New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | October 4, 2005

Ted Balaker's glad NASA admits its old mistakes—but wonders whether that really means we should fund its fresh ones.

Comments

|10.4.05 @ 7:34PM|#

So the Shuttle has cost 150 billion since 1971? I wish the government showed the same fiscal restraint with the war on drugs and the adventure in Iraq, not to mention 14 lives vs. many thousands.

And we got cell phones and hubble housecalls!

|10.5.05 @ 2:48AM|#

As someone who's worked with NASA from the outside, I wouldn't give them another dime for spaceship development. They've got way too much group-think going on.

I also know from many conversations with NASA scientists and engineers, that NASA hasn't been able to figure out what its purpose in life is for many, many years.

NASA does, however, have a role to play, and we would be best off settling them firmly into it. Somebody has to be the forensic expert when commercial planes go down. That's something NASA has done, and done well, for a long time.

Let them fall into that same role for space vehicles. They're good at picking other people's brains, then using what they've learned to perform autopsies. They just aren't any good, anymore, at designing the bodies in the first place.

What people don't understand is, why NASA was good back in the Apollo days and why it isn't good now.

In the Apollo days, NASA was drawing in people from all over the place, acadmia and industry. They were drawing on a pretty good pool of knowledge and experience.

Today, most of the NASA's people are way too inbred. They try to harvest outside knowledge, but they've become too beauracratic to do it effectively.

Forensic science, however, can still thrive in the midst of beauracracy.

My opinion, fwiw.

|10.5.05 @ 9:04AM|#

$150 billion over 34 years? For a government program? That can't be right that the shuttle program only costs $4.5 billion a year.

BTW, the "door opening to the outside" has been a bugaboo for NASA ever since Apollo 1. Why not just design it similar to an airplane door? It opens to the outside but seats (partially) from the inside.

Anyway...while it's sad for a kid raised in the old space race days of the 60's and 70's to see how dismally NASA has failed over the past, it's even sadder still to measure how little NASA has achieved over the past 30 plus years.

Where is the Velcro of the last 30 years, I ask you?

|10.5.05 @ 10:04AM|#

Edward Tufte really lets into the NASA engineers in his seminars. He shows examples of powerpopint presentations used to determine how much damage was done to Columbia and whether it was safe to bring it back or not. It was filled with cya comments and timid analyses.

|10.5.05 @ 12:05PM|#

I think it's interesting that the author conveniently forgets every major NASA success of the last ten years to pursue this particular hatchet job. No mention of Cassini, or the overwhelmingly successful Mars rovers (which managed to perform well beyond spec). Or the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray observatory, Compton Gamma Ray Observer, etc, etc.

I happen to agree that the current $100 billion "Return to the Moon" is a bunch of rubbish, and don't even get me started on the fucking ISS. It's clear there are fundamental problems in the engineering culture at NASA, and having a president whose title might as well be "King of Unfunded Mandates" doesn't help either. But to simply offer a $1 billion dollar carrot to get back to the Moon is not merely moronic, but likely to leave a large stack of corpses behind. And that's the problem---even with a solid business model, the capital required to make a Moon venture is truly staggering. $1 billion is unlikely to get you past design and (some of) the construction, however charming we may find the picture of fresh new private ventures racing past the stuffy, overly-comfortable government agency.

One case in particular---the outward-swinging door that the author assumes NASA built that way to most effectively waste money. It is built to be outward-swinging so that it can be opened in the event of an on-board fire, when the internal pressure is raised by superheated air. NASA learned this lesson after a fire early in the Apollo program, when all three astronauts died. Horribly. So you'll forgive me if bargain-basement engineering doesn't inspire much confidence in an improved safety record, no matter where the dollars are coming from.

That said, I think private space ventures will really come to dominate the activity at low earth orbit. The cost per kilo to low orbit has been high for far too long now, and is the greatest evidence of the space shuttle program's colossal failure. It's exciting to see private ventures start to push this boundary, and possibly start to provide a real rationale for manned exploration (as opposed to merely planting flags). But in terms of scientific instruments and robotic exploration, it'll be a long time before anyone comes close to what NASA has already done.

M.

|10.5.05 @ 12:39PM|#

The article says The expectations for what the space station would contribute to science keeps shrinking, even as its price tag swells past the $100 million mark--about a dozen times early estimates. Is that correct, $100 million? 'Cause, y'know, that's awful and all, but that's hardly "real money". I can't help but think that was supposed to be $100 billion.


larry