
The dark future of American space exploration - mariusz79
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8052365/nasa-budget-europa?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=feature-share-top
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krschultz
The real missing part of this article is that NASA's budget is dominated by
building launchers. If all NASA did was build payloads and buy launch
services, it would get a lot more done for its dollar.

In the short term this is not feasible, but we are on track for it happening
in the next 10-20 years. I think we'll have many years of SLS/Orion, but that
is probably the last NASA launch system. Once NASA gets out of the launcher
building business, the entire enterprise because much more viable. The cost of
any particular mission is not terrible, and if any single mission fails it's
not the end of the organization. If the launch program fails, NASA gets off
track for a decade. Effectively the Space Shuttle was a slowly unfolding 30
year failure that pushed NASA off course for decades.

~~~
nickff
I think you are right that building launch vehicles consumes much of NASA's
time, money, and focus, and that private launch systems will relieve NASA of
this burden (if they accept the relief).

I do not think this is NASA's main problem, as they were able to create launch
systems while performing exploration in the 1960s. It seems that they lost
their way after Apollo, when NASA no longer had a clear priority. NASA is now
dominated by internal politics, where each center tries to run its own
projects, and there is no overarching goal. If NASA had one main program, it
would be more visible to the public, and have a greater chance of success on a
realistic timeline (5-10 years), though NASA would risk complete defunding if
there were problems with the project.

Mars in the short term (5-10 years) is a realistic goal (under their current
funding levels) which could get NASA started again, but it would require them
to sacrifice a variety of smaller projects which have strong internal lobbies.

~~~
fapjacks
They didn't lose their way. In the Apollo years you're talking about, NASA
enjoyed as much as FIVE PERCENT of the federal budget.[0] You can build all
the Saturn V launch vehicles you want when the government is throwing bags of
money at your particular problem.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)

~~~
seanflyon
Their budget during the Apollo program was 50% higher than it is today. I
don't think funding is the primary problem.

~~~
fapjacks
Technology is more expensive. The projects themselves are more complex and
machinery more expensive. You can build an antenna with pocket change that
will let you talk to someone on the moon, but you need some serious hardware
to talk to something on Mars, let alone further out. Plus the bureaucracy --
the oft-referenced bureaucracy -- is grinding more and more to a halt. It's
more expensive from a bureaucratic standpoint, with more layers of management
slapped on layers of management. The NASA of the 60s was an entirely different
creature. We would do well to try to get that back, but honestly, really I
think it's too late for that. I think honestly it's out of the American
government's hands what happens in space over the next 50 years, barring
another space race with China (fingers crossed). American commercial
interests? Maybe. But our government just grinds to a halt when it needs to
get anything done.

~~~
seanflyon
It seems that you agree with me that funding is not NASA's primary problem (I
think I am actually more optimistic about NASA's competence). The point I
disagree with is "Technology is more expensive". Technology has gotten
dramatically cheaper (though I agree that current projects are more
difficult). We have better materials, better manufacturing techniques, better
computers and all of it more affordable than it was in the 1960's. Look at
what SpaceX was able to do; in their first 10 years their total expenditures
was only $1 billion, a small fraction of what it would have cost half a
century ago.

------
DanielBMarkham
<meta>

I am beginning to feel that Vox is more of a time-sink than a useful addition
to my regular feed. This article is an example of why. It's long format, goes
over well-trod ground, adds in some items that are politically interpreted a
bit heavily, and ends up kicking off partisan discussions that don't go
anywhere.

They're like Op-Ed columns presented in Wikipedia format. If we had a thesis
and supporting arguments you would at least know what you're dealing with and
engage it on its own terms. But as it is, you're left either accepting this
huge hunk of text or going through half a dozen items to nitpick it to death.
Either choice is suboptimal.

</meta>

I'm a huge supporter of the space program. NASA lost its way a while back,
like the 1970s, and is not the right tool for the job we have. It's no fault
of NASA's -- every new administration and every new Congress feels free to
whipsaw it into a new direction.

We have some clear foundational science goals that NASA could supervise other
competent organizations doing, like reducing cost-to-orbit 100-fold (mass-
drivers, anybody?), creating a cheap, mass-production radioactive battery that
can be used everywhere, or rewarding the first team to optically-image an
earth-sized habitable exoplanet.

Writing NASA a check won't help much of anything, because five years from now
the money will all be re-allocated various political ways. Yes, I grok the
multi-year planning thing. Not germane.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
So what kind of organization(s) do you see doing a better job than Nasa? I
would agree that it's a political and rather inefficient organization, like
any government-funded agency, but I'm curious how exactly we could improve.

Bear in mind that many of Nasa's best projects were undermined by politics. A
new Administration comes into power vowing to re-prioritize spending, and
Nasa's champions within the White House and Congress are suddenly without
jobs. A recession hits and Nasa is an easy target for budget cutters. A
Congressman threatens to withhold spending unless Nasa locates a facility in
his district. You can't fix this stuff; it's part of the landscape.

~~~
jerf
The ideal would be for someone to figure out how to make money in space. Once
you harness the mighty power of greed, nothing short of all-out war would be
able to keep humans out of space. But that's proved to be a bit of a tall bar,
unfortunately, which in itself sort of raises questions about the actual
utility of space anew after 50 years. But before quite making that call let's
see what knocking another order of magnitude off launch costs does for us.

But I find myself often thinking that space just isn't viable for very many
uses without a still-higher level of technology than we have.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Agreed that we really need to knock a couple of more digits of cost-to-orbit
before we can make any kind of informed decision one way or another. Also
agreed that it's not looking good so far.

Mass drivers could send cargo into orbit cheaply -- perhaps given the right
cargo/human ratio, you'd end up with a drastic decrease in cost overall,
especially with reusable rockets.

Right now there's just no there there. Most of the great arguments for getting
off the planet are 1) Science! and 2) We need to get the heck out of Dodge
before we kill ourselves. These are very good reasons, but it's like pushing a
rope -- you'll never make space exploration happen by lecturing people and
taxing them for it. Instead put some greed into the mix. If you find a big
enough pull, then you'll see the dynamics radically change.

Space needs an 1849 Gold Rush.

------
stcredzero
I'm beginning to suspect that the powers that be in American politics and in
the military industrial complex simply lack long term vision.

In the next several decades following, continued US dominance is dependent on
effective education and a strong economy supporting a healthy middle class. In
the next several decades after that, whatever nation/culture succeeds in
expanding the scope of human civilization is going to dominate through its
progeny. (In much the same way that European and in particular WASP culture
that originated in England became dominant through the ascendance of the
United States.)

However, the system is set up to reward those who enter the financial sector,
with its tendency towards rent seeking, and the realm of law/politics, which
tends to engender a viewpoint somewhat distant from the first principles that
govern reality.

China, with its largely technocratic leadership, and with its pent up desire
to express its pride and prowess as a civilization-state may well have the
means, knowledge, and impetus to engage in such an expansion of scope. This
would be the smart strategic move -- instead of directly challenging the US
for power on Earth, they would expand into an even larger context.

Another beauty of such a strategy: the entrenched short-term interests of the
US military industrial complex might well assist them in gaining an
insurmountable lead by staying fat and happy in their status quo.

~~~
Shivetya
Oh I am quite sure the powers that be have long term vision, they just don't
align with some of what we want. They are quite willing to promise the moon
and the stars; not the celestial kind; because it works.

Space exploration does not garner votes, raw science does not garner voters,
and neither do they garner blue collar jobs. Politicians route money to where
it buys them most influence. They rely on this money and positioning people
against each other to maintain their standard of living. See, they are safe
and the masses will stay in their irrational world grousing about the lack of
change they do little to change.

They count on the irrational decision, the rally behind a thousand page health
bill no one reads, the three hundred page net neutrality bill no one is
allowed to read, and they make sure you don't want to by portraying the
challenge to such as an affront to privilege and intelligent and we want to be
considered both. After all, if they tell us its not smart to do otherwise well
those who say otherwise must be wrong.

So they play the people off each other while they keep their backroom deals
and move along merrily laughing at an electorate whose current concern is
their internet connection so they don't miss the latest streaming movie.

Who needs space exploration when Game of Thrones is on.

~~~
stcredzero
_Oh I am quite sure the powers that be have long term vision, they just don 't
align with some of what we want._

Everyone _thinks_ they have "enough" long term vision. I'm sure many of the
Roman emperors who we now think of as being short-sighted thought they had it
all figured out in the way you outline above.

------
spiralpolitik
I've always been of the opinion that if it were left up to the private sector
we wouldn't have gone to the moon or placed a human in orbit. The project
would have been too long term, too risky, and have no obvious return on
investment.

Which is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that
were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make
a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that
were spawned as a result.

~~~
claar
This is a great point.

However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government
organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand
the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while
undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the
little work that got done.

A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a
reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing
& friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the
discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope
for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.

~~~
spiralpolitik
I've seen equal or worse inefficiencies in the private sector.

While the root causes may be different, a badly managed organization is the
same whether it is public or private.

~~~
seanflyon
While their are also massive inefficiencies in the private sector, the public
sector does not have the same ability to fail. Those private companies need to
be efficient enough to avoid bankruptcy.

~~~
fargolime
Note that some of the private sector can't fail now either.

------
blisterpeanuts
Well, this author has a rather pessimistic view of things. In fact, we are a
couple of years away from a major change of government in the U.S. and whoever
succeeds the Obama Administration will have an opportunity to address the
shortcomings of the space program.

The Obama Administration has focused on domestic social issues like jobs,
education, and health care, and deemphasized longer term programs like Nasa.

Typically, the pendulum swings back and forth with space and science
allocations, and I would expect an adjustment upward in the next couple of
years even as the social spending is inevitably cut.

Also, as the U.S. economy comes out of the 2008-2010 recession and starts to
generate more government revenue, it will become politically easier to re-fund
some of these mothballed or back-burnered programs and get Big Space back on
the front page.

Americans love cool space stuff. The entire Baby Boomer generation grew up
with the 1960s-70s manned programs and these things are near and dear to their
hearts.

I was a 10-year-old boy when men first walked on the moon, and my friends and
I all had model rockets, Nasa posters on the wall, and dreamed of becoming
astronauts some day. We all assumed that the country would just keep on
funding more exploration until we had a massive rotating space station in
orbit, a permanent base on the Moon, and probes reaching to every corner of
the star system and beyond.

Very little of that has come to pass, and we are a poorer and less
accomplished nation because of it. Nasa indeed should be getting more than
$18.5B, in my opinion more like $50B or $60B. It's a great investment.

Sure, let private companies try to jump into the satellite launching business,
more power to them. But the heavy lifting has got to come from Nasa, that
great organization that has been neglected for too long.

~~~
rayiner
> Americans love cool space stuff.

So I'd like to believe that. But my conclusion based on studying the relevant
history is that it was fear which motivated Americans to spend the money for
space exploration.

When Sputnik launched in 1957, it threw Americans into a panic. Here was a
Soviet god-knows-what that you could see from your house in Kansas. The
Soviets beat us to nearly every milestone: first satellite, first animal in
space, first man in space, first EVA, first probe on the moon. The Soviets'
first manned lunar landing was scheduled for 1968, but the architect of the
program died at an inopportune time in 1966. The need to keep up with or beat
the Soviets is what drove the space program until 1969.

I don't think we would've gone to all that trouble if we didn't have the Red
Empire breathing down our necks.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Obviously, it was international politics and Cold War thinking that woke a
fire under the Americans in the late 1950s. But that has little to do with
what I'm talking about.

The Boomers, who are the predominant generation today, grew up on Ray Bradbury
and Isaac Asimov, Star Trek and 2001 and model rocketry. We lived and breathed
space exploration.

There is a huge ready-made audience for more great achievements in space. We
need national leaders who can inspire the voters to allocate the funding. The
last few presidents haven't been very enthusiastic. G.W.Bush actually did have
a vision of replacing the Shuttle, but unfortunately he didn't lock in the
funding for the replacement Orion/Constellation systems before his term ended,
so the U.S. ended up with no means to get humans into orbit, a rather
embarrassing predicament for the world's erstwhile leader in space travel.

~~~
rayiner
None of the presidents from that generation have invested in space
exploration, nor has there been any public call for them to do so, so I'm
doubtful very many boomers "lived and breathed space exploration" although
many certainly did.

I'm sympathetic to your point. I majored in aerospace engineering in college
because I grew up reading books that told me we'd be going to Mars any day
now. But in the process, I became convinced that nothing would happen in that
field for the foreseeable future, and probably nothing economically worthwhile
in my lifetime.

------
anovikov
I explain this by the lack of competition. Rest of the world is not making
anything comparable to what NASA does. Only Japan's Hayabusa is remotely close
to a typical NASA mission. Nobody can say 'our nation is lagging behind in
planetary missions' so politicians are happy and prefer to concentrate funding
on more pricey things having less real scientific impact, like manned
spaceflight, where there is really a lag to be fixed.

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ChuckMcM
Interesting that they don't mention SpaceX. One of the profound changes is
that in 1962 it took the resources of a nation-state to send a probe to Mars,
now someone in the 1% bracket could fund something equivalent without
disturbing their kid's trust fund. That is pretty profound.

We will get on-orbit refueling. Once we get there you can launch pieces,
assemble and fuel in orbit, and then head out to where ever you want to go.

The interesting question is what happens when it becomes clear that the space
faring capability of a corporation exceeds that of the government. Over
regulation I suspect.

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codecamper
Maybe better to solve global warming before we chart out every square inch of
our solar system. It's pretty clear that there is way more life on Earth than
the other planets. Too bad because the life here is under extreme threat. You
don't need to look far. Species going extinct. Rain forests converted into
palm oil plantations. coral reefs bleached. And now the possibility of runaway
climate change.

There are only so many brainy people on the earth. Better that they focus on
these more immediate problems at hand.

Space exploration is probably just a distraction from the much more pressing
problems of the day.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
We hardly spend anything on space exploration. Not to mention it has a lot of
benefits and carryover to the rest of the economy. If we have to make cuts,
there are many other places we can target instead of the .5% of the federal
budget to NASA.

~~~
fargolime
If the benefits and carryover paid for it, fine. But I doubt it, not now
anyway. If it wasn't borrowed money, I'd say throw .5% at at it. But no way
when it's borrowed, unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the outcome is
net positive.

~~~
caseydurfee
I really wish we could retire the word "borrowed" to describe the nature of
sovereign debt. It makes it sound like we're borrowing dollars from the
Chinese to pay NASA. That's not how it works. (United States currency is one
of the few things that isn't made in China these days.)

~~~
fargolime
Are you suggesting there are no adverse consequences to the "borrowing",
similar to borrowing?

------
InclinedPlane
This article skews towards trying to make a political point, but it does so at
the cost of truthfulness. It lays an elaborate case before the reader,
detailing the woeful state of NASA interplanetary science and the assumed
perfidy of a stingy congress.

This is a narrative that has only the slimmest hold on reality. Congress has
done reasonably well at keeping NASA funded, with some occasional road bumps
here and there. And certainly at a lower level than what many of us who value
planetary exploration particularly highly would like. But still not too bad
all things considering.

The real cause for the pinch in planetary science is NASA itself. It has
indulged in undisciplined budgetary behavior and project planning at the cost
of diversity and robustness in its science missions.

The major cause of these problems is something that is not mentioned once,
even in passing, in this entire article: the James Webb Space Telescope
(JWST). As of right now JWST is more than $7 billion over budget and 8 years
behind schedule. That $7 billion compares to: 1 Curiosity rover ($2.5 billion)
plus 2 Dawn double asteroid rendezvous missions (2x $500 million, 4 total
asteroidal bodies visited) plus 1 Cassini mission ($1.4 billion) plus 1 New
Horizons mission ($650 million) plus 1 Kepler mission ($550 million) plus an
entire extra billion dollars. That's an exciting panoply of opportunities, and
imagine those figures in the context of similar classes of missions. Ion
engine powered comet-survey missions, planetary landers and rovers, Kuiper
belt flyby missions, survey missions to Neptune and Uranus, exo-planet
searches, and so forth. To say that NASA's space science missions have been
sucked dry of funding is to ignore _why_ and toward what end they have been.

Make no mistake, JWST is a remarkably ambitious mission that is likely to be
as groundbreaking as Hubble was, but it is absolutely squeezing the life out
of the rest of NASA right now. It would be nice if congress would provide even
more funding for NASA so they could go forward with JWST as well as other
missions, but to implicate congress as a villain depriving NASA space science
of life is to ignore the reality of the situation. This is a self-inflicted
wound.

[http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-
aa...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aas-nasa-
james-webb-space-telescope-astrophysics-budget-20130108)

[http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-n...](http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-
nasa-budget-cuts-mars-exploration-by226/)

P.S. Moreover, the doom and gloom tone of the article is unwarranted.
Regardless of either NASA budget mismanagement or congressional stinginess the
capabilities of NASA in regards to exploration are set to vastly balloon due
to the incredible reductions in launch cost on the horizon (from SpaceX and
others).

------
happyscrappy
I am strongly in favor of boosting NASA's budget, but the US still spends more
on space than every other nation combined so I think saying it has a dark
future is a bit hyperbolic.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/25/the-
u-s-still-spends-more-on-space-than-every-other-country-combined/)

~~~
blisterpeanuts
China's spending isn't very transparent, and their costs are much lower, so
dollar-for-dollar they are accomplishing more than Nasa is. And they're not
just screwing around. They're planning to put humans on the Moon in a few
years, which implies a huge and well funded effort.

~~~
happyscrappy
That is a good thing, the US could use some credible competition.

------
mikerichards
NASA isn't the end-all organization for space exploration.

