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| Mon Oct 26 23:16:45 2009 No Moon |
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| Tue Jul 8 23:31:32 2008 Moon Shot |
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| Tue Jul 1 23:00:35 2008 Near Miss |
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| Mon Oct 26 23:16:45 2009 No Moon NASA reconsiders its spending |
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| Last year,
I whined about poor spending decisions at
NASA.
Well, it's clear that my high-profile blogging has finally attracted the attention of the White House! A few days ago, a White House panel concluded that NASA should avoid the moon for now, because it was too expensive and not a good use of money. Instead, the panel recommended "concentrating on new rockets and new places to explore." That's great! My original 2008 post said: NASA should focus on cheaper, robotic missions to meet scientific aims, and also work on parallel tracks on the chief obstacles to human missions: getting into space cheaply (propulsion out of Earth's gravity well), and surviving in a self-contained environment. So I feel somewhat vindicated. The panel has recognized the poor economics of a moon landing, and has also decided to focus on propulsion. Excellent! For some reason, NASA is still really keen on both the International Space Station, and manned spaceflight in general, which strikes me as just launching money into space. Don't get me wrong! I think we need manned spaceflight. But it is still too expensive. We need to work on the core technologies to make human spaceflight cheaper (and survivable) before we throw money at long-range manned missions. So I predict that NASA (and/or this panel) will come to the same conclusions eventually. That is, someone will sooner or later recommend scaling back human missions for now, in favor of more robotic ones. But in the meantime, this is a good sign. We'll get a lot more use out of our NASA dollars by skipping the moon! Comments |
Related: economics > science < predictions Unrelated: books energy environment geopolitics lists mathematics |
| Tue Jul 8 23:31:32 2008 Moon Shot How not to run a space program. |
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| Today's announcement about
retiring the shuttle fleet reminded me of the poor US space strategy in general.
I'm a big fan of basic science research, and of space exploration. But the current proposal to put a man on the moon by 2020 is bad science, and bad economics. It reminds me of the Onion article titled "NASA Announces Plan to Launch $700 Million into Space". Of course, the Onion was thinking too small. The moonshot proposal will cost over $100 billion. And that's before the inevitable cost overruns. What are the benefits of sending men back to the moon? Not many, really. While it is easier to launch from the Moon than the Earth, it is even cheaper to launch from orbit. So a moon base isn't useful just as a launch pad to go further. The moon mission is generally opposed by scientists. The main objections are that it isn't a good way to train for Mars (landing on an asteroid would be far better), and the cost would mean basic science research would be drastically cut. What are the chief problems that we are facing in human space exploration?
What are the chief aims of further space exploration?
If you look, you'll see that we could meet most of the chief scientific aims without manned spaceflight! Manned spaceflight increases costs by 10x or more, and doesn't provide any better data. In fact, given current technologies, it isn't clear that manned spaceflight is worth pursuing at all! [Aside: it was hard to find good data on the costs of manned vs. unmanned space flights. But based on costs for recent shuttle launches and Mars probes, it appears that 10x is a safe estimate, and it could even be 20x or more. Think about that: if we cut a few shuttle flights out, we could launch dozens more robotic missions into the solar system!] Instead, NASA should focus on cheaper, robotic missions to meet scientific aims, and also work on parallel tracks on the chief obstacles to human missions: getting into space cheaply (propulsion out of Earth's gravity well), and surviving in a self-contained environment. I suspect some of the reasons for the moon plan are strategic and military. But having a range of flexible and reliable space technologies will probably be of more strategic use in the future than an expensive (and probably abandoned) moon plan. Comments |
Related: > science < economics Unrelated: books energy environment geopolitics lists mathematics predictions |
| Tue Jul 1 23:00:35 2008 Near Miss The one that almost got us... |
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| I was just reading through the 26 June edition of
Nature. There are usually a few interesting tidbits in every issue. This issue
focused on "Cosmic Cataclysms": particularly impacts.
There was a good story on the Tunguska blast of 1908. I had recently read that Lake Cheko could be the remnants of the impact crater. Soundings had indicated a curious impact-shaped dimple at the bottom of the lake, and a follow-on visit was planned to look for meteorite debris at the bottom. However, the Nature article didn't think highly of the Lake Cheko theory. Another article, "The Burger Bar that Saved the World," was excellent. It talked to a group of long-time asteroid hunters that had started searching for near-Earth asteroids in the 70's, and they had a 30+ year perspective on how asteroid hunting had changed. Certainly the technology has changed a lot! And the idea that impacts were common on Earth was new. Many of the scientists claim that it was Alvarez's theory about the impact that killed the dinosaurs that really woke people up: here was proof that a rather small impact had decimated life on Earth. The article was a good read. It interspersed comments from several scientists to give an overview of how the field had evovled. But I was shocked by comments by Clark Chapman about a near-miss in 2004. He writes: In 2004, an object was discovered ... and the nominal calculated orbit had the asteroid hitting the Earth the next day. ... [JPL] concluded that there was something on the order of a 30% chance that this object would hit the Earth during the next three days. He noted that the European and North American observatories were desperately trying to observe the object to get better data, but weather was bad over both continents, and no one could see it. So we were debating late into the night, at what point should we go public with this? Wow. As it turns out, later observations revealed that the object was larger than originally thought, but also farther away. And so the collision chances dropped to around zero. But regardless, there was a period of a day or so when the world's leading experts thought there was a 30% probability that an asteroid would hit the Earth. Rusty Schweickart has since started the B612 Foundation (named after the asteroid in Saint Exupery's The Little Prince) which is attempting to establish protocols for engaging the United Nations and other bodies when an impact is deemed imminent. So sleep soundly, but not too soundly. Comments |
Related: > science < Unrelated: books economics energy environment geopolitics lists mathematics predictions |
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