I wish the US government wasn't the worst steward of capital on the planet. If objectives actually mattered instead of a combo of jobs programs and bribery/influence laundering so much could get done. Im all for science funding but its looking increasingly likely you could just pay spaceX to do this research while they are literally on the planet.

Further, you could basically solve homelessness in CA or build a vast network of public light rail for $10B. Obviously you couldn't do any of that because you need 1-3 layers of consultants and 10 layers of subcontractors to do anything.

These stories frustrate me. Heres a link to Patrick Collison's blog section fast[1] so we can review what it was like when we could build things and do science in this country.

[1] https://patrickcollison.com/fast

Can you provide any evidence that $10 billion can solve homelessness in CA or build a vast network of public light rail? I think you’re off by at least a zero.

I don't know about homelessness (which is a much more difficult issue which can't be solved by just throwing money at it), but most developed countries built high speed rail lines and/or urban light rail transit systems for much less than 10,000,000,000$.

I'd much rather have my tax dollars go to science and space exploration rather than giving away free stuff to people.

I'd much rather give free stuff to people. Given those people are citizens and it allows their reinsertion into society. Space exploration supposed benefits are far more remote and as of now, not very useful.

I'd rather invest in space to live there one day than staying on this floating rock with people that give stuff for free.

I

None of us alive today will be living in space one day.

All of us alive today can benefit from assistance given to the least of us.

I want the space future too. However, I also want my time here to be better.

I won't see the space future. Sadly.

I could easily see a cleaner, more harmonious world.

Being human can suck. These discussions are one of the ways it does.

Ignoring the "free stuff" straw man but it's fascinating how someone can be so cruel to not want society to solve the homelessness problem. If this becomes a "mainstream" opinion, we've truly failed as homo sapiens.

Adding more money to "the homelessness problem" seems unlikely to actually solve the problem. It's (politically) difficult to address the underlying root causes, but easy to show how compassionate we are while subsidizing homelessness, and you get more of what you pay for, so.

You might not be able to solve the crisis with money alone but you need lots of money to solve it is my gut feeling.

Giving free stuff to people will in many cases free up resources that are currently being wasted on solving the same problem. Then there actually would be more money available for science and technology.

Spending money on third party development of tools to get to space is giving away free stuff to people (notably the part of the spend that is the profits of those third parties).

Agree 100%. I worked at Kennedy Space Center for a government contractor in the early 2000's. While I was there, NASA cancelled a software re-write of the launch control system. By then, they had already spent something like $800M and had nothing to show for it.

I can't think of a single piece of software that exists in the world today that couldn't be rewritten with $800M in capital.

10 billion can't do any of those things. If it could, we'd have them. California's gdp is 3,000 billion. They make that every year. This is 10 billion over a decade.

> 10 billion can't do any of those things

Has CA actually spent that money on those problems and shown that it couldn't solve them? If not I don't think that statement is true?

The (current) upper bound on the cost of building a high-speed rail line from SF to LA is nearly $100 billion.

https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/

A statewide light rail system would probably run closer to a trillion dollars.

They could probably do the statewide light rail for $100 billion if private property rights were ignored. But $10 billion doesn't sound plausible. Maybe just the single already planned line could be built for $10 billion, if private property were ignored and the state did good planning.

To be fair, light rail is cheaper to build than high-speed rail. And if we are going to fantasy-land where the government can do things for the public good without caring about who it inconveniences right now, they could build light rail on land "the government" already owns: in cities dedicate lanes to public transit (as in light rail + bus), to go between cities take some highway space. Rail has much higher capacity than cars, so if you get public transit right this should actually decrease traffic after it's built.

Of course this makes it obvious why California can't do it for $10 billion, $100 billion or even $10 trillion: wherever you put your rail network it will inconvenience someone, and that causes massive delays and cost overruns, or makes the project politically untenable from the start. Even if you put the rail underground you would get massive protests from nearby residents because "poor people" can now get there easier.

$10 billion is roughly $6 per homeless person per year in California. How much are you expecting this one free cup of coffee per quarter to accomplish?

Wow, there are 1.7 billion homeless people in California?!

Are you saying that there are 42 million homeless people in California?

(10B / $6 / 4 quarters / 10 years)

Oops, yeah, that was a calculator fail. It should have been about $6k/year, but I dropped a factor of 1k. Which is still not much, but a bit more sensible.

They have a billion homeless people?

> 10 billion can't do any of those things. If it could, we'd have them.

How does that follow? There's plenty of reasons why there's no high speed rail in the US, none of them have to do with lack of money.

Good point, there are many reasons on top of the lack of money. Especially for the homeless issue.

> Starting in 1942, 1,700 miles of military roadway were built over the course of 234 days, connecting eastern British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska.

Color me dubious on this one. 1700 miles / 234 days = 7.26 miles/day = 0.444 feet/second, every second of every day for about 8 months straight.

Even if you had 10 teams working in parallel the entire time, that’s a lot of road.

You might be right that NASA and other government agencies have inefficient cultures, but so does IBM. I think it's hugely problematic to privatize space research. As far as I know, every photo NASA has ever taken is in the public domain. Who would own what SpaceX learn on Mars?

That's not such a big issue, if NASA pays them, they can have stipulations about ownership of the resulting data. If NASA doesn't pay them and they do it on their own dime, then they get to do whatever they want with the data.

yeah maybe Musk should pay for it

As the article says, contracting a private company like SpaceX or Lockheed Martin for the lander would likely be much cheaper than letting JPL do it. We already see massive cost differences between public and private institutions in related areas, e.g. for new rockets and space suits.

Contracting Lockheed would not be cheaper lmao

This is the ultimate form of the "tyranny of rocketry" equation.

Imagine the smallest possible rocket that can take off from Mars with samples aboard. How much does it and it's fuel weigh?

Now imagine how big of a craft you'll need to slow that rocket down from interplanetary speeds and land on a target on Mars. How much does it weigh?

And how much fuel will it need to accelerate to interplanetary speed after lifting off from earth? And how big will the rocket need to be to lift all of that into orbit?

The answer to all of this is making fuel on Mars. SpaceX called this it over a decade ago, and they aren't wrong.

For ten billion dollars, you could just pay SpaceX to send a Starship to Mars and have a human on board grab your samples directly.

The idea of making fuel on Mars was popular enough to have the calculations be part of undergraduate thesis' over 20 years ago, back when I was in college. I bet that people far more serious than Aerospace Engineering undergrads have been coming up with far more detailed versions decades before that. But those plans are no panacea: The fuel creation takes time, so you are either sending a mission first, just to make fuel, hoping it all goes well, and then send a second mission later, or you might end up having to keep your rocket in the surface of mars in good shape, still able to come back, for quite a bit. You also have to consider general timing: It's not as if efficient trips in either direction can be done any random day, of any random year, just due to orbits.

So yes, the mars fueling idea is compelling, but let's not assume that the people doing this for a living, and proposing this plan, are just worse at this than random undergrads.

Can we "just" build a Mars space elevator? It should be free of a lot of the concerns an earth space elevator would have - no terrorists, no populated areas, rather less gravity.

I've heard that this could be done with current materials science. Same for the moon. The problem is that it's a solution without need for now. It's somewhat like building a cross continental railway before San Francisco was founded. One day hopefully we'll need something like the elevator, because that implies lots of other interesting things would be going on.

The problem is Phobos, which orbits closer than areostationary orbit.

Could we just tether Phobos with an elevator?

Since Phobos isnt areostationary, the base of your tether on mars would have to move around for this to work. Additionally, you would have to constantly adjust its length. Therefore, boarding the elevator would be more difficult.

Or set the height above the highest obstacle on the orbit and have some variant of planes or wilder mechanisms get the cargo up to that dangling tip.

The main difference is that SpaceX operates very efficiently, while most public institutions (like JPL, which currently develops the lander, apparently while being ill-prepared for the task) are highly inefficient.

A striking example is the large amounts of money NASA spends on SLS, which is in most places already an extremely conservative vehicle which reuses as much as possible and keeps any innovations at a minimum. With the JPL lander the situation could be even worse.

As we just saw in the news this past week, the jury is still out about the wisdom of building and operating complex, dangerous missions "very efficiently" and with "innovations".

The Falcon 9 is very efficient and innovative, but also one of the most reliable rockets on the market.

Yeah. By itself Starship is indeed very dangerous for human spaceflight (no launch abort system, very risky landing procedure) compared to other designs except the Space Shuttle. But the reliability can be optimized while doing a lot of unmanned satellite missions.

We are hundreds of successful starship flights away from it being human rated IMO.

Agree 100 percent. But also why return the samples at all? Just send automated lab equipment to analyze it.

The article says the utility from sending the samples back is indeed limited, at least compared to the cost, which would likely exceed the (already astronomical) JWST cost substantially.

No amount of automated lab equipment is as flexible to work with as samples on Earth, for obvious reasons.

There's no such thing as automated lab equipment that can analyze it. Even the space station has to send air and water samples down to Earth for anything beyond very rough analysis. You need technicians and a cleanroom environment to do this work.

How about 10 billion to NASA instead of privatizing research with public money.

Because NASA is absurdity inefficient when developing technology. That's why SLS is such a problem child, and why they abandoned their new space suits, which were already years in development and consumed billions of dollars. They were recently outsourced to a private company which is expected to do it in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the price.

Because NASA hasn't done anything useful at a reasonable cost in decades.

I'd rather a somewhat inflated cost to make the research public. Also private equity doesn't mean it's not wasted. 37 billion dollars for a forum.

Musk really living rent free eh?

How many rockets do you think NASA themselves have R&D'd?

A lot of those 10 billion would go to aerospace contractors either way. It's not like NASA would spend all that money in-house.

And yet, if extra terrestrial life sits in one of those, it would trigger a geometric spending frenzy in biology. The key to pulling this trigger is confidence in the samples. Nobody wants to bring back "just dirt".

The chance that any of those samples contains evidence of extraterrestrial life is quite low. No one is betting this much money on those kind of odds. The samples are scientifically valuable even if they are “just dirt”.

This is essentially the issue. Nobody expects life in these tubes. The project was designed to find it, and the assumption was made that a high confidence sample would fuel and expedite a return mission. With a very high price tag and a very low chance of finding life, it's better to spend money elsewhere.

I wonder how much this cost will be reduced if the project was managed by NASA but open source, with feedback from a tech, science community. As opposed with the current model that relies on deals with companies such as Lockheed Martin.

Is that a sustainable profit model? Lockheed Martin is barely staying alive making new engines for 5 year old jets. Two trillion dollars doesn't go as far as it used to you know.

What exactly is it that costs so much money when it comes to space stuff?

Is the materials, exotic and rare stuff?

Do you need custom microchips/fabs or something?

Is it the engineer salaries, thousands of highly paid people times N years?

It's largely down to NASA's "waterfall" development approach. Everything must be custom designed from the ground up, all things made sure to be correct and safe before the first bolt is installed.

That's why a lot of the "new space" oriented programs emphasize "commercial-off-the-shelf" solutions so much. They're only just barely catching on to the relatively obvious bit that costs can be reduced a lot by relying more heavily on existing commercial solutions. Space isn't the most extreme environment compared to what a lot of industrial gear has to be able to deal with.

Some examples which come to mind are the cameras which were used to record video of Perseverance's landing, as well as most of the Ingenuity copter itself, were COTS parts. IIRC as a result Ingenuity has more processing power on board than Perseverance's main computers. These were all low cost lower priority components, but they did a great job of showcasing the usability of COTS parts.

Careful, careful. The COTS part is a bit misleading as a great part of the total cost is in testing and certification. Some might be under the impression that JPL just took some COTS parts, stuck them on Ingenuity and that's that.

This is not the case. Of course every component had to be tested for space worthiness and possible interference with other systems. All that takes time, money, and specialised facilities.

It's also important to keep in mind that the helicopter was a technology demonstrator, a proof-of-concept that played no critical part in the overall mission. Its job was to perform one flight to show it can be done. It's a big difference if your components only need to do their job once, or if you have to have a guaranteed minimum endurance and the entire mission depends on them.

Cancel the project. Do it in 15 years when the cost drops dramatically.

SpaceX, AI, robotics, etc will make significant improvements over that time.

“If NASA manages to develop and launch the Sample Retriever Lander by 2028, the samples could be returned to Earth in 2033”

NASA developing these one-off projects is expensive and time consuming. We need most of the technology to develop commercially.

Commercial will benefit massively from the R&D results of this mission, which is attempting many engineering firsts and enablers. SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of past giants, too.

The thing is, companies fail more easily financially than governments do. It's a good use of gov funds to minimize risks of productization for the private sector, to give them a competitive leg up.

This is how the US space industry is winning, imho - spoken as a European.

Yes, companies usually don’t have unlimited funds. Shareholders start complaining (e.g Metaverse).

It’s quite simple. The budget doubled to $10 billion. Cancel the project.

We’ve been promoting a faster, better, cheaper NASA for 3 decades. It’s not working. Let’s find a better way to increase innovation.

https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/2000/03/15/NASA-study-faste...

>It's a good use of gov funds to minimize risks of productization for the private sector, to give them a competitive leg up.

It's a good use to spend public funds to boost private profit?

Well it certainly is a good use, but only for one of those parties.

So let me get this straight, for the (relatively) low cost of only 9 billion they could return materials from Mars?

That’s a steal. The entire US Department of Defence spends 800 billion.

The fact some of that can’t be shared for a one off project is deeply frustrating.

Wait until you see how much it costs to build and run a single offshore drilling platform or prospecting well in the ocean.

Then think how many there are.

An offshore drilling platform costs about 250M to build and deploy.

It is not funded by tax payers and it starts paying for itself after a few years (they extract $250,000 worth of oil per day on average, up to double that).

I don't understand your comparison?

Maybe parent was hinting at the astronomical numbers and the relative futility of spending this amount on this vs that.

I was saying that in the scale of human enterprises, the cost of returning soil from another planet is a rounding error. 9 billion over a decade vs the operating cost of O&G industry as an example, isn't even close. Soil from Mars vs oil from earth.

Both are an amazing scientific and technological accomplishment, but one is also historic.

Not directly funded by tax payers… the exceptional tax breaks that oil companies have received from our shat government are astronomical.

Also that's 9 billion over the course of ... A decade of development? Maybe half a decade? DoD spends that per year.

Never mind too how big a savings this is from sending a manned mission to Mars (to also return samples).

Interestingly we spend much more on military. Most people only quote the discretionary spend as the military budget ($751b in 2022), but if you look at the mandatory spend there's another ~ $250b in 2022. Things like survivor's benefits, VA, and foreign base leases/costs end up in the mandatory budget, which has the effect of both making US social programs seem more expensive, and our military complex cheaper.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58890

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58889

A little bit on what makes the sample return mission so hard:

The crux of the matter is getting a fueled rocket onto Mars that can launch back into low Mars orbit and rendezvous there with a waiting satellite. The size and weight of this return rocket is itself constrained by its ability to fit into an aeroshell and survive entry and landing without breaking. You quickly get into a regime where you're trying to land the heaviest thing ever attempted on Mars, which makes the landing conditions harder so the rocket has to be sturdier, which makes the landing vehicle heavier, and so on.

The Martian atmosphere gets you both coming and going. On the descent, it is thick enough to make supersonic retropropulsion very complicated and potentially unstable, but too thin to slow a really massive re-entry vehicle down sufficiently with parachutes. You end up having to fire rockets that kick up a lot of rocks and dust during the very last seconds of the landing, while at the same time relying on your onboard computer to find a safe landing spot.

On the ascent, the atmosphere is thick enough that you have to deviate from the most efficient launch trajectory and worry about aerodynamic forces on the ascent rocket. Because of the atmosphere, the launch rocket has to be staged, which makes it bigger and heavier than you'd ideally want. And you can't use the most efficient cryogenic fuel, because there's no way to keep it from boiling off on the long trip over to Mars and down.

There are also non-obvious couplings between the lander and the ascent rocket, like center of gravity issues when you pack the rocket into the aeroshell, the question of how to get the samples into the rocket and point it up, and constraints on the design imposed by the hard conditions of atmospheric entry (15G acceleration) and the low surface temperatures.

None of these problems are insurmountable, but they are thorny enough and interwoven enough that it's very easy to see how the price tag climbs into the billions, even before you factor in organizational dysfunction and inefficiencies at NASA. The fact that it has to work on the first try (since political factors rule out trying it piecemeal) is also a huge cost driver.

There's a great paper that goes into some of these challenges in detail: "Drivers, developments and options under consideration for a Mars ascent vehicle", DOI 10.1109/AERO.2016.7500822

Mass to space is a little expensive but not that expensive. NASA's refusal to just fly more payloads and join or coordinate them in space is a political one moreso than technical, and if they took the opportunity to get more payload mass they could stop worrying about minor mass margin issues.

The very obvious price comparison here is that Mars Sample Return has a price tag meaningfully bigger than the two winning HLS bids combined, including demonstration missions. Yes, the moon is closer, but also HLS is moving living humans, not small rocks.

You don't seem to understand the constraint here, which is getting the mass of a rocket capable of reaching orbit down to Mars intact through an atmosphere. You can fly all the payloads you want without getting any closer to solving that problem. Sample return would be hard and expensive even if launches from Earth were free.

No, the point is that this constraint is dominantly a mass margin issue, and if NASA wasn't politically handicapped their mass margin would look very different.

Say I can send 1000 metric tons to Mars for a million bucks. How does that solve the problem of safely landing a heavy rocket on the surface?

NASA was broadly happy with technical feasibility for Red Dragon, which pretty much just repurposed Dragon 2's biprop abort motors to land >1 ton on Mars for their estimate of $150-190m/launch. They didn't go forward with it, but this was early 2010s so that's not much surprise.

With infinite mass in Mars orbit, you'd presumably want to scale up, but while this marginally hurts aerobraking performance, you have vastly more mass margin to just bring a bit more propellant.

If course, you'd probably still want to land something in scope of what you can launch from Earth dry in one flight, but for sure we're still talking >5 tons there, probably more like 10.

They could probably open a credit card and get a free checked bag.