This Week's Lazy Anti-Humans In Space Op Ed Award Goes To …
Trump’s call for human space exploration is hugely wasteful and pointless, opinion (or something), LA Times
“Among the dangers of cavalier calls for publicly-funded human space exploration is that monumental Big Science programs like the space race tend to suck resources away from any science left on the outside looking in. A multitrillion-dollar program to put an American on Mars, endorsed by a president, will get first call on the federal budget, leaving programs aimed at disease cures, chemistry, and physics far behind.”
Keith’s note: Here we go again. “Today few can summon up the names of shuttle astronauts …” Where’s the poll where someone actually measured public knowledge on this and published the results? The author just proclaims this as it it were a commonly accepted fact. “Multi-trillion dollar”? (sigh) No one has ever published an actual cost estimate for anything NASA has done or might do that uses the word “trillion” – other than references that lazy journalists make to references that other lazy journalists make to references to other lazy journalists make etc.
It is quite obvious that the author spent absolutely no time whatsoever researching the facts behind the topic he has written about. He set out to write an anti-humans in space article and found tired old quotes that people have been dredging up for years and uses them out of context, and then adds in unsubstantiated alternative facts to make his point – or so he thought. I am surprised he did not mention Tang or Teflon as NASA spinoffs. If you are going to try and debunk the notion of humans in space don’t just dial it in – do some actual research – and don’t just repeat the tired old unsubstantiated rants that others have been writing for years.
I am, by no means, a paragon of any manner or form of virtue when it comes to online behavior, but …
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I blame the Editors and Publishers for not vetting what they “print” and continually allowing such garbage to be spewed into our social consciousness. This disingenuous behavior only serves to cripple and divide our society and worse if it scares off potential future STEM candidates. A society ever lacking in accountability for bad human behavior?
Disagree. It is a legitimate point of view. Not useful to disparage motivation.
The entire space shuttle program cost around $200 billion. So yes, “trillions of dollars” is disingenuous.
Actually, how you go matters, if you want spinoffs, then change the architecture and start creating the technology and infrastructure that reduces both the science and HSF costs to travel in deep space. Rating: Mostly True.
“Trump’s brief, offhand comment won’t get any follow-through”
True: EM-1 will not fly crew w/o test flights of common config. Red Congress wont’ fund a private venture (Huh?!)
“Job One, which is to fight climate change”
True: Climate change will costs trillions. False: cc deniers.
“Obama tried to send crew *to* an asteroid 2025, Mars 2030s”
True: CxP Bs more expensive, Orion had wrong heat shield
“The exponentially more challenging voyage to Mars will yield exponentially greater benefits.” True: NASA must solve cost, crew health, long term deep space travel, + new architecture.
“Walker/Navarro don’t actually mention specific eco. returns” True. Tech. from Shuttle/Apollo derived back to the moon?!
“A multi-trillion dollar program to Mars”. Who knows? Congress last month during a hearing stated Mars was ‘at least 250B’ and hence said to go mooning’. Augustine +3B/yr to head to the moon. Mars DRM 5 required aerobrakes nuclear reactors, ISRU 30 yrs * 8B/yr is ~ 250B. Drop CxP shift it to reactors and ISRU and other hardware -100B!
https://alternativefacts.com does not fit this article
Garbage in garbage out, the guy is using those old assumptions and confirming his own bias. However it’s not surprising there exist people like this, I run into them quite a bit. The public has been told for decades that science results are the only justification for space exploration, at least whenever the topic turns to funding, and they also tend to think spending on space is a magnitude or more than it is. Perhaps more dangerous is they don’t discriminate between an astronomer or any other researcher as long as they both have the “scientist” honorific, meaning the article’s appeal to the wrong authority for the topic will go unchallenged outside of our little circle. Thanks to intellectually bankrupt editorials like this I will continue to hear in smug tones from otherwise smart people “we need to fix all problems on earth before spending any money on leaving it.” The tail chasing continues for another generation.
Could anyone name the names of Shuttle astronauts when the Shuttle was flying? Most of the astronauts have been lost to obscurity. There are fewer than a handful that the public knows by name: Neil (or is it Lance)Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, maybe John Glenn, and one or two others.
I don’t think knowledge of their names is a measure of the value of the program.
NASA has done itself a lot of harm over the last many years. Overemphasis on astronauts is one issue and problem. Sure people would like to look back at the earth from space, but based on my experience speaking with the public they have just as much or more admiration for the people who design the spacecraft, direct the flight, even those who calculate the mission trajectories but sorely for NASA’s sake, all of these people are hidden figures. At one time names like von Braun, Faget, Gilruth, Kranz were nearly as well known as astronauts. Today no one knows; even in the program today, few know who had a hand in designing SLS or Orion or the ISS or how they came to these designs.
NASA used to maintain goodwill by issuing grants to the scientific community in exchange for payloads. Some NASA management felt that was a poor use of dollars, and they cut it out a long time ago. Now they have trouble getting useful payloads and in getting the scientists to tell the value.
I hope that last part about cutting out NASA grants to the scientific community isn’t true. That’s where I get 100% of my funding. At least for planetary science and heliophysics, those grants and university-developed instruments are alive and well. I can’t speak for experiments on ISS in general. But I know one person who builds some of those experiments, and he’s a professor at University of Central Florida. Yes, there some pressure to keep money and hardware work at NASA centers, but the proposals are competitively selected and that keeps things reasonably fair.
Ha-ha! Sorry, but since Hiltzik is about as extreme left-wing as you can get, I find Keith’s point about him responding like the Trump WH pretty funny. Careful Keith, he might go all SJW on you. 🙂
Not that I disagree with Keith’s points. Hiltzik cherry picks what windmills he chooses to tilt against in order to make his case and uses quotes from anti-humans-in-space scientists to “prove” his assertions. He even uses the same old tired arguments like we could cure cancer if we just pulled out all that money we are wasting on space exploration. Keith’s right. Same old, same old arguments.
Assuming a 30 year program and multi-trillion means, say, $5 trillion, that’s a yearly budget of $166 billion. At NASA’s current budget of $18.4 billion, it would take 271 years to spend $5 trillion (assuming every penny goes to HSF).
Nothing against this journalist, but people shouldn’t be nasty when they are shown their errors. Maybe he can track down whoever taught him math comprehension and demand his money back.
Well, maybe we can turn this into an interesting discussion. Would an order of magnitude increase in NASA’s budget be good for the space program? The positive side is obvious; all the things we could do. But such an increase in funding could also remove all motivations for cost efficiency and drive out private efforts (which have to worry about costs.)
wow .. he was attacked on all fronts… no one seemed to want to defend him or the article.
I liked Homer Hickam’s criticism the most: “Why travel anywhere, when you can always just watch a video or make a phone call?”
That said, if you are looking at it just from a cost-effective-for-science perspective, the robots really are a much better deal. I don’t think it’s possible to keep NASA’s funding levels if it abolished the crewed program and redirected the funding to more robotic missions, but if it was I’d have to seriously consider it (although I would support funding for commercial launch companies like SpaceX regardless).
The Times article makes some accurate points that we as space enthusiasts should not ignore. The article is correct in saying that almost any scientific task can be performed by robotic systems. Indeed, there is no existential imperative or technical requirement for humans to travel in space. But then, there is similarly no imperative to explore the Earth, or visit the polar regions or the sea floor. The deep ocean is, for the most part, explored only by robots, but at shallower depths where the cost and risk are reasonable humans often venture for science, tourism and national pride. The article misses the point entirely that as the cost of human spaceflight declines, the same rationale, mundane but consistent, will sustain human spaceflight. Obviously this still requires significant cost reduction, but there is no physical reason human spaceflight is so expensive; the cost of the fuel that gets us into orbit is a tiny fraction of the total cost. It also requires that we focus our efforts on making LEO accessible to casual tourists rather than making Mars accessible to a handful of civil servants. Human spaceflight is sustainable only when customers, scientists, tourists, or VIPs, are available who are willing and able to pay the fare.
Once again, the main stream media is so quick to trash Trump that they stoop to tabloid levels of fake news to do it. Sad.
Wow, all it took was a couple of negative comments and he blocked me on Twitter. I feel so privileged.
I’ll be sure and include that chestnut in the blog entry I’m polishing on this. 😉
Too bad he won’t see it. 🙂
I read the op-ed Hiltzik linked to. That sounds like a ridiculously expensive way to go to Mars, essentially building an entirely new ISS-style spacecraft only to expend the whole thing on each trip. There are much cheaper ways to do it (at least on paper), like with some expanded version of Mars Semi-Direct with more rockets to land supplies on Mars for redundancy.
In any case, I got into an argument with Hiltzik on twitter the day before you did, Keith. I argued that the crewed program is why NASA has as large of a budget as it does, and that if it had never existed all of NASA (including the robotics program) would be much smaller and more vulnerable in funding. I doubt the agency would crack $3-4 billion/year in funding, half of which would be Earth Science spending. Forget $3-4 billion Curiosity, or the multi-billion-dollar Hubble. But NASA having elevated funding levels in the Space Race along with some clever political engineering in production and NASA center sites means that NASA’s funding is “anchored” to a certain degree.
I thought you won that battle.
I expect this is just the first of a barrage of anti-space articles that will be written by newly minted “space experts” as soon as President Trump announces his space policy. It doesn’t matter what it is, it will be denounced as stupid, wasteful, crazy, etc. And anyone who defends it will be labelled a “Trump supporter’ and be attacked as well. Such is the political environment now.
Given how fast the Trump admin is going off the rails I’m starting to think I don’t want them to mention NASA at all in any way shape or form so that when the inevitable backlash happens NASA isn’t tossed out with the bathwater.
If I remember the numbers correctly it took about 45 years for NASA to spend a trillion dollars on space activities.
$10e12 / 45 years = an awful lot of annual potatoes.
I suspect that the article was more about partisan politics and the author probably doesn’t really care, one way or another, about one space policy vs another.
What mankind needs is a rational, affordable long-term space roadmap that will ultimately get us out of this doomed solar system. Learning how to survive and thrive on the Moon or Mars would be helpful steps along the way, although I think a faster path might begin with remote-controlled rover armies on the Moon, autonomous rovers on Mars, long-term low artificial G human experiments in rotating LEO space stations, and laboratory experiments on space manufacturing and closed loop life support.
http://spacenews.com/35712t…