

NASA Gives Up on LISA - turnersauce
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/04/06/nasa-gives-up-on-lisa/

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juiceandjuice
This has been feared for a while in that community. There's quite a bit of
animosity towards the JWST for soaking up NASA's budget in recent history, and
JWST is trying to do some serious damage control because they're too far along
and too big to fail. I saw John Mather (Nobel prize winner) give a talk
recently that was basically "Look how far we are, and we're sorry for soaking
up the budget."

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mturmon
More on the JWST overrun:

[http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-
pri...](http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-priority-
projects.html)

~~~
d2
Canceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.

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gammarator
Unfortunately, with JWST sitting out there as its own line-item in the NASA
budget (as opposed to rolled in with the rest of Astrophysics), there's
concern in the community that it will be a tempting target for a Congress
anxious to cut anything that moves.

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OstiaAntica
To be fair to the cutters in Congress, running a government that borrows 40
cents of every dollar it spends is going to lead to a catastrophe.

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ars
That's too bad. Gravity waves are one of the last unknowns in science that we
also know how to study. (Most other unknowns we don't know how to study.)

I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do
any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?

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wladimir
To me (as an outsider) it looks as if the USA, en masse, doesn't believe in
science anymore.

So many interesting research projects have been stopped lately, education is
being crippled, and other avenues of education and research are being killed
for religious reasons.

We owe so much to science in our daily lives, why are (common) people so
reluctant to see that?

Or is the issue deeper. Do people hate the current, fast, technological era on
some level and hope that stifling science will bring back older, more gentle
times somehow?

I don't get it anymore, honestly.

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prawn
People want immediate results. Investing in something that won't necessarily
bring results for years or decades (or centuries in the case of space
exploration) is rarely going to be popular.

At least here in Australia, a common comment on something like this is that we
shouldn't spend money on this sort of thing when there are people starving and
dying in the third world. Then the typical comments on, say an article about,
the plight of the poor in the third world are critical of throwing money
abroad when we have problems of our own at home. Then the typical comments on
those problems (say, gap in life expectancy between that of the Aboriginal
population and the average) find another excuse.

It frustrates me too. I'd love to see military budgets (as one example) plowed
into aggressive space research and exploration (as well as third world
problems) and uniting the planet.

Maybe the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox is just the tendency of the masses
towards selfish, lazy, basic instinct-driven behaviour.

~~~
ars
> I'd love to see military budgets (as one example) plowed into aggressive
> space research and exploration

Interesting example - because they are. The military is responsible for a lot
more research than is immediately obvious. All you have to do is come up with
some plausible military use (offense or defense), and you have a chance for
funding.

I've seen projects with just the barest hit of possibly being militarily
related get funded by the military.

I get the feeling the military knows they are overfunded, and they try to make
up for the lack of funding in other places.

Or perhaps the military likes being over funded - so when they need it, they
have it. But the rest of the time they can fund other things (and presumably
cancel them in an emergency).

~~~
prawn
I'm talking about the 'fighting' part of the budget more than anything else.
How much money and effort around the world is spent on destructive or
defensive behavior rather than constructive or exploratory action?

~~~
ars
Very little. Most of the military budget goes to research of one kind or
another. The rest goes to pay salaries for all the military employees.

~~~
prawn
Are you just making that up? R&D is around 10% of the US military budget (and
the US military budget is roughly 50% of the world budget).

If the construction, deployment, staffing, etc was pointed towards space
research and exploration, we'd be able to push forward all sorts of projects.

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helwr
A question to all the billionaires watching this thread:

Why would you give away money to charity while you could sponsor LISA?

~~~
gammarator
Many (most?) ground-based telescopes are funded by private donors: e.g., the
Keck Telescopes, the Allan Telescope Array, etc. Space missions, not so much.
My guesses for why: the costs are significantly higher, and NASA isn't set up
bureaucratically to work with private capital.

That said, private money for technology development efforts or data analysis
could likely be well-used.

