NASA's Gloomy Budget Outlook for Planetary Science
NASA Wants A Flat Budget For Fiscal 2013, Aviation Week
“NASA will take only an $89 million cut in its topline spending request for fiscal 2013 compared to this year’s operating plan, sources said Friday, but the $17.711 billion NASA budget proposal due out Feb. 13 will axe the joint effort with Europe to return samples from Mars to pay for development overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope.”
Scientists say NASA will cut missions to Mars, MSNBC
“Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who also serves as president of the nonprofit Planetary Society, said “there’s some validity” to the criticism of NASA’s budgetary record. He said the scientific community “has heard that message” and is trying to focus on the highest-priority planetary projects for the next decade, including missions to Mars. “The community has a responsibility to demonstrate that we can do this within cost limits. … If there are to be cuts, let’s try to make them as fair as possible,” he told msnbc.com. “It would seem to be fair if everyone across the board is being asked to scale back. The cuts should be equitable, but I don’t think we’re seeing that.”
Congressman Adam Schiff opposes potential cuts to NASA’s planetary exploration program, San Gabriel Tribune
“Schiff described his meeting with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden as “tense.” “What I’m hearing that they’re proposing will be absolutely devastating to planetary science and the Mars program,” Schiff said. “If this is what they have in mind, I’m going to be fighting them tooth and nail.”
Scientists say NASA cutting missions to Mars, AP
“Two scientists who were briefed on the 2013 NASA budget that will be released next week said the space agency is eliminating two proposed joint missions with Europeans to explore Mars in 2016 and 2018. NASA had agreed to pay $1.4 billion for those missions. Some Mars missions will continue, but the fate of future flights is unclear.”
Keith’s note:Meanwhile the James Webb Space Telescope crowd is eerily quiet. They know that the cost being covered for their latest overrun grossly eclipses the cuts that are being made elswhere. Alas, the grossly over-budget and oft-delayed MSL is on its way to Mars while the grossly over-budget ISS orbits overhead.
50 years of doing this – and NASA still can’t figure out what things will actually cost?
Keith’s note: Details of the FY 2013 NASA budget are starting to trickle out. One of the most prominent changes will be the substantial cut to planetary science at SMD. At the same time, the agency has to eat $1 billion in Webb telescope overruns – half of which will come out of SMD. Stay tuned. It isn’t going to be pretty. This certainly promises to be a rather depressing event: Second International MEPAG (Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group) Meeting 27-28 Feb 2012.
A few words about NASA’s Mars mess, Houston Chronicle
“NASA needs to find money to pay for the $8.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which has run wildly over its budget but is nevertheless considered a foundation to the future of astronomy. Think: Too big to fail. As NASA’s science chief Weiler was ultimately responsible for that budget, Keith Cowing notes. And because of the Webb problems NASA is now in the position of having to gut part of its Mars program and seriously damage its relationship with the European Space Agency, which has been a reliable partner in the past.”
Ed Weiler Says He Quit NASA Over Cuts to Mars Program, Science Insider
“Next week, President Barack Obama will propose a $300 million cut in NASA’s planetary science programs as part of his 2013 request for the agency, ScienceInsider has learned. If adopted by Congress, the 20% cut in planetary science would in all likelihood shelve NASA’s ability to participate in two Mars missions to be carried out in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). “
Obama’s budget would cut Mars, solar system exploration, Washington Post
“The budget coming Monday from the Obama administration will send the NASA division that launches rovers to Mars and probes to Jupiter crashing back to Earth. Scientists briefed on the proposed budget said that the president’s plan drops funding for planetary science at NASA from $1.5 billion this year to $1.2 billion next year, with further cuts continuing through 2017. It would eat at NASA’s Mars exploration program, which, after two high-profile failures in 1999, has successfully sent three probes into Martian orbit and landed three more on the planet’s surface.”
Europe and Russia Plan Trips to Mars–But Maybe Without NASA, Science
“The European Space Agency (ESA) and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, are making plans to carry out the international ExoMars exploration program without help from one of the project’s original partners: NASA. The U.S. space agency may have to pull out of the project if the Obama Administration’s 2013 budget request to Congress, to be released on Monday, includes expected cuts in the agency’s funding for Mars programs.”
ExoMars cooperation between Nasa and Esa near collapse, BBC
“Nasa has told Esa it is now highly unlikely it will be able to contribute to the endeavours, which envision an orbiting satellite and a big roving robot being sent to the Red Planet. The US has yet to make a formal statement on the matter but budget woes are thought to lie behind its decision. Europe is now banking on a Russian partnership to keep the missions alive. A public announcement by Nasa of its withdrawal from the ExoMars programme, as it is known in Europe, will probably come once President Obama’s 2013 Federal Budget Request is submitted.”
NASA is too poor to help Europe go to Mars, io9.com
“But now, it looks as though NASA could be just days away from officially pulling out of the joint project, depriving the ESA of a major source of financial, technological, and experiential backing.”
Has NASA Scuppered Europe-led Exomars Mission? , Discovery News
“It is now hoped Russia might be able to step in where NASA left off. Unfortunately, this decision will raise a few eyebrows considering Russia’s recent bad luck with getting stuff into space and keeping it there. Also, Roscosmos’ track record with getting stuff to Mars is abysmal.”
I sincerely hope that the JWST is worth it. It saddens me how much science isn’t going to happen because that money black hole still walks the Earths.
As I said before on the old commenting system, nothing the JWST possibly images and discovers will make it worth the investment. Nothing.
The huge cut in the commercial crew program was almost exactly equal to the vast amount _added_ to Constellation (to use its true name) to fund an additional unmanned test of the Orion capsule on a Delta IV. Coincidence? I think not. The switch was intended to slow Commercial by years while giving the illusion that Constellation was accelerating past it.
The Orion program had not even asked for this test, which will require adapting the capsule to a booster and pad that will never be man-rated and will only carry it once, all in the name of “reducing risk” of finding a problem after the design is “finalized”. The only positive aspect of this is that it will prove how absurd it was for the authors of the ESAS to claim the Delta could never carry the Orion and thereby justify spending more billions on the (now-canceled) Ares I.
How do all you JWST supporters feel now, knowing your baby is the slow death of anything meaningful coming from Mars in the future.
And whatever the final number is – you can take another billion off next year when the congress needs to trim $1 trillion in 2013. NASA’s cut will be $1 billion.
SLS and JWST = death of NASA. Even if you choose not to believe it now, its coming. This is shameful. Just cut JWST and fund planetary science.
Respectfully,
Andrew Gasser
TEA Party in Space
Sadly, we are past the “beginning of the end…” JWST again takes the essentials from all the little folk that have delivered for the agency, and continues to feed at the trough. We are watching the preparation for NASA’s dismembering in the near future when the nation gets serious about the budget deficit. This will not end well.
Let commercial crew die its own death, NASA doesn’t need to keep paying for the life support. If they want to play, let them do it with their own money.
What a bizarre comment. Commercial crew is intended to serve an actual NASA mission requirement, one where NASA is currently facing a rising cost ($60m per seat and rising) via a monopoly foreign supplier that NASA has no control over and which is experiencing rapidly decreasing safety.
By comparison, SLS has no mission and instead seems solely intended to provide money for former shuttle primary contractors.
I like cheaper piglets. Make cheaper missions for them to do instead of feeding them trait from the troth to develop their stuff. It just hooks them on NASAs slop.
X Prizes or small cots
50-60% Mars program cut and that’s _before_ the JWST impact? Is that what you’re saying Keith?
Damn, just damn. That’s sad
Is that 50-60% reflective of cuts to other planetary science, or does Mars take a disproportionate hit?
If the latter, I’m not *too* surprised. I said on other forums nearly 10 years ago that if the “life!” possibility didn’t pan out, it would eventually become difficult to sell such a big Mars program — especially relative to other planets. If we’re just doing rocks and atmospheres on Mars, why focus there so much more than Venus or gas giants or comets?
It’s going to be one of the great ironies of planetary science, that the MERs Spirit and Opportunity, by virtue of being two rovers in two very different locations, and by sheer luck of favorable conditions and good constructions, have a high probability of lasting longer and returning more science than the nuclear powered MSL will.
Looking at the slate of Mars projects, although I’m very sad they are being cannibalized to feed the JWST beast out of principle of quantity of science, the projects themselves are really unnecessarily narrow. Like the Mars Trace Gas Mission. That’s really necessary? We’re looking for life via Methane signature now? Well what have been doing in that case since 1997? Or why the $2.5 billion MSL instead of say, four modernized, proven, MER clones deployed to four separate places on the planet. Wouldn’t a broader search for indications of life have a better chance of a positive return than one probe in one crater at one time?
And I mean, while NASA drowns under the weight of the JWST, let’s not forget that the NRO has been launching (essentially) clones of Hubble for decades (the KH-11 Kennan series), most recently January 20th 2011. And these are upgraded clones with larger mirrors, pointed to Earth. And it does it billions of dollars under budget.
Maybe the coming years will teach NASA a pretty important lesson: not every expedition for science needs to be based around a special, unique snowflake. That there is wisdom in making a design and sticking to it. Because for all of its massive investment, when are we ever truly going to need to duplicate the technology involved in the JWST unfolding mirror? The 2040s maybe?
Absolutely agree. If you have a good design, one that exceeds specifications, stick to it. You might change the instrumentation slightly as you go along to get additional kinds of data.
Build a number so as to get some economy of scale, and cover many areas of the planetary surface.
One big probe in one place is limited in what it can find by definition. Many smaller probes/rovers would see many different environments and cost less per probe to launch.Win, win, win.
Never happen.
Despite the obvious logic in what you’re saying, I suspect that we’ll always have to argue with the know-nots who insist that you can extrapolate anything from two or three data points. Money is only half the battle, politics is the second half, and ignorance is the third half (using Reaganomics).
Steve
I know that everybody will jump to tell me that I’m wrong, but Mars is a big planet. We know that Spirit and Opportunity are incredibly successful pieces of technology. It seems to me it would be quite a bargain at the next launch window to stick four more Rovers on two Atlas V rockets and send them to for other locations on Mars. There would be almost no research and development cost, with proven hardware and Mission profile, and would return us a crap load (excuse my French) of more data points to give us a more complete story of water on Mars. Why is it that everything we do needs to start with a clean sheet of paper? Nah! Where’s the fun in that. Maybe if we had the SLS we could send a dozen of them to different points? Nah! We wouldn’t want to think too big.
Commercial section nasa.gov looks a lot better and has some good up to date articles.You can even post comments.
The $3 billion dollar a year ISS program, not the $ 4 billion a year SLS program, is what’s killing the limited NASA manned spaceflight budget.
According to most advocates of commercial crew development, which I am one, NASA is supposed to be focusing most of its resources on manned beyond LEO missions. Commercial Crew Development funding should be at least $1 billion a year, if not more.
But spending $3 billion a year on the ISS plus additional expenditures on Commercial Crew development takes up nearly half of NASA’s manned spaceflight budget. So its kind of difficult to focus on manned BEO activities when you’re spending nearly half your budget on manned LEO activities.
Either Congress needs to increase NASA’s annual manned spaceflight budget by $3 billion or it needs to put an end to its LEO on steroids ISS program.
For those who would argue that without the ISS program, the Commercial Crew industry would have nothing to do– well I strongly disagree with that!
Marcel F. Williams
“NASA is supposed to be focusing most of its resources on manned
beyond LEO missions.”
I am an advocate of commercial space, and I cannot agree. We cannot even reach LEO for a sustainable cost. Rocket fuel costs almost nothing. The energy to get into orbit is virtually free. over 80% of the total cost of human spaceflight is in vehicle fabrication and processing. LEO is the first step to anywhere in space, and at present we cannot reach LEO with a manned spacecraft except as an expensive political stunt. To try to go BEO with this technology would be like building a city at the South Pole supported only by dogsleds.
Well said.
Thats why I always try to remind everyone interested in spaceflight that we must lower the price per pound to get to LEO for HSF to flourish. I have always thought that the next logical step for NASA is to lower the cost of spaceflight through innovation because it is practically impossible to have a sustainable BEO human outpost with the technology that we have now.
From what I can tell, this craze to go beyond to other planets with current technology came as a desperate response to the Columbia 2003 disaster for people not to lose faith in NASA and the space program. Unfortunately many people took it to heart.
I predicted the space program was headed in the wrong direction when President Bush announced Project Constellation way back in 2004. Fast forward to 2012–sure enough the space program is in shambles!
I do believe that someday we will send people to Mars and beyond. The real question is: will we be alive to see it?
NASA’s not a corporation. So not sustainable for a government program means that it is spending more than its annual budget. President Obama inherited an $8.4 billion a year manned space flight budget from George Bush: $3 billion for the Space Shuttle program, $2 billion for the ISS, and $3.4 billion for the Constellation development program.
It has been estimated by the CSIS that a Moon Base program under the more expensive Ares I/V program would have cost $7.35 billion a year, but less if lunar water resources were utilized. So a Moon Base program would be sustainable with an $8.4 billion a year budget. Current spending on the SLS/MPCV program is about $4 billion a year.
If your argument is that traveling to LEO should be much cheaper then that’s why the Space Shuttle was built in the first place: to make flights to LEO cheaper. And it probably would have worked, if there had actually been demand for 40 to 60 flights per year as originally contemplated. But no such demand ever occurred.
But high demand is the key to lower the cost of space travel. But flying 4 to 6 flights per year to the ISS by three or more private companies is not going to dramatically lower cost.
High demand for space tourism flights is the key to lowering the cost of space travel– not a big government programs like the ISS. Then economies of mass production can finally be utilized for mass producing rocket engines and other space craft components.
Marcel F. Williams
It may not be accurate to say a budget is inherited. George Bush, for example, inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton, but it did not last long. Development of the lunar lander and base hardware was never funded because it would have required increasing the budget under Bush. Launch cost for the SLS is likely to be least $1B (just launching Orion unmanned on an existing Delta is about $500M).
If the ISS and all other NASA activities were abandoned and NASA did nothing other than build the Ares (sorry, SLS), a lander stage, a habitat, and send 4 people to the moon for a couple of 30-day sorties each year, it’s possible it could eventually be done within the current total NASA budget of about $16B (including the operational cost for the elaborate infrastructure and facilities required by SLS/Orion).
But there would be no way to increase the scope of human spaceflight (beyond a little lunar geology which could be much less expensively accomplished with robotic systems) since the entire budget would be consumed by operations, and no resources for development of less expensive reusable technology. And if the total NASA budget is cut (as seems likely given the extraordinary deficit and pressure for further tax cuts) it’s likely the program would have to be canceled (as was Apollo) with little or no residual value.
“But high demand is the key to lower the cost of space travel”
This is fine as a generalization, but it’s not a rule that applies to everything. In the case of the Space Shuttle, I don’t think it applies at all. In fact, I think the situation is exactly the opposite — the number of launches per year was low because the cost was so high. The economics of selling pencils and refrigerators by the hundreds of thousands doesn’t apply to labor-intensive, highly overpriced Launch Vehicles. And I’m sure the situation will be exactly the same for SLS.
Steve
However, years with the most launches didn’t have much higher budgets than the years with the least launches. Suggesting fixed costs significantly outweighed per-launch variable costs.
The issue (okay, one of many many issues) with the shuttle would have been the limited number of orbiters. Building a second generation of orbiters after Endeavour, during the late ’80s & early ’90s would have allowed increased launch rates (and a third generation in the late ’90s & early 2000s maybe lowered refurbishment costs and time.)
(However, all suggestions for shuttle replacements immediately became someone’s pet super-project. SSTO, NASP, Apollo-Redux. Instead of just “take what you learned from the first one and make a slightly better second one.” Which gets back to the recurring theme in NASA critiques.)
Announcing big cuts before the next rover lands (touch wood) seems a tad shortsighted. What if we discover something really interesting?
Just cancel the Bush/Obama tax cuts.
You can send your check to pay additional taxes to the Department of the Treasury any time you want … however the next $5T are pledged to layabouts
The nonchalance some people take in regards to tax increases is incredible and downright stupid.
Last I recalled we had trillions of dollars in bailout to FOREIGN and domestic banks and their hard working yet “layabout” administrators. I guess according to you, Paris Hilton deserves her zero output life, tax-free, and so does Donald trump, who has been involved in multiple million dollar bankruptcies.
The ending net jobs and wealth generation the Bush tax cuts created were in China, period. The national debt would be nowehere it is now with those stupid cuts and stupid war in Iraq.
Baby boomers started retiring recently and it’s goign to cost a lot, fed funded and privately
Some of you are not even worth of discussion more than a chair.
I expect if the economy continues to improve the tax cuts will be allowed to expire this time. There’s a good discussion of the budget issues here: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/…. The Eurozone tried austerity and it failed.
I don’t think we should cut spending in areas that are going to provide growth in education/technology down the road.
Hum … Maybe it’s time for WWIII, so the surface population can be reduced and the books can be cleared. Then as Einstein once said (paraphrased), we’ll fight WWIV with clubs. Ugh … A new round of baby boomers with clubs!
“You can send your check to pay additional taxes to the Department of the Treasury any time you want”
Sorry but that is just the dumbest and most irrelevant response. Somehow it keeps coming back up and it annoys the heck out of me every time I hear it. Please elaborate on how one single person donating a bit of money to the Treasury solves anything. Really it’s just used as a clever retort but all it does for me is make the speaker sound ignorant.
I agree. Basic research does not generate direct profits, it is accomplished with tax dollars in the public interest. Unless wealthy Americans are willing to pay a fair share of the fare it cannot be done. In fairness to Mr. Obama, it is poor economic policy to raise taxes during a recession, but as soon as unemployment hits 6% or so he should do so. Mr. Bush, in contrast, was handed a balanced budget and immediately cut taxes, an inexplicable blunder which predictably resulted in a boom and bust.
“In fairness to Mr. Obama, it is poor economic policy to raise taxes during a recession”
Not necessarily. If you are increasing taxes on “rent seekers”, while lowering the burden on middle-income earners, the net effect is to stimulate the economy.
I think it is about time that we bravely look at where the data collected is leading us. Mars is a dead planet. If some form of microbial life did evolve there in a watery past billions of years ago, which is doubtful, it’s gone now.
Continuing to spend billions of dollars to study Mars’ rock chemistry is pointless. The money should be used to develop missions to the other planets where the scientific information has some real value.
In all fairness, Gonzo, your definitions of “pointless” and “real value” are not necessarily the same as those of other people. But I will agree that there is money being spent on things that will offer us no practical gains.
Steve
I would also argue that a dead Mars is more valuable than one with life, and that confirming the absence of life is money well spent.
If there’s so much as a possibility of microbes down in the aquifers, we’ll never be allowed to terraform the planet.
In the shorter term microbial life on Mars means that everything going there must be sterilized – which is a lot harder when you’re sending humans. Media hysteria about an Andromeda Strain style extraterrestrial microorganism – no matter how loony – could be enough for politicians to block astronauts or sample return vehicles from returning to earth.
Roger,
I agree with you. Plus, in the real world, things are only considered loony until they actually happen.
Steve
I have always been hoping for a dead mars too. But isn’t terraforming not smart in the near future unless we are ready to provide mars with a magnetic field? Wouldn’t it be just like us to release all ice to create a nice atmosphere that lasts only a few hundred years? And then cry about all the lost h20 after it’s all blown out into space.
“If there’s so much as a possibility of microbes down in the aquifers, we’ll never be allowed to terraform the planet.”
Personally, that’s a bonus. I wish people would lose the “terraform Mars” obsession. That and Helium-3 mining on the moon.
My read on research and likelihoods here leads me to believe we’ll likely eventually find that life co-evolved on multiple bodies including Mars and Earth, trading material back and forth through asteroidal impacts. And that Mars will have remnant life as extremophiles.
The irony may be that we learn more about Earth and the origin of life from visiting Mars than we could find on the Earth alone. Because the “missing pieces” of the puzzle may still be there.
Simply put, Mars is the ONLY planet in our solar system beyond the one that you are standing on that is replete in resources, especially water, which can be sustainably colonized. Someday, the rock you’re sitting on is going to get hit or something else, and all the eggs will be broken. It’s a matter of survival.
“Mars is the ONLY planet in our solar system […] which can be sustainably colonized.”
So stop looking at planets.
“It’s a matter of survival.”
A single backup is not a backup strategy.
If you want to guarantee humanity’s continued survival if something happens to Earth, you need to come up with a system which continues to expand when the initial burst of funding fades. A Mars colony doesn’t do that. You’d need a laser-like commitment for centuries before Mars can truly backup Earth.
Worse, colonising Mars does nothing to develop the tools and resources to develop the rest of the solar system. But developing the rest of the solar system builds the tools and resources that dramatically lower the cost of supporting a Mars colony.
If you use a stepping-stone philosophy of development in space, each small step justifies itself and makes the previous step self-funding and the next step cheaper. Eventually you end up with multiple branches of development outside of your control, unable to be cancelled by your funders.
(However, setting Mars as your goal almost guarantees that the general purpose stepping stones will be replaced with a narrow specialised direct run to Mars. It’s the nature of big projects. Von Braun’s early plan for the Apollo program included fuel-depots and Earth orbital assembly via small launchers, instead of the all-in-one Saturn V.)
Good thinking, Paul.
One reason that I’ve long advocated learning to “farm” the asteroids for resources is that in doing so we learn how and acquire the ability to do two other important things — 1) live in space (in either reworked asteroids or man-made facilities), and 2) create Earth protection capability, either by laser, to deflect them well ahead of Earth impact, and or impacting them with another smaller asteroid. Either one will alter the trajectory enough to save Earth — if we do it from far enough away (like the asteroid belt). We would also get better resolved detection, and get it sooner, because of the better visual contrast out there.
Any undertaking that has more than one valuable benefit sits higher up on my priority list, even if it requires a bolder commitment.
Steve
Please explain why it costs anywhere near $3 billion to operate the ISS. The construction is complete. We only have two astronauts up there. Is Russia spending $6 billion to keep their four guys up there? Where is this money being spent? I’m surprised no one even bothers to ask. $500 million maybe, $3 billion no.
Most of this money goes to salaries of civil servants and contractors who have no capabilities other than supporting ISS. NASA has become a jobs program. We at KSC have hundreds upon hundreds of ops people who have no function in life since Shuttle retired and ISS construction is complete. They have absolutely zero skills for design and development and have to be covered in salaries from any source that can be found, regardless of the work that needs to be done (which they cannot do). We’re hosed, man. It’s over. It will be a long, slow death.
Thanks for your response. I appreciate your insight and honesty. It appears that our system is badly broken. This is why our human space flight goals are set so far into the future. Asteroid by 2025, Orbit Mars by 2035, and land sometime after that all because we cannot hire enough people with the right skill set today and still afford to keep the others. This is a sad situation.
The ISS is $3 billion a year black hole that continues to suck the life out of the US manned space program. Extending the life of the ISS to 2016 is questionable, IMO. But extending it to 2020 is simply outrageous!
That money could easily be better spent on a lunar base program, Commercial Crew Development, and larger and cheaper Bigelow Space Stations such as the Olympus BA-2100.
Marcel F. Williams
You miss the point. If it costs $3b/yr for ISS, with the station finished, how would it be possible for the same agency to develop and fly everything it needs for a lunar base for the same budget?
OTOH, if NASA is capable of doing a lunar base for just $3b/yr, then they must be capable of doing ISS for $500m/yr.
You can’t have it both ways. Either you know how to reform the agency to run programs for vastly less, in which case the ISS wouldn’t be a black-hole, or you don’t, in which case a lunar base is wildly out of reach.
Proposal versus billing math lolol
It doesn’t take a rocket scientistt lolol
Marcel,
I’m of a different mind about the ISS. I think it is valuable in several different ways. What I see as “simply outrageous!” is the fact that it is completed (they claim), and large amounts of money are being spent on it (not necessarily running it, but being charged against it), and we do not appear to be using it’s capabilities to anywhere near the extent that we could be.
My other big complaint is that public money (tax dollars) pays for its operation, yet much of its scientific output is declared proprietary by the investigators, and the details about findings are not available to the public. And all too often, those details which have been released into the public domain are frustratingly hard to find, and all too often require expensive membership and/or subscriptions to publications, societies, whatever, to be accessed. This public asset is very much a closed door to the public.
Steve
Removed for editing
Mr. Consequence I have taken your advice and am learning to use the technology. Cut and paste on an iPod works pretty dam good. Goodbye desktop! 🙂
More good advice noofcsq lol
Like NASA sometime us old people get in rut doing what works without taking the trouble to try that other hall in the maze once we have already found those few bread crumbs. We end up missing the cheese.
Out
All of you are great posters, but I am afraid I am going to have to let you all go from your employment for not responding to the work order at the top of the page,
According to the Decadel survey if ESA/NASA Jupiter or Mars missions cant be descoped to below $1.3 Billion then the third highest priority is a Uranus orbiter as long as it does not exceed $1.3 Billion and that that amount cant come from the discovery and new frontiers budget.
Left a couple thoughts in ULA after reading 16 posts there last week Steve and Mr. Consequence.
Judging from the comments being made, it appears that Americans lack the ingenuity,vision and education for the U.S. to progress in the future and lose our leadership in the world. Who’s to blame? We are for believing that government will take care of us instead of standing up for ourselves. Critical thinking is becoming a lost cause because of people’s dependency upon the Liberal media to provide information valuable for progress and instead to boost a certain president’s popularity and re-electability. We all need to start thinking for ourselves and decide just where and what we need to do to become the great nation we once were. If we don’t then look at the condition of Europe,that’s where we’re heading to.
What is this Obama administration trying to do? What’s the rationale for gutting the Mars exploration program and planetary science? In terms of science return they have been doing quite well with the two MERs, Phoenix and MRO, apart from the “faster, cheaper, better” fiascos of Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter. Just how is Obama committed to seeing humans on Mars one day if he’s gutting the robotic precursor missions that tell us what Mars is like? Yes the economy may still be in trouble and budgets are tight, but is Obama all of a sudden now for reduced government spending? It seems as if he’s just following the Republican mantra of “cut spending”, just because they’re yelling so. And reducing the pittance of spending on government led science, in the name of what? How does this enhance American competitiveness, American leadership, and promote the sciences and STEM education among our young people? All to support some socialist cause that this country has heretofore been OK without? This is utterly unacceptable. We’re ending the wars, keeping that money in our treasury, so why cut back on planetary exploration? Obama does not know vision and he does not know leadership. End the ISS and promote planetary exploration, as well as a healthy beyond Earth orbit human spaceflight program. Why is this president pandering to the myopic wings of both parties? First cut the Moon, now cut Mars? Just how is this a flexible path leading to Moon, Mars and beyond?
Show me someone, anyone who *can* reliably predict how much first-of-a-kind large projects with ground-breaking technology will cost. Please.
Kibitz,
I assume that the process at NASA is the same as elsewhere, A team of people work together contributing to the estimate, which then goes to their manager who adjusts everything higher for contingency and risk mitigation. It then goes up to his manager who does more of the same, etc. So, by the time it’s in the final document, it may have doubled, tripled or more. Sometimes, it’s the opposite. Successive managers adjust it down to buy the job with a low bid. So it’s never “anyone,” but rather a group of people spread over multiple management levels. But even if everyone didn’t fiddle with it and did their best I think your point about “first-of-a-kind large projects with ground-breaking technology” is exactly right. You can’t accurately predict what’s not been done before, except by exceptional dumb luck.
Steve
I think that the loss of Mars science is a tragedy for those scientists who have focused their entire careers on key missions. Its not just about not flying hardware, or failing to keep pace with other space powers. Careers are being wrecked by this action on the part of Obama, which is extremely short-sighted.
The exploration of Mars by unmanned probes and rovers is an important task, especially if one day (maybe, hopefully) humans set foot on its surface. But to me, the most important task for unmanned science should be finding life beyond Earth. Mars may have such life, but it would be pretty basic – essentially, microbes in a dead Martian soil, and given Mars’ exposure to solar and cosmic radiation, I’m not convinced we will fund evidence of active life on the surface – maybe evidence of past life though.
How much more amazing though would it be to find more complex life forms in the Europan ocean now, or potentially on Enceladus? Seeing a creature that evolved entirely independently from life on Earth would have to have a massive impact on how we see life on Earth and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Beyond that prospect, what would be the impact of advances in exoplanet research leading to the first images of a Earth-like, habitable planet, orbiting a stable star, comfortably inside the goldilocks zone? And what if analysis of that planet’s atmosphere suggested life flourished on the surface? To go even further, what if its atmosphere suggested such life had developed technology, or if upon closer examination, we picked up evidence of radio transmission, or even evidence of nuclear fission? Dare I say it, but how about a result coming from SETI (finally!) and not just a ‘Wow!’ signal, but one which has global implications for humanity? To me, these are far more important than rovers on Mars.
So even if money is being cut back for Mars, a strong case should be made for prioritisation for other areas – Outer planet probes, Exoplanet research, and linked in with that, SETI. The last one has pretty much gotten the short end of the stick on funding, and has had to go to commercial benefactors, but the more habitable exoplanets detected by Kepler, and other programmes, I think the more SETI could push for more funding.
Of course, what I’m talking about don’t necessarily lead to human space flight, at least in the short term. The further out you go, the more difficult it is for humans to get there. If we were to discover multicellular life in the Europan ocean, would NASA then fund complex and sophisticated probes to go there, and send robot vehicles beneath the ice? That’s a very demanding mission, and would not be cheap, but I seriously doubt that governments would ignore the possibility to study complex extraterrestrial life in our own solar system (as opposed to microbes in the dead Martian soil). I think human nature would compel us to go, first with robots, and then with humans. In terms of exoplanets, we are probably centuries away from being able to visit a habitable exoplanet – even one reasonably close to Earth. But given how many we are discovering and how often we are discovering exoplanets, and given the potential indicators that Earth type planets may not be that rare, it does open up some amazing possibilities.
I think the big discoveries – life in the outer solar system, habitable exoplanets, or evidence of intelligent civilisations, are all in front of us. They would surely encourage us to have a surge in investment in new propulsion technologies, including breakthrough propulsion, rather than consistently pay lip service to it, whilst relying on rockets that are a seriously constraining approach to human or unmanned spaceflight. Even if interstellar travel is not possible for the foreseeable future, a greater investment in advanced propulsion, life support, and other advanced deep-space spacecraft technologies means that maybe not only we can travel to the outer planets sometime this century, but we can do Mars in about two months, rather than two years.
Then we can send the most advanced probes of all…humans…to stay.
Malcolm Davis
Canberra, Australia
They’re eerily quiet because they are aware of the irony. Let’s go back a decade, pre-Columbia when the great debate was how truly necessary funding further expansion of the ISS truly was, and should there even be a manned space program in general.
A lot of scientists, at universities in particular argued that more, better science is done, for less money, by robotic rovers, satellites and space telescopes. The pointed specifically to Mars Pathfinder and Hubble.
Here we are… the year is 2012. The Space Station is done and the shuttle is no more. Mars Pathfinder’s direct descendant is on its way to Mars, five years behind schedule and $700 million over budget. What is billed as Hubble’s direct successor (even though it really is Spitzer’s), the JWST, is a decade behind schedule and so over budget that it will in the end cost more than two Nimitz class aircraft carriers combined.
And those scientists, who so exalted how much better unmanned exploration is over manned, are eerily silent.
This isn’t a rant about manned versus unmanned exploration. Both are necessary then as now. But it is a commentary on people. A decade ago, as today, it was never about what was the better science. It was about money. It was about grants and favored projects getting funding and people wanting to maximize their slice of a limited pie. There was no higher idealism about “better science”, only about “my science”, “my” being the researcher who would stand to gain from freed up millions in the absence of manned space exploration.
Such a sad irony then, that such scientific devastation is being wrought by a robot and a space telescope billed as the next generation of what we had before. Naturally, the voices of a decade ago are silent because their projects get the money.
You know. I truly wonder what the few hundred scientists who will ever utilize the JWST hope to find. So they image the universe when it’s just 100,000 years old…. up from what, half a million? Worth maybe $2 billion. $9.7 billion? I’ll take five Terrestrial Planet Finders for that much. Or maybe funding for NIH Alzheimer’s research. Or maybe a couple of orbiters to the outer solar system. Or maybe a couple of Aircraft Carriers. I’ll take almost anything. The $9.7 billion dollar single space telescope should not exist.
How does going from $2.5 billion in 2002 to $9.7 billion today despite a total of 13% inflation in the dollar happen and no one lose their job (and never work in the field again) over it? Who will be held responsible? What is his or hers name? Who else was involved? Will they fired? Were they investigated for corruption? Were they qualified in the first place? Sounds like a job for the Inspector General: find out how a project’s budget explodes, name names, and make an example of them.
Well, I hope the Mars Science Laboratory lasts a while. Maybe someday we’ll get a straight answer as to why no one though to put a cacher on it, just in case. Because after it, American planetary exploration is done, and those JWST images of the Universe at 200,000 years old will be just as blurry as our future in space, manned or unmanned.
Employees of GSFC and STScI who were working on JWST 10 years ago were all told to go along with the pretend budgets because Mikulski would save the day in the end once the project was too big to kill. The budgets were known to be lies from the very beginning. That was the whole point of getting JWST “on-center” at GSFC so that the civil servants would have a new cash cow to charge against.
The cache was thought about, was baselined on MSL, and then later was descoped.
This isn’t a rant about manned versus unmanned exploration. Both are necessary then as now. ====== ==
You’re aware that in the 40 years and $500 billion since Apollo… NASA has not gotten a single American more than 300 miles from earth..
While JPL has had dozens of extremely successful unmanned exploratory missions, on a small fraction of that cost..
If manned exploration is ‘necessary’, then NASA has been a total failure for 40 years?
PS: The goal of manned space should be colonization… or human adventure..
Jonathan, you might be interested to know that NASA also supports Alzheimer’s research, not in space, but on the ground, using some unique equipment originally built for Neurolab. Just a small study with a very modest budget, but we believe it will contribute useful information on how protein molecules aggregate in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other amyloid diseases. (http://alzfl.com)
I new once Obama cut human space , robotic space was next
Mr.Law lol So that means sls and Orion are not human space flight. Lol I thought so! Lol
🙂
“50 years of doing this – and NASA still can’t figure out what things will actually cost?”
Keith,
They know the cost to the penny with a lot of this. Its the politics of budget that has more to do with the inflated costs. E.g. subjective costing to rob Peter to pay Paul – usually at the policy maker level.
And then there also is “over ambition” like with JWST. And MSL to be fair – it finally made it off towards Mars. E.g. objective setting.
And there is the inability to run a tight ship like Alan Stern valiantly attempted to do. E.g. tactical – overbudget means writing off a MER ahead of time.
Yes this business could be done a lot, lot, better. But to do so means more that many collectively need to make better happen throughout the full lifetime of a mission … and sometimes it happens but not often enough.
“Oh no, we can’t do that” trump’s reality.
There are 7 billion people on this planet now. Looking for bugs way out there is great, but first things first why should we go to space? To do what most would benefit those 7 billion. And what is that??? It is building a way to get resourse from near space. It’s having the tech ready for a near earth asteroid, it’s laying the ground work to one day settle on either of the two rocks near by. Those are the first priority reasons to spend money on space. Think big picture like Elon does. JWST is great but does it affect the 7 billion at all if we find an earth size planet now or 1000 years from now? Anyway I hope we all get our priorities straight.
This country bounced back from an even worst economic condition in the great depression, so I think this current downturn may rebound as well. Plus, if we wait until everyone of the 7 billion people are living at least a middle class life, we’ll be waiting forever. We will always have social and political problems on Earth. And Earth weather, climate and resource satellites address the needs of people. Also, the US is primarily responsible only for itself and its allies. I’m not saying get rid of humanitarian aid–that would be cruel–but we don’t have to take care of the 7 billion people on the planet. Other governments do that — and many of them don’t have space programs, yet they still have their social problems. Getting rid of fundamental, pure research is a mistake, beyond just short-sighted. It’s an attempt to get political points for a failed presidency–saying, see we cut the budget.
I am not against pure research. I am for doing what it takes to make space affordable and useful. Push commercial suborbital so rich can pay to make horizontal flight help bring down cost to Leo. Make a cheap moon plan to start to get fuel from the moon. Us the sun in Leo to beam energy to earth. If we did first things first we could have all kinds of affordable research in the near future.
You know expand the economy to raise all boats. I pay taxes for this use my money to benefit me or my children
Don’t take MY dime and tell me you to want launch a robot rocket to some other rock at ten time what it should cost, to look for bugs while my kids future is spent. I’ll hire someone else.
I’m tired of paying for you people to have fat chushy jobs thinking space and doing little else.
If you want to do science at ten time the cost form a company and pay for it yourself.
40 years after a moon landing 50 percent of our energy should be coming from Leo It’s to hard it’s too expensive blah I don’t buy it! A resourse pay off is what I want. An expanding economy, a rocket ready to protect us from an asteroid! Somebody make a plan!!!
Joe q public
Ps you don’t need sls to have a booster big enough to defect an asteroid all you need is a Leo spaceship or a few more cores on a falcon heavy so don’t to sell me that sls Orion c$&@ again!
I do agree that after 50 years of spaceflight we should have incorporated space way more into our economic sphere than we currently have. We should be concerned about asteroid or comet impacts. Regarding the “fat cushy jobs” comment, what about the fat cushy jobs that elected officials enjoy on the taxpaper dime. Maybe those jobs should have their pay cut considering how little progress politicians tend to make in advancing society. And they don’t call rocket science, rocket science for nothing. Space exploration is tremendously difficut, calling upon many diverse areas of science and engineering, yet at a relatively small cost compared to our nation’s overall budget. Space exploration is among the best and most noble things that human beings can do — robotic spacecraft are our emissaries to the universe we live in. Science and engineering is not easy. Don’t you think those jobs should be highly paid to answer questions as old as time? Scientists and engineers are among the smartest people in the human species. I think all their effort studying and excelling should be rewarded. Why else do we want our kids to do better in science and math? As for “science at 10 times the cost”, well I agree that science should NOT be pursued at unnecessary cost. It has to be efficient and within the allotted budget. But there are somethings that ARE worth the investment and space exploration definitely is.
“Maybe those jobs should have their pay cut considering how little progress politicians tend to make in advancing society.”
adastramike
I’ve often thought that if the politicians’ incomes were indexed to the state of the economy, the politicians would work much harder towards improving and maintaining the GDP, reducing the debt, and eliminating waste, and do so much more expediently than what we’ve seen in the past. In fairness, times of war would be a special case, and there would perhaps be increased incentive for them to circumvent wars.
Steve
Note to Joe q Public:
Some of the things you advocate which haven’t happened were vetoed basically because of the public’s collective general ignorance in scientific matters. Solar energy from LEO is a pointed example. Those who are least qualified to make an assessment collectively pronounced that beaming solar energy to Earth is very dangerous. So, that very worthy project was basically shut down before it could even get started. The situation with nuclear energy, even after all these years, is essentially the same. People, in mass, don’t understand it, but are convinced it is too dangerous, so it’s usage is much less than it could/should be.
If you want the benefits of science and technology, then their acceptance and application must be a matter of rational assessment, not folklore and popularity in the minds of the uninformed.
Steve
Common sense had me already knowing that but thanks Steve good point 🙂 check road map thread and leave answer there Steve
Folklore hummmm believing that NASA still knows how to build Rockets and has a plan for the future for American space flight.
During the Eisenhower Administration (you know, the very peak of the United States’ power and influence in the world) the maximum income tax rate was 90%. Today it is 35%. Returning it even to Reagan’s rate of 42% would pay for everything. Has America become a place that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing?
During the Eisenhower administration the government was a much leaner operation. Over 60% of the Federal budget did not go to direct payments to people as it does today. I pay a lot of taxes and am counted among the slothful, undeserving and evil 1%. I’d be glad to have my taxes increased if the money went to the human & robotic exploration of the solar system. I’ve always considered that a worthwhile endeavor and long-term investment for the country. But that’s not what this crowd has in mind.
“During the Eisenhower administration the government was a much leaner operation.”
Not really. As a percentage of GDP, the size of the US Federal government is smaller than it was for much of the 20th century. Likewise, the tax burden on the top tax payers is lower than it has been in many decades.
The reason it doesn’t feel that way, (beyond anti-Government propaganda aimed at supporting politicians who, when in power, blew out debt and spending), is because there is a disconnect between GDP and the incomes of almost all Americans. For a long time, GDP increases were reflected in median incomes. But after the early ’80s, increases were confined to the top 1%. After 2000, it was limited to the top 0.1% (even the 99-99.9% were no longer benefiting from growth.) And I suspect that since the end of the Great Recession, it has become even more concentrated.
Say, I have just been hit by a BFO … Blinding Flash of the Obvious. Why not tax the country at a tax rate of 100%? Then the big government can decide what is best for you! Brillant! With over 50% of the population living off the government now … why not 100%? … Brillant!!! — Grandpa
Even better: move to Somalia! The tax rate there is zero, and you can keep everything you make! All you need is enough guns and ammo, and people you can trust while you’re sleeping.
“I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” – United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Republican
Do you accept medical care for yourself paid for by Medicare? Without my taxes, you wouldn’t get it. Do you think NASA should be dissolved? Anyone who wants to spend their own money on spaceflight is free to do so; not many have volunteered.
This is going to destroy the capability of NASA and this nation to build robotic planetary missions. There have been layoffs at JPL for over a year (ignored by NASAWatch/SpaceRef), with more planned. This means that the only possible flagship mission for the next decade is going to be cancelled before it gets started. Europa mission was already cancelled! What is next, no New Frontiers or Discovery missions?
NASAWatch likes to complain about MSL cost overruns, but the JWST overruns were a factor of 3 or 4 larger, and the Mars Program has already paid for them.
SoCal and Laid Off
The real issue here is the inherent waste, inefficiency, pork of all Federal Govt agencies..
NASA center bureaucratic, red-tape center overhead grows constantly… over time it will consume 100% of the budget, with 0 left over for Science/technology/exploration..
1% of Fed Spending, nearly $20 billion a year should be a gracious plenty… for that we should have lunar colonies, Americans on mars, new technology..
Instead, we have a fat, wasteful, pork filled Fed Agency who hasn’t gotten a single American 300 miles from earth after the 40 years and $500 billion since Apollo.. and a dead-end boondoggle $200 billion shuttle, a useless boondoggle $160 billion ISS, a failed/canceled $20 billion Constellation project…
and now the immoral pork of a unneeded/unwanted, unaffordable SLS/Orion pure earmarked pork for ‘big space’ legacy corporations.
Private enterprise innovation, efficiency, competition, spirit is the way forward.. downsizing/eliminating big govt NASA.. keep and directly fund JPL for probes..
rely on X-prizes for manned space goals.. e.g. after axing NASA’s budget, set aside $1 billion/year to be paid to the first American enterprise to establish a lunar colony.. another $1 billion per year for the first American on Mars..
Pay for results… not waste/pork/overhead/bureaucracy…
The American manned space program is too important to be further entrusted to Fed Agency NASA.
Very Good … The truth will set you free. — Grandpa
PS: “… glorified space weather service.” Yes, and we must not forget about proving Global Warming too.
Perhaps NASA should seek commercial sponsorship for ExoMars? Imagine the PR value of having your company logo on Mars?
“Understand this–Obama did not support Commercial Crew because he supports the idea. He supported it because it let him end the Shuttle program and the budgeted amount for those flights.”
Why does this myth that “Obama cancelled the Shuttle program” keep popping up like a weed? The decision was made under the Bush Administration. It would have been almost impossible to reverse.
“Bush cancelled Shuttle, true, but the infrastructure of the program was supposed to move across to the new launch system.”
Except that was (and is) a retarded plan, and you know it. Operations people don’t built rockets, they don’t design rockets.
The infrastructure created for Apollo was created very quickly without much consideration of long-term operational costs. The goal was to get to the moon as quickly as possible. It is now over 40 years old, is inappropriate for any proposed designs other than SLS, and is very expensive to maintain and operate. Given the choice, it does not appear any of the current commercial launch providers would be interested in using LC-39. Bush not only cancelled Shuttle, he cancelled all NASA development of reusable launch vehicles and indeed he cancelled the whole concept of sustainable human spaceflight.
SO far as I know, less than one percent of the original Apollo infrastructure remains. And if it all did, it would have to be completely revamped for SLS. Did you misspeak?
ISS is expensive because we have no practical way to reach it, and Orion would be more expensive than Shuttle for this purpose, while carrying far less. Mr. Obama has kept the NASA budget constant in the face of enormous
pressure from the GOP to slash discretionary non-defense spending. If we seek to blame our failures on the President we will never admit our own mistakes. Returning to the Apollo paradigm of hurling a few astronauts to the moon with a multibillion-dollar throw-away rocket is not and never was either productive or sustainable. Even Bush never proposed funding for the lunar lander, though he cancelled not just the Shuttle but all work on reusable launch vehicles. Unfortunately Congress (including, regrettably, Senator Nelson) seems determined to sacrifice Commercial Crew and all RLV programs to sustain the new incarnation of Constellation.
Not sure what you mean by “rent seekers’. The bottom 40% of the entire country have less than 2% of the total wealth, so there is not much to be taxed, even if we tax 100% of total wealth. The upper class, given the choice, make virtually all their investments in China. On reflection, I would agree that tax increases for the upper 10% will stimulate the domestic econmy.
“Not sure what you mean by “rent seekers’.”
It’s an old economics term, used in Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”. (And probably long before.) Rentiers, Merchants, Workers, representing the three types of income: Rents, Profits, Wages. The rentiers are the least productive class in the economy, even though they are typically the wealthiest.
(Modern “rent seeking” is trying to use political influence to game the system to increase your share of wealth without acting to create new wealth. Since you expend capital and labour to gain and protect that influence, but don’t create new wealth, the net effect is a diminishment of the system as a whole, even though the rentier increases his own wealth. Wikipede “economic rent”.)
(In theory, government taxes are also public “rents”, but taxes on private rents have little or no effect on the economy, unlike taxes on wages and profits which diminish the economy unless spent on something that adds a greater value, like infrastructure or education or the rule of law.)
Please do not post opinion (and uninformed opinion at that) as fact.
Steve Whitfield Mr Consequence Tinker
I left Steves answer in the another road map post. Please check the idea out if you get time
Steve Infrastructure blog feb 14, 2012
Steve
After The Spacex recoverable rocket post I was very bothered. I wanted to know for myself if they could really do it. So I thought about it for about a week and realized that all that was really needed to make recoverable rockets work was to have enough fuel. So how do you get enough fuel? You add a third stage. That was the reason for my vertical jets and all those ideas. I left some of the thoughts at the end of some threads so as not to bother news bloggers only to have some record of my thoughts.
Anyway from these thoughts I realized that recoverable rockets are very possible and there is no good reason that we don’t have recoverable rockets today. So when I’m told it’s very hard to do and all that I don’t buy it! It may take over coming some tech things. But nothing good engineers in the proper work environment can’t easily do.
So what does that mean!
It means SLS is a crock All the EELVs are an expensive joke. Falcon 9 and Heavy are only a good start.
When I hear others want to build programs based on EELVs and use NASA to plan the missions and infrastructure for our space future I pause and think this will never work.
So this is why I rant Spacex is our only hope.
You and I are talking about a real global infrastructure Plan Why?
Because given the nature of NASAs work environment they can’t even make a really good functional infrastructure plan.
Steve I just wanted you to understand why I think like I do. Also sometimes I get angry at NASA and rant some without thinking. I’m not against fixing NASA but I want a Space future that I know is possible soon! At the very least a workable plan that others like Spacex can execute. If they can’t do that, as an American tax payer that’s just scraping by to put my last kid through school then I want NASA to get the hell out of the way.
Just thought it might help to know some of the logic why I rant Spacex is our only hope.