Congress, NASA, Other

Mars food and other space waste highlighted in report

Mars food illustration

Dining Martians? Not exactly what NASA is doing. (The illustration is taken from the Waste Book 2012 report.)

Ask different people in the space community to identify wasteful spending at NASA and you’re likely to get a range of answers. Some will argue that NASA is wasting money by supporting three commercial crew competitors when it should downselect to a single company. Others decry the cost increases and schedule delays on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that have hurt other science programs. And, of course, the Space Launch System (aka the “monster rocket”) has its share of detractors.

None of those programs, though, made it this week into Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) “Waste Book 2012″, a compendium of generally obscure government programs that the senator deems a waste of taxpayers’ money. One program that has attracted a considerable share of media attention is a NASA effort: “Out-of-this-world Martian food tasting”. It’s a reference to a $947,000 program to develop and test foods that could be enjoyed by crews on future Mars expeditions. To Coburn, studying that now, at least a couple decades before any such human mission to Mars, is a waste: “You do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize the millions of dollars being spent to taste test Martian meals that may never be served is lost in a black hole.”

That, however, is neither the only nor even the biggest NASA program included in Coburn’s report. The report cited “NASA Entertainment, Inc.”, what it calls the $1.6 million the agency has spent on various interactive projects, including games and the “Third Rock Radio” online radio station. A $771,000 lessons learned database that is “outdated and poorly utilized” (citing a report by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General) also made the report. The biggest NASA program in the report is the $12.4 million spent by federal agencies ($10 million by NASA) to develop a new visitors center for the Stennis Space Center; the report complained it was less cost effective that making upgrades to the original visitors center there.

The report also cited one DARPA space-related project: its funding for the “100-Year Starship” effort, which awarded a $500,000 grant to a group earlier this year as seed funding to continue the effort in the private sector. “Is this project a priority while we have over a $16 trillion debt?” the report asks. (Disclosure: this section in the report relies heavily on an article I wrote for The Space Review last month about the recent 100-Year Starship Symposium in Houston.)

The combined value of the NASA programs cited in Coburn’s report is about $13.3 million, or less than 0.1% of NASA’s overall budget. (The total value of all the programs is about $18 billion, slightly more than NASA’s entire budget but less than 2% of the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2012.) Coburn argues in the report’s introduction that while this might seem like small change, it can still seem like a big difference to the average person: “How many of our friends, families and neighbors could be fed with the nearly $1 million the government spent taste testing foods to be served on the planet Mars?” One imagines, though, that some people still believe there are bigger sources of waste in their pet programs in the space agency.

19 comments to Mars food and other space waste highlighted in report

  • Dark Blue Nine

    It’s begun to leak that SLS is facing another schedule slip into 2018:

    “SLS is currently scheduled to launch in 2017, but recently started to show signs it will slip into 2018 – even at this early stage of development – after a core stage design issue was revealed.”

    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/10/atlas-v-saa-milestones-preparation-crewed-launches/

    The 2010 NASA Authorization Act set a deadline of 2016 for the first SLS launch. This is the second year-long delay in as many years. Like Ares I/Orion before, SLS/MPCV is slipping year for year.

    One would hope that a multi-ten billion dollar program that can’t manage any schedule progress in its two first years of existence would make Coburn’s report on wasteful spending. But apparently he and his staff are only interested in small-fry waste that makes the Senator look tough without ruffling any feathers or doing any heavy lifting on the Hill.

    Political kabuki at its worst…

  • Googaw

    No sooner does this critique of the “100-year starship” come out, then the announcement of the discovery of a planet in the Alpha Centauri system follows on its heels. This has no less a science superstar than planet hunter Geoff Marcy panting breathlessly about even more ambitious ideas:

    “There is now great impetus to send a probe with a camera to Alpha Cen to study the three stars there (including Proxima Centauri) and to study the planets and moons there,” Marcy said. “What a rich opportunity for NASA and ESA, working with all nations on Earth, to send a probe to Alpha Centauri, galvanizing interest from people of all ages around the world.”

    Such a mission is not practical with today’s spacecraft, which would take tens of thousands of years to travel the 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers) to Alpha Centauri. So researchers will have to come up with new, superfast propulsion systems — perhaps nuclear rockets, antimatter fusion drives or another such advanced technology in the early stages of development today.

    Marcy thinks the world should aim to launch a robotic spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri by the year 2100.

    “The president of the United States, after his election in November, should lead a vigorous new NASA program,” he said. “We should study the prospective propulsion methods that can launch a probe to Alpha Cen before the century is out, returning data back safely to Earth.”

    (Reference).

    Perhaps Marcy is playing the Overton Window game. Bid for a starship in order to actually get a bigger telescope. Still, there are all sorts of other reasons to develop advanced propulsion tech; this adds another one.

  • NeilShipley

    And I wonder what the latest spending and schedule progress (and I use that word advisedly) is with JWST and MPCV?

  • CharlesHouston

    Googaw has some welcome news about the apparent discovery of another planet, even if it is tens of thousands of years away (with today’s projected technology). As a participant in the recent 100 Year Starship symposium – unfortunately I did not see much effort being expended to develop either the technology nor the motivation to launch a mission by 2100.
    The current effort does seem unfocussed, it remains to be seen if they can actually produce anything.
    And the “Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence” still does not even mention the project on their web page. They are for excellence except in communicating on their web page maybe.
    Right now, it does deserve a place in the Waste Book.

  • amightywind

    I’d rather see Senator Coburn call out the big stuff – egregious, multi-billion dollar waste like ISS, particularly in light of its lack of scientific production and deteriorating relations with Russia.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “This has no less a science superstar than planet hunter Geoff Marcy panting breathlessly about even more ambitious ideas”

    As much as the space cadet in me applauds Marcy’s exuberance, he seems surprisingly ignorant of the energies and costs involved in timely interstellar travel. The state-of-the-art beamed propulsion concepts for putting a robotic probe in orbit around Alpha Centauri require laser power approaching the 30 terawatt range sustained over 80-odd years, or 2400 terawatt-years:

    http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/3.8632

    By contrast, annual world energy consumption is something short of 20,000 terawatt-hours.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Annual_electricity_net_generation_in_the_world.svg&page=1

    Rounding up, there are 10,000 hours in a year, so annual world energy consumption is less than 2 terawatt-years. So if we applied every watt of energy produced by our civilization for 1200-odd years (2 terawatt-years x 1200 years = 2400 terawatt years), we could get a probe to Alpha Centauri before the end of the following century.

    Okay…

    Color me a crazy skeptic, but even if all the hot alien women from Star Trek were spelling out “Land Here” in Morse code from some paradise world circling Proxima Centauri, I don’t see our world civilization committing all their energy resources for a millennium to this project. I really don’t see everyone giving up heat in winter, air conditioning in summer, automobiles, and cooking heat for 50 generations just because some European astronomers think they have evidence of a lava world with a few-day orbit in their Alpha Centauri spectra.

    I’d rather see Marcy and his fellow planet hunters pushing for telescopes that could find, characterize, and image Earth-like planets around other stars. That a realistic goal that’s not going to consume the world GDP for a millennium or more. A good first step would be getting WFIRST funded, especially now that excess NRO telescopes would enable it to mount a coronagraph and get exoplanet spectra:

    http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=wfirst%20coronagraph%20nro&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CC0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.astro.princeton.edu%2F~lipman%2FExploring_the_NRO_Opportunity_white_paper.pdf&ei=blmBUJjqKeHo0gH8uYD4Dw&usg=AFQjCNEptjh65jB5LiQBFtMLU3AjEeHQNw

  • common sense

    @ Dark Blue Nine wrote @ October 19th, 2012 at 12:11 am

    Not sure what people were expecting. SLS and Ares I/V suffer the same ailment. Why would it be any different?

    “Political kabuki at its worst…”

    Someone once told me here I believe such a comment was bad press for Kabuki… ;)

  • common sense

    “Color me a crazy skeptic, but even if all the hot alien women from Star Trek were spelling out “Land Here” in Morse code from some paradise world circling Proxima Centauri, I don’t see our world civilization committing all their energy resources for a millennium to this project.”

    That’s because you haven’t seen all the hot alien women from Star Trek spelling out “Land Here”. Yet. Can you imagine the effect on all our nerd friends at NASA and in the science community? What better incentive to develop new thrusters? Improve Specific Impulse?

    The rest of us, common people, are satisfied with the hot, possibly (resident) alien, next door. Hence the lack of motivation to support such extravagance.

  • Robert G. Oler

    From DBN

    “SLS is currently scheduled to launch in 2017, but recently started to show signs it will slip into 2018 – even at this early stage of development – after a core stage design issue was revealed.”

    http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/10/atlas-v-saa-milestones-preparation-crewed-launches/

    I said this on the forum 6 months ago…As you note SLS is slipping year for year as it just grinds up money RGO

  • Googaw

    The problem with the starship propulsion research is not that it is unfocused. Research is supposed to be unfocused — given how unpredictable[*] the future is, especially the future 100 years from now, any rational research program would be experimenting with a wide variety of technologies that might contribute towards one day building an economically viable and useful starship.

    The problem with the starship propulsion research is that so far at least it is just slideware. They need to get into the laboratory to make and break things, however far from a real starship they may be. In the meantime there are likely to be practical applications in earth orbit — it’s many decades premature to be focusing on tech that could only be useful for starships.

    require laser power approaching the 30 terawatt range sustained over 80-odd years

    That’s why the other leg of this research, at least as important as the propulsion, and with even greater and more obvious practical application much closer to home, is miniaturization. We certainly won’t be boosting today’s spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. 100 years from now a starship should mass mere grams.

    Meanwhile to forward the actual exploration of actual planets in this decade, here are a couple low-cost missions that would greatly increase our knowledge of hundreds of known planets and discover thousands of new planets respectively:

    http://finesse.jpl.nasa.gov/

    FINESSE would remotely characterize the chemicals on 200 planets: some of them presumably similar to planets in our own solar system, but dozens of them unique planets of a kind we’ve never studied before.

    http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20120011750

    TESS would be a follow-up to Kepler optimized to work with the James Webb Space Telescope and other future planet imaging telescopes. In other words to discover thousands of planets around bright stars which would make the best targets for JWST etc. to image and do even more in-depth remote (spectroscopic) chemical analysis.

    By comparison traditional planetary science is becoming a sideshow. There is now far more to be learned from the thousands of just discovered and soon to be discovered planets.

    [*] The Omniscient Prophets of our new Space Planning Directorate excepted of course!

  • vulture4

    A miniaturized probe can be populated by artificial intelligences which can simply remain dormant for the century or more of the trip. AI can already drive at speed over rough and unknown terrain. Given current progress, within a century AI will be as capable as biological humans of overcoming unexpected problems and exploring an unknown world. They may even be as capable at experiencing the thrill of discovery. Whether humans will travel to other stars depends less on warp drive and more on our definition of human.

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “100 years from now a starship should mass mere grams.”

    I’m all for miniaturization (and standardization) of robotic probes whereever it makes technical and economic sense. But absent a practical quantum communications device, it’s hard to see how a probe weighing grams could get a signal back to our solar system from light years away. Metamaterial antennas might allow a cubesat to transmit over interplanetary distances using laptop power. Pen-sized lasers could do theoretically same at very low bandwidths with large enough receivers (infrared telescopes) on Earth. But neither of these concepts is gram-sized or capable of operating over interstellar distances.

    FWIW…

  • Robert G. Oler

    I am curious about the news from Alpha C….all you smart folks here.

    Do you buy this? I am not in a position to intelligently discuss the methods and data used (but assume the people who make thestatements are)…it just strikes me odd that most if not all the planets we are discovering all are quite different from anything in our solar system? OK that could mean we are just ‘unique”…but there is nothing in our solar system that goes around the sun 3.X days…

    comments? RGO

  • Dark Blue Nine

    “Do you buy this? I am not in a position to intelligently discuss the methods and data used (but assume the people who make thestatements are)…it just strikes me odd that most if not all the planets we are discovering all are quite different from anything in our solar system? OK that could mean we are just ‘unique”…but there is nothing in our solar system that goes around the sun 3.X days…”

    It makes sense if you understand the detection method. They measure the wobble in the star’s spectral red/blueshift as the star gets pulled ever so slightly back-and-forth by the planets orbiting it. Really big planets and/or planets really close to their parent star are going to produce the biggest wobbles in those parent stars. And that’s all astronomers are able to detect right now — the really big wobbles in the parent stars — which skews the exoplanet population they’re able to confirm towards really big planets and planets really close to their stars. Although able to detect some exoplanets, our still-primitive, ground-based telescopes are acting like sieves, letting all the small grains of sand through and only capturing the big rocks. Until they’re able to field more sensitive telescopes, like WFIRST, astronomers won’t get a population of exoplanets that includes the more “normal” types of planets found in our solar system. And astronomers won’t really be able to define a “normal” solar system until they’ve taken a census or two with these more sensitive telescopes.

    This is why finding a terrestrial planet in a habitable zone is such a holy grail for exoplanet astronomers. It’s both the most interesting type of planet from our Earth-centric point-of-view, but it’s also among the most hardest type of exoplanet to find, i.e., a relatively small planet a good distance from its parent star (which isn’t going to produce much of a wobble in that parent star’s spectrum).

    Hope this helps.

  • Googaw

    It makes sense if you understand the detection method…

    That’s a great explanation for the Alpha Centauri detection and a large number of earlier exoplanet discoveries, and of the selection effect that produces a distribution of sizes and orbits in the observed planets very different from the actual overall distribution. Kepler uses a different method, the slight dimming of stars when their planets transit, but that method too is biased towards discovering larger planets. It’s also biased towards discovering planets with shorter orbits, albeit for different and partially fixable reasons — it requires several orbits (several transits) to get enough data to cut through the noise. There’s more such noise than expected, so it will take several more years of a Kepler extended duration mission or a follow-up mission to be able to reliably detect a significant fraction of the planets within its survey region that are near terrestrial in size and near one-year orbits. The vast majority of its discoveries will be larger and have much shorter orbits than that. Let’s hope Kepler’s remaining reaction wheels remain intact long enough!

    It’s both the most interesting type of planet from our Earth-centric point-of-view, but it’s also among the most hardest type of exoplanet to find

    To me this implies that we should be a bit more patient and a bit less earth-centric. In the meantime there are a ton of interesting and important things to be learned about the temperature, surface and atmospheric chemistry, etc. of super-Jupiters, cold Jupiters, hot Jupiters, hot and cold Neptunes, hot super-terrestrials, super-terrestrials in or near the habitable zone, hot rocky planets, large dust rings, etc. As well as from imaging some of the ones orbiting brighter stars with JWST etc.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Dark Blue Nine wrote @ October 19th, 2012 at 11:49 pm

    Googaw wrote @ October 20th, 2012 at 2:56 am

    thank you both very much…yeah I see the method and assume what they are doing is scientifically and math rigorous, I saw some of the smoothed and raw data the other day.

    I am just wondering (with no real information actually but just speculating) if what we are seeing is “noise” however and looking to hard at the data to find something.? Dont know and perhaps I am being to “solar system centric” but well the planet around AC would be “Vulcan” (the one they looked for in our solar system before relativity explained Mercury…

    It just strikes me as odd…but then again our system might be odd.

    I look forward to better “tubes”. RGO

  • Googaw

    I’m confident their announcements of verified discoveries reflect reality, because the signal is quite simple and distinguishable from noise: it’s a clockwork-regular fluctuation. There’s nothing else we know of that can cause a metronomic variation in the wobble or brightness of a particular star except a big or heavy orbiting object.

    Let’s say the star dims a bit after 50 days, and there’s a 50% chance that’s due to noise. Then the star dims again after another 50 days with the same odds of error. Now we can be 1-(2*50%) = 75% confident we’ve got a big orbiting object. After three such observations in a row, 87.5%, after four, 93.75%, and so on.

    The error decreases exponentially, so with enough periods we can be extremely confident. Similarly, the error in the amount of brightness change (and thus in the inferred diameter) and in the amount of wobble (thus in the inferred mass) decreases rapidly with the number of observations.

    As for how normal or odd our own solar system is, we have much left to learn to figure that out. I don’t take the studies of statistical distribution that have come out so far too seriously — e.g. the ones that try to extrapolate the data to estimate the number of earthlike planets — because of the selection biases we discussed above. With our own methods, we couldn’t rule out any unobserved planets at Kepler distances corresponding to any of the masses and orbital distances of any of the planets in our own solar system. Indeed most such planets in the Kepler sample region will probably remain undetected, and the vast majority not reliably detected (i.e. “planet candidates” only rather than announced discoveries). To detect more planets that are farther out or smaller we need more patience and a spacecraft that is much longer-lived than Kepler likely will be.

  • It is theoretically possible for an inertial-confinement fusion engine to send a probe to Alpha Centauri with a flight time of ~100 years. We are already building full-size inertial confinement fusion devices (for science and for power generation, not propulsion).

    Interstellar missions aren’t science fiction. They’re a plausible, but technically risky, option to consider.

  • In some Cinebench benchmarks the X4 630 is 25% quicker than the Core i3-540. In the Squaretrade reliability report, ASUS takes top honors with Toshiba coming in just behind.

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