
Can NASA change in order to survive? - J3L2404
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-nasa-costs-20101228,0,5202597.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fscience+%28L.A.+Times+-+Science%29
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rbanffy
It's a bit unfair to say SpaceX spent only 800M to build the Dragon. A lot of
the technology it uses was developed by and for NASA with NASA's money.

Not to say that NASA has been doing design-by-politics for a very long time.
When practicality gives way to what politicians want in order to increase
their own constituency, the technological endeavor is pretty much doomed.

Of course, Feynman said it much better than me.

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CWuestefeld
_A lot of the technology it uses was developed by and for NASA with NASA's
money._

While Dragon may be standing on the shoulders of giants, isn't that equally
true of the Orion program? I mean, sure, SpaceX has benefited from past
lessons, but so does the current NASA development program. Those giant numbers
quoted for Orion/Constellation surely don't include moneys spent on Apollo,
Space Shuttle, etc.

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rbanffy
If you read the following paragraph (I should have edited it, but when I
realized, it was too late) you would see that NASA is a politician-driven
endeavor. It also has a mandate to generate new technology, while SpaceX only
needs to apply it.

Obviously, Orion/Constellation is not money well spent. At least it teaches
that basing a project in common parts with an existing system and then
specifying them in a way they are no longer common is appallingly stupid. Ares
V may look like a shuttle tank with shuttle SRBs attached, but it's not.

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iwwr
NASA proved it was possible to spend money and gain practically nothing of
scientific value (ISS & the entire Shuttle program). Of course, the main
reasons it got those money was to spend it in favorable political endeavors.

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rbanffy
There is a lot of value in learning how not to do something. The shuttle is a
valuable (albeit costly) lesson on why you should keep committees out of a
design process, on focusing on doing one thing well instead of many things
badly, on why graceful degradation is important and so on. Likewise, I don't
think the ISS is a complete failure - it teaches us every day how you can (and
can't) build huge structures in LEO.

And it's not that the ISS is horridly expensive - it's shipping its parts to
its final location that's expensive. I wonder how much would it cost if we had
the Falcon-9 Heavy, a couple Saturn V's or a shuttle-derived expendable cargo
pod available in 1980.

Could the money be better spent? Could politics be less of a problem?
Probably. It's a shame we still rely on chemical rockets and solar panels.
It's a shame we never deployed a deep space probe with a large solar sail and
that there is no Aldrin Cycler station in place yet.

OTOH, we still don't have flying cars.

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DanI-S
Summary: The first time you do anything, it usually sucks. NASA do things
first, so that we don't have to.

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stcredzero
I think we could accomplish many more firsts with less money if we used the
X-Prize model. (If we did this, we wouldn't have to abandon the NASA model
either!)

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DanI-S
I'm not sure, but I suspect that some things are expensive enough to be beyond
private investment. Mega-projects like the Apollo missions, the Hubble
telescope, the LHC and such seem likely to be too risky to embark on with a
prize as the incentive.

Edit: I know the LHC has nothing to do with NASA; it is just in a similar
vein.

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stcredzero
I think a $20 billion prize for a manned Mars landing could pay off handsomely
for both the winning contestant and the government, particularly if the
government received a license to the technology used to accomplish the prize.

$2 billion for a fully reusable TSTO lofting 5000 pounds to LEO would also be
money well spent.

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sever
Why do you need an escape system? Doesn't it just add tremendous cost and
complexity for a, possibly imagined, modicum of safety?

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rbanffy
Tell that to Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov

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jerf
Also, compare the PR impact of "The pilots safely ejected from the enormous
explosion" vs. "the pilots died screaming in the enormous explosion". One
instance of the latter cost us about five years. Even just on a PR basis the
money may be well spent.

And no, I don't think just accounting for the PR is a good idea, the human
factor is very important. I'm just saying that the PR factor alone is adequate
to justify it before you consider the human factors.

The greatest threat to private spaceflight is the government stomping on it,
and the most likely way that will happen (/most likely excuse the government
will use) is fatalities in the program, because our culture not only doesn't
want to take risks like that, it doesn't want anyone to be able to choose to
take risks like that, for better or worse. (I'm serious about the ambivalence
in "for better or worse"; I can muster good arguments either way. It is not
sarcasm or snark.)

