
Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing - grannyg00se
http://news.discovery.com/space/armstrong-congress-nasa-embarrassing-110922.html
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bradleyland
I know this has to be incredibly difficult for anyone who grew up during the
space race, but there comes a point at which you must force yourself to let go
of the old in the act of grasping at the future. Compared to the advance of
technology within government organizations like NASA, the progress seen in
private programs chasing the X PRIZE has been astounding. So long as the
government keeps their 70s era technology in service, the role remains filled,
and the young upstarts have less motivation to shoot for the stars.

~~~
nate_meurer
Bingo. Armstrong and many of the other old Apollo-era astronauts are
emotionally invested in manned space-flight. I think he romanticizes it to the
point of being immune to arguments of cost-effectiveness.

~~~
diogenescynic
It's not just about emotions. It's the next frontier. Don't you want us to get
there first? It's also a great investment, it creates jobs and develops
technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.

~~~
eru
> it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit
> everyone.

That's a testable statement. Though the more interesting statement would be:
It creates more jobs than other things we could do with the many, and develops
more beneficial technology.

(My guess is that those stronger version aren't true.)

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nhebb
The title is completely misleading. Armstrong did not tell NASA "you're
embarrassing". He told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
that the demise of NASA is embarrassing. And it is. Regardless of the other
crap our government spends money on, NASA is a fantastic investment, and has
always provided a positive return to our economy.

~~~
SamReidHughes
I'm sorry, but you have no way of knowing this. What would happen if you took
a bunch of would-be rocket scientists and _hadn't_ given them jobs at NASA?

~~~
ap22213
That's an interesting perspective, assuming you're alluding to private vs.
government funding.

However, can anyone provide evidence that private funding can accomplish
anything near the scale of what NASA accomplished? I'm asking that as an
honest question.

I don't love government spending or bureaucracy, by any means. Who would,
except perhaps government workers? However, I fail to see any major
advancements that have happened without the scale of funding that only
governments can provide.

I really want to believe that the private sector can do it. I just don't see a
lot of historical evidence that it can.

~~~
astine
It's hard to make an apple-to-apples comparison here as private companies in
the past decades have been forbidden to do what NASA has done. Not to mention,
NASA's most memorable achievements were fueled largely through patriotic
furor.

I suspect that it's possible. Much of NASA's flouted benefit are the
technological discoveries it has made while solving the problems of Space
exploration. Assuming that those discoveries have benefited our society
economically more than NASA has cost it (an argument I've read before) then it
seems like their would have been at least one sufficient financial incentive
for private industry to pursue space if given the chance. Not to mention R&D
that can only be performed in a zero gravity environment. A patent system
_could_ make all this profitable.

But there are still so many other concerns, such as national defense that crop
up in talk of private space exploration that it's really hard to make any real
comparison.

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DanielBMarkham
The shuttle was never flown the thousands of times it needed to have all the
bugs worked out, NASA is an agency lost in middle-management hell, and you
can't trust exploration to the politicians.

That being said, Armstrong has a point: none of what I've just said is new or
is satisfactory as an excuse. The failure to manage these facts and manage our
access to space -- perhaps by a privatization push a decade earlier -- is an
embarrassment.

~~~
riverlaw
I strongly disagree with the notion that NASA is lost in middle management
hell. Do you know how many successful missions they have running right now,
that are to the benefit of all? Dawn, Chanda, Hubble, Messenger, Cassini,
GRAIL, 2 current mars missions, one halfway to pluto, another on its way to
jupiter. Not to mention all of the valuable earth research. Manned missions
are important for inspiring and our long term survival. But we can afford to
take a break. The private sector in the US is doing really well. Nasa is
getting ready to send people on a long term mission. Cut them some slack.

~~~
hugh3
I don't want this to turn into a huge thread listing all current NASA
missions, but I just want to put in a word for Kepler, which to me could be
easily the most important NASA mission going on at the moment.

In 1994 we knew of _zero_ planets outside the solar system. Ten years ago we
had a handful. Now, thanks to the Kepler mission, we're on the verge of
_really_ understanding how common planetary systems are, how they form, the
typical distribution of planet sizes and orbits, and how common Earth-like
planets are likely to be throughout the universe. That's a big freaking deal.

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FrojoS
>>[...] Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only taxis for the world's astronauts
heading to low-Earth orbit, and each ticket to the ISS costs global space
agencies between 50 and 60 million dollars each.<<

I thought, the last shuttle starts we're costing over 1 billion. So with 7
crew members, thats more than twice the price paid to the Russians. Sure, they
could raise that price in theory. But the Russians can't afford to run the ISS
on their own.

~~~
anigbrowl
The ISS is great and all, but the real value of the shuttle was that we could
park next to Hubble or one of our spy satellites and do maintenance in place,
so milking a lot of value out of orbiting platforms that would otherwise have
to be shut down. I don't see what we have that replaces that right now.

~~~
krschultz
Satellites are not designed for that - the Hubble sure wasn't. It is not a
capability that needs to be replaced.

~~~
droithomme
KRSchultz is basically correct, please don't downvote him. The last Hubble
repair mission went way beyond the Hubble's expected service capabilities,
which was an amazing accomplishment.

However, it's _vastly_ more economically sound and safer to bring an aging
device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the
latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do
space walks for a repair and upgrade mission.

The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble
telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit,
and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared
to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as
payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of
the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.

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pnathan
It is terribly embarrassing. But the solution is not to keep the Shuttle
program creaking along, but to work on a new program. At some point, legacy
must be removed and a new platform created.

~~~
lhnn
Like I've said repeatedly, what is embarrassing is our dependence on forign
nations to get to a space station largely funded and built by us. Russia is
not our friend. Russia is a business partner with whom we're not at war.

We should have gotten our asses up and had something new by now, so we could
retire the shuttle.

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johrn
Isn't SpaceX scheduled to make a resupply flight to the ISS this November? I'm
not sure how we get from that to "We will have no American access to, and
return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an
unpredictable length of time in the future".

Is it just because the SpaceX flights are only cargo and not personnel? I
can't tell from the SpaceX launch
manifest(<http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php>) what the launch is going
to be carrying, but the Dragon is at least capable of carrying crew.

~~~
jessriedel
It's not looking good:

[http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-
allowed...](http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed-to-
dock-to-iss-on-next-flight/)

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raldi
Asking how we can shut down the shuttle program "in the middle of its prime"
reminds me of the line from Star Wars about the bad guys surrendering "Now? In
our moment of triumph?"

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diogenescynic
America has stopped dreaming. Remember all those futuristic visions of
tomorrow and the optimism America had? That all stopped once we stopped going
to the moon. We just need to make this a priority over say, two wars and a
military presence in hundreds of countries.

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droithomme
I agree with Armstrong. It is indeed very embarrassing the US has no human
launch capability left at all, especially given our enormous lead. Hopefully
that will be rectified with the work SpaceX is doing.

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nazgulnarsil
canned primates are not the future of space. I wish every dollar spent on it
was spent on brain research. i want to explore space in an appropriate body,
not this laughably fragile meat one.

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martythemaniak
Great, now try to tell people they should pay more taxes to support a bigger
space program - be it carried out by NASA or private companies.

~~~
cryptoz
The people don't need to pay more taxes. An adjustment of current budget
allocation is all that's needed. For example, you could double NASA's budget
by shrinking the war budget from ~$698,000,000,000 to $678,000,000,000 / year.
Seems pretty reasonable to me.

~~~
rbanffy
And you should not underestimate the propaganda value. Generations were
inspired by the Apollo program. The shuttle is a beautiful machine, but it
really doesn't go anywhere interesting.

~~~
hugh3
Is the Moon _that_ interesting?

~~~
rbanffy
It's a real place. The ISS is not a "place" - it's something we put up there.
It's the difference between going to the woods and camping on your mother's
lawn.

Besides that, if we can manufacture spacecraft parts on the Moon, launching
them is much easier than launching from Earth. You can even use a maglev rail
to launch stuff from there - no reaction mass involved.

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nirvana
This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon
race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied
private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get
a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a
space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from
showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for
a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen!)

This should resonate really well with anyone building a startup. A startup is
a money engine. You find something that is profitable, and you invest in it
and grow it.

You can go out and spend a lot of money doing things the manual way, but if
everything pretty much stops when you stop spending money, you're not really
investing in a sustainable business.

This is the case with NASA and a lot of government programs. We were spending
a lot of money, but we were not building a space industry... in fact, because
government bureaucrats saw space as a competitive advantage (NASA, for
instance, long enjoyed easy funding from Congress) they worked to stymie
private interests that might show them up.

It is great that things are changing now. We have SpaceX building launch
vehicles. Virgin Galactic will start their business any day now (hopefully,
though remember how congress wanted to shut it down because it might not be
"safe"?) Jeff Bezos is doing something off in the desert of west texas, and
even John Carmack has a small space business.

But we cannot ignore the legacy of hundreds of billion sunk into NASA on
unsustainable programs, and quirky launch vehicles designed to meet
bureaucratic needs, such as to at least have one component of it built in each
of the 50 states.

So, the news that NASA is in an "embarrassing" state to me, is good news. I
say this, because I would very much like to see Humans have ready access to
space.

~~~
krschultz
"It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your
vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as
happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not
a US citizen"

For the military, that is a feature not a
bug.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investigations)

Realize anyone with the ability to get to orbit has the ability to drop things
on the USA.

Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and control
regulation are not bumbling idiots. Sure, it's easy to make jokes about the
DMV or the post office, but the reality is that the person at the counter you
interact with doesn't make laws. The guys making laws are generally really
sharp and well educated, and in fact a lot of them actually have economics
degrees because it is a great background for that position. So they probably
understand better than you or I roughly how many jobs are going to be killed
by these tight regulations.

That is weighed against the military's desire to keep space less open for
security reasons. For a long time the military was winning the argument. It
has slowly started changing, but the delay certainly has nothing to do with a
mis-understanding of economics.

~~~
mkn
"Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and
control regulation are not bumbling idiots."

Actually, in the case of the export restriction laws in question, they were
bumbling idiots. These laws were passed in haste after there was an accidental
disclosure of technology from the U.S. to the Chinese during an investigation
of a launch failure. The law is terribly vague, with industry leaders unable
to tell even what is covered by it or isn't. Additionally, enforcement
responsibility moved from the Commerce Department to the Defense Department,
with a concomitant increase in red tape that really only a large prime defense
contractor could have the resources to cope with.

It would not be too much of a stretch to say that this law would be like
outlawing airline travel completely on the basis of security concerns arising
out of 9/11.

Finally, the arguments that will bring about a much needed change to these
regulations will not be economic in nature, they will be arguments about
national security. Already there is an international market for technologies
untainted by U.S. control. Unfortunately for the U.S., the need for that
market is going away as U.S. companies have been isolated for so long, and
other nations have been so free to cooperate for so long, that non-U.S. space
technology is, for the most part, superior to U.S. technology on cost,
reliability, and performance bases. We, the U.S., are losing the larger
security war by winning every local security battle with senseless and callous
efficiency.

~~~
krschultz
As someone who has been trained in the law (admittedly by a large prime
defense contractor) it's not that hard to understand.

~~~
tryp
Perhaps not for you and your colleagues, but for the folks at the state
department charged with enforcement, it often seems to depend on their
personal interpretation on a given day.

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mkramlich
I have massive respect for Armstrong and Cernan but disagree with their
positions. I think they're both wrong on this issue, they're distorting the
actual state of things, and at a deeper level they're romanticizing the
shuttle so much and looking so much through the lens and context of the 60's
US-Soviet space race that their prescription is nearly the opposite of what we
should be doing. I and a lot of techies I know are way more happy with the
state of US space affairs now than say 20 years ago precisely because there's
so much private enterprise innovation now, while, at the same time, NASA is
still doing new missions and research. NASA ain't perfect, govt ain't perfect,
market ain't perfect, but there are lots of things going right at the moment.
And I think they're overlooking it.

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sixtofour
Space? You can't get there from here.

