more willing to do stuff like this.
If we want a vigorous manned program, then we must set and commit to a goal of permanent settlement and colonization of bodies other than Earth. Every mission (manned and unmanned), every scrap of hardware, every bit of research has to somehow be tied to that goal. There has to be a larger context that people can grasp than just a random mission to the Moon or Mars or an asteroid.
And then you have to sell it as something worth doing, and that's going to be damned hard to do. I'm not convinced it is. Getting wiped out by asteroids? Invest in detection and deflection. Space-based mining? Not cost-effective for anything but the rarest metals, and even then it's iffy. Because it's there?
Please.
Now, if we hadn't spent the last 30-some-odd years redistributing wealth upwards to a privileged few and telling everyone else it's the gummint's fault, we maybe wouldn't be in this mess. Perhaps, if more Americans felt economically secure, we'd be more willing to do stuff like this.
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tl;dr: NASA is a political football, subject to cancellations, redirections, and gratuitous horse trading depending on the administration and who has power in Congress, who are always working against each other and never for the benefit of NASA's mission.
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Do you honestly think NASA still needs to maintain 18 facilities? I believe there could be some serious gain in consolidating the workforce and facilities.Insurgence":2bian7rw said:
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DSwann":jd33z2qg said:
Congress won't ever allow NASA to do that. Congress allows NASA to continue to exist purely because NASA employs highly paid workers in their respective districts. NASA consolidating it's workforce in order save money and increase efficiency is antithetical to the reason Congress agrees to provide it with funds in the first place.
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BTW, deorbting that fiscal black hole in orbit called ISS would fix almost all of NASA's budgetary problems instantly.
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Private industry has never led costly exploratory ventures with unknown risks and no guaranteed return. We need national agencies like NASA to do the real exploration where man has not gone before (Mars, asteroids, etc) and science-based missions, while Space X and other private companies can perform what should be rudimentary tasks like cargo runs to low Earth orbit (International Space Station, satellites, etc).AaronLeeR":138pe50m said:
Having said that, should NASA have the capability to send astronauts to the ISS? Absolutely. Does this mean that NASA always has to be the one to do it? No, let Space X do the heavy lifting if it's cheaper.
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The technology displayed in the movie "2001- A Space Odyssey" was not a pipe dream. That film was based on where the hired consulting technologists of the film thought the US space program would be around the year 2001.
One Caveat: that was assuming (as Arthur C. Clark proposed) that the space program would be locked in annually to 4-5 % of projected GDP. (And taken out of the hands of the politicians.)
Well, obviously, the purse-string holders in Washington weren't going to stand for that. NASA's budget is now roughly a 10th of that. And declining, btw.
The only thing out of that movie that actually DID come to pass was the iPad. Go figure.
Retiring the shuttle fleet 20-30% into the vehicle design lifetimes of the orbiters was a crime of willful stupidity pushed by OMB and a bunch of two-legged unmentionables in Washington.
"But, but the Shuttle was too expensive!" -they bleated. ...No; they MADE the launches expensive by reducing the flights from the original 50-60 launches/year -to an average of 2.66 per year. Duh!
Internationally, we are known as an unreliable nation of quitters when it comes to seeing big programs through to completion; The SST, SSC, VentureStar, etc., etc.
If I were ESA, I wouldn't team with NASA on a bet. They'll see a project through 80% and then bale. It's an absolute miracle the ISS was ever completed.
Oh, that's right, it wasn't.
As for humans on Mars in 2030. Pfft. That can gets kicked further down the street with each administration. We were supposed to be on Mars in 1983.
One Caveat: that was assuming (as Arthur C. Clark proposed) that the space program would be locked in annually to 4-5 % of projected GDP. (And taken out of the hands of the politicians.)
Well, obviously, the purse-string holders in Washington weren't going to stand for that. NASA's budget is now roughly a 10th of that. And declining, btw.
The only thing out of that movie that actually DID come to pass was the iPad. Go figure.
Retiring the shuttle fleet 20-30% into the vehicle design lifetimes of the orbiters was a crime of willful stupidity pushed by OMB and a bunch of two-legged unmentionables in Washington.
"But, but the Shuttle was too expensive!" -they bleated. ...No; they MADE the launches expensive by reducing the flights from the original 50-60 launches/year -to an average of 2.66 per year. Duh!
Internationally, we are known as an unreliable nation of quitters when it comes to seeing big programs through to completion; The SST, SSC, VentureStar, etc., etc.
If I were ESA, I wouldn't team with NASA on a bet. They'll see a project through 80% and then bale. It's an absolute miracle the ISS was ever completed.
Oh, that's right, it wasn't.
As for humans on Mars in 2030. Pfft. That can gets kicked further down the street with each administration. We were supposed to be on Mars in 1983.
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NASA needs more funding plain and simple. The problem is no President seems to really care for it to give it the funding it deserves. Bush had the most sensible plan in a long time to get to the Moon and then to Mars. Then Obama came around and scrapped the plan and scaled it back but gave it more goals. Land on an asteroid? Who cares about an asteroid. If you want to practice landing on Mars then lets go back to the Moon. We know we can get there and it would help garner interest to land on Mars later!! Seeing a moon landing with modern technology and HD cameras broadcasting back would be incredible and inspire a whole new generation. Right now with no space shuttles and the Russians ferrying the astronauts back and forth from the ISS theres nothing for any American to be excited about.
Lets go to the Moon and then lets go to Mars. NASA needs to focus on beyond earth orbit. Leave that to SpaceX and corporations to take over now.
Lets go to the Moon and then lets go to Mars. NASA needs to focus on beyond earth orbit. Leave that to SpaceX and corporations to take over now.
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Actually, JWST is an example of exactly the problem stated above: NASA was asked what the minimum level of funding was for it, and how much it would cost overall at that level. They came back with a number (as part of a whole study), saying you could fund us for $X million a year, and it will cost $X billion total, or you could fund $X+Y million a year, and we'll get done in less time, but it will still cost more than $X billion. If you fund us for less per year, it will cost more overall, as some of that will have to be wasted putting sections in and out of storage, etc.pusher robot":32n3mn96 said:
Congress then funded them for $X/2. Which, as predicted, meant the total cost was far higher than it would have been otherwise.
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Pubert":33a12i9a said:
The shuttle was never going to fly at that rate. It was far too complex and needed too much maintenance after every flight, and there was no mission or economic reason to support that kind of mission rate. The only reason it was flying at all for the last 15 years of the program was ISS, which is a massive boondoggle in itself.
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From most of the things I've read about manned space flight proposals many do not have compelling reasons to be undertaken. Unmanned missions have made the vast majority of discoveries in our solar system and in our understanding of the universe. Robots explore at a fraction of the cost it would take for humans. Other than repairing satellites for what are humans absolutely NEEDED in space.
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doppio":2r5t8aqu said:
For the same reason that R&D is generally consolidated into a department in larger organisations - reduced overhead.
Centralised R&D has a number of benefits, but one that most people don't think of is the reduced complexity of distributing the discoveries that an entity cannot fully exploit in-house. Imagine you've got a large, cross-discipline, collaborative think-tank. They come up with a hundred ideas a week, and only about ten of them relate to the goals of the organisation. You work on those ten internally, and sell or license the rights to the other ideas (assuming that these are developed sufficiently to be worth something to others) - the group becomes largely self-funded, and the net costs to the organisation to come up with breakthroughs is low enough to justify maintaining the think-tank.
There are two things working at cross-purposes in this model, though. On the positive side we have serendipity - a lot of the time, you make a breakthrough discovery in something completely different to what you were trying to achieve. Having a system in place to monetize these happy coincidences makes the thing a lot more efficient to exploit and the benefits to society spread relatively quickly.
On the negative side we have the law of diminishing returns. In order to make significant breakthroughs these days, the scope of R&D has to be orders of magnitude greater than in the glory days of NASA (1950s and 1960s), and the equipment to make the increasingly-detailed discoveries is more and more expensive, and you have to buy more and more of it, so the costs increase massively year on year.
It's a tricky balancing act, and these things go in cycles: maybe for a decade or two you get fantastic yield from R&D, then for the next 20 years there's nothing. In business, such a department would get its budget slashed to the point where there's no benefit to maintaining it any more - but you lose so much by doing that it's pretty unusual to ever start such a group again. This is where governments are supposed to come in, with long-term vision and the willingness to fund useful endeavours with nebulous, unquantifiable end results. But governments also are accountable to the populace, and the populace is a crazy beast whose understanding of such matters is often rudimentary and whose plans are impulsive (when they exist at all).
As others have already stated, NASA needs to develop a singular goal for each of its specialty areas - but it needs to be able to describe it in ten seconds or less, sell that message to everyone in the US, and then deliver the expected results. Set the expectations low, achieve incremental progress, and regularly (about once a decade) blow people away with a mission that far exceeds expectations. If they can do that, then the funding will always be there. While this sort of activity doesn't qualify as science in the traditional sense, it's how the general population sees the world, and you do what you gotta do to survive.
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Bad Monkey!":3pmyj8ta said:
There was also the fact that they specifically redesigned the program several times to lower development costs knowing full well that they would increase operational costs by doing so (eg., switching to the solid rocket boosters over recoverable liquid rocket boosters). They did succeed in lowering development costs (the development program only had a 20% overrun or so, which is amazing in big aerospace projects), but obviously the development cost bite was a lot higher than they anticipated, particularly since they had a far worse understanding of the relevant technologies than we do today. Hindsight is 20/20, but they did know damn well they were going to make a less economical booster than was theoretically possible at the time.
Bad Monkey!":3pmyj8ta said:
Well, that and the fact that it was the only HSF program the US had before 2001. If Columbia hadn't failed, they were planning on flying the damn things into the 2020s...
Personally, I don't really think I support HSF any more, to any real extent, at least as something that NASA ought to be doing (if SpaceX or Golden Spike wants to spend their money, more power to them). I'm much more interested in and excited by the robotic explorers than human ones, anymore. So I guess NASA could dump HSF after ISS and it wouldn't really bother me...
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I couldn't disagree more. Americans don't like being in second place. While we used to take the lead in so many things, seeing China take the modern lead in manned exploration would set off every competitive alarm in the American psyche.
While Americans currently don't think they have a compelling reason to lead space science and exploration, they will absolutely react with vigor if a country that doesn't celebrate freedom beats them at the game they once owned.
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NASA needs some crowdfunding to get around the political football game. Who else beside me would donate to a NASA Kickstarter project(s)?
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CompleteArsHat":wqurcn68 said:
Okay then, give NASA all the money they want for research, as long as they don't waste it on sending tons of expensive stuff in space...
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siliconaddict":1m0y180x said:
No cash, no Flash Gordon? Hmmm, doesn't have quite the same ring.
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Is the US even number 2 in space at the moment ?
More likely number 3 ?
Russians , ESA, Japan ,China. India is still definitely behind.
ESA and Japan can't do manned launches yet.
Have any South American countries got space programs ? Brasil ?
Any African countries ?
Middle eastern ?
The Saudis could easily afford it.
More likely number 3 ?
Russians , ESA, Japan ,China. India is still definitely behind.
ESA and Japan can't do manned launches yet.
Have any South American countries got space programs ? Brasil ?
Any African countries ?
Middle eastern ?
The Saudis could easily afford it.
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