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from the robots-take-our-jobs,-who-takes-the-robot's? dept.
NASA's robotic Mars Exploration Program is on a troubling path of decline—and decisions must be made now in order to stop it. This is the conclusion my colleague Jason Callahan and I reached as we prepared a new report for The Planetary Society: Mars in Retrograde: A Pathway to Restoring NASA's Mars Exploration Program (pdf). I urge you to download it and read it yourself.
[...] [We] found a fundamental contradiction in NASA's extant Mars plans: there is not much of a program within the Mars Exploration Program. Currently, NASA has a single mission development—the Mars 2020 rover (InSight, which launches in 2018, is part of the Discovery program). There have been no new mission starts for Mars since 2013, one of the longest droughts in recent history.
But the existing Mars missions are aging and won't last forever. A new orbiter is badly needed to relay high-speed communications with ground missions and to provide high resolution mapping of the surface to support landing attempts by NASA and others (not to mention provide important science). Yet the latest budget release for 2018 contained no new start for this critical mission.
Also at The Verge.
Other upcoming Mars missions include SpaceX's Red Dragon lander, the Emirates Mars Mission, the EU's ExoMars 2020, a Chinese orbiter, lander, and rover mission, Japan's Mars Terahertz Microsatellite, and India's Mangalyaan 2.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:01AM (19 children)
It's quite predictable. NASA funding has been very consistent from the mid 1970s to the present. There isn't an organization operating in space with a more stable funding source than NASA.
There's an even better reason. Such major manned missions aren't important to NASA or its funding sources.
It's time to abandon the country-centric view of space development. I think it's time to let private enterprise take a crack at it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:49AM (18 children)
That's just not true. NASA's budget, even just since the 1970s, has dropped by 50%. [wikipedia.org] And that's just in raw numbers. You need to keep in mind that a huge chunk of that budget is forcefully used as little more than congressional pork. The SLS, in particular, is extremely unlikely to every lead to anything yet NASA is blowing a good sized chunk of their budget on that.
I mean and this is all happening at a time when space is becoming more important than ever. Within 10 years, 20 at the most, we will be mining asteroids. That will completely and permanently change the world's economy forever. It also stands to completely undermine gold, which is still considered a national security. Objectively we need to be their first, but we're seemingly intentionally approaching that a snail's pace. And we're also standing on the edge of interplanetary settlement which will similarly change human civilization permanently. Even in the experimental sciences realm - NASA spent years analyzing and testing the EM drive. It passed every single test and analysis with flying colors, and now that has seemingly been completely abandoned. I imagine the truth there is, as the rumors go, that the air force is taking over given the national security implications but really this ought be the domain of NASA. NASA's budget is constantly being cut at a time when their role is more important than ever. It's idiotic.
For every dollar of tax you now pay less than one half of one penny goes to NASA.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:52AM (10 children)
The EM drive puzzles me. The tests seems to pan out. Why not send one up with a SpaceX rocket and test in space? The weight is far less than any of the re-supplies regularly sent to ISS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @12:10PM (9 children)
Yeah that's what I was getting at. The latest rumor is that the Airforce has been actively testing one. The idea was published by some media outlet towards the end of last year. Based on 'anonymous sources' but it does go a good ways towards explaining why NASA has suddenly started pretending the EM Drive doesn't exist after it passed all their tests. It's supposedly the purpose of one of the air force's classified X-37B [wikipedia.org] spaceplanes. Interestingly that would also fit with even what the air force has said of the ship's purpose which was, "risk reduction, experimentation, and operational concept development for reusable space vehicle technologies, in support of long-term developmental space objectives."
There's also the fact that China claimed they had succesfully tested an EM-drive in space - which was met with no reaction. Again, that just seems kind of bizarre given how revolutionary the technology would be if it [somehow] does actually work. The lack of visible action/reaction rather strongly suggests classified action.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:19PM (8 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:28PM (1 child)
In a way I think that's why testing it is so important. Right now there is no real bounds on what could be happening. If it fails to work in space then we have radically limited the search space of possible explanations since it's clearly interacting with something on Earth. If it does work then we might need to repeat experimentation one more time in deeper space away from our magnetosphere and maybe even shielded behind a planet relative to the sun to try to minimize any possible sort of external influence.
In any case at some point why it works becomes less relevant than the fact it does work from an immediate utility point of view. Even before being scaled up it could be immediately used to enable orbital corrections for satellites indefinitely with 0 fuel and I imagine the cost of building one is substantially less than the ion thrusters currently used.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @02:57AM
If you can't explain it, then there's a good chance that you don't actually have an effect to explain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:49PM (5 children)
Same AC here. Another thing I'd also add is that it may be, even if it does work, that we could spend years and years of man hours without managing to discover why.
Astronomical spectroscopy [wikipedia.org] was discovered and used to make further new discoveries many centuries before quantum mechanics began to be discovered offering an explanation to what was being observed to happen. They were, initially, so far removed from the answer that I think it would be safe to say it would have been literally impossible to discover the underlying functionality given that they would have been searching in directions that made sense given the cutting edge of understanding at the time.
The rate of revolutionary discovery has slowed, but that means relatively little. Many physicists thought physics was, at least on a fundamental level, mostly finished in the early later 19th century as the pace of revolutionary discoveries had similarly slowed. There were some kinks to work out, but many felt that the fundamentals has finally be more or less solved. Then came pesky relativity, quantum mechanics, the dissolution of the luminiferous aether, the complete explosion in atomic physical structures, and much more. The point is, I think it's always wise to remain some degree of humility as it relates to our level of understanding. In every generation you have countless individuals, otherwise extremely intelligent individuals, that become overly secure in their (speaking of humanity as a whole - not just the individual) capacity for progress and understanding.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @03:03AM (4 children)
Except that effect was obvious and easy to generate in the lab. The EM drive apparently is not. That's a strong indication that maybe our ability to explain things is not in peril and there isn't actually an effect to explain (or an explanation involves rather mundane effects (like the consequences of a lot of wishful thinking) which don't generate a novel propulsion system).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:21AM (3 children)
Well you're simply wrong there on both accounts. This effect is obvious and easy to generate in the lab. One of NASA's first steps was to have three independent organizations also build and measure the apparent thrust of the device. They all achieved identical results. And the effect of spectroscopy is not obvious by any means at all. It took thousands of years relative to the point that we began some degree of scientific exploration to discover, and hundreds of years after that before it was able to be sufficiently explained. And even going from a prism splitting light to spectroscopy requires instrumentation that, by the standards of the time, was quite sophisticated. You're certainly not going to just crack open a quartz and start measuring out the elements.
It's abundantly clear there's already something to explain - and we have completely failed to do so. Our ability to explain things is obviously failing here. For that matter, I am half wondering if you may not be aware of how ignorant we are in science in general. There are countless open questions in science we have not even begun to be able to explain. Dark matter and dark energy are the two most pop sci culture things you would be familiar with. These may or may not exist but are simply placeholders to describe other unexplainable effects that contradict the state of the universe as we understand it. Not all that different than the luminiferous aether which was though to be an invisible goo through which all things in spaced traversed. It was created as another patchwork explanation to something that contradicted knowledge of the time.
Much of science as we currently know is contradicted by results in one way or the other. That doesn't necessarily mean we're wrong, but it certainly does mean we're not even remotely capable of explaining our universe. Science is an ongoing and fluid process. Thinking we know how to explain all things known is simply ignorant. It is absolutely the message taught at undergraduate level and I believe it's wrong. The best way to open your eyes to the beauty of our universe and of the scientific process is with an appreciation and understanding of how little we truly are capable of understanding. In spite of this, our minuscule grain of knowledge has been able to provide immense and marvelous gains to society.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @11:16AM (2 children)
Perhaps it is time then to discuss those results? Supposedly there is a minute amount of thrust for an extraordinary amount of power. That's not useful territory for a propulsion system and still leaves open a lot of room for error. And once again, it may be a more mundane propulsion method, like a crude electric drive combined with wishful thinking, masquerading as something more exotic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @06:12PM (1 child)
I'm not sure you understand the scope of what's going on here. Something generating thrust without expelling 'normal' matter is HUGE. As in that would be likely the greatest single discovery in human history to date - and likely for many centuries to come. Energy is infinitely available. The big thing that constrains us in space is the fact that in order to move in space you generally need to expel something. That something being fuel of some sort. So for instance when you see a rocket, somewhere around 97% of its mass is fuel. That 3% that remains is the payload. For the Falcon 9, which is quite efficient - it manages to get 4.1% of the rocket to actually be payload. Even getting a feather of thrust for a mountain of energy would be an enormous game changer. Not only would it completely reshape physics as we know it, but it would would dramatically reshape space travel. Going a step further it even means you could reach relativistic velocities. The implications there are absolutely stupefying.
In any case 'Crude electric drives' cannot generate thrust suspended in a vacuum. There is no 'masquerading.' I don't think you understand how ridiculously absurd it is that it's DOING what it's doing is. Nothing, so far as we know, ought be able to do what this device is doing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @06:25PM
And something which doesn't do what is advertised is NOT HUGE. Let us also note that flashlights generate thrust without expelling 'normal' matter either. There are plenty of mechanisms for generating thrust in this situation that we still need to rule out (eg, photonic propulsion, ionization of exterior of microwave cavity).
No, it wouldn't. For example, it wouldn't help get payloads off of Earth. The reason why terrestrial rockets to orbit has such a vast portion of their mass as payload is a combination of the extremely high thrust to mass ratio of chemical propulsion used, combined with the low exhaust velocity of the propulsion. They need the former in order to escape into orbit. And they have the latter because of the inefficiency of the propulsion system.
Ion drives and other electric drives don't have this problem. They aren't intended for high thrust to mass ratio work and their efficiency means that they can generate a lot of delta-v (such as for changing orbital trajectories) using a lot small mass fraction than chemical engines would under the same circumstances.
Yes, they can. The thing you're missing here that the wall of the microwave cavity may be the propellant of the system, being ionized on the outside and ejected by the tremendous energy input in the interior. It does however rule out a fair number of other experimental failure modes.
Which should be a warning sign to you that the device may not be doing what you think it's doing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:03PM (6 children)
No it hasn't. Read the chart comment: "NASA's budget as percentage of federal total, from 1958 to 2017". Federal spending adjusted for inflation has grown significantly over that period of time - more than doubling [supportingevidence.com] from the 1970s to present. Instead, look at the table of NASA's budget in 2014 constant dollars. The current spending is more than any year in the 1970s after 1973. Sure, NASA spending has been higher and lower than present over the past forty years, but it has always been consistently funded at levels near the present level.
So what? What is it doing with that money that warrants you giving them that much even? Let us keep in mind your litany of woes, the things that you said NASA just isn't doing with its "declining" budget.
My point here isn't to defend NASA's many decades of failure in its space endeavors, but to point out that NASA has long had an adequate budget for doing the tasks that you want it to do. More money won't fix what is wrong. It's good money after bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:17PM (5 children)
You have to keep in mind here that NASA doesn't get to decide, on the most broad level, how they spend their money. This is one of the many reasons that looking at percents is more useful than raw dollars. The percents are reflective of congresses valuation and direction of NASA. This should be going up - not down. So for instance, NASA blowing tons of money on the SLS is not a decision made by NASA, but by congress. Their actual budget is broken up by the numerous subdivisions and is incredibly small. Even in total budget real dollars, NASA received vastly greater funding the years when they were able to quickly do some incredible things with their budget in the mid to late sixties running from $30 to $40 billion. Now keep in mind that that $30-$40 billion was dedicated almost exclusively to doing said great things. Now instead they get $19 billion broken up in countless different ways. They only have one allowance in excess of $2 billion - and that's the nearly $4 billion (more than 20% of their budget) being forcefully dumped into the SLS. Planetary science, which is where all the great things like the Mars rovers and so on is left with $1.9 billion. More than Obama did, but still should start to put things into context. Factor in their 20k employees, and NASA is running a bare bones budget.
I do agree that they could have done more with what they had in the past, but this isn't a dichotomy. They need to spend their money more responsibly, but even if they spent it perfectly - they'd still be far short of what they need to actually start making things happen.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @03:14AM (4 children)
But it is their responsibility to steer those who do decide how to spend NASA's funding. NASA has long been a willing accessory to their irrelevance by this means.
No, it's not. As we saw in the previous cycle of posts, this was instead a way to claim misleadingly that a relatively constant funding stream was a decline by half.
They also followed economic practices like avoiding one-off missions that allowed that money to be spent much more effectively in pursuit of their incredible things.
If they spent it far more effectively, they'd have a far more effective case for getting more funding in the next cycle of funding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @07:14AM (3 children)
You think congressional funding has even the slightest bit of anything to do with merit? Congressional budgets are decided by committee. And this [wikipedia.org] is the current head of the Congressional Committee on Science which has direct oversight of the funding of NASA. A bible thumping lawyer with 0 scientific or technical background fueled by big oil and big media and with no apparent interest in science whatsoever beyond the realm of undermining climate related research to keep those "donations" flowing.
Smith has been responsible for substantially increasing the funding for SLS, cutting the funding for earth sciences, scrapping the asteroid redirection mission, and more. Congress doesn't care about NASA. They're largely the ones responsible for destroying it. And again on the above - what NASA does or does not spend their money on IS NOT THEIR CHOICE. They have discretion in the implementation but what is funding and for how much is the choice of congress. Congress is slicing NASA up a dozen different ways, underfunding each part - except the useless jobs program known as SLS, and then acting surprised when nothing productive happens which is then used as a justification for further cuts.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @11:09AM (2 children)
Yes. And let us keep in mind that the only reason those congressional committees have any money to play with at all is because they actually do on occasion fund things that are viewed as of merit to the voters.
Again, I strongly disagree. NASA has been a partner in its irrelevance. Where again is the NASA opposition to the SLS which consumes a sixth of their budget or similar projects over the past four decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @05:28PM (1 child)
And politicians in congress are reelected, not out of nuance of our system, but because people approve of the job their doing? You should check the congressional approval ratings sometime. You see the thing is politics is divided in America and we use a distracted first past the post system. That means you vote D or R, or you waste your vote. And even if you don't approve of the job your D or R is doing, people who would vote for this individual would still prefer to have somebody they think is doing a shit job but goes by their same preferred letter, rather than have somebody in office who uses the other letter. Ta da - politicians getting elected for decades even when their own supposed constituents think they are horrible.
Do you know what would happen to NASA if they didn't cheerlead for the SLS? Their budget would get hacked and slashed even more. They play ball and get slowly squeezed to death or they try to take a stand and rapidly die.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 09 2017, @06:06PM
So supporting evidence for my point that NASA, which is after all the organization tasked with space development by US Congress - while US Congress is not so tasked by voters, is responsible for its shirking of its duties.