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Responses to Krauthammer

In the comments to a post on Friday about Charles Krauthammer’s op-ed in the Washington Post, one person noted, “It would be good if a couple short letters to the editor appeared in such a national paper pointing out that less expensive and more quickly developed alternatives, such as operational Air Force launch vehicles, exist, if NASA could let go of its institutional biases and hubris.” Message received. Today’s Post includes a couple responses to the Krauthammer essay, including one with this concluding paragraph:

NASA needs to bury its engineering hubris, leverage prior investment toward a less costly and more timely vehicle for reaching orbit, and get on with creating lunar hardware before the next White House cancels the effort entirely.

I’d like to think the letter writer was inspired by reading this blog, but realize coincidence is a much more likely explanation. There’s also a not-unexpected response that goes into “spend this money on Earth instead” file:

I’m forced to conclude that Charles Krauthammer would rather listen to the “music of our time” than hear the cries of the 200,000 people who have died in Darfur because of our lack of resources to protect them, or pay attention to the quiet agonies of the 18,000 Americans who die every year for lack of health insurance.

13 comments to Responses to Krauthammer

  • Daniel Roberts

    I was encouraged by Charles Krauthammer’s editorial and am pleased to know he supports NASA’s efforts. On the other hand there are a great many people who buy in to the “spend money on Earth” diatribe so many mis-informed people seem to have regarding NASA. Those same people seem to forget the money NASA injects in the economy is spent here on Earth. As for Darfur and the next famine bound to appear on the continent of Africa, a tradegy to be sure. But it’s ironic the satellite technology NASA helped to develop is integral in helping the worlds farmers grow more food. Now maybe NASA can help build similar satellites that can spot political despots like the ones in Africa who knowingly send thier own people down the path of starvation.

  • canttellya

    You don’t have to buy the “spend money on Earth” argument to buy the “waste is bad” argument. Wasting money is always bad, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a dollar or a billion dollars. If money is being wasted on gov’t funded manned space flight, then we should stop wasting it. I’ve seen no arguments in the time I’ve been on this site to dissuade me from this opinion.

    One side simply says ‘well, politicians need their pork, thus a wasteful manned space program will continue’ and another flavor is ‘someday we’ll colonize space, and somehow or another all this wasteful spending on Ares and Orion will have something to do with that, so let’s not fight it’.

    To both positions I say “bull”. Pork can and will take any flavor it wants, and the pork argument won’t sustain the manned program forever. To the future-colonists, I sympathize with you. I’ve read “The High Frontier” by O’Neill, several times actually, and the only economic argument he can make for large scale space activity is solar power satellites, a technology I’ve investigated extensively and which has little (IMHO, no) prospect for meeting future energy needs.

    The only argument I can see for putting people in space is tourism, and that’s not the government’s job. So free up the $7-8B being spent on manned space flight and do something better with it. I’m sure some of that money could be spent on reconnaissance satellites over Darfur, if that’s your inclination.

    But do something that actually builds the US economy and promotes new growth. Stop wasting all that money.

  • Anonymous-Prime

    I don’t buy the “better to spend the $ on Earth” argument either. However, the first comment on NASA’s need to lose its engineering hubris and institutional parochialism is right on. As a NASA employee, I’ve observed this attitude being fostered within the management ranks, but not at the engineer level. Most of your NASA engineers, scientists and technical types are open to new ideas, and want to see us move forward in space, especially in the area of space tourism.

  • anonymous

    Wow, I don’t know if he visits this site, but Mr. Bergstrom’s letter to the editor hits the problem dead on here:

    “… under Administrator Michael D. Griffin’s plan, NASA will not begin to build actual lunar hardware in earnest until 2011 at the earliest.

    Instead, Mr. Griffin is wasting precious time and tax dollars on the boondoggle of NASA’s Ares I rocket, which can barely reach Earth orbit and needlessly duplicates the capabilities of existing Air Force and commercial rockets.

    If Mr. Krauthammer wants to see another human landing on the moon in his lifetime, he should encourage NASA to take advantage of its limited window of political opportunity under the Bush administration.”

    I could not have summed up the problem and situation more succinctly myself. Here’s hoping that someone in the NASA leadership takes notice.

    I wouldn’t worry about the other letter to the editor. Not to ignore the dismal situation in Darfur, but these kinds of objections to the space program have always been with us.

    There’s another opinion piece here:

    http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/159434/toward_the_third_space_age.html

    Although Mr. Whittington get some numbers wrong (NASA has only provided about $10 million to prizes over the past several years, not $30 million) and some of his lengthy proposals are a bit uncoordinated or unrealistic, it’s certainly another push in the right direction.

  • Anonymous: could not have summed up the problem and situation more succinctly myself.

    While reading Jeff’s excerpt from the letter, I found myself wondering if you had written it!

    — Donald

  • I think it might be useful to lay aside the false choice between issues of public investment in space, and public investment in solutions to human ills.
    It is a useless red herring, serving neither space or humanity.

    It seems to me that a better use of our energies is:
    that the brillant space community spend a reasonable portion of its time figuring out solutions from space to earthly concerns-concurrent with exploration efforts. In fact,

    Doesn’t it then follow that the case against exploration is harder to make if in fact the public sector investment mission is willingly and actively returning benefits to humanity, as a function of exploration?

    Kathleen

  • anonymous

    “While reading Jeff’s excerpt from the letter, I found myself wondering if you had written it!”

    No, if I want to remain anonymous, I’m obviously not going to release my name in the Post. Also, as my posts here will testify, I’m way too verbose to pull off such a short, well-worded letter.

  • Doug Messier

    I think the problem is that most people don’t see **human** spaceflight as having benefitted them much. Yes, all the money is spent on Earth and so on and so forth, but most of the benefits go to people already in the industry. There are direct and indirect benefits in terms of economic growth and spinoffs and tech development. But, the actual practical benefits coming from ISS or shuttle flights or moon landings….not a whole lot, especially when compared with the money spent. How does human spaceflight affect your day-to-day life? Not much. So, the arguments from those with direct ties to the idustry come off as self-serving to most people.

    There are a lot of things that NASA and other agencies do that benefit us day-to-day in terms of the non-human spaceflight. These aren’t very controversial. It’s also ironic that NASA satellites have been instrumental in measuring global change. Although this hasn’t generated a whole lot of progress in addressing it in the U.S., with the exception of lots of money thrown at new technology research. Useful, yes, but the minimum we need to do.

    In a broader sense, I think there is truth to the charge that our concern for the planet is selective. Spend a half trillion (and rising) on overthrowing Saddam. Sure, Chuck and the neo-con crew are all for it. As for Darfur, there’s less interest it (for a whole variety of economic, social and political reasons).

  • Doug: think the problem is that most people don’t see **human** spaceflight as having benefitted them much. Yes, all the money is spent on Earth and so on and so forth, but most of the benefits go to people already in the industry. There are direct and indirect benefits in terms of economic growth and spinoffs and tech development. But, the actual practical benefits coming from ISS or shuttle flights or moon landings….not a whole lot, especially when compared with the money spent. How does human spaceflight affect your day-to-day life? Not much. So, the arguments from those with direct ties to the idustry come off as self-serving to most people . . . These aren’t very controversial.

    The ironic thing is that every one of these points is just as true as, say, a $5 billion automated mission to Saturn. Yet, somehow, many people, both scientists and the public, see that as valuable and a human base on the moon capable of survey geology as a waste. In reality, if all this is true to one endeavor, it is just as true of the other.

    — Donald

  • Texas Space

    “The ironic thing is that every one of these points is just as true as, say, a $5 billion automated mission to Saturn. Yet, somehow, many people, both scientists and the public, see that as valuable and a human base on the moon capable of survey geology as a waste. In reality, if all this is true to one endeavor, it is just as true of the other.

    – Donald”

    Quite true about an unmanned mission, but there isn’t much opposition to unmanned flights. Why you ask? Because the missions are actually exploring! Missions to the Moon, Mars and other Solar System locales will be seen in a better light than the Shuttle and ISS programs since they will be doing something beyond doing laps around the block. Exploration is something that governments can and should do on behalf of their peoples that is unlikely to be done by private interests.

    As far as the “spend it here on Earth” argument goes, why spend it on Earth? If space is seen as political pork, then why is pork on Earth any better? At least space has the potential to advance the human race as a species.

  • D. Messier

    We’ve spent $5 billion on an automated mission to Saturn? Did it really cost that much?

    I think Texas Space is right in general. In response to your point about where to spend pork, I think what I was trying to say is that there are ways of spending money on Earth that are generally seen as benefiting more people and in more practical ways.

  • canttellya

    That $5B mission to Saturn was 15-20 years in development. The shuttle spends $5B in about a year. The Saturn mission is real exploration. The shuttle is pork for Texas, Utah, Alabama, and Florida a beacon for the American public.

  • Texas Space: Because the missions are actually exploring!

    I thought we were talking about lunar missions, not the Shuttle. However,

    canttellya: That $5B mission to Saturn was 15-20 years in development. . . . plus a share in the development costs of the Titan IVB-33 and its infrastructure, plus the development cost of deep-space spacecraft technology, etc., etc. If you are going to bill the development cost of the Ares infrastructure to human lunar missions, you also have to bill these costs to Cassini; if you want a fair comparison of the value and costs of each approach, you need to compare the full costs, or the incremental costs. You can’t compare the full costs of human spaceflight to the incremental costs of an automated planetary probe and come up with a meaningful comparison of their relative value.

    Once the Ares infrastructure (or whatever gets developed instead) is paid for, the true costs of human missions to the moon are the incremental costs of one flight. It is very likely that, measured this way, the cost of one mission to place geologists on Earth’s moon will be a good deal less than one automated mission to Saturn. It will also accomplish a lot more exploration, albeit different exploration.

    It is true that, today, the infrastructure required for automated planetary exploration is a sunk costs, but someday the same will be true of the infrastructure to take geologists to the moon. (If we hadn’t abandoned the Apollo spacecraft, that would be so today, and it is a safe bet that automated exploration would not look quite as financially attractive as it does now.)

    What if we had said, gee, it’s cheaper just to build terrestrial telescopes, so why waste all this money adapting Titan’s to send spacecraft to Saturn when we could be spending it building gigantic telescopes on Earth, which is far better science anyway than wasting our money actually going to Saturn. . . ? We didn’t say that, fortunately, and we should not be saying the equivalent today.

    — Donald

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