
Do we need NASA? - gibsonf1
http://www.news.com/Do-we-need-NASA/2009-11397_3-6211308.html?tag=nefd.pop
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tx
It's always easier to criticize. The problem is that space travel is very,
very, very hard. In that regard the Cold War was the best thing that ever
happened to space exploration: two super powers spending crazy amount of money
and human effort to beat each other 'who's gonna do THAT first?'. I think it
was awesome: the best kind of competition you can have, almost like a high
school science contest on a giant scale.

If you look around at other countries in the "space club" the situation is not
much different. Launching 1gk of _anything_ so high is so expensive that it
makes very little economic sense. Private sector will never launch anything to
Mars. Why would they? Private investors would never build a giant space
station just to run a bunch of experiments on it.

The main message this article is trying to send is a bit creepy one (IMO):
"NASA, you should do some kick-ass research using our tax dollars, and we'll
be trying to make money out of what you will come up with". The problem with
it is that only small percentage of what can be done in space is profitable:
satellites, high-altitude tourism... that's about it.

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jsjenkins168
I often wonder what could be achieved by privateers with just a fraction of
NASA's annual funding. Just look at the incredible pace that X-Prize teams
develop on comparatively minuscule budgets!

If you think about it, the situation mirrors that of startups. A small team of
"hackers" can now build aeronautical technology better, faster, and cheaper
than the big behemoth NASA can. And the reasons are also similar, in that it
now costs less to build spacecraft than it used to.

Incidentally, some of these space "startups" are run by hackers. Like
Armadillo Aerospace, which was co-founded by id Software's John Carmack. I
guess hacking on aeronautics is in the same spirit as hacking on software.

I would really like to see what this article proposes: Focus on giving money
to space "startups" and let NASA focus on the things that a slower moving, big
company can do well, like research.

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rms
It gets a lot harder to engineer an orbital craft and I don't see a hacker-
type startup building an orbital manned spacecraft anytime soon.

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JulianMorrison
SpaceX Falcon 9 / Dragon?

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rms
I'm glad people are trying, I will be very impressed when they launch.

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rms
We could have funded ten missions to Mars with the money that the corporations
stole from the US people and laundered through Iraq.

So no, we don't need NASA, but it represents a perfectly reasonable way to
spend enormous amounts of money.

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DanielBMarkham
As a big aviation and space junkie, this has been buggin' me for some time.

I remember the astronauts on the moon (I was but a wee lad at the time) saying
that in a few years, the new Space Shuttle would be hauling up cargo every
week or so into earth orbit. Our new space pickup truck would mean space
access for all.

It was all BS. In fact, there is a long list of BS that we've heard about
NASA. The problem is that, just like big IT, NASA is big space. It works under
the idea that one big honking agency can do everything for everybody. And when
you really look at it, NASA is all about politics and not performance, as it
is with most programs run by politicians.

NASA needs to do one thing: reduce cost to orbit by developing/sponsoring new
high-risk technologies. If they can whack cost to orbit by a factor of a
hundred, the market will take care of the rest. We won't have these political
debates about whether to fix the Hubble ST because it will cost something like
$100K to go up there and do it. Reducing cost to orbit just will change
everything -- that is, if we can get them to do it.

This is kind of like IT was in the days before Apple. To do anything, you had
to have a lot of money and staff. I'm looking forward to the day when space is
much more like YC and the current startup world -- anybody with a small amount
of money can get into the game and play with the big boys. We should encourage
that progression. We need to for our survival, imo.

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lst
NASA is highly overestimated. They still didn't figure out how to land on sun.

/sarcasm

