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from the But-it's-only-$2-milllion-per-week! dept.
NASA spent a decade and nearly $1 billion for a single launch tower:
"NASA exacerbated these issues by accepting unproven and untested designs."
A new report published Tuesday by NASA's inspector general looks into the development of a mobile launch tower for the agency's Space Launch System rocket.
The analysis finds that the total cost of constructing and modifying the structure, known as Mobile Launcher-1, is "at least" $927 million. This includes the original $234 million development cost to build the tower to support the Ares I rocket.
After this rocket was canceled in 2010, NASA then spent an additional $693 million to redesign and modify the structure for the SLS rocket. Notably, NASA's original estimate for modifying the launch tower was just $54 million, according to the report by Inspector General Paul Martin.
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Does NASA understand what a sunk cost is?
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Related: NASA to Launch 247 Petabytes of Data Into AWS - but Forgot About Egress Costs
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:32AM (2 children)
Have you actually looked at US funding of science and education? For example, the Department of Education increased spending from $3 billion a year at the end of 1980 (Reagan's chopping of that budget came after) to $20 billion at the end of 2017. That's not keeping up with GDP, but it is growing significantly faster than inflation over the same period. I don't have exact numbers for the 1980s, but public funding is moderately higher in 2017 than it was in 1980, even adjusted for inflation (looks like $10 billion a year in 1980 growing to $38 billion a year in 2015, with huge growth in private side research).
The money is there. We should instead look at why the money isn't delivering the expected result. My take is that the whole public side system in the US is slowly growing more parasitic and less effective (and less interested) in delivering education and research. I'm not going to blame that on Reagan since it was decaying even before he came to power, and continued to decay after he left.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Monday March 23 2020, @06:03PM (1 child)
Again, history countradicts that assertion. Here are some stats on the budget cuts to general education in the recent decade [neatoday.org]. These go back through Obama and Bush II and somewhat with Clinton and the GOP fighting about cutting further than Reagan had. Back in the day, Reagan aimed for a 30% cut out of educational capabilities for the US which was mitigated to only 10% damage as a "compromise". His real target was to just plain abolish the Department of Education.
Nowadays, further proposed cuts are on the agenda [go.com] of the current administration.
That is all intentional damage to the US and its future: it is shown again and again that education is an investment that returns many times over and, conversely, cost society more than is saved when it is cut back.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 23 2020, @06:36PM
Ignoring that eliminating the Department of Education was probably a really good idea, we see that there was no long term decline in spending for the Department of Education contrary to narrative.
Once again, we're ignoring that we're spending more on education and getting progressively worse results. I would look at the people demanding more funding without demanding more accountability as the starting point for why this happened.