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Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.
In light of the film's recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film's otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.
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Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization “Will Inevitably Fail”
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Do what comes naturally. Seethe and fume and throw a tantrum.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @03:49PM (10 children)
Root cause? IMO: we lack is the will to fund space exploration instead of oversized homes, SUVs, and restaurant food.
The majority of voters.
Showed who? A handful of archaeologists who looked really really hard and found some scraps of evidence 500 years after the fact. Anybody else, beyond whoever or whatever wiped them out?
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:33PM
The root cause was Congressional pork. The Shuttle's performance was compromised to ensure that the work went to the 'right' military supply contractors, and then those companies deliberately made it near unmaintainable in order to pad their sole source maintenance contracts. That left NASA with an overpriced, underperforming vehicle that took a year to refurbish after every flight. The exact same mentality (and contractors) then created both Constellation and SLS, with predictably disastrous results in both cases.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:53PM (8 children)
The obvious rebuttal here is that when we spend money on oversized homes, SUVs, and restaurant food, we get those things at a reasonable price. We spend money on space exploration, then we get the Space Shuttle circus. There's no point to spending more money when the present money is spent so poorly. It's good money after bad.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:49PM (5 children)
Do we, though? Have you ever priced construction materials vs the cost of finished structures? In our experience, the lowliest contractors will price most jobs at cost of materials, times two, plus $50 to 100 per man-day. But wait, there's more: if you hire a General Contractor, they'll take care of the hiring and management of low-life (lower than you'd ever consider hiring for yourself) contractors, and they generally charge the price of the contractors (materials x 2 + $100 per day) multiplied by two to four again, depending on the reputation of the General Contractor. This is how a bathroom remodel, which takes $1000 in materials and about 10 man-days, costs $10,000 and up when handled by a general contractor. Furthermore, the GCs generally won't use long lasting materials or methods no matter how much you pay them, thus ensuring that they or another GC has future remodeling work in 7 to 10 years out of necessity rather than choice, when a 10% increase in materials and labor cost could result in a product lasting 30+ years.
SUVs? Starting in the 2000s the auto industry began replacing aluminum castings and other metal parts with plastics, warrantied to last 10 years or 120,000 miles, guaranteed to self destruct within 15 years. Manufacturing costs dropped dramatically, but consumer prices continued to inflate normally - margins have never been better.
Restaurant food? Maybe in west moose rapist Idaho restaurant food is reasonably priced. The big chains in the cities will generally charge $40 and up for a meal that could be prepared at home for $5.
Everything has margins, profits, and waste. NASA could be run more efficiently, but why don't we take a hard look at the military, roads and other domestic programs and see how they stack up in terms of overpriced bloat, first, hmmm.
Oh, and you really should read: "A Libertarian walks into a Bear"
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:59AM (4 children)
Yes. Here's the difference between that and NASA. You then multiply that by a factor of ten to get the inflated cost that NASA thinks it'll cost. Then multiply it by another factor of 2 because they used cost-plus contracts and the contractor is milking that for all they can. That's what actually gets spent in NASA-world.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @12:48PM (3 children)
>Here's the difference between that and NASA.
Boldly going where no man-person has ever gone before, doing things that have never been done, in strange new places with challenges nobody and no creature in the Billions of years history of life on earth has ever faced. So, yeah, it does cost more than swapping faucets on standard PVC pipe.
Do they milk it? sure they do. Does that slush multiply up into obscene multiples of actual cost? yep. Are the private space contractors going to be any better 50 years from now? In all probability, they'll be worse, and in the meantime they're getting all kinds of support that makes them look better than they really are.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:17PM (2 children)
So does every over-sized house builder. You keep ignoring the over-priced NASA efforts here.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:58PM (1 child)
Everything is overpriced, some of those things have better reasons for that than others.
Transparency is always the answer. NASA actually leads most of the world in terms of transparency into their fat margins.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2022, @02:08AM
Overpriced isn't merely a bitflag you set. As I noted, you can basically take those inflated prices for those testosterone houses and multiply it by another factor of 20 to get NASA prices.
Transparency? Here's an example [soylentnews.org] of NASA transparency:
In other words, the official of the linked story was able to identify enough hidden, unreported costs that the cost of the SLS/Orion/Artemis programs almost doubled ($53 billion to $93 billion). Imagine you're building a muscle home and your contractor says he's managing to keep the costs at a million dollars. Well, you've been talking to those subcontractors and well, there's like $750k of costs you have to pay under the contract that the contractor didn't tell you about. That's NASA transparency.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2022, @03:38AM (1 child)
khallow relapses! Intervention!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:00AM