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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: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Saturday March 21 2020, @12:36PM (3 children)
Read some history then. Reagan's administration was the watershed. Before Reagan, the US funded education and science quite generously as befitting the need. Up untill him, both were a high priority, and the US position in the world rose with the increased knowledge and capabilities. During Reagan's administration the cuts and ridicule started. They have continued since and increased, up to and including present day.
If you want to drag this into a "blame game" then I will blame him for having blown up the space shuttle through his policies. Yes. I am still angry that Reagan's policies destroyed the Challenger and took the US out of the space race [globalresearch.ca]. That pretty much single handedly ended the planet's chance at space for at least two or three generations. No serious attempts at regaining those capabilities have been allowed [brainyquote.com] to be made, what with all the outsourcing and games of pork barrel politics.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Captival on Saturday March 21 2020, @06:01PM (2 children)
So then why the fuck didn't the enlightened metropolitan forward-thinking Democrat geniuses who came after him restore NASA to their previous science-loving glory? Oh yeah, because they were much too busy doing more important things [realclearpolitics.com] with it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday March 21 2020, @06:44PM
Don't pull that game about playing opposites. They aren't. While neither group has the best interests of their nation at heart, one of the groups causes far more damage than the other. The one group is in it for themselves and their lobbyists, the other appears to just be out to stir up shit, tear things down, and otherwise engage in sedition. I find that the seditionists are far more harmful and observe that over the years they have been able to block any forward progress regardless of who sits in the White House.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 22 2020, @07:29AM
Do you know why the US ran a surplus during Clinton's 2nd term? Neither really gave a damn about fiscal responsibility. The Republicans sought to cut government services in a lose-lose game in which they hurt themselves, and knew it, but they're okay with that as long as their perceived enemies are hurt worse. Also, it was dog whistling. By running a surplus, Clinton made their arguments hollow.
It's a big world with thousands of agendas. Lot more going on than science funding.