This is sometimes seen as wasteful, on the surface, but there are very real benefits to doing things like this, even when it is much more expensive than alternatives:
1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability
2. having backup launch capability
3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US
4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech
5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US
These are all generally good for furthering science and technology, and our economy, but it is critical in times of war (and as a deterrent to war)
The romantic nature of space is definitely the best way to sell these programs, but there are much more pragmatic reasons to be doing them.
A particularly salient example in light of Russia's war is that Congress repeatedly underfunded the Commercial Crew Program in favor of over-funding SLS, while we were trying to wean off Russian dependence.
But this is far from the only case. We could have had redundancy in Artemis by designing for commercial lift; half the money split between three providers would have given a lot more lift and a lot better cadence than SLS. We could seek out redundancy for SLS now, by buying rockets Artemis already requires, modified for SLS' flight profile, and spending a tiny fraction on, say, ULA and Blue's rockets.
We would have more backup launch capabilities, and more relevant talent, and more institutional knowledge, if we just invested the money in open-market demand for products, rather than supporting and endorsing monopoly-making. Was Congress more up in arms over Starship HLS, or ULA EELV? Think what it says to the market when a government is more willing to give money to a company for forming a monopoly and to penalize them for flying commercial payloads, than in purchase of a product.
The motivations for these programs aren't actually grounded in the betterment of the industry, nor of the US' launch capabilities in general. There is no way ~$100B on SLS/Orion is a sane allocation of money for that.
And private aerospace has highly monopolized themselves -- there's a reason there's so many hyphenated company names in this space. Consolidation is the natural evolution of large private companies in industries with high barriers to entry. The only mechanism we have to counter that is public spending that intentionally props up smaller players. SpaceX would already be out of business if it weren't for the US government swooping in to save the day. They didn't have a viable commercial business until later.
This is the major accomplishment of the ISS program. So what does NASA do? Decide (or be told to decide), "oh no, we need a launcher that can lift much bigger things, because OF COURSE we can't put smaller modules together in space."
The simplest way to understand if society wants something is if it will pay for it.
> the idea of access to space being solely the preserve of commercial entities is an uncomfortable one
It shouldn't be. Until SpaceX, the only way to the ISS was a Russian-controlled system. Would you prefer that to SpaceX today? Or is it better to have companies - that are regulated - follow money rather than the whims of whomever is currently in charge?
That’s society’s preferences weighted by how good each person is at making money, but it doesn’t represent society as a whole. If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences.
They don't get that through the government. A mostly binary choice comprising of what two sides promise to do on a thousand issues? How is that anything close to the perfect accessible system you're positing?
why?
I realize how dangerous/potentially harmful a "taxpayer contribution === influence" is. But I think it doesn't have to be a binary. Perhaps a "three house" style system would be an improvement for representative democracy here:
One house for representatives of each state One house for representatives of vote by population One house for representatives of taxpayers by net tax burden carried
As for having reps of taxpayers by net tax burden, what the hell does "net tax burden" mean? Tesla is useless without roads. Boeing is useless without airports. How do we apportion the tax paid against benefits received?
It's nonsense that "taxpayers" are worthy of further representation than any other citizen. The fact that corporations pay tax should not give them rights to representation in the legislature. Unless you think of corporations as one way to "represent taxpayers by net tax burden" because they are a collection of taxpayers.
Thats called aristocracy.
Because as a society, we decided long ago that everyone should be treated as equally as possible.
We don't throw people into the garbage dump because they're not as good at certain things as others.
We've encoded this into our laws, our norms, our education, and our society as a whole. We've even fought world wars because of it.
That you could even ask the question makes me think that you're just being provocative.
That we have a progressive instead of flat personal tax rate system shows this is a pretty lie.
The fact that people have got to the point of personal selfishness that they think that only "money talks" is a measure of their societal contribution is a sad indictment of the past 30-40 years of Thatcher/Reaganite nonsense.
The purpose of money is to aid in trade and that very creation and distribution of wealth.
Billionaires should be taxed at 100% for all of their liquid wealth over that $1B. If they have it invested into productive and useful wealth creation, then leave it there, otherwise, take it and do something productive with it.
Why not just say, 'I don't believe in treating everyone equally"? If you have a different position then say so. Why try and redefine things? What's the goal?
Because that's not what I mean. I'm not redefining things - progressive tax was invented way back.
- If you're born into a wealthy family, how should we handicap you or boost others to give everyone "equality of opportunity"
- Or, should we outlaw wealthy families (maybe this is a 100% tax on wealth > $1m), assuming we could actually do this
- If you're born into a normal family, but one of your parents dies when you're 17, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?
- If you get thyroid cancer at age 33, how should we compensate you, or handicap everyone else?
- How would we even quantify these opportunity gaps? The way we currently do it is by comparing lifetime earnings and try to ceteris paribus everything else, but as we start compensating, we're disturbing the experiment. Also, where does the money come from?
I'd love to hear a set of policies that deals with life's basic unfairness, but I bet it would look a lot like progressive taxation, a strong social safety net, and heavily subsidized education, and the people who support equality of opportunity definitely don't support those things. Mostly their position distills down to "don't tax us to subsidize low income/wealth people", and the best you can say about that is it doesn't reckon with the unfairness issue.
So I reject the premise. But, I also think that "equality" is actually a complex concept. Is a society that allows super wealthy people alongside homeless people equal? Is a society that puts a 100% tax on wealth > $1m but a 0% tax on income < $12,950 equal? What about a society that gives women 6 months paid leave for birth and early childhood, but men 6 weeks? What about a society that subsidizes insulin but not L-dopamine for Parkinson's sufferers?
My ideal would be that we treat people with "equal regard" for their needs and situation. Maybe that sounds like bullshit, or the idea of the government deciding what your needs are/should be is worrying, or you're skeptical we could ever really quantify it, and I would mostly agree. But I also can't come up with a better or more reasonable goal, even though we might not ever practically achieve it.
Equality of opportunity isn't equalising everything in life, it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person. Equalising everything is equality of outcome, or how some people use "equity".
I.e. having a decent schooling, being treated equally by social institutions such as banking and law enforcement, and having an decent shot at jobs and housing, those are things to do with equality of opportunity. People shouldn't be unequally treated.
That doesn't mean that a legally blind person can become a fighter pilot, or people should be graded in school differently to compensate for ancestral sins; changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Outside of those definitions, to be clear, I'd say some things are definitely fantastic to do terms of helping people, such as providing braille on money. We just need to remember that each time we do this it's disproportionately expensive, so we need to make sure we're prioritising (somehow) to remove the most disadvantage from the most people. But I don't think this sort of thing should be in an equality discussion, as it muddles it too much.
> it's equalising what the state (and other institutions) provides to each person
Well, a couple of things about that:
- That's not equality of opportunity, it's anti-discrimination
- Generally the point of these programs is to create a more equitable society, i.e. when bad stuff happens to you (cancer, slavery) we drop a money bag at your door to catch you back up. People at least say (and indeed the Declaration of Independence starts off by saying) we want an equal society, and this is how we do it. If we give the same bag of money to everyone no matter what happened to them, that doesn't address the inequality, it just causes inflation. Indeed, you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally, because life doesn't treat everyone equally.
> changing the treatment based on the individual would also be equality of outcome.
Why aren't we concerned with outcomes? Whenever I hear the opportunity/outcome framing this is my immediate question. Aren't outcomes the only thing that matters here? Of course we need to consider tradeoffs and costs, but if the goal is to make a more equitable society, how can we not consider outcomes? Can you claim to be an equal society when none of your policies discriminate (let's stipulate this is the case in the US, but it definitely is not), but 2/3s of your people (women and minorities in the US) are effectively an underclass? If that's the definition of equality, it doesn't sound very useful. I think we can do better.
Again this sounds like an excuse to ignore life's basic unfairness, as well as bad stuff our society has done in the past (slavery, the chattel system) and currently does in the present (the war on drugs, the gender pay gap). It's like, it's fine if we deprived people of opportunity in the past, even last year, as long as we fix that opportunity inequality sometime in the future, as though that didn't permanently set millions of people back. How do we make up for past, current, and existing and future inequities of opportunity?
Or put another way, how will we compensate the people today who will be victimized by:
- a vindictive immigration policy
- a racist carceral system
- a misogynistic reproductive rights regime
- a transphobic... everything
Will we just fix the glitch and ignore the damage those systems and policies have created? Again that doesn't sound like it really addresses the full scope of the problem.
Therefore if one wants to know what the society's preferences are, that data must be collected in such a way the each individual's preferences are included in the data set.
We might still apply a weighting function at aggregation time, depending on why we're looking at society's preferences in that instance. There are certain group's of opinions that we don't value as much for answers to some questions, but we should like to be deliberate about those choices instead of applying an implicit weighting function during collection.
The nazi also had a criminal record for raping a young boy.
The parent put it this way:
> If a person is disabled or uneducated and can’t hold a job, that person should still get an equal say in society’s preferences even though they have no money with which to express their preferences
Morally and rationally the nazi child rapist should not have equal say in society's preferences. Any society - any culture - that is stupid enough to place that person's preferences at a level of equality, deserves and will have earned its inevitable collapse. And there are far worse monsters roaming about than the nazi child rapist. While my specific example is an outlier (on purpose), the premise is far more expansive in principle.
It's also why a Constitutional Republic is vastly superior to actual Democracy.
For example, when considering questions of crime and punishment / deterrence we probably wouldn't value the preferences of say, psychopathic murderers, on the same level as those of the families of their victims. That would be silly.
However, it would still be good to collect their preferences on conditions within the prison system and host of other topics. And we might still intentionally devalue those preferences too, but that would be a deliberate choice of values as society.
When we fail to collect the data effectively in the first place, we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to determine what we value and what we don't. So we're still going to want to know these things, that way we don't just discover later that we were ignoring a big thing that, turns out, we would have liked to value once we knew about it.
In your particular example, add in the one stipulation that both the Nazi and the family of his victims don't have much discretionary income to spend and yet they live in a world where society's preferences are collected primarily or singularly by way of observing what people spend money on. In that scenario, all of those people's preferences share the equal status of being completely ignored. That seems unfair to victims as well.
Modify the scenario a little differently and say the Nazi is very wealthy while the victims are poor. So then because of the data collection method alone, as a society, we would then be elevating the Nazi's preferences to 100% greater value than the victims.
That outcome seems vastly contrary to what we would actually value if we just fairly and accurately collected the data first and then applied our judgements about what should be valued.
Further notice that in just asking the questions, we can also easily discover at the macro level that this guy is a Nazi, after all, given the chance, he'll tell us so. This means deliberately ignoring his preferences is easy at time of aggregation and now we can do that on purpose, because as a society, we don't value the opinions of Nazis when it comes to questions of how to run things in a democracy.
Through market approach? This has never worked for roads, fire service, police, courts, sewage, water supply or any other natural monopoly.
Victorian Britain actually had a court system where you would pay the judge to judge you, and the more you paid, the 'better' the judging. You fan imagine the issues...
The things it doesn't work for are very easily defined, and don't interfere with the fact that almost everything does work well like that.
To be fair, everything else has been like this. The first railways were government funded, the first airlines (in most places), this is quite typical.
Then as things mature, as there can be a profit-motive, government tends to get out of the lime-light, and private orgs take over.
Space-X, as an example, is just that. And space travel is about to become mundane, common, normal. Just like air travel in the early 50s.
And this doesn't mean the government has zero power here. It can take over companies in time of war/national emergency, it can compel for national need.
Again, what we need to do... is realise that space travel is becoming like air travel. And I for one, would be horrified if all control to air travel was through governments only.
And there are other examples, such as the East India Company having its own army, navy and effectively ruling a big part of India at a time.
Air travel only began because the US Mail paid for airmail deliveries.
NASA only began because the post-war MIC needed to develop ICBMs.
Public education only began because industrialization required an educated workforce.
Air travel is one of the safest modes of mechanized transportation in the world, space launches would be among the least and probably wont change much in their overall reliability.
This is a very, very strange assertion.
Airflight was incredibly dangerous 100 years ago. Yet now you claim it is one of the safest, thereby validating that technological improvements, and design improvements, can change safety.
Then you say, effectively "things won't improve" for "this other tech over here".
Which is it?!
My point in all of this is, while space travel was a monumental achievement 60+ years ago, it's simply not that big of a deal now. Endless commercial corporations now engage in the act, for profit, because there is profit, and because it is so commonplace.
And this trend will only increase, eventually leading to people actually being station in space (eg, the moon, larger commercial structures, mining, etc). This will lead to more trips, and for people visiting said structures for business, and on and on.
Just as with planes, this will become safer, more common, more regulated, more... normal.
What part of this iterative process do you believe will block launches from being more safe? NOTE: don't use today's technology as a blocker, please.
Now, just because no one else is doing it doesn't mean it's automatically bad, but it's a launch technology suite that was selected against for good reason in the post-shuttle era. The (eventual) launch of Artemis I made clear, for example, that cryogenic hydrogen is a really problem-prone PITA to work with.
Let SpaceX et al. take the technology risk, and support them via contracts.
But it's an improvement on the prior approach to instead put space eggs in two baskets: {lower risk, conservative technology choices} + {higher risk, cutting edge technology choices}
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33939692
> " 'Indeed, besides the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, every organization [of 60+] in the western world that's been continuously operating since 1530 is a university.'
-- https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...
I believe this is why it's critically important that universities remain focused on their timeless mission rather than chasing secular fads. The Buxton index, described in the [link], is an incredibly important concept."
It's natural that we would think technology startups compelling due to the way they succeed with difficulty and risk management competence. But if their Buxton index of planning horizon is limited by their runway, and a decade is considered an Uber-long horizon, how futuristic and exceptional are we ultimately talking? I agree with the parent commenter that the eggs in two baskets serve separately appropriate purposes.
I agree with the other poster that the only thing that will light a fire under the US' butt is having a peer country clown them in a space milestone. I don't like the CCP and I abhor their practices but I do root for their space program since seeing that bright red commie flag on the moon is the only egg big enough to cover all the faces necessary in the usgov in order to actually get something done.
I also really hope that India gets in the game in a serious way so we can have even more competition, an India-China space race would be fun to watch and would have the US scrambling to catch up.
It does seem historically accurate to say that governments don't successfully complete state-of-the-art mega-projects absent war or an existential treat.
I expect those are the only things powerful enough to cut through the bureaucratic resistance to progress.
Musk is … unique. Let’s say. But he is very good at organizing companies for a relentless push for the results.
> 1. having alternatives to other commercial ventures, which are subject to their own financial viability
> 2. having backup launch capability
> 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US
> 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech
> 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US
But leaving aside the SLS, there are missions like the mars rovers and the james webb telescope, that I think show innovation and scientific success (but I do not live on the us, so i have an incomplete view).
SpaceX suddenly going out of business (as in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) seems rather unlikely. The same is true of ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. Absolute worse case scenario would be Chapter 11, in which the business continues to operate under new ownership, and the current owners lose everything – but even that doesn't seem that likely. Anyway, the chapter 11 scenario is still a risk with the cost-plus procurement SLS model – Boeing (or Aerojet Rocketdyne, or Lockheed Martin) going through chapter 11 might not have doomed SLS/Orion, but it likely would have caused delays. In fact, it is open to doubt whether SLS/Orion-style cost-plus contracting has any real advantage over commercial from a bankruptcy risk perspective, for two competing commercial providers must have less bankruptcy risk than a single non-commercial government contractor
> 2. having backup launch capability
Multiple commercial providers, like they've pursued for commercial cargo and crew to ISS, and are still planning to pursue for Artemis HLS, would meet that just as well as an SLS-style program could. Given they likely could have afforded at least two commercial systems for the cost of SLS+Orion, it seems this actually gives worse backup than commercial does.
> 3. maintaining more relevant talent in the US
This doesn't seem relevant, given that the most likely firms to have provided NASA with a commercial SLS alternative – SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada, etc – are all US firms anyway. In fact, IIRC, the NASA procurement documents for commercial crew and cargo, and Artemis HLS, all said only US firms could respond. ITAR makes it a lot harder for US space firms to offshore jobs than most other industries.
> 4. maintaining institutional knowledge of cutting edge aerospace tech
While it is true that NASA doesn't own the engineering for the commercial programs, in the way they own SLS engineering, NASA engineers are still heavily involved in the commercial programs, for review/advice/consulting/sign-off/etc. This factor is the most plausible of all those you've mentioned, but it is unclear if having somewhat deeper engineering expertise among NASA employees (as opposed to US private sector space firms) is important enough to justify a procurement approach which costs billions over and above its commercial alternative
> 5. maintaining aerospace industrial capability in the US
This doesn't seem relevant for the same reasons as (3)
SpaceX is not critical to national security, and it—many times—came close to bankruptcy in its adolescence of the early 2010s. Aerospace, in the past, saw massive recessions where companies larger than SpaceX went poof. This will almost certainly happen again, once we’re done tooling up for China.
Which specific firms are you talking about going bankrupt here? Were those bankruptcies chapter 11 or chapter 7?
Those benefits are from having government rocket program, not from having one where politicians micromanage the rocket design to the extent of dictating the choice of engine.
Or are run by folks with sleep deprivation issues...
Yes. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
] For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.
As a kid in the 80s, most of the issues made sense as "yeah, people still debate this", but seeing space exploration there as a big, controversial thing while living through the heyday of the pre-Challenger shuttle program always gave me this strong sense of cognitive dissonance.
In any case, several of Etzioni's arguments were clearly NOT thinking about tight closed black boxes. Here are three:
> It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors. ...
> We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. ...
> the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves
The quote from the LA Sentinel flips your black box argument around, pointing out the benefits come with a people cost:
> .. argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."
The linked-to M.A. thesis has more direct quotes, like protestors who want some of the money diverted from the space program to feed some tens of thousands of people who don't have adequate food, nor comfortable homes from which to watch the Moon landing.
These are issues we still delay facing.
The moon is an interesting destination for its Helium-3. We will run out at some point on Earth (Helium literally floats away), and going to the Moon for this resource could very well be our first extra-terrestrial mining operation.
The first geopositioning satellite[1], first satellite that broadcast of a human voice from space[2], and the first photos taken from orbit[3] all predate the first human in space[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_6 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1
Telstar 1 started blasting TV from space in 1962.
I don't know how that required Gargarin or Shepard to be in their tin cans first.
Also, we sent up SCORE in 1958, and famously Arthur C. Clarke wrote about using satellites for telecommunications in 1945.
TIROS, the US's first weather satellite, preceded Gargarin.
KH-1, the US's first spy satellite, meant for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union, was even earlier.
These certainly didn't require humans in tin cans first.
3He can be made by DD fusion (which either produces 3He, or produces T which can be allowed to decay to 3He; neutrons from DD fusion can also be used to make tritium which can also be allowed to decay to 3He.) This is Helion's plan, with the system operated in a mode that suppresses DT fusion.
All the "get to the moon" or beyond SF, which per Robert Heinlein was an explicit goal of his juveniles, to teach the attitudes and what you needed to learn to to get into space, which he was later told actually worked for a number of Apollo project people was ... what??
Can't make fusion reactors that interesting and the SF series never tried except when they didn't get a chance to shut down properly and went boom (actually a very beginning plot point), but I'm glad for all the fiction creators who inspired me into a STEM career when I was young.
Your digression seems irrelevant to that point.
We didn't use Heinlein stories as a source of evidence about reality. We didn't use thorium rockets to get to the Moon. Nor did we develop monoatomic hydrogen ("Single-H") fuel.
Similarly, we don't use Gundam stories.
Also, Project Daedalus' proposal to mine the Jupiter atmosphere for 3He for fusion predates the first Gundam episode, and is likely what influenced the series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus .
"Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa" - https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
Simplistically it's true that whenever you spend money on some effort there's going to be some benefit. Paying NASA scientists to dig ditches would have some benefit in stimulating the economy, even if it doesn't offset the costs (material and opportunity). Would it be the best use of resources, however?
Whenever I go down the rabbit hole of "spinoff technologies," I find a lot of it to be a gish gallop of stuff, much of which is overstated. There's a reason why you hear NASA talking up pioneering research done on Alzheimer's at the international space station, but you don't read Alzheimer's researchers talking about breakthroughs coming from the ISS.
Still, there are a lot of important technology that NASA has been involved with. But when you look into most of it, the connection to human spaceflight is tangential at best, and often completely non-existent (NASA does a lot of stuff outside of human spaceflight).
The kernel of the argument is accurate - scientific research can be important even if it doesn't provide immediate dividends. But too often people misuse that to argue that no amount of money is poorly spent. It's precisely because scientific research is important that we need to carefully consider the return on different projects, and make sure that the funds that are being allocated are well spent.
If 200 years ago a country had decided to keep a settlement going at the top of Mount Everest in the name of progress, it wouldn't have been any benefit to the modern efforts to keep people in the ISS. Likewise, I don't expect the ISS to have any noticeable impact on efforts to have people live on other planets.
Keep in mind, this doesn't mean we won't make progress. A lot of people are excited about what SpaceX has been doing, and until very recently they've been entirely involved in non-human cargo. There are a lot of reasons to send things into space, which is why we send up a lot of stuff. There's just not many reasons to send people up at the moment, other than to be able to say we're sending people up.
Also SpaceX wouldn't exist without the ISS. It's NASA contracts for resupplying the ISS that kept it alive in the early days. Which just goes to prove the model: Government invests in "useless" project that allows private industry the toe-hold of capital needed to kickstart a new technology.
To your Antarctic exploration analogy, I'd say the ISS is more equivalent to McMurdo station than the Amundsen expedition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa#Rel...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181012074427/http://www.slate....
In 2012, William Doino Jr, wrote that "The remarkable thing about Hell's Angel is that it purports to defend the poor against Mother Teresa's supposed exploitation of them, while never actually interviewing any on screen. Not a single person cared for by the Missionaries speaks on camera. Was this because they had a far higher opinion of Blessed Teresa than Hitchens would permit in his film? Avoiding the people at the heart of Teresa's ministry, Hitchens posed for the camera and let roll a series of ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated accusations, as uninformed as they were cruel."
Edit: Questlove is a DJ.
Origin of my question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo-ddYhXAZc
The primary objections of which I am aware focused on Apollo's prioritization above addressing poverty:
https://www.ajc.com/news/why-civil-rights-activists-proteste...
As in, SpaceX hired the engineers from NASA, got paid by NASA and basically built the rockets that were in fetal at NASA?
I am not saying nothing innovative happened, I am asking is the difference taking the same engineers out of NASA or is there something else?
The simple answer is to prevent small numbers of people having outsize influence on massive spending. So for example, billionaires...
This is a thing I have been noodling on for ages but have no answers other than "you need a clear mission and people at the top focused on that mission even if they are not clear their retirement packages are secure"
(or maybe their retirement packages were secure some way in ...)
The public started to lose interest in Apollo after a couple of years. There was supposed to be an Apollo 18, 19, and 20. They were cancelled. One of them turned into Skylab. The others are in museums. You can walk under a Saturn V in Florida and see the other in Houston.
The previous president Eisenhower allowed the Soviets to get ahead of us starting with Sputnik to avoid them whining forever about overflights of others' territory. To the point Wernher von Braun's team had to put ballast in their rocket payloads to make sure they wouldn't "accidentally" put something into orbit.
This resulted a massive shock in the US which you can see in for example a whole bunch of science education programs spawned after Sputnik, and to the rest of the world put into doubt our technological superiority. After the Soviets were the first to put a man in orbit a month before JFK's speech and a few weeks before our first manned suborbital fight, the next spectacle was obviously a manned moon mission. Which we had a chance to beat them at although back in 1961 that was no sure thing.
This would also fit in with the JFK campaign's fictitious "missile gap" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
Why are you concerned about commercial viability of a public good?
You may be interested in this: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/
There are legitimate complaints to be made about things like cost plus accounting, but the project itself isn't a boondoggle. Like, the people who greenlit it aren't idiots.
If you want to complain about boondoggles, look at the military.
Boeing is maintained as a competitor for Airbus for national competitive reasons. As are the other contractors for NASA and the general MIC itself.
The MIC is the biggest socialist redistribution of wealth in existence, it takes $800B/year from taxpayers and redistributes it to the relevant companies, which in return, commit to providing employment and general wealth distribution.
The MIC even beats out the US Department of Agriculture, which is the most "socialist" of all the US departments.
NASA does great stuff, it's science is unparalleled in the space world, but the projects and systems that are developed, particularly for space as opposed to aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA) use space as the excuse for the wealth distribution.
There's actually nothing wrong with that. EU has had national "champions" as companies for centuries. It just doesn't fit with the conventional view that the US is a "free capitalist market".
Tom Lehrer
We did some work on a camera system for the Artemis project. It will hopefully make it to the moon's surface by the third mission. Also worked on spacecraft going to the ISS.
I don't think people --including most engineers-- have a good grasp of just how difficult it is to make anything going to space, much less anything that involves people.
The simplest statement I can make is:
Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time.
Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse.
Designing safe and reliable systems to go to the Moon or Mars is complex and hard to nail down to a schedule. This isn't like a software startup where you can deliver half a product and iterate (or even execute a full pivot) over time. You have to get it right or things fail in spectacular ways and people die.
Imagine having to deliver your Social Media, online commerce or SaaS product with a full 100% working set of required features, non-trivial failure tolerance and uptime guarantee, or (to be dramatic) your entire family dies. A bit out there? Not so sure.
I was appalled when I learned about LEO atomic oxygen.
"Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse."
Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Or is this another Apollo Program timed with the solar cycle (which due to delays cut the latter short)?
Well, GCR's (Galactic Cosmic Rays) will go through just-about anything. I think I remember an experiment that measured penetration in water to over half a mile (800 meters). As such, all you can do is manage exposure...you are not going to stop them. On the moon one of the ideas is to pile-up regolith (moon dirt) to create better protection. Without that you would need to transport more material out there than might be possible.
I am not aware of what long-term plans might look like today. I guess is that the ideal habitat will likely take the form of repurposing the rocket to become living quarters and bury it under as much regolith as it might be able to support. Of course, that implies suitable construction equipment to be available. I doubt astronauts are going to shovel the stuff at that scale.
In terms of electronics, you try to keep things powered down to the extent possible. Circuits can self-destruct very quickly if powered-up. An unpowered circuit is less likely to suffer the same kind of damage.
Beyond that, critical systems are typically designed to a fault-tolerance (FT) level. A single fault tolerant system can have one failure and still operate within mission parameters. You could have 2FT systems that will run after two failure. Because mass is important in going to space, FT doesn't necessarily fully duplicate a system (for example, triplicate copies of a system to be able to survive two failures). These days deeper analysis is possible and enhanced fault tolerance can be applied to selected functional units. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to test, test, test.
NASA has a lot of publicly-available resources about this and more. Chapter 3 of this one has an overview of protection from space radiation:
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/sf_radi...
But I wasn't clear about my real question: is there a shield planned for the Orion spacecraft to keep astronauts alive during a sufficiently bad solar event on a trip to or from the moon? As I recall the lunar orbiting space station was going to be unmanned but I was wrong or they've changed their minds: https://www.nasa.gov/gateway So they've got to be thinking about this problem, and as the reference notes we'll need for example adequate space weather surveillance which I note we've been emplacing as of late.
I've never checked it out like running the numbers but I've heard for a long time Apollo was timed for a low part of the solar cycle and one reason Nixon cut it short was because delays put those canceled missions into the active part of the cycle.
Not sure what they are using in Orion. The general answer is that, yes, there has to be a shield. Historically that has been aluminum. Mass is a huge problem in going to space. Because of this, you can't have the shield you really want.
Over the years we have learned that thick laminated (under heat and pressure) polyethylene is a better space radiation shield than aluminum and at a significant savings in weight.
You should know that using words like that taints the rest of your comment. While you are welcome to your opinion, and expressing it is perfectly fine, you should be aware that other people may not take the remainder of what you write seriously.
$1,000,000,000/launch
A microwave oven used to cost more than a car.
We learn, we innovate, we iterate, and eventually the cost comes down. But we have to start somewhere.
I suppose it really boils down to whether the organization was succeeding _because_ of him or _in spite_ of him. Maybe he was necessary to get it where it is and can step back and have the company continue to perform well.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/spacex-shakes-up-starbase-le...
Based on Musk’s recent antics, pretty sure a VP runs Tesla too.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600964083913588736
> I continue to oversee both Tesla & SpaceX, but the teams there are so good that often little is needed from me
Besides Tom Mueller actually makes the rockets go brrrrrr.
> getting less and less reliable option for space launches
I wonder if people felt this way about Apollo? In hindsight it feels worthwhile. But the big difference between Artemis and Apollo is that Artemis is coming after Commercial Crew/SpaceX has proven a different business/engineering model.
I’ve been waiting for this since I was in the fifth grade, so I should be happy. But then, I was promised a path to Mars with boots on the Moon two years ago.