Many of the newspaper editorials about NASA’s exploration strategy, unveiled a month ago, have been critical of it, particularly in light of questions about the cost and utility of the program. The Atlanta Journal Constitution published an editorial today taking a very different approach: it spoke favorably of the exploration plan, and in fact argued that NASA should focus almost exclusively on it, instead of continuing to fly the shuttle in the near term to complete the ISS: “The moon can and probably should be our ultimate space station. But to return there, NASA must turn its attention fully to that mission.” In effect, NASA would be betting everything on the exploration program right now.
This comes around the time concerns have come to light that there’s not enough money in the NASA budget estimates over the next several years to continue flying the shuttle and assembling the ISS while also starting up development of the CEV, crew launch vehicle, and other exploration-related projects. Worse, there’s no guarantee that NASA will get even what it has been projecting: according to one scenario the Houston Chronicle reported today, Congress may enact a two-percent across-the-board cut on all discretionary programs in the budget, in an effort to satisfy those fiscal conservatives who have been seeking bigger cuts to pay for hurricane relief. A two-percent cut would take over $300 million from NASA, and could add pressure to make some difficult choices about the shuttle, station, and exploration programs.
concerns have come to light that there’s not enough money in the NASA budget estimates over the next several years to continue flying the shuttle and assembling the ISS while also starting up development of the CEV, crew launch vehicle, and other exploration-related projects.
Well, duh. I’m afraid that the future I’ve been predicting is already coming to pass.
There will be no more money. Go over budget in this environment and you’re dead meat.
The only things you can cut and still have an expansionist space policy are the Shuttle and the non-EELV, non-commercial launch vehicles, and, as a very last resort, the Space Station. Cut anything else and you don’t have a program.
I still think NASA’s marching orders have to be: abandon the Shuttle now; make the lunar stuff fit into the EELVs however you have to do it; Mars comes later; commercialize as much of the logistics as you possibly can, especially to the Station. The space commerce benefits of that aside, it’s the only way this is going to fit into the money we’re going to have.
— Donald
Donald: “abandon the Shuttle now; make the lunar stuff fit into the EELVs however you have to do it;”
That would mean firing practically every single STS employee, right now. You know that this will not happen. It is a politically untenable plan.
I have been a firm supporter of the “finish ISS, retire shuttle, build VSE” plan. But if the money is not there I would support retiring Shuttle now and abandoning ISS, the VSE is more important.
There would still be layoffs among STS support, but if work were immediately started on the SDHLV and CEV “stick” those layoffs would not be as great as abandoning all STS components and going the EELV route.
As the article suggests, it’s just bad mathematics to pay for Hurricane Katrina with a 2% cut in discretionary spending. They already approved $60 billion for this hurricane. That’s 6.5% of discretionary spending. Or if you want to save defense spending, it’s 13% of non-defense discretionary.
And why stop at hurricane expenses? If you take the entire likely deficit for 2006, it is about the same size as all non-defense discretionary spending. So they could have an across-the-board 100% cut in non-defense discretionary spending to balance the budget. You can later tell your kids about the old times when there was a program called “NASA”.
Hello, Cecil,
I don’t think the EELV employment situation in my plan would be as bad as you make out. The transition would be harder, but you’re still spending the same amount and that’s going to hire a similar number of people. You’d have them upgrading EELV’s, developing the new upper stages you’d need, working on propulsion aspects of the CEV. The only real difference is that the nation would be supporting only one set of large government launch vehicles, not two to three, and more people would be employed on payloads rather than launch vehicles, the former being something we are arguably better at anyway.
Worse (in my view) you’re repeating a mistake Greg makes and that is to view the Shuttle and Station as a single entity. While NASA has made every effort to encourage that view, it is not necessary. The Station may or may not need the Shuttle to be finished, but maintenance going forward can happen just fine without the Shuttle; it can and should be completely commercialized. And, while the Station is certainly expensive, I believe it costs less than half what maintaining the shuttle does, even before any commercialization of logistics.
Going forward, it should be considered completely separately from the Shuttle. If we need it for the larger picture — and I think we do — than a scaled down version can be kept while the Shuttle is abandoned.
— Donald
I group Shuttle and ISS together above for the purpose of the discussion of money savings to pay for VSE; IE if we can’t afford everything then ISS/STS should be axed to pay for VSE IMHO. And if monetary reasons were to kill the shuttle prior to 2010, the same forces would likely prevent ISS completion via other means. As costly as the STS is I believe that “changing horses in midstream” in order to complete ISS via other means would be even more costly. That would negate the savings that you would want to see from retiring STS in the first place. So if STS goes away early, I believe we must also at least severely curtail our involvement with ISS. And if US involvement in ISS were cut back to the degree I imagine it would need to be the advantages of such a small involvement would not be enough to go forward with ISS at all.
I might agree with you, Cecil, except that I think that there is one spaceflight issue more important than getting the VSE off the ground. That is providing a market for for entreprenurial launch providers to get started on a commercial space transportation industry. For that reason, we need the Space Station. If it really came down to a choice between the moon and the Station, I would with great reluctance chose the former (for reasons I’ll go into some other time), but I think the price for our long-term future in space would be very high. If alt.space is going to succeed, we _need_ that Space Station.
— Donald
I remember reading something recently that stated that congress was unlikely to retire the space shuttle before 2010 because of responabilities of finishing the space station and that European countries might have legal recourse if we dont bring their modules up. Would it be possible to bring the remaining space stations modules up with an Ariane or Proton rocket?
See nasawatch.com for another view of this. Evidently NASA is sacrificing bean counters right now to come up with numbers that the agency and the White House can live with.
This all looks errily similar to what Nixon did with the Shuttle, give it life, but not enough money to do it right. Now, its possible we won’t have a useful space station, the shuttle will die an early death and the VSE will be no more than a CEV.
But that begs the question, why do the CEV if the space station is just a two man show with no European or Japanese support?
I’d say NASA better step carefully or our manned effort could be severely compromised.
Donald, I don’t believe that ISS provides as any better opportunity for commercial space as would a base on the Moon. Sure a moon base is a long way off, but just how robust can commercial space get just by hauling a few supplies up to ISS 2-3 times a year? And I don’t think whatever market ISS may create for commercial space will be too different between the current configuration of ISS and a complete ISS. IE 2-3 commercial supply flights as is vs. 5-6 for a “complete” ISS.
I just don’t see ISS being the boon to commercial space that you do.
And why stop at hurricane expenses? If you take the entire likely deficit for 2006, it is about the same size as all non-defense discretionary spending. So they could have an across-the-board 100% cut in non-defense discretionary spending to balance the budget. You can later tell your kids about the old times when there was a program called “NASA”.
Greg,
I find it hard to believe, especially since shenzhou 6, that congress would not find a way to fund nasa and give them all that they need. I think most of the house and senate would rather have the US greet China as they land on the moon in the future instead of have China greet us while we land on the moon in the future.
In 5 years China will have its Long March 5 rocket which will be able to put its space station in orbit and then they will be somewhat equal to us in ability. By 2018, they will definately be able to land on the moon.
Ray: An agency like NASA never strictly needs anything. It requests; it makes its case. So there is no such thing as “all that NASA needs”, because it can always request more, or make do with less. It’s as undefined as giving Wal-Mart all the business that it “needs”.
But other than that, I partly agree with you. Congress will probably not stomach this 2% cut. Not this year anyway. Instead they will probably once again accept a larger deficit.
But eventually there will either be an increase in tax rates or a great reckoning. Our current budget path was charted by radical free lunchers. TANSTAAFL.
I think that there is one spaceflight issue more important than getting the VSE off the ground. That is providing a market for for entreprenurial launch providers to get started on a commercial space transportation industry. For that reason, we need the Space Station.
These “entreprenurial launch providers” — You’re saying that NASA’s main reason for existence should be to subsidize these entrepreneurs and rugged individualists via contracts for the Space Station boondoggle?
( Didn’t I say something yesterday about the alt.space kiddies having a curious symbiosis of sympathies with the ISS Establishment?
It’s as if the NASA is the parent and the alt.spacers are the children who want Daddy to increase their allowance every week and also send them to SCI-FI jamborees several times a year. Sorry boys and girls, but that money has to come from somewhere.
…. Maybe give a little to those kids down the street. Their Dad used to work for General Motors. )
But eventually there will either be an increase in tax rates or a great reckoning. Our current budget path was charted by radical free lunchers
Greg, I think their was a great reconing back in the earlier 90’s when Clinton was president. He paid off Reagan’s deficit when he was president, but the space station and shuttle lived on. I think the same could be said for NASA and their future projects.
What to do about the International Space Station?
1. Promise only about eight more manned Shuttle deliveries of ISS structural modules. Eight ISS trips plus one Hubble servicing mission = three more flights for each of three Orbiters.
Assume NASA can only get one Shuttle off per year in some years, and nine more flights are practical, provided the schedule for nine for Shuttle missions is stretched to about 2012.
Don’t save the Hubble mission for last. Do it, umm, three or four Shuttle flights from now, in 2007-2008.
2. Assume that the ISS may be in orbit for most of the 21st century. Make long range plans to support the space station and add more modules to it, but on a greatly stretched out schedule.
3. Plan on using EELV’s, any Shuttle-derived follow-on lifter, and possibly unmanned Shuttle Orbiters — unmaanned, that is the end-of-life plan for the Orbiters — to deliver additional ISS modules on this stretched-out schedule.
4. A space tug will be needed to handle these unmanned deliveries.
5. Hurry up and get started on a spacecraft to replace the Orbiters. Perhaps a four seat lifting body, perhaps a capsule more like the orginal Apollo than the proposed 25,000-32,000 kg Steroid Capsule.
Items 4. and 5. above will also be used for return flights to the Moon. Think of Return to the Moon as piggybacking on ISS completion and support architecture.
6. Try to get get some newer contractors and subcontractors involved in the program, but agree to no peculiar obligation to subsidize people in make-work projects.
I don’t think whatever market ISS may create for commercial space will be too different between the current configuration of ISS and a complete ISS. IE 2-3 commercial supply flights as is vs. 5-6 for a “complete” ISS. I just don’t see ISS being the boon to commercial space that you do.
I actually agree with this, Cecil, though I think you underestimate the supply requirements. No alt.space vehicle will have the the capacity of the Shuttle, at least in the near term. This is why we need _both_ the Station and a lunar base (and any other bases we can talk Congress into buying). The larger the market the better. We need to find something other than either the Station or the lunar base to cut. I say it again: we’ve been trying the vehicle first, bases second route for thirty years and it’s not working. It’s time to give bases first, new vehicles second a try.
Greg, regarding the “great reconning,” you are one-hundred percent correct. The second greatest long-term threat to the VSE (after spending money on launchers instead of going to the moon) is Republican credit card budgeting.
David: You’re saying that NASA’s main reason for existence should be to subsidize these entrepreneurs and rugged individualists via contracts for the Space Station.
Well yes, but not quite. How is this different than the government paying private contractors to build freeways so that the automobile industry and end-users don’t have to pay the astronomical cost of those at the point-of-sale? How did we get from fabric kites with an engine on the front to a 747 in a half-century? It certainly wasn’t paid for through non-military end-users. Using government contracts to jump start a new industry has a time-honored past in our country. There is no non-government market except a dozen or so comsats every year of any kind in space. If you want alt.space, you need a real existing market available now (not in some over-the-rainbow future), and the only thing available now is the Space Station and hopefully a Lunar Base soon.
If that works in LEO and to the moon — and I see no reason why it shouldn’t; again, it is a time-honored tradition with a great history of success — then we’ll actually have the lower launch costs that many people here want NASA to continue pretending to aim for. Yes, this is “merely” a different way for the Feds to fund a desired transportation system, but it’s the one that has worked.
So, yes, that’s exactly what I want.
— Donald
[…] when Clinton was president. He paid off Reagan’s deficit when he was president, […]
Um, no he didn’t. He had an annual budget surplus for a short time, but he didn’t pay off the deficit accumulated by Reagan.
Well yes, but not quite. How is this different than the government paying private contractors to build freeways so that the automobile industry and end-users don’t have to pay the astronomical cost of those at the point-of-sale?
Zillions of taxpayers use and depend on the highway system every day. Most of them prefer their own rides to mass transit, thank you.
Zillions of taxpayers may not perceive the ISS or a Moon base as something they need. That’s the difference.
How did we get from fabric kites with an engine on the front to a 747 in a half-century? It certainly wasn’t paid for through non-military end-users.
Well then, let’s put more money into new military aerospace firms, instead of that orbital United Nations, the ISS.
Using government contracts to jump start a new industry has a time-honored past in our country. There is no non-government market except a dozen or so comsats every year of any kind in space. If you want alt.space, you need a real existing market available now…
Again, the military aerospace market could take up all the slack created by cancelling the ISS, your Moonbase, and all other NASA manned spaceflight budget lines.
You need to make a case for not cancelling the ISS , etc., and putting that money into other aerospace sectors instead. In addition to military programs, there are also peaceful unmanned space projects to contemplate.
For example, why not fund a project to land a robot rover on Europa by 2010?
If an H2O ocean is found there, the rover could lower a little minisub for further exploration. A new space firm could try to get a contract for the Europa mission, couldn’t it?
Why this fixation on a manned Moonbase, unless one’s real agenda includes not just “alt.space,” but some cultish notion of Cosmic Starchild communes off Earth?
Live long and prosper! :0> I grok your needs!
Water woman in a water world,
Think I’ll go down and drown myself.
Fishies swimming through my hair,
Mermaids soothing away my cares
[…] when Clinton was president. He paid off Reagan’s deficit when he was president, […]
Um, no he didn’t. He had an annual budget surplus for a short time, but he didn’t pay off the deficit accumulated by Reagan.
Terminology nit: both of you are using “deficit” when you should say “debt”. In a given year, you either have a surplus or a deficit. When you have a surplus, you pay off debt, and when you have a deficit, debt accumulates. It is nonsensical to speak of either “paying off” or “accumulating” past-year deficits.
Paul: Not that Clinton deserves sole credit for it, but I think that you are ungenerous in your summary of what happened to federal debt during the Clinton years. The best economic measure is debt held by the public measured in months of GDP. That is summarized by the CBO in Table 2 here. (Actually they give percentages of annual GDP, but that’s equivalent.) Total debt is the wrong number, because it includes self-borrowing; and debt in dollars is the wrong number, because it neglects population growth, inflation, and prosperity.
In the eight Reagan years, federal debt held by the public climbed from 3.1 months of GDP to 4.9 months of GDP. In the eight Clinton years, debt held by the public fell from 5.9 months of GDP to 4.0 months of GDP. By this measure, the Treasury really did gain as much ground from FY1993 to FY2001 as it had lost from FY1981 to FY1989. Namely, it gained almost 2 months of GDP.
David: Zillions of taxpayers use and depend on the highway system every day.
It didn’t start out that way. The government built the highway and freeway systems for military reasons, then strongly encouraged thee and me to use them, presumably to help amortize the cost. This very very socialist “encouragement” went so far as physically destroying most alternatives (which should sound familiar to Space Shuttle historians). If you want to use a private automobile, be my guest, but if you are also going to claim to believe in the “free market” and that, all history aside, no other model will work (or be allowed) in space, than you should volunteer to pay the full cost of doing so.
I believe there are those among us who dream of zillians of people going to orbit. If so, they are unlikely to do so without a lot of prior government investment.
Economically, I agree with you that there is no meaningful difference between building military installations or a “United Nations” space station. Both are government-funded installations that create a market for commercial supply and could lead to a trading economy. Now, an international space station is my personal preference, but I do grant that either model will work and the military one is the one with the most historical precident.
— Donald
It didn’t start out that way. The government built the highway and freeway systems for military reasons, then strongly encouraged thee and me to use them …
America had many paved roads and automobiles using the roads before Eisenhower was president:
Go to the Public Roads Web site
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956:
CREATING THE INTERSTATE SYSTEM
by Richard F. Weingroff
In the mid-1960’s, an average of 196,425 vehicles per day roll over this section of the Capital Beltway.
An average of 196,425 vehicles per day roll over this section of the Capital
Beltway, shown in the mid-1960s. (This statistic is from traffic counts in 1994.)
“Together, the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear – United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.”
– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Feb. 22, 1955
By the late 1930s, the pressure for construction of transcontinental superhighways was building. It even reached the White House, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt repeatedly expressed interest in construction of a network of toll superhighways as a way of providing more jobs for people out of work.
He thought three east-west and three north south routes would be sufficient. Congress, too, decided to explore the concept. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938 directed the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) to study the feasibility of a six route toll network. The resultant two-part report, Toll Roads and Free Roads, was based on the statewide highway planning surveys and analysis.
Part I of the report asserted that the amount of transcontinental traffic was insufficient to support a network of toll superhighways. Some routes could be self-supporting as toll roads, but most highways in a national toll network would not.
Part II, “A Master Plan for Free Highway Development,” recommended a 43,000-kilometer (km) nontoll interregional highway network. The interregional highways would follow existing roads wherever possible (thereby preserving the investment in earlier stages of improvement). More than two lanes of traffic would be provided where traffic exceeds 2,000 vehicles per day, while access would be limited where entering vehicles would harm the freedom of movement of the main stream of traffic.
Within the large cities, the routes should be depressed or elevated, with the former preferable. Limited-access belt lines were needed for traffic wishing to bypass the city and to link radial expressways directed toward the center of the city. Inner belts surrounding the central business district would link the radial expressways while providing a way around the district for vehicles not destined for it.
On April 27, 1939, Roosevelt transmitted the report to Congress. He recommended that Congress consider action on:
[A] special system of direct interregional highways, with all necessary connections through and around cities, designed to meet the requirements of the national defense and the needs of a growing peacetime traffic of longer range.
Model of a six-lane divided highway shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.Model of a six-lane divided highway shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
The president’s political opponents considered the “master plan” to be “another ascent into the stratosphere of New Deal jitterbug economics,” as one critic put it. Overall, however, reaction was favorable within the highway community although some observers thought the plan lacked the vision evident in the popular “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
The exhibit’s designer, Norman Bel Geddes, imagined the road network of 1960 – 14-lane superhighways crisscrossing the nation, with vehicles moving at speeds as high as 160 km per hour. Radio beams in the cars regulated the spacing between them to ensure safety. In the cities, traffic moved on several levels – the lowest for service, such as pulling into parking lots, the highest for through traffic moving 80 km per hour. Although the “magic motorways” shown in Futurama were beyond the technological and financial means of the period, they helped popularize the concept of interstate highways.
…
http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/p96su10.htm
A two-percent cut would take over $300 million from NASA, and could add pressure to make some difficult choices about the shuttle, station, and exploration programs.
What amazes me is how ready most are to write off the $75 Billion already spent on space station. No one is accountable. No one did anything wrong. The money just magically vanished. Now you’re ready to dump $100 Billion on the same organization that just wasted $75 Billion, and you see now problem with that.
It amazes me because I can sit here and tell you that the aerospace companies are making free profit on every development dollar they spend. I also explain to you that they would rather do development than actually build hardware because the profit margin is the same but the risk is higher – higher, ha, exists for building and flying hardware. And still you don’t even realize you’re being taken. You go dancing down the street after the next great pie-in-the-sky. I guess you deserve to have that money taken from you. You know what they say about the fool and his money?
Where do you think the pressure to cancel space station really comes from? NASA? This Griffin bozo? Who will gain the most from ESAS? Amazing.
“What amazes me is how ready most are to write off the $75 Billion already spent on space station.”
I understand that facts have never been your strong point, but this number is incorrect. The number “already spent on space station” is more like $26 billion. Look it up.
But is that $26 billion in current dollars, or historical dollars? Is that only direct spending, or does it also include the cost of maintaining the space shuttle for the space station?
Besides, it’s not reasonable to tell people to “look it up” without giving a source. This question is addressed by many different sources with many different calculations.
Whether its $26 billion or $75 billion the words “sunk cost fallacy” come to mind. Does it really matter what the past number is?
Keep arguing over whether it’s 75 billion or 26 billion NASA has wasted in the past ten years while HHS wastes the same in ten MONTHS. And we pour another half a trillion in that hole every year without question. Yet no one cares, too busy worrying over the “massive waste at NASA”.
No one plans to tell every grandmother in the hospital that her Medicare coverage is sheer government waste. The lion’s share of HHS goes to Medicare.
On the contrary, entitlement spending, which is to say Social Security and Medicare and some other small change, really amounts to negative taxation. Everyone with a clue understands that the money in these programs isn’t “wasted”, it’s money back to the taxpayers. Maybe it is a bad thing to have a load of negative taxation balanced by another load of positive taxation. But if so, it is not the same kind of bad thing as unwelcome discretionary spending. Only discretionary spending can logically be called “waste”; entitlements are money to and from the taxpayers.
This would be a digression from NASA problems except in that it shows you just how bad the budget problem really is. If you set aside entitlements as negative taxation, the deficit is about half of the meaningful remainder. No one is going to listen to a plea that goes, “cut all other discretionary spending by half if you must, but please leave precious NASA alone.” Especially given that defense spending alone is close to half of discretionary spending.
David: I think you’re research actually more-or-less proved my wider point, that the major roads in this country were developed by the government and subsidized a kind of transportation that would otherwise not have been economic. But this debate is too off-topic to continue here.
Cecil, as someone who works very indirectly for the HHS, in an outfit that makes sure hospitals are doing what they say they are doing with government money and allowing independent appeals of medical decisions by (usually elderly) patients, I have to ask if you really consider all of that “waste.” If so, all I can say is I hope you never get in over your head on a medical issue and need help from one of us contractors working for the government. Since it is all waste, I trust that you will be honest enough to always turn down medical help and advice from any government agency no matter what you or your family may need in the future.
Maybe there should be higher priorities in government, but you are painting with an awfully wide brush.
— Donald
Hmm, where did I get the $75 Billion number? Jeff, any ideas? One fool has broken cover.
Have you never wondered why these programs go through development without any significant controversey, then once it comes time to cut metal, suddenly all hell breaks loose?
La, la, la, the next thing will be better. Sing it with me now! With feeling!
Oops, sorry about the “fool” comment. Bad word to use. It can only be inflammatory. It’s just so frustrating. How can you sit there and watch all this money get flushed down a toilet? It’s not the fact that it could go to fund some other program, it’s that it could be going to fund a REAL space program that should upset you.
First did I say ALL of HHS 550 billion per year budget is waste? No, I said that easily 26-75 billion (using the dueling ISS “waste” figures) is waste.
As for the “money back to the taxpayers” comment; so where exactly does NASA money go? Is it loaded onto rockets and launched into orbit? No, it goes into the pockets of space industry employees, IE taxpayers. Does that automatically make all NASA funds untouchable as it seemingly does for HHS?
Question for Dfens: Who has a “real” space program? Russia? Europe? China? Japan? “Alt-space”? LOL
NASA has a “real” space program, a really imperfect one. But it is the one we have to work with. We can try to make it better, or give up and write posts here about how much smarter we are and how we would do it if only we were in charge. As for most of you here, I thank God that you will never be in charge.
Anyone who really thinks that NASA is just going to be abolished while Russia, Europe and China etc. advance their respective space programs is the real fool.
“Besides, it’s not reasonable to tell people to “look it up” without giving a source. This question is addressed by many different sources with many different calculations.”
Here:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/smith.htm
Widely regarded as the definitive source on space station costs. It dates from 2001, so you have to adjust things a bit, but it answers the question.
You people are like a ladies sewing circle with your bickering.
Me, in charge, Cecil? It’s funny how little people understand engineers. For me to get paid to do engineering is like for an athlete to get paid to play professional sports. All I’ve ever wanted to do is be an engineer. Sure, I played sports in high school, but everything else I have done has always been secondary to engineering. All I want to do is my job. It would benefit me, it would benefit all taxpayers for me and my colleagues to be able to do that one simple thing.
It is ironic that it is easier for you to believe that pouring another $100 Billion after $75 Billion is a sure path to success, and making even the smallest of changes to the system that has failed for the last 30 years is certain to fail. How can it be easier to go to the Moon than to fix NASA?
The NASA money earthbound argument is spurious. If we spent money on flu shots, we would get the flu shots and the benefits of the consequential spending from the health care employees. Further, the people would produce something else useful even if all the government does is set monetary policy well. Justify the product and not the jobs.
As for the “money back to the taxpayers” comment; so where exactly does NASA money go? Is it loaded onto rockets and launched into orbit?
This bit of economic illiteracy comes up a lot from the desperate NASA apologists. Money is a placeholder, a token that represents the real wealth (labor, capital, natural resources) that are consumed by the program.
I do hope you aren’t claiming that if a program doesn’t consume physical currency, it has no cost.
William Berger: A four-year-old transcript of House testimony is the definitive source on space station costs? That’s pretty unlikely. It may be a popular source or a useful source, but it cannot be called “definitive”. Although Marcia Smith only partly explains this, it looks like it is just direct costs in historical dollars. That is a narrow definition of the cost of the space station. In any case there has been four years more spending since her testimony.
Cecil Trotter: In fact you are right that even direct government salaries are money back into the economy, and can’t be called waste. You can’t call it negative taxation because it isn’t broadly distributed among taxpayers. It’s like the difference between a sales rebate and a raffle prize.
However, the key point here is that money is not an economic resource, it’s a social convention. Labor and raw materials are the real resources. When HHS writes Medicare checks, it is only paying for the same things that the beneficiaries (who are a broad section of the taxpayers) would pay for themselves.
But when NASA launches the space shuttle, it consumes valuable labor that could go to unrelated enterprises. If the effort is fruitless, then that really is government waste. It’s a waste of the valuable thing, the time of skilled workers, although you can (slightly misleadingly) estimate it in dollars.
Dietz” As for the “money back to the taxpayers” comment; so where exactly does NASA money go? Is it loaded onto rockets and launched into orbit?
This bit of economic illiteracy comes up a lot from the desperate NASA apologists. Money is a placeholder, a token that represents the real wealth (labor, capital, natural resources) that are consumed by the program.”
Note that the example is NOT my argument. It is just in responce to Kuperbergs silly artgument that the HHS budget is “money back to the taxpayers”. My point to him is IF that argument is correct for HHS why isn’t it correct for NASA? HHS is wealth re-distribution for the most part, at least NASA creates high paying aerospace jobs.
“A four-year-old transcript of House testimony is the definitive source on space station costs? That’s pretty unlikely. It may be a popular source or a useful source, but it cannot be called “definitive”. Although Marcia Smith only partly explains this, it looks like it is just direct costs in historical dollars. That is a narrow definition of the cost of the space station. In any case there has been four years more spending since her testimony.”
Do you know anything about this subject at all? First of all, this isn’t a “transcript.” It’s a CRS report to Congress. It was produced precisely at the request of Congress, and the author is highly regarded by Congress. The four years has not made much of a difference in the total–it certainly has not jumped from $25 billion and change to $75 billion in those four years. Can you provide a more reliable source that is as respected by the decision-makers as this one?
All right, it’s a prepared report rather than a transcript. Nonetheless it is Congressional testimony. “Mr. Chairman, Members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify today…” It’s a bit of a stretch to refer to one-off Congressional testimony as the definitive reference. It could be a good reference, but “the definitive reference” means something else.
But I do not question Marcia Smith’s data or qualifications. Let’s agree that the direct billed cost of the space station as of 2001, in historical dollars, was about $25 billion. The space station’s full cost in current dollars, including especially its recent monopolization of the space shuttle, would be a great deal more than $25 billion. I do not know of a good calculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it really does come to $75 billion. (Which by the way was someone else’s figure all along.)
Keep trolling your red herring, William. Does it matter if they wasted $75 Billion or $0.10? If you gave someone a dime and they threw it in a lake, would you give them a quarter next? If the point to NASA is wealth redistribution… That’s probably the truth of it. How very sad. I wonder how much the CEO’s of NASA’s contractors made last year?
Cecil: Yes, that’s exactly right, HHS redistributes wealth. It redistributes wealth back to virtually every retiree in the United States. But if you redistribute wealth, you therefore aren’t wasting it. Unless, in the case of HHS, you believe that medical care is wasted on old people. (Maybe you prefer Kevorkian solutions?)
NASA, however, is doing something more than redistributing wealth. It isn’t just paying engineers, it’s also taking their labor. If it squanders that labor, that really is government waste. It takes skilled labor away that would almost certainly have gone to other uses.
Let’s agree that the direct billed cost of the space station as of 2001, in historical dollars, was about $25 billion.
Perhaps if Mr. Kuperberg spent some time actually reading the document, instead of debating what it is (report? testimony? output of large numbers of monkeys, typing ceaselessly?) he would know his statement above is incorrect. As Ms. Smith writes, “Congress did enact a cost cap on the station, including in the conference version of the FY2000‑2002 NASA authorization act (P.L. 106‑391) a Senate‑passed provision limiting development costs to $25 billion and associated shuttle launch costs to $17.7 billion.” That amount is, presumably, the maximum NASA can spend through ISS completion (whatever “completion” means nowadays).
True, the $25 billion doesn’t include shuttle costs, but that’s provided in the separate $17.7 billion cap. I suspect the actual amount spent on both ISS and shuttle launch services for ISS is below both caps (when corrected for inflation), but I do not have those figures in front of me.
I am not an expert in mathematics, but I do not see how 25 + 17.7 = 75.
Cecil” NASA has a “real” space program, a really imperfect one. But it is the one we have to work with. We can try to make it better, or give up and write posts here about how much smarter we are and how we would do it if only we were in charge.
I fully agree. I wish people would be more constructive here. I once asked Dfens what _he_ would do if he were “god king” of the space industry and he didn’t answer (though he may not have seen the post). I’d still like to hear that. I think it is okay, and even good, to criticise certain aspects of the VSE, or even in theory the VSE itself, but I want to hear technically and politically justifyable proposals on how to get from here to where we want to go, not just variations on “the aerospace industry sucks” or “the government sucks” or “alt.space is useless because they can only get to LEO.”
The negative aspect of HHS, et al, was once pointed out by The Economist. While you do want to support the elderly, the way we fail to means-testthat while hugely underfunding public education creates a vast transfer of wealth from young people to elderly people, which is not what you want if your economy is to have a future.
— Donald
AJ Mackenzie: $75 billion was never my figure. All I said was that this figure was plausible and that Marcia Smith’s testimony doesn’t address it. Her report is about cost estimates and cost caps, not historical costs. In any case historical costs through 2005 would be impossible in a report written in 2001.
The presumption that a cost cap is the maximum that NASA can spend on the space station does not always hold. They can always spend past the cost cap, in principle, they just aren’t supposed to. There may also be expenses not covered by the cost caps.
$25 billion plus $17.7 billion is still not the relevant calculation, because it is in historical dollars, not current dollars. If you add inflation, you easily pass $50 billion. But I suppose that it would be hard to make it to $75 billion, even if there are other hidden costs besides this 25+17.7. As I said, $75 billion was not my number.
Donald: “abandon the Shuttle now; make the lunar stuff fit into the EELVs however you have to do it;”
Cecil:That would mean firing practically every single STS employee, right now.
I’ve seen this argument countless times before, but i never understood it. The way i have seen organizations operating with big projects is .. if its screwed, then its screwed. A couple of managers get fired, but the specialists and workers get reassigned to new projects, the company takes the loss and wriggles out of it if it has sufficiecnt resources avaialable. Why should STS be any different ? Especially as the “company” running it seems to be unable to go bankrupt, nevermind how many big budget projects it has botched in the past few decades.
Unless, of course, the thousands of “specialists” employed are actually trained monkeys unable to learn anything new, but just turning that one screw, signing that one approval document or watching an indicator on the panel that he has been taught to watch for decades ..
… that the major roads in this country were developed by the government and subsidized a kind of transportation that would otherwise not have been economic.
Nope, transport via car and truck on the highways was quite economic in the era 1930’s-early 1970’s, because gasoline was abundant and cheap at that time in history.
Anyway, thanks to Google, we now know that the American autobahnen are the fault of the Commie-infiltrated, collectivist New Deal, instead of upright and uptight Eisenhower Republicans conspiring with the evil business pigs of Detroit.
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or even in theory the VSE itself, but I want to hear technically and politically justifyable proposals on how to get from here to where we want to go, not just variations on “the aerospace industry sucks”
Both Lockheed and Boeing had better Return to the Moon Power Point shows five or so years ago when O’Keefe was NASA’s big cheese.
At that time, LockMart wanted to return to the Moon using a lifting body spacecraft and Earth orbit rendezvous of two Atlas V’s; Boeing likewise with two Delta IV’s and a very Apollo-like crew capsule. If I had more time to Google tonight, I’d try to find ‘em.
These plans were politically palatable to the first Bush Jr. admin, and technically accepted by NASA and the respective contractors. What changed? I dunno, other than another election cycle.
The Boeing-Northrop capsule for Apollo on Steroids (TM) looks like the same capsule from five years ago, except bigger.
I still think NASA’s marching orders have to be: abandon the Shuttle now; make the lunar stuff fit into the EELVs however you have to do it; Mars comes later; commercialize as much of the logistics as you possibly can, especially to the Station.
You remain confused about two very basic points, which are:
A. If NASA stops flying the Shuttle right now, without any other plan to finish the Shuttle, then the USA will abandon the International Space Station.
B. If the Shuttle/ISS lobby is thereby disappointed, and the general public perceives that American manned space efforts just don’ work no mo’, then it’s going to be hard to sell your beloved return to the Moon project.
You are nuts if you think people will say. “Oh, the Shuttle and the space station have proven to be dudmobiles, so let’s double down on our bet on NASA and give ‘em all the funding they want to go to the Moon.” Unh-unh, mass psychology won’t work that way.
Here’s what I think: NASA has to try to fly a lot more Shuttle missions between now and the end of the decade, four or so times more frequent than one a year. Then when Shuttle missions finally end, we need to have another manned spacecraft ready, something more modern and better looking than a 32,000 kg Steroid Capsule.
Why? So the public won’t get in the habit of life going on without American spaceflight. It’s not as if American spaceflight were an essential activity
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David: we now know that the American autobahnen are the fault of the Commie-infiltrated, collectivist New Deal, instead of upright and uptight Eisenhower Republicans conspiring with the evil business pigs of Detroit.
I’m glad to read that you _still_ agree with me that the American freeway and highway systems, supported by the government for government purposes, are two of the world’s most socialist institutions. I find it obscenely ironic that all the supposedly free market capitalist ideologues out there freely consort with the devil by using this immensely subsidized system, without batting an eyelid, while continuing to pretend that government institutions have little or no place in our economy or in realistic roads to confident and reliable space transportation. Shame on you.
I also have repeatedly and frequently agreed with you regarding the insanity of supporting both the EELVs and Shuttle-derived vehicles at the same time.
If you are trying to make a point beyond arguing for the sake of arguing, David, I am completely missing it. But, then, I’m just a simple Liberal refusing to live in the real world. . . .
— Donald