One of the main questions surrounding humanity's next giant leap into deep space is whether humans can thrive on missions far from Earth. A new theory says yes, but only in environments modeled deeply after our own planet.
Father-daughter research duo Morgan Irons of Cornell University and Lee G. Irons from the Norfolk Institute dub the idea "pancosmorio," a word that means "all word limit," in a paper published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences last month. Irons and Irons argue that, to allow humans to survive on lengthy treks into deep space, these missions must recreate Earth-like ecosystems, including Earth-like gravity and oxygen, reliable sources of water, as well as societal systems like steady agricultural output and the recycling of waste.
"For humans to sustain themselves and all of their technology, infrastructure and society in space, they need a self-restoring, Earth-like, natural ecosystem to back them up," said Morgan Irons in a press release from the institution. "Without these kinds of systems, the mission fails."
[...] "There are conditions from which human life has evolved. Such conditions are required to sustain human life at its current level of growth," the scientists write in their study. "The availability of such conditions to humans defines the limit of their world."
[...] "Our bodies, our natural ecosystems, all the energy movement and the way we utilize energy is all fundamentally based upon 1G of gravity being present," Morgan said in the press release. "There is just no other place in space where there is 1G of gravity; that just doesn't exist anywhere else in our solar system. That's one of the first problems we must solve."
[...] "Gravity induces a gradient in the fluid pressure within the body of the living thing to which the autonomic functions of the life form are attuned," Lee G. Irons said in the press release. "An example of gravity imbalance would be the negative affect on the eyesight of humans in Earth orbit, where they don't experience the weight necessary to induce the pressure gradient."
[...] No doubt—creating Earth-like conditions away from Earth will be a daunting challenge, but the new paper offers a sensible roadmap for moving forward.
Journal Reference:
Lee G. Irons and Morgan A. Irons, Pancosmorio (world limit) theory of the sustainability of human migration and settlement in space [open], Front. Astron. Space Sci., Volume 10 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2023.1081340
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @04:48AM (18 children)
The problem here is that if such an extreme variant of this theory were correct, we'd already have seen it in not just our present space activities, but also on Earth with the less Earth-like environments. Zero gee does have harmful effects, but they aren't that harmful. Meanwhile the crude life support systems of the ISS, for a glaring example, have worked for 22 years continuously. So while we've had to recycle crews every so often over that time due to the gravity problem, we still manage to have someone up there all the time without a significant nor natural ecosystem. And there's a variety of harsh environments on Earth that humans have managed to survive in, sometimes for tens of thousands of years.
My take is that with better bioengineering and cybernetics, those ecosystem needs will decline dramatically.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday April 15, @12:37PM (17 children)
The Gizimodo article confused years long missions with the paper's discussion of long term, multi-generational colonization of space:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspas.2023.1081340/full [frontiersin.org]
That is, the paper models (with proper equations) factors such as how big a human population needs to be to survive from a genetics diversity standpoint, the physical size of the space they need, heat and power requirements, how diverse their food sources need to be, what kind of environment growing kids require etc... And once they factored everything, they stepped up the specs from "goo from tubes" and "run on a treadmill" (contemporary short missions), through small hydroponics areas (the underlying models behind various private sector enterprises and a few long term NASA moon/mars programs) to HUGE ASS biosphere-type closed ecological systems (hundreds of years into the future following decades of robotic construction work).
The actual core issue is being self-restoring: You can replace a few things with tech (engines to produce heat... rotation to get gravity... lighting to get day-light...), but when you actually put the numbers together and consider how the system needs to sustain itself without shipping parts from earth, even the least demanding model (level 1 sustainability) is just massive.
Anyhow, this isn't a new claim as science fiction writers and planetary scientists were echoing those issues for decades. The novelty is that the moon-loons and various space cadets will now need to satisfy some serious specs or at least counter the paper's theory with actual facts before depriving NASA of probe mission funding.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Saturday April 15, @12:56PM (2 children)
I remember reading about the O'Neill Cylinder [wikipedia.org] many years ago ...
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday April 15, @03:13PM (1 child)
Yup. And to be clear, that's on the smaller size of the proposed solutions. McKendree, which is also mentioned, is massive:
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder [wikipedia.org] )
I think it's all basically the same message: Space colonization isn't a solution to any of our big problems. It's the big problem we'll be left with after we solved everything else.
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(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @11:06PM
My take on that is that we have little incentive to solve a lot of Earth's problems - like recycling resources we use. Might as well go somewhere the problem is worth tackling.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @01:11PM (1 child)
What is level 1 sustainability? The only place [everythingsustainable.com] I found a discussion of levels of sustainability was talking about kinds not levels. There, it was "the three key levels of sustainability: social, economic and environmental" which could be implemented separately (more like talking about colors of a car as "levels" than the sense of one level rising up to another) and the last involving Earth ecosystems - which would be a circular argument (if you require a massive Earth-like ecosystem then of course, you require a massive Earth-like ecosystem). There, social sustainability was about "share natural resources and economic activity in a way that is equitable and just" which could be done in ways that are sane or in ways that could destroy any human system. That last point needs emphasis - sustainability is notoriously unsustainable.
My take is that even with a more sensible system of sustainability criteria which you presumably have, there's not much point to discussing the demands of a far future space colony. The tech that merely contributes a little now could run the whole show in a few centuries. Space-side humanity might not even be carbon-based by then.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday April 15, @02:30PM
They define it in the paper:
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday April 15, @01:51PM (4 children)
It's still guaranteed wrong (at least as said in the summary) because of the word "exact". E.g. I'm rather sure that we could adapt to 3/4 atmospheric pressure with slightly higher Oxygen, and perhaps a gravity of 3/4 Earth standard. And if not 3/4, then 4/5, or, if necessary 5/6.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 15, @02:45PM
It's a matter of degrees...
Clearly, we are not going to step out of the first capsule on Mars and have the next generation of humans walking around the surface without environmental support suits, growing food crops in the open, etc.
On the other hand, there is a bit of terrestrial variation from the Arctic Eskimos to the Tibetans with their high altitude adapted genome to the Amazon rainforest dwellers with their adaptations to the vast parasite community to the desert dwelling Bedouin, the urban adapted multi-generational New Yorkers, etc.
However, all that variation is actually in a relatively narrow range. Even LA smog vs clear Atacama high desert air is relatively similar as compared to other atmospheres in our solar system. Liquid water is somewhat available everywhere people live. And even the vast urban landscapes of Tokyo, Delhi, etc. are supported by heavy importation of animal and plant products from vast farms. Same for semi-self contained environments like nuclear submarines or the space station, while they may recycle their air and even water, they are far from growing their own food.
So, OP may overstate the needs of humans a little bit, but not by much in the relative scheme of things. The smallest sustainable "self contained" human societies on Earth are also the most dependent on natural ecosystems.
Early expeditions to places like Antarctica underestimated nutritional and environmental needs of the explorers, with ugly results in less than a year. We know more now, but I doubt that everything we think we know about self-contained multi-decade expeditions is accurate or complete. Fully reproducing terrestrial conditions would work, shortcuts are bound to reveal inadequacies of the shortcuts in surprising ways.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @04:21PM (2 children)
For example, we already have high altitude cities on Earth. El Alto [wikipedia.org] is at 4150 meters with over a million people which presently makes it the highest city per Wikipedia. According to altitude calculators, that would make air pressure there about 2/3 of an atmosphere with a normal oxygen distribution.
Really the argument that it somehow takes extraordinary resources to live in space relies solely on our lack of experience with that. I think we'll find that we can figure the hard problems out and that the extraordinary resources will end up not being that extraordinary. One wonders if the pancosmorio theory is an educated guess or merely a phase of ideological breakdown.
For example, space development is somewhat threatening to various environmentalism-based ideologies because it's leading up to a purely technological approach that can hit ecological goals (like near complete recycling of everything in a society) that low tech ideological approaches can't match. If you're not invested in the low tech option, it's not a big deal - adopt best practices and move on. But if the approach is more important than the goal ideologically, you have problems.
A common outcome of such breakdown is confirmation bias and heavy weighting of any problems experienced by the better approach. In extreme cases, there will be appeals to far vaguer and subjective criteria. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that in the far future some greenies might decry the then modern approach to environmentalism because dumping all the refuse into the mass sorter for almost perfect recycling isolates one from nature especially when compared to the far more spiritually attuned processes of sorting one's recyclables and then turning that into kitsch.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 15, @05:18PM (1 child)
No, it *does* take extraordinary resources to live in space. You must import even the air you breathe (or extract replacement locally). But a claim that it's got to be an exact replica is silly, and probably just headline grabbing nonsense.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @06:09PM
"Or extract replacement locally". We have to do that even on Earth. And virtually all non-propellant mass is readily recycled. On Earth, we do it with plants and algae, but no reason they couldn't do that in space or use some sort of mechanical equivalent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @07:38PM (6 children)
Actually, level 1 is the most extreme sustainability with level 4 being the weakest. And it's worth noting that the great majority of humanity doesn't live in level 1 regions. There's a reason those apocalyptic stories are so common. Isolate almost any city and it will starve.
As to shipping stuff from Earth, what will space need over the next few centuries that only Earth can provide? Answer: terrestrial organisms. Everything else can be found or made in space. Even if Earth isn't trading, there's the rest of the Solar System.
While I get there is some funding competition between lunar development and probes, it ignores the white elephants in the room - namely, the SLS/Artemis and ISS. End those two and there's plenty of money for all kinds of productive things (somewhere around 11 billion USD per year, 1 billion USD for ISS and at least 10 billion USD [soylentnews.org] per year for Artemis).
Further, I'd take probe missions more seriously, if they were more than merely dead end technology development. I discuss this more here [soylentnews.org]. Consider first the list of rover missions on Mars (there's a bit over two dozen missions to Mars of any sort by anyone, successful or not, since the dawn of the Space Age). There's five rovers in total over a 25 year period. That means all that knowledge about driving on Mars learned from previous missions is only used for one vehicle every five years. That's what a dead end technology looks like.
Now, notice the simple suggestion I make in that post.
This is elementary economics. Martian rovers have a high R&D cost. Why aren't we spreading that cost over a bunch of vehicles rather than one or two? I think there's a number of other obvious economic decisions that a functional space program would make, but that's a big one.
As to the Moon, that is simply the second most important object in the Solar System to us - Earth being first. NASA's unmanned division gave the Moon short shrift for decades after the end of the Apollo program. It's only in the last decade that we're starting to see a return to a serious exploration program for the Moon.
I think moon-loons can figure out on their own why the NASA's unmanned program abandoned the Moon and how much value there really is to that program as a result.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15, @10:48PM (1 child)
Third. Life on Earth might get tossed around a bit if the Moon disappeared, but it would survive. Not so if the Sun disappeared.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @10:58PM
Touche!
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday April 16, @09:55PM (3 children)
It's referring to the various models within the level 1 sustainability since levels 2-4 aren't self-sustaining at all. That is, within the realm of self-sustaining models (i.e. the various level 1 sustainability proposed solutions and maybe a few level 2 at first), the smallest one mentioned was simply enormous and its modern version upgraded to a continent-sized mass.
Human growth is currently unsustainable. It could work for a short period of time but if the end-goal isn't level 1, you're in for a rude awakening in the form of one catastrophic failure or the next.
One of the differences between model 1 and 2 is having enough land and soil to account for monoculture. That is, you need a massive amount of diverse crops (and humans, and lands to grow them) if you're not getting them from earth. The "how much" is what the models cover...
The whole point of probes is to do scientific research in hopes of finding novel discoveries and physics. Not to develop patents for the sat-com and robotics while running publicity stunts for elected officials.
Anything to do with Mars and the moon is publicity stunts and congressional pork dispensary: There's basically little to no scientific interest in either but the military wants certain capabilities in space and the politicians want to feed a dozen contractors in each state so... Honestly, it's been that way from the very first moon mission but that's the price you pay when you put a government agency between the scientists and the money for absolutely no good reason.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 17, @03:15AM (2 children)
The whole point of said probes is public funds redistribution to the right parties. That it does some minor discoveries and physics is a fortuitous coincidence.
Exactly. So what's in that for moon loons?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday April 17, @02:30PM (1 child)
Least demanding in personal and supplies from earth. Most demanding in short term resources. Level 2 demands some resources and occasional new blood from earth but can make due with air, food, water and such. Level 4 is what we basically got rotating the earth now. Level 3 is a temporary solution between 2 & 4 where you're building up towards things.
It doesn't add up. The way cities achieve sustainability is by importing food with money they earn by producing various goods and services. However, the transportation costs for transporting anything to space will never add up unless it's a one way trip for personal going to actually live and die there. And since robots can do anything humans do cheaper when it come to space, the only viability is really level 1 with the rest being partially justifiable when assuming they're required stepping stones to level 1. e.g. Putting together an level 2 waystation in Lagrange point 2 between various level 1 colonies might be logistically / economically viable enough.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is behind the various probes and they don't contribute campaign funds. But I admit Boeing and SpaceX do so you have a good point there even if it's only partially true.
Most of the lunar development groups are robotics companies... But honestly it's basically just nationalistic posturing from all sides like the original space race.
Look, it all comes down to what you want to do in space and scientists only want to do some astronomy and such. So, the only way to justify sending people to space is to scale it to the point people are actually colonizing space in a fully sustainable fashion. Otherwise, robots do it cheaper.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 18, @05:09AM
What doesn't add up? Cities achieve higher level sustainability via trade. Well, guess what everyone in space will be doing. Trading. And if trading anything to space "will never add up", then trade with parties already in space. It's not that hard.
As to "personal going to actually live and die there", that describes almost all of Earth which has plenty of personnel living and dying where they are.
Robots aren't humans living in space. They don't do that cheaper!
My take is that this talk of sustainability is way overrated. First, it's really just empty talk by people who wish it were impossible to live in space and keep trying to come up with reasons why that should be. Notice the really poor argument made for the supposed need for such a high level of sustainability. Second, sustainable practices often are less sustainable than the unsustainable practices which would be replaced. For example, there's willful ignorance of the poverty cycle which is simply that poor people are high fertility people. A mildly unsustainable process (which modern society might be) at least dumps us into a state where we have both population control and societies with extraordinary resources. I imagine that would work in space just as well.
Third, when one speaks of "extraordinary resources", one speaks of a level of resources many orders of magnitude less than what is available in the Solar System. If somehow the resources could be partitioned up, Jupiter could make a few hundred Earths with equivalent biospheres. So right there, we know that the Solar System has at least two orders of magnitude more mass available for biospheres than the entire Earth does.
That in turns leads us to the fourth point. Technology is really, really open-ended in at least two different ways: creating new livable habitats in harsh environments (including the transportation of extraordinary resources, should that be desired) and in modifying people to adapt better to these environments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by coolgopher on Saturday April 15, @05:47AM (50 children)
Or we could engineer humans to better adapt to space. Seems more logical to me.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday April 15, @08:40AM (46 children)
Tomorrow's humanity will be machine. Machines will be able to go anywhere we ugly bags of mostly water can't, and in fact already do: our robotic offsprings have been exploring the solar system much more effectively than we walking breathing humans have for the past few decades.
I don't have a philophical problem with that. Sapiens sapiens has evolved from a puddle of slime through millions of years of lucky evolution coincidences, and has reached the point where it can itself create new forms of life through technology at an exponentially accelerating clip.
I have no problem considering a sentient machine as the next iteration of the human race: our species has freed itself from the shackles of natural evolution, and whatever we will create will be human too. And what those machines will create will be human as well. Until humanity either loses its meaning altogether, or encompasses anything of any form that owes its existence to our own.
The next humans will go everywhere because they won't be Earth-bound. We future proto-humans, their forebears, will stay here until the last of us disappears. And I reckon that's perfectly okay.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday April 15, @09:11AM (4 children)
Most influencing factor to human society still is.. the religion.
I doubt the machines will tolerate that kind of irrational non-reality and total waste of deductive capabilities.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday April 15, @09:42AM (1 child)
And that's bad... how?
I look forward to the day machines won't tolerate militant irrational and magical thinking anymore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday April 15, @10:30AM
I didn't said it's bad.
Though it may be as well the main reason why machines decide to cull human species to minimal population. To keep the dangerous predators and social cannibals contained.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 15, @02:49PM
We create the machines, they will tolerate whatever we build them to tolerate. If we feel that it is important for a robot to stop five times per day to face towards Mecca and "meditate" for a period of time, then that is what they will do.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @11:10PM
I'll note that in modern times the birth control pill trumped religion.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @04:33PM (40 children)
The obvious rebuttal here is that a manned mission to Mars would in a few weeks do more than 50 years of robotic missions to Mars have done so far. The capabilities of robots to this point are greatly overrated.
And what would be the point of waiting for future robots to do stuff when we can do it now? My take is that present day humans can do a lot more than simply wait for the future to come. We ought to see what we are capable of before passing the baton on.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 15, @08:33PM (39 children)
Robots and astronauts are different, neither superior to the other in all aspects.
If you plowed the resources necessary for a marginally successful manned mission to Mars into a robotic mission (more like series of higher risk missions for the same investment) the robots would kick asteroids all over any science that the meatbags might pull off in a couple of weeks.
For starters Mars is big... A variety of robots spread around the planet are going to cover a lot more ground and observe a much more complete picture of what is happening as compared to a 14 day proof of life support functionality in a small area.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @09:54PM (38 children)
They're dropping over 7 billion USD for a sample return mission (split between the Perseverance probe and a more costly Earth return delivery vehicle). That would be by itself a significant fraction of the cost of a sensible manned mission, and the manned mission would do sample return as well with better and faster picking in the field.
Here's my take on the robotics/human thing. You want to scout out a bunch of potential landing sites without risking people? Probes. You want to map and survey several hundred thousand asteroids? Probes, lots of them. You want to explore the surface of a major planet or moon in a time frame where your principle researchers don't die of old age first? Humans.
Even when a mission is better done with probes, you'll have a lot better outcome if the person running the mission is seconds away rather than hours or days. It'd be even better on the Martian surface. With a modest constellation of satellites a person on Mars or in orbit could control robots anywhere on Mars with a delay of a few tens of milliseconds. Whether in person or via nearby teleoperations, humans would add a huge amount of value to any mission.
Another example. Suppose we have a lab set up in orbit around one of the major moons of Jupiter, say Callisto (the outermost of the big moons and thus, the one furthest out in the gravity well). Calisto's orbit is crudely 18 million km across, making everything inside that orbit and orbital plane no more than 6 light seconds away. Meanwhile Earth is on the order of 40 light-minutes away with the occasional occlusion by the Sun. Is a robotics mission in this region going to run smoother with an hour plus round trip communication delay compared to a 12 second or less delay?
There's huge costs not just to the slow pace of unmanned missions, but also to the gear needed for the mission to run ok in the absence of near real time control.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 15, @10:08PM (37 children)
>a significant fraction of the cost of a sensible manned mission,
Significant, like 2%?
Not only is Mars significantly farther than the moon, our appetite for risk in manned missions is significantly lower than during Apollo. And if you are talking about the cost of the original manned mission to the moon, you really need to factor in everything from Mercury through Apollo 11.
I still haven't heard the plan for our astronauts in interplanetary space during a solar storm, are we going to return the craft on autopilot, or leave it in orbit as a memorial / mauseleum?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @10:39PM (36 children)
Like a third to two thirds. If you're spending more than 20 billion USD, you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday April 16, @12:37AM (33 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 16, @01:17AM (32 children)
Are you talking about the cost of a single launch, or the R&D required to get to that point?
Both have to be spent. And if we do it like Apollo, there will only be a handful of missions to amoritize the R&D across, unlike the series of JPL robots that each build on previously developed tech.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16, @05:03AM (31 children)
Both.
"IF". There are some better approaches out there, if we don't do it like Apollo. Superheavy/Starship gives us some relatively low cost options for getting to Mars. And given SpaceX's effective approach to R&D, NASA probably would do well - that is, an order of magnitude cheaper - to contract out R&D for the entire thing to SpaceX.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 16, @03:20PM (30 children)
>Superheavy/Starship gives us some relatively low cost options for getting to Mars.
According to pothead promise accounting. Bear in mind, while political funding comes with pork, pothead leadership gets you Twitter buyouts and similar.
>given SpaceX's effective approach to R&D
You mean waiting for 60 years of global technological advances, then still nearly failing to get a successful launch before running out of money (the private sector equivalent to political support, which is largely what killed Apollo)?
On the other tack, competition is good, I am glad we have SpaceX vs NASA because the ESA is weak, and Roscosmos is both stalwartly competent and spastic in their commitments to cooperation. Then China is something of a wildcard, copying the SpaceX approach of wait 60 years then copy the best parts as best they can, while talking about science fiction ambitions.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 17, @03:10AM (29 children)
Better than federal government accounting. You need better drugs for that.
We've already waited those 60 years for Mars tech, right? So that box is checked. And "still nearly failing to" is still better success than NASA has ever achieved in that area in those 60+ years.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 17, @09:52AM (28 children)
>And "still nearly failing to" is still better success than NASA has ever achieved in that area in those 60+ years.
If that's your take, then you're tokin' Elon's pipe.
NASA has been in short funds limbo for 45 of those 60 years, and still has an operational success record on par with to better than military operations that never even attempt to break atmosphere.
SpaceX just started "clearing the tower" without regular funny rocket go boom videos in the last decade. They are doing well, but could have done better if they truly had learned all the organizational quality lessons pioneered by NASA and Roscosmos 50+ years ago.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 17, @12:35PM (27 children)
Let's do the obvious and look at what I was talking about. In a few hours, SpaceX might launch the Superheavy for the first time (it's on the pad and start of the initial launch window is currently 6am EST). Maybe it'll be a giant fireball and they'll have to try again. Shrug.
But to get to that point, SpaceX has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion. For similar capabilities and a vastly higher price, NASA has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 billion presently (between SLS and Constellation).
But there's more! SpaceX also used part of that $2.5 billion to develop four rocket engines (Kestrel, Merlin, Draco, and Raptor) and two other launch platforms the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. Now for the parts that NASA has never done before. SpaceX launches Falcon 9 dozens of times a year. It has developed purely on its own the ability to soft land booster rockets that were previously used in an orbital flight. And despite "nearly failing", it has done that all for roughly a quarter of what NASA squanders on a woefully inadequate competitor. Nobody else in the world is doing this either!
The world needs to smoke what Elon is smoking!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 17, @01:01PM (26 children)
FTFM. You can't really understand the depth of NASA's failure until you understand the opportunity costs of the money that NASA spends. I also should have commented on your last sentence:
That is utterly nuts. We can see where those "organizational quality lessons" took NASA and Roscosmos. Both are developing launch platforms today that make no sense for space development. Meanwhile SpaceX has launched about as often as Arianespace has launched with similar reliability in a fraction of the time.
I'll note that the criticism of SpaceX has transitioned from hard concrete terms (they never launched, their rockets blow up on the pad, they don't have a record of hundreds of reliable rocket launches) to subjective and vague terms (haven't learn the right organizational quality lessons or bad accounting - ignoring that NASA is worse on both).
My take is that the end game for these sorts of criticisms will be that SpaceX and its competitors aren't taking the right spiritual path to rocket launches. Because no criticism about more concrete issues will pass the laugh test.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 17, @01:29PM (25 children)
My take is that you are in an "Elon is the second coming" cloud combined with a "gubbmint iz baaahd" social conditioning, and it leads you to predictable conclusions every time.
I wish SpaceX all the success in the Solar System, I'm glad we have them. Accounting for how we all got to where we are is a slippery thing that won't ever show an accurate picture of true costs, starting with:
https://www.quora.com/How-did-SpaceX-acquire-so-much-talent-and-engineering-know-how-in-such-a-short-time-Are-many-of-its-employees-and-engineers-ex-NASA-or-NASA-trained [quora.com]
There are some true efficiencies to be gained by getting off the pork farm, and I'm glad we're getting them. But without the pork farm pioneering the way, none of this technology would be "on the shelf" ready for companies like SpaceX to make efficient use of.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 17, @06:34PM (24 children)
And yet, where do I go wrong? This seems more like arguing that Ferraris can't possibly be as fast as they say. My oil-burning AMC Gremlin with bald tires can outrace one.
I have kept up with space issues for about 35 years. Through about 2010 my outlook was pretty pessimistic. Nothing serious had been going on in space since Apollo. Huge sums of money were going down ratholes in space. And a bunch of ignorant fools talking about how that's supposed to be fine.
SpaceX single-handedly changed that. We can't say that's all Musk's fault, but it wouldn't have happened without him. Remember when I joke about the bug paste utopia [soylentnews.org]? Fundamentally, that is a future state that validates your worldview such as a future where everyone is a head in a can, dining on bug paste for their nutritional needs, validates the idea that we can screw the future up in such a way.
Here, SpaceX validated my space-related ideas on economics and has profoundly changed everyone's views on what is possible in space. I wouldn't characterize SpaceX as the second coming, but rather as the first coming. The change is that profound.
Bullshit. What's missed here is the enormous opportunity costs of a pork farm. Let's consider something you wrote a few posts back:
While there are some aspects of SpaceX's success that can't be duplicated in the past, it remains that one could do most of what SpaceX does now decades ago. Orbital rockets are a 60 year old technology after all.
So why didn't they?
Answer: NASA founded a monopoly [heritage.org] on commercial launch for the Space Shuttle from 1975 to 1984. Any US commercial payloads could only launch on the most expensive vehicle since Saturn V. So it kills commercial payloads as well as commercial launch vehicles! When that was broken up during the Reagan era, they then followed up by creating an oligopoly [soylentnews.org] from that point through to the 1990s when a DoD program, the Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicle program created competition between Boeing and Lockheed and later encouraged Musk to start up SpaceX.
As I've noted before, SpaceX literally could not have started much sooner than it did and still survive.
This pork farm heavily damaged the launch market (both suppliers and customers) for 50 years and set back any sort of space development pretty much by that. NASA also turned more than two trillion USD into shit over that time period. It's only our epically pathetic standards for government work that hides the size of this failure.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 17, @07:20PM (23 children)
>And yet, where do I go wrong?
Well, clearly - inside your own head - you never go wrong.
>This seems more like arguing that Ferraris can't possibly be as fast as they say. My oil-burning AMC Gremlin with bald tires can outrace one.
More? Never said expensive toys don't have interesting performance capabilities. Never said "NASA can run rings around SpaceX". Did say, and will repeat, "SpaceX would be exactly nowhere if not for standing on the shoulders of NASA achievements." Stick that in your Gremlin and smoke it.
>I have kept up with space issues for about 35 years.
Congratulations. I watched the 11 moon landing from my grandmother's lap. In kindergarten I was one of the "wanna be an astronaut"s instead of firefighters or police men. I've more than "kept up" with developments through the years, lived for several years just out from the main gate of Space Center Houston, many neighbors working inside in various capacities and lunched with the contractors quite a bit. Not all peaches and cream there, but a lot of infrastructure has been developed and maintained - things like the NBL which SpaceX astronauts train in, and on and on and on.
>What's missed here is the enormous opportunity costs of a pork farm.
Again, are you forgetting $43 Billion spent on a Tweeter? Private enterprise, particularly private enterprise with strong leadership, has its own forms of pork, and they stink quite a bit worse than "jobs programs back home." Things like Ellison's Island: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-oracle-larry-ellison-lanai-hawaii-plans-tourism/#xj4y7vzkg [bloomberg.com] , Kuok's Yacht: https://supercarblondie.com/history-supreme-most-expensive-yacht-world-costs-4-8-billion [supercarblondie.com] (if it's real) , and - a little more on-point: other private space ventures: https://www.virgingalactic.com/sign-up/ [virgingalactic.com] https://www.blueorigin.com/ [blueorigin.com] which is what you need in a free market: competition, and failures. Those are also opportunity costs, and much of the value they might have developed tends to be lost for various reasons - primarily: not wanting criticism from burned investors.
>Here, SpaceX validated my space-related ideas on economics and has profoundly changed everyone's views on what is possible in space. I wouldn't characterize SpaceX as the second coming, but rather as the first coming. The change is that profound.
https://youtu.be/0mYBSayCsH0?t=27 [youtu.be]
>it remains that one could do most of what SpaceX does now decades ago.
If only one had the political capital with which to divert even 10% of the military budget to NASA. Instead, we've turned that cash over to the Bezos, Bransons and Musks of the world, and finally, after a few hundred of them got everything they ever wanted, we finally started getting progress in space again.
Thanks Ronnie.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 18, @02:16AM (22 children)
If only I had been talking about objective measures of success for both NASA and SpaceX?
Which would probably cost SpaceX a few million dollars to duplicate, right? That's a lot of peaches and cream! /sarc
My experience is with the alt space side - doing remarkable things with shoestring budgets and volunteers. Sure, they weren't going to Mars any day soon. But seeing what you can do with $10k to $100k compared to someone who has trouble doing anything useful done with $20 billion a year, gives me a bit of lack of respect for NASA.
I see you didn't actually come up with an example of such pork in what followed. Luxury goods aren't pork. Nor are businesses that happen to be owned by billionaires. Let us also keep in mind that Ellison's private island, an imaginary gold boat, or the private businesses mentioned haven't held back space development for 30 years.
We could waste $80 billion a year instead of $25 billion? I'm fine with cutting the US military budget a lot. 50% cut is a reasonable level. I'm not fine with merely redirecting the savings to other sinkholes.
The white elephant in the room is NASA's propensity for creating huge, dead end, low value projects with lots of long term liability. They could have already done a lot of good stuff in space, if they hadn't dumped so much of their budget into things like the Space Shuttle, ISS, or the James Webb Space Telescope.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 18, @12:14PM (21 children)
>My experience is with the alt space side - doing remarkable things with shoestring budgets...
And, it makes mildly successful TV too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1 [wikipedia.org]
>Luxury goods aren't pork.
No, they are actually much worse. Look at third world shit holes if you want to see where luxury goods and vast wealth disparity leads. And: both pork and wealth disparity are the spawn of government policies.
>The white elephant in the room is NASA's propensity for creating huge, dead end, low value projects
My first boss was a bitter old man who never accomplished much, but developed a political skill for attacking his enemies. After hiring too many employees and burning through $10M in investment money without getting any sales income, he decided all his new hires were his enemies and set about making us look bad so he could justify firing us. His primary tactic was to assign a project, give nothing but shoestring support in terms of supplies or tools, then when impressive progress was about to happen: "shelve that project, we need this other thing more right now." He collected three examples of such "failures" he had assigned me to deliver, and presented them to the CEO as a case for my firing. Luckily the CEO wasn't a dim bulb and I was transferred to work directly for the CEO and soon given a 23% raise...
I have seen similar sabotage being perpetrated on NASA over the years: ambitious mission statements with inadequate funding, shifting priorities, and no real reason for it other than to make them look bad. Yes, the Apollo budget was unsustainable and needed trimming, but the shift to the Shuttle was poorly administered from levels above NASA, particularly the decades of stagnation in manned missions. Then W's lame duck return to the moon redirection was absolutely ridiculous. There's much more but that's the general idea of what I think is "wrong" with NASA.
Still, a lot of resources have been invested, with far more positive return than similar military expenditures. It's good that SpaceX and others can build on those foundations, but the overall system (tax the masses, coddle the rich) that led to three Billionaires playing space cowboy for the past decade has far more waste in it than NASA has ever been funded with.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 18, @01:10PM (20 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 18, @01:23PM (19 children)
>Third world shit holes are that way due to lack of infrastructure and even greater corruption. Not because rich people have nice things.
And this is where we fundamentally diverge.
Pork, with all its problems, builds infrastructure.
Rich people have nice things, sure - thus and ever it shall be - but when the rich people keep having their nice things without funding things like infrastructure, that's when you devolve into third world shit holes.
Did any of the previous discussion even register in your head as: NASA is infrastructure for SpaceX?
>So why are you still working with your first boss?
I was 23, and stubborn, and opportunities in the town were limited, and by 28 I was promoted to where he was handing his timesheets to me - and he retired about a year after that. He went on to teach engineering at a two bit local Uni, and has the reputation as the worst prof in the department, deliberately making kids lives hell for no apparent benefit other than getting his own jollies from it.
>And NASA should know how to play politics to fulfill its actual missions.
I "beat" my bad boss by having a better boss over him. NASA's bad boss is our Federal government, and their boss (us) isn't any better. Apparently, the "for peaceful applications" mission statement played better during the Vietnam War than anytime later.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 18, @06:03PM (18 children)
Fortunately, we can look at actual facts rather than merely "diverge". For example, consider your last assertion that pork builds infrastructure. This glosses over two huge flaws. First, that the infrastructure can be worse than not building the infrastructure - such as bridges to nowhere which are useless (aside from transferring public funds to the corrupt private entities), or infrastructure that degrades the overall system (improving less important parts of a transportation network that in turn overload bottlenecks in the system). Second, it takes money away from maintenance - which destroys infrastructure. So observing that pork can sometimes build infrastructure ignores that it can create harmful infrastructure and destroy infrastructure!
Moving on:
Of course not. Because I showed plenty of examples of anti-infrastructure such as the Shuttle monopoly and subsequent NASA-enforced launch cartel. There's also the employment of a huge number of bright people in a dull, stagnant environment. And even when you have valid infrastructure, you have that pesky price tag issue: for example, spending trillions of dollars to provide a few million dollars of infrastructure for SpaceX.
We're further behind in space development than if in 1975 we had fired everyone and razed every bit of NASA to the ground. That's my take on the value of NASA infrastructure.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 18, @06:28PM (17 children)
>First, that the infrastructure can be worse than not building the infrastructure - such as bridges to nowhere which are useless
Yeah, the U.S. is full of those (as opposed to China, for instance.) /s
>anti-infrastructure such as the Shuttle monopoly
Oh, because NASA fought tooth and nail for that? I believe you need to look a level higher for the perpetrators of that bit of protectionism.
>We're further behind in space development than if in 1975 we had fired everyone and razed every bit of NASA to the ground.
And what you're missing, which is easy to miss because it's hard to pin down, is human infrastructure. The people who know how the shit actually works, the ones who have experience running the enterprise and dealing with the human factors that make or break every major program. Human capital is difficult to pin down, pesky humans being mostly free to change jobs or countries as they choose, but... it's more expensive than all the buildings and facilities to develop, particularly in an enterprise like NASA. Through the lean years, when there wasn't money to buy office supplies, much less new rocket engine designs (figuratively speaking, mostly), keeping that human capital employed working on space related projects, even if the projects themselves were not doing much (like the Shuttle), kept that human infrastructure in better condition than if they had all dispersed to go work for BP, Gulfstream and Yamaha (as many of them did, anyway, pesky humans,)
It's not just the "rocket science" that has been distilled into textbooks and taught at Universities, it's not just the program management philosophies that have been codified and shared around the world, it's the actual people who run a place like the NBL and know WTF they are doing in a facility like that - the people who train in NBL and the skills they learn there that otherwise they'd have to develop on-orbit, and a hundred other NASA facilities that do more than hold X million gallons of water, they train people in the things that are important to getting it done, without dying most of the time.
So, fuck yeah, let's go back to 1975, shutter NASA, and wait until 2020 to try a space program reboot with a bunch of billionaire potheads (a friend parties with Richard Branson in the islands, he makes Musky look respectable.) See what you've got? A bunch of German tourist owned condos on Cape Kennedy, for starters, but who cares? We can launch from anywhere. What matters more are the people who know how to do the launching, they cost more to "build" than the pads and towers, and that's the infrastructure that ~$20B per year has been maintaining since 1975, oh and doing a few little projects like Hubble along the way. $1T in NASA operations over the last ~50 years, Compare that to operation of one carrier group (of the ~11 we have) at ~$8M per day, ~$30B per year, or nearly $1.5T for the same time period, and they have the economy of scale on their side.
Me, personally, I see more direct value out of NASA than 6% of our aircraft carrier program for the same period, and the bigger difference is: if you reduce the aircraft carrier program by 6%, we still have the remaining 94% of personnel who "know how to carry aircraft." Shut down NASA, and that human capital leaves the U.S. - much like Oppenheimer, Einstein, von Braun, left their country. Operation Paperclip was significantly important, shuttering NASA would be reversing those gains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 18, @09:42PM (16 children)
Why bother saying that? Chinese shitshows don't matter to US shitshows.
Yes to the question. NASA pushed that really hard even to getting DoD funding support for the Shuttle and locking in the commercial satellite market for 9 years.
SpaceX did more for that than NASA did.
Why wait till 2020, when the billionaire potheads of 1975 are around?
Get rid of the infrastructure and we have $20B that can go to useful purposes. Remember the opportunity costs of NASA are its largest sins.
Except, of course, the US's aircraft carrier program didn't delay space development by decades. You will never understand why NASA is a problem, until you understand how it has harmed the US's future.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 18, @10:21PM (15 children)
>when the billionaire potheads of 1975 are around?
They weren't so plentiful at the time, and had near zero interest in outer space: https://www.forbes.com/sites/seankilachand/2012/03/21/forbes-history-the-original-1987-list-of-international-billionaires/?sh=d12f426447e8 [forbes.com]
>NASA pushed that really hard even to getting DoD funding support for the Shuttle and locking in the commercial satellite market for 9 years.
>You will never understand why NASA is a problem, until you understand how it has harmed the US's future.
NASA and the Congressional funding of NASA are inextricably linked. NASA's top administrators are politically appointed, the good people start a layer or two below the C-level titles of the periodically rotating management companies. One day at lunch, our NASA contractor friends had all new badges, because their management company had changed, again, for the third time in the last 15 years. New badges read "HO" which was the new company's abbreviation for Houston, but the contractors put it more directly: "HO - we do it for the money."
Could it be improved? Yeah, absolutely, just like every other big government program AND out-sized corporation on the planet. Could scrappy little cowboy hero startups with $100M and a vision get anywhere without NASA? Only in an Andy Griffith TV series.
> how it has harmed the US's future.
In your head. Whatever opportunity costs have been lost in the last 50 years and $1T spent on NASA pales in comparison with mis-adventures like the $850B wasted in Gulf War II, toss Vietnam on that heap and you've already exceeded the cost of NASA for its entire history, and forget about the direct loss of US lives in those wars, focus instead on the physically and mentally disabled we have been burdened with ever since as a result of their deployments. We're a strong country, if we weren't those two misadventures alone would have us looking like the pile of graft and corruption that is currently in charge of Russia (although, we do resemble that mess much more than I would like...) Imagine how much better off we would be today without having been mired in those two conflicts for decades, and then tell me again how NASA has harmed the US's future in comparison.
As government programs go, NASA is a net benefit to the U.S. and the world - like highways, like global communication networks - sure they could be better administered, but overall they're making most lives better instead of worse. Meanwhile, we're spending 42x as much on a military program which, arguably, is doing more harm than good overall.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 18, @11:47PM (14 children)
Inflation on the first. For example, by the CPI index, $2.5 billion is under half a billion. And on the second, billionaires have no more interest now in outer space than they did then. It just took a successful one to open the door.
The blame game. The problem here is that NASA had and continues to have a great deal of control over that. They got greedy and have repeatedly tried to build Apollo programs and other white elephants rather than projects that further explicit NASA goals (as stated by law).
Of course they could get somewhere. $100 million was a lot of money in 1975. It's what SpaceX spent on Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 combined, for example, including a number of launches.
But even if we suppose you are somehow right, all the major technological components had been developed by NASA by 1975 such as two stages to orbit, gimballed rocket nozzles, LOX/hydrocarbon and LOX/methane systems, computer control systems, telemetry, etc. NASA had already done its part by 1975 even if that were necessary!
That's merely whataboutism. I never claimed NASA was the sole source of harm for the US's future. And considering that the DoD implemented the EELV program (as I noted already), they actually did a huge amount to create the market for a SpaceX.
Prove it. Net benefit means you have benefits that exceed the known costs: such as $15-25 billion per year, a huge delay in space development, and soaking up a bunch of intelligent, highly educated engineers who could be doing more important things!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 19, @01:22PM (13 children)
>$100 million was a lot of money in 1975.
Not without bootstrapping off of NASA tech, and more importantly NASA trained employees, $100M would have been hard pressed to do much more than Sputnik in 1975.
>how it has harmed the US's future.
Could you elucidate this point a little more clearly: how has NASA's behavior specifically harmed the US's future?
>Net benefit means you have benefits that exceed the known costs
Costs and benefits on this scale are subject to extremely vague accounting. We can start with: providing careers for STEM students, and more importantly: STEM aspirations for students currently deciding between firefighter, policeman, nurse, teacher, astronaut or rocket scientist, thus building STEM programs in our schools and universities that benefit others as well. Continuous satellite monitoring of terrestrial conditions, beyond just weather - that alone provides greater than $20B/year ROI. Then there's the question: if NASA weren't funded, would that $20B do more good as tax cuts for the wealthy?
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 19, @06:29PM (12 children)
That's already commercial satellite territory which is most of SpaceX's present business. And once you're making a profit on that, you have the means and knowledge to fund development of better rockets.
And as I already noted, the NASA tech in question already existed by 1975.
NASA cratered the commercial launch market from 1975 through to at least the mid 1990s. First, it was an outright monopoly. Then it was a cartel with huge financial advantages. For example, there were multiple launch start ups during the 1980s and 1990s, for example: Roton, Beal Aerospace, E'Prime Aerospace, and Orbital Sciences. Only the last, Orbital Sciences ever succeeded at orbital launch.
Orbital Sciences is instructive. They were successful enough that they were added to the cartel club for their small payload Pegasus rocket. They quickly became another military-industrial complex blob that mostly did government contracts. Nowadays, their orbital launch capability has been horse-traded off to Northrop Grumman who now only launches the Antares rocket (Pegasus hasn't launched for two years) at a rate of two a year.
This is the dead end that NASA provided over those years. Even the most successful entrant ended up a fly in amber that ran out of creativity before SpaceX was even born.
And as I have already repeatedly noted, NASA has continuously from well before the Apollo spent huge sums of money for mediocre results. One can't speak fully of the failings of NASA without considering opportunity costs!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 19, @09:27PM (11 children)
>NASA cratered the commercial launch market from 1975 through to at least the mid 1990s. First, it was an outright monopoly
So, we look at NASA two very different ways. When I say: "NASA" I refer to the thousands of engineers, managers, quality systems administrators, and other people that "do the stuff" - oh, and their rockets, launch, command and control facilities too.
Seems like when you say "NASA" you refer to the 1% politically appointed doofuses and their layer or two of direct reports who are "in charge" of NASA operations. And, there, like so many otherwise good organizations, I will agree with you. Like my first boss, the henchmen installed at the top more often than not have an apparent agenda to make NASA look bad, to give the Senators and other politicos a nerdy whipping boy that they can hold up as "we spanked the tar outta this 'un so you can have that new football stadium, vote for us in November!" Yes, monopoly on orbital launch at the expense of private industry ranks right up there with other administrative turds like: draconian regulation of commercial domestic UAV usage for over a decade, stunting that industry relative to the rest of the world who were free to develop AND commercialize the tech at the time, "export controls" on strong cryptography, tax breaks and subsidies to the oil industry... but I digress.
>They quickly became another military-industrial complex blob
So, that's another thing about NASA: they wear this fig-leaf of "we come in peace, for all mankind" while they are an obvious demonstration of "we can deliver a two seat buggy and two astronauts to the surface of the moon, and return them safely to Earth, we sure as hell can send H-bombs via rocket to the Kremlin and anywhere else we want." I do want a non-military organization handling the bulk of our space activities, but when the men in black suits cordon off the shuttle crash site until they can "recover sensitive materials" that should erase all doubts as to whether NASA is also handling state secrets of a military nature as at least part of their otherwise peaceful mission payloads.
> One can't speak fully of the failings of NASA without considering opportunity costs!
Yeah, I don't feel like the $1T spent over the last 50 years were wasted at all, especially as compared to the shit I see go down in our successful Fortune 500 organization on a day-to-day basis. As compared with the "scrappy startups" I worked with for 25 years before landing here, it takes us 20x the manpower and 5x the time to "develop" a next generation of a product that has been on the market for 30 years already, and the innovations that are built into these next generations are about as sad as the crap the auto industry, and home appliance industry, and so many more have been peddling for the past 50+ years. The thing is, 19/20 of those scrappy startups are doomed to failure, not because they aren't making better mousetraps: most of them actually are, but getting those better mousetraps successfully launched in our commercial-political reality, against entrenched barriers to competition, is easy to say, hard to do. So, taken as a whole: you might focus on that Unicorn, the magical scrappy startup that makes it big, but if you want to look at what it took for that to happen you're lying to yourself if you don't also account for the dozens of similar little companies who go down in flames - some due to mismanagement or incompetence, but more often it's just down to luck - they weren't in the right place at the right time and therefore they got squashed, sidelined, starved, and forgotten.
You want to harp on the "failings of NASA," you should open your eyes to how every big organization on this planet operates. Like this fun factoid:
So, yeah, NASA is big, and they've got political idiots in charge, but considering all that I still say they've done pretty well.
>NASA has continuously from well before the Apollo spent huge sums of money for mediocre results.
And I still say: private industry is unlikely to do better when they reach NASA scale of operations. Remember: NASA owns all their successes _and_ failures, unlike the Fortune 500 which gets to conveniently forget companies that used to be in their ranks and have since cratered.
Could _we_ have done better? That depends on who you ask. In the early 1970s there was a strong voice coming out of the black community that "millions of dollars spent on joyrides for a few white dudes to go to the moon ain't fixin' anything in my 'hood." Then there's the highly vocal and reliable conservative midwest viewpoint that "anything that flashy has to be a waste of tax dollars." There was also the thinly veiled military threat aspects of Apollo and earlier NASA missions which weren't winning many points around the world. So, yeah, 6 year old me ready for the astronaut training corps is now disappointed that the whole thing seems to have fallen apart compared to the potential it had in 1969, but as my teachers of the time pointed out: there was a long time between 1492 and real settlements like St. Augustine and Jamestown - and that was a comparatively easy transition to make.
Make me king of the world, invincible and omnipotent, you'll be much happier with how things run: trust me. Otherwise, this is the system we've got, and there are much more deserving whipping boys all over the place than the bulk of NASA which has delivered incredible progress from their inception to today. You want to dump on NASA top leadership, I'm with you, but the bulk of the organization has done well in spite of that leadership.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 20, @12:07AM
And when I look at NASA, I look at what they've done. I think it's a bit wasteful, for example, to employ thousands of engineers, manager, quality systems administrators, and others to do things like block a competitive commercial space flight for around 30 years. This half century plus misallocation of labor is another example of the NASA opportunity costs.
We do have examples of NASA-scale private operations and well, they're not that bad. *shrug* Consider your second half of your last sentence. Companies that do get to high levels of fail drop out and are replaced by someone better. Government agencies that reach high levels of fail, keep going for another 50 years or more.
SpaceX shows we could have done better. As to the 1492 colonization of the New World, Columbus had decent luck with his second colony, Santo Domingo in 1496 which looks to have done well for centuries afterwards. Spain was already conquering huge swaths of the New World by 1520.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 21, @11:34AM (9 children)
Thousands of the smartest (allegedly), a decade of exposure to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, yet NASA still isn't prepared to even mention these huge changes. NASA is a dinosaur that can't even begin to consider the asteroid that will wipe it out.
How relevant will SLS be in such a world? That's about 40% of NASA's budget right there, squandered on a dead end.
As to "saturating" the launch supply. Sure, that's nobody's job. But it's an enormous capability that NASA stalwartly refuses to let enter their worldview. The concrete price point of Super Heavy that gets mentioned here is 500 mT (metric tons) for $100 million. With NASA's expenditure of $10 billion per year on SLS and Artemis, they could afford to launch 50k mT into space every year just redirecting that budget. Meanwhile with SLS, they could for the same budget each year launch roughly 100-200 mT into space each year (depending on whether they can mange 1 launch a year or every two). That's why SLS is a dead end. You lose more than two orders of magnitude of payload with nothing gained in return.
Moving on, I have something to say about this from your post:
Actually, SpaceX is way beyond NASA scale of operations! Scale of operations is not budget nor staff. It's what you do. It turns out you don't need $25 billion per year to develop more launch capacity than the rest of the world combined. There's a lesson here for you, Joe, should you choose to pay attention.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 21, @12:23PM (8 children)
Human spaceflight at NASA has been a clusterfuck since Challenger. I will make this observation, however: when NASA launched a clean sheet lunar capable rocket design for the first time, it successfully made lunar orbit and earth return - on the first try. That's a fuckton more mature and capable program than "yeah, I give it 50-50 odds of an unscheduled rapid disassembly" on the first attempt at a single earth orbit, demonstrating said rapid disassembly at T+4 minutes of a 90 minute planned flight.
Your first example is full of press release and politics - that's the 1% of NASA that I ignore, because it distracts from the accomplishments they (like the rest of us) make in spite of corrupt and deceitful political machinations.
"Enter Starship" and a lot of rosy claims about the future. Please proceed to deliver those promises without detracting from the people who made those promises even slightly feasible in the first place.
> SLS be in such a world? That's about 40% of NASA's budget right there, squandered on a dead end.
And I credit Bushie Jr. aka W, 100% with this bit of "decisive leadership." Not attempting to see good in W's "return to the moon" lame duck proclamation, but having SLS as a program to make look silly probably did serve as inspiration for the BFR design parameters - no point in duplicating a lunar mission system when there's already a good one in the works, so BFR takes it to the next level - with significantly more risk in the program than NASA has been allowed to take since 1974.
>It turns out you don't need $25 billion per year to develop more launch capacity than the rest of the world combined. There's a lesson here for you, Joe, should you choose to pay attention.
It turns out: NASA does a lot more with their budget than flashy rockets with big capacity promises. You can start with these lessons:
https://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/non-public-education/other-federal-programs/nasa.html [ed.gov]
https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/what-we-do/food-security-agriculture [nasa.gov]
https://www.nasa.gov/SpaceforUS [nasa.gov]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 21, @04:49PM (7 children)
I find it remarkable how you think a "fuckton more mature and capable" is something that a) costs an order of magnitude more, b) refused to tell you the odds - they weren't low for that test flight BTW, and c) won't do much even if everything works out perfectly from now on (Orders of magnitude less payload to space! So much for "capable"!). How many test flights of SLS will happen before they put people on it? I hear it's the next flight or the one after. Hope they don't run into any loss of crew incidents that they missed with the first flight! Super Heavy will have a bunch more before they decide it's reliable enough for humans. That's true maturity.
And because failure is part of the plan at SpaceX, they'll be launching as soon as they figure out the problems. If an SLS goes boom, it'll be several years of soul-searching for NASA without much to show for it. The same institutional flaws will show up again for the next loss of crew. At least SpaceX will get in a large number of flights between accidents. Not so much for NASA.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 21, @07:48PM (6 children)
>And because failure is part of the plan at SpaceX
they can get away with looking like NASA in the early 1960s.
Yeah, NASA loses astronauts, that's the game: boldly stepping onto massive mostly-controlled explosion contraptions that few, if any, have stepped onto before. However, after their Texas BBQ, NASA has significantly stepped up the "safety culture" that at least informs them when unreasonable risks are present at the "go / no-go" decision level, or so they say... at the pace that Congress funds manned missions it will take a decade to find out if the cultural refinements have had the desired effects or not.
Notably: Boeing went through a similar "profits over people" lapse recently with the 737 MAX program. Nobody's perfect, but it's particularly sad when an organization that used to know better lets people die more or less on purpose.
But SpaceX: new cowboys on the block? Yeah, they'll get a pass for their first astronaut BBQ. Move fast, break things, it's a great sound bite, but I don't want to be anywhere downrange of one of those launches for a good long while.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 21, @10:13PM (5 children)
How was NASA again in the 1960s? Was it immature? Incapable?
And they'll step up the safety culture the next time they lose astronauts and the next and the next. Everyone does that. As the the "pace", one can go a lot faster with that pace than NASA does. I seem to recall, just in this thread, talking repeatedly about a business that has managed to come up with a much faster pace without requiring much heftier funding. You then at some point started talking about maturity and capability.
I figure it'll be a typical FAA investigation. The FAA investigates the crashes, finds what caused the crashes, fines/punishes any wrong doing, fixes are made by SpaceX to the relevant vehicles and operations procedures, and things move on. Somehow the commercial airline industry has figured this out.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 22, @02:57AM (4 children)
>How was NASA again in the 1960s? Was it immature? Incapable?
You tell me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8 [youtube.com]
>I seem to recall, just in this thread, talking repeatedly about a business that has managed to come up with a much faster pace without requiring much heftier funding. You then at some point started talking about maturity and capability.
If you're going to compare the whole $25B NASA budget as your measuring stick, then you need to consider ALL the things that NASA does - things SpaceX doesn't even touch. Much of what the public thinks of as "Satellite Images" are actually taken by NASA airplanes. In 1992 I flew to California seated next to a JPL scientist who had spent two weeks on Key Largo taking sunrise atmospheric absorption readings - waiting for a clear day so they could fly a 22 band hyperspectral imaging mission over the reefs. Seems wasteful, sending someone across the country for two weeks - but without those dawn readings of sunrise, the image data is of lesser value because it can't be referenced against other days when the light absorption spectral profile is different - either you pay for a permanent unmanned installation that takes the readings all the time, or you send someone with a portable kit - those are the choices and neither is cheap.
Operating aircraft (Vomit Comet ride, anyone?) and ocean vessels isn't cheap, but it's part of the game. NASA also does a tremendous amount of communication - over and above off-the-cuff tweets - and good communication requires people, and people cost money. Delivering payloads to orbit and around the solar system is a valuable part of their mission, yes, but if nobody communicates about it, or fails to communicate effectively, that diminishes the value tremendously. The astronaut selection process is primarily about public communication abilities - the physical stuff is a bar you have to pass, but thousands of candidates pass that bar easily - where they search for top talent is in ability to communicate.
>I figure it'll be a typical FAA investigation.
Yeah, except the FAA is used to dealing with fleet operations, type and model specific issues, the BFR is not likely to be operating 2400 flights daily anytime soon (but the MAX does...)
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 22, @03:40AM (2 children)
Ok, so even if we restrict our attention to the $10B part that SLS directly affects, we still have that huge problem. And there's other white elephants in the room too. Incidentally, the scatter-brained approach of doing projects with lots of goals is a great way to drive up the price tag of NASA missions, and all the contractors know it. Talking about all the crap NASA does (especially when bragging how inefficiently they do it) isn't a virtue, it's a cost.
The BFR doesn't have to be that numerous in order to be treated as fleet operations. FAA can handle vehicles with significantly lower flight rates. And who knows Super Heavy or a successor, or a rocket by some other player may well achieve those ambitious flight rates.
As to the bit about communication at NASA, that's not very valuable when you're not doing valuable stuff. Keep that in mind.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday April 22, @12:12PM (1 child)
>Incidentally, the scatter-brained approach of doing projects with lots of goals is a great way to drive up the price tag of NASA missions,
If all you care about is the headliner mission, sure. One positive aspect of the pork process is serving the needs of 435 different representatives, not just one headline grabbing goal. If those representatives would serve the needs of their electorates instead of themselves, that would be real progress. Here again: Transparency is always the answer.
>who knows Super Heavy or a successor, or a rocket by some other player may well achieve those ambitious flight rates.
2400 rocket flights per day would fuck up the atmosphere worse than the jets already do. We had better be on a space elevator or something fusion powered before we are sending 2500kg per second to orbit.
>that's not very valuable when you're not doing valuable stuff. Keep that in mind
NASA is one of the few Federal programs that isn't just society jerking itself off, either policing behavior or coddling basic needs. I rate NASA's various missions as more forward progress than anything military or social needs. They should be "wasting" 10x as much of GDP on NASA today like they were in 1969. Stephen Hawking put that number at 40x.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday April 23, @12:07AM
That's NASA in a nutshell.
Which isn't saying much since jets don't do that much actually.
I don't buy that in the least. SLS is a glaring counterexample in a long line of counterexamples. It's just more of the military-industrial complex wealth distribution.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday April 24, @01:29AM
Rereading the thread, I see that I didn't do such a comparison. Can we drop the straw men arguments, Joe? Just look at the quote again:
No talk of $25 billion in there. But as I noted in my other reply, when we do compare like to like, NASA is a black hole of funding. We won't see anything useful come out of that $10 billion a year.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday April 16, @01:20AM (1 child)
Artemis is clocking in at $93 billion and getting nowhere near Mars, but if it is reused as a launch system for Mars missions, the Artemis development costs should be attributed to the cost of a manned Mars program.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 16, @05:06AM
Because NASA totally needs to double use that tax write off, amirite?
My take is that unless Artemis becomes Superheavy/Starship-based, it's not going anywhere near the Moon, much less Mars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Saturday April 15, @09:56AM (2 children)
We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. That certainly is a way to go. I wouldn't rule it out tho, perhaps not FULL Borg. But eventually someone or somethings might go there. But it's probably not to far off before they start to inject or insert tech into the body. It's still very niche and not common but I would assume there will be more and more things. Then some things to fix things that are broken and wrong with us, like joins and devices to monitor our internals, or assist our old slow reptile brain in doing various tasks etc. We'll get there eventually. Resistance is indeed futile.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday April 15, @10:44AM (1 child)
You fun, but consider the Borg (while still being only a toy of Q) the most advanced civilization in the Galaxy, far superior to fascist-militarist Federation with its privileged officers getting all resources, suppressing poor working class on behalf of the Fleet.
I still remember the 60's plots. And 70's games on mainframes. Even the Klingons were originally modeled after... Russians. Bloody brutish drinkers who understand only war. Pure U.S. propaganda machine.
The real history now pays back this cultural investment.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday April 15, @01:52PM
Or the "cultural investment" predicted the real history to some degree. Funny how the Russians are acting so Klingy these days.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday April 15, @03:02PM (1 child)
With the utmost of respect to the authors, there is insufficient data for this assertion.
We have millennia of data for humans operating in 1G.
We have less than 200 man-years of data operating in 0G.
We have, 157 man-hours of data for people operating in 0.16G.
We have, IIRC, less than 10 mouse and rat-years of data at > 1G.
That's it. Any statement about humanity's ability to survive and thrive long-term at other levels of gravity is nothing short of a guess.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 15, @07:23PM
Bingo.
This is a case of 'we don't even know what we don't know'.
As horrible as the Nazis were, their medical research did advance the field of medicine quite a long way. Space medicine will be advanced in a similar manner. That is, people will die horribly, and the survivors will learn from those deaths.
And, I'll point to 'The Expanse' for hints about how people will adapt. Children who grow up in micro gravity may or may not be able to ever walk unaided on Earth. Children who suffer from malnutrition while growing up in micro gravity will almost certainly never walk unaided on Earth. And, all those lessons will be learned the hard way.
I'm reminded of a safety officer's speech. "You may not like some of the rules, but all of our safety rules are written in blood." I still think he was a cretin, after all these years, but that statement was most definitely true.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Informative) by agr on Sunday April 16, @02:21PM
"There is just no other place in space where there is 1G of gravity; that just doesn't exist anywhere else in our solar system. That's one of the first problems we must solve."
Factual error. A colony floating in the atmosphere of Venus would experience close to 1g. Given the slow rotation rate of Venus, it could arrange to stay on the sun lit side, providing constant solar power. It could expand using materials dredged from the surface or mined from asteroids. Lots of other problems, of course, but another 1g locale does exist in the solar system.