[no1youknowz]

A bit of a contrarian opinion. But nasa, whilst lauded for their achievements thus far. Due to the issues like:

- politics surrounding it

- regulations

- money dependent on jobs (think SLS program)

- ever changing goals (bush, obama, now trump)

Should now just be a research only facility and fully give the mechanics of space exploration to private facilities such as Space X, rockets and Bigelow for the habitats for example.

To clarify this more. Nasa should be given monies by the tax payer for various projects.

Invest in such projects that require 100 years to come to-fruition to projects that can be achieved within 10-25 years and absolutely no government interventions! Just leave them alone and let them to their glorious work.

They should be projects that the private sector can't invest in because it's too costly. That said however, they should also act in a VC capacity. That researcher that wrote a paper about newer modes of transport? Throw $10m at him, put a team around him consisting of nasa scientists and engineers and see what comes out of this. Do this for 10 or 100 ideas and we'll get a lot of inventions.

Finally for gods sake, the current budget is 0.49% of the total spend. Increase that to 5%. If all the current engineers dedicated to the failed SLS program and moon base machinations were reassigned on separate projects like :-

- vasmir ion engines

- portable space nuclear reactors

- simulating gravity without needing a spinning chassis

- solving the galaxic cosmic rays problem with space ships

(and I could go on...!)

Would be a total game changer.

[zaroth]

These types of ultra long open-ended research projects with no driving commercial or defense need, or real-world short term deliverables are just the kind of project you can dump billions of dollars into and get roughly nothing back in return.

At the Starship even a couple weeks ago Elon quipped when it comes to schedules, "Long is wrong, tight is right." The point is that humans respond well to aggressive but achievable goals with big payoff in the short-term. It focuses the effort on what is actually needed to achieve mission success.

To put it more succinctly, necessity is the mother of innovation.

[Reedx]

Yeah, it helped when NASA had this:

"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win"

[jonshariat]

Doesn't that help his point? They aimed to do it in just 10 years that was a very short deadline considering.

[roymurdock]

We needed to beat the russians to the moon, it was part of the cold war effort, as much as I agree with these ideals they need to be tempered in reality and politics. We have no comparable political need for space exploration today.

[robbiep]

Unless you’re concerned about us as a species not making it out of the local minima of the comfort of earth before an extinction level event wipes us out. Which, fair enough, most politicians aren’t.

[roymurdock]

We are so, so far away from being able to leave earth and terraform/colonize other planets. A better argument is that we might find new technology or make new observations that help raise the standard of living on earth through designing to the requirements of space survival and exploration. But it's hard to translate potential ROI into spending when there are much more pressing problems here on earth.

[nwah1]

Not true. We've had sufficient technology for a long time. We've been sending robots to Mars for decades.

We just haven't made it an objective to terraform Mars. We've even been quite cautious about avoiding even the possibility of transporting microbes there and "contaminating" it.

But the basic mechanics of how to terraform are known. Elon Musk mentioned nuking the poles of Mars as an option. Changing the gas composition could be done, albeit slowly, with enough resources and motivation. You can send robots in advance of human settlers to prepare things.

Self-replicating robots would be more ideal, and that is not a solved problem, but you could likely build partially self-replicating robots that are replenished with "vitamins" much like how the RepRap project does.

Various NASA theorists have written about such things

http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

[jjoonathan]

Yes, and the equivalent of 175 billion dollars per year (4% of federal budget times 4.4T$/y). I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the money may have helped, too.

[TrueDuality]

That is not how inflationary comparisons work with government budgets. The entire documented cost of the Apollo program[1] was $25.4 billion over 11 years. Adjusted for 2018 dollars that's $153 billion over 11 years, which works out to just about $14 billion per year.

The total expenditure in the 2018 United States budget was $4.109 trillion[2] or %0.34 of yearly expenditures. Budgets do not follow inflationary trends even remotely, the 1961 expenditure[3] was $181.588 billion (wow that's pretty crazy). For the year that makes the Apollo program %1.2 of the federal expenditure.

Another useful point of reference, the entire NASA organization in 2018 had an operating budget of $19.2 billion and this has to cover all of the mandated projects such as the SLS. They're also responsible for maintaining and monitoring a lot of infrastructure for other agencies (the weather service, DSN, etc) which wasn't the case during the Apollo mission. NASA itself is kind of left with scraps.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...

[3]: https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1960_1970USb_...

[jjoonathan]

> That is not how inflationary comparisons work

Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.

In any case, thanks for digging up more numbers.

I stand by my claim that money (and enough assurance of continued money to bet everything on one large project) is key.

[Dylan16807]

> normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget

No it's not. Maybe normalize to the median income if you don't like bread and milk, but how much the government spends on education, health care, interest, military fleets, farm subsidies... that's not relevant to NASA's budget.

[h3throw]

> Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.

The CPI is composed of much more than that: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2016.pdf

[twh270]

The money was necessary. But if it had been run like a typical government program, it would have been 25 years before we landed on the moon.

[papito]

I agree. Give me one year for a software project, and I will procrastinate. Give me 4 months, and I will get my shit together, I will be frugal with my time and resources.

In the same fashion, I would get the same or MORE work done in less than an 8 hour work day, because I would just not have time to be on HackerNews.

Smaller, achievable goals are more productive.

[wallace_f]

Elon is also kind of like a dictator of his economic resources. NASA has thousands of stakeholders clamoring over getting a bigger slice of pie.

[isostatic]

Musk is the most powerful man in history. Everyone else with the ability to wipe out cities has had some form of government controlling their actions or relied on armies to do the deed, and they couldn't do it anonymously.

Musk can.

[zie]

Well sure a couple F9's dropped on a city would cause some problems for sure. or maybe you are thinking launching a bunch of titanium rods and dropping them.

Sure he could definitely DO that, but I don't think he could do it anonymously.

Once Starship is up and running, his ability to cause destruction def. goes up, but he would have even less anonymity.

Fans (and I'm sure govts) closely monitor all of SpaceX launches/development/etc. Also, once you got a bunch of rods or rockets or whatever you were going to drop, they don't exactly hide in space, they are pretty easily tracked, and publicly tracked even.

Since they are backlogged with rocket orders, it would cost a LOT to do and lead to to economic decline, if not financial ruin of the SpaceX business.

So could he do it? sure, easily? Not really, but certainly WAY easier than Bezos or anyone else. But anonymously? I really doubt it. Plus who else even has the single handed capabilities? The US Air Force, Russia, India and China. That's pretty much it. Bezos maybe in a few years.

[krapp]

Elon Musk doesn't have the ability to wipe out cities anonymously.

Even if he had the ability to wipe out cities, which he doesn't, by definition being the only private citizen capable of doing so would make the suspect list pretty short.

[jandrese]

I don't know, it seems like more of a Bezos move.

[jahlove]

they're also the kind of project that never gets followed-through to completion because a new administration has its own ideas for how to direct NASA.

[0xffff2]

>Should now just be a research only facility and fully give the mechanics of space exploration to private facilities such as Space X, rockets and Bigelow for the habitats for example.

That's exactly what NASA is and always has been. NASA does the research and development that is worthwhile but not sufficiently obvious/commercially viable for private industry to do themselves. Space was at one time categorically that. Now, LEO is largely a solved problem as far as launches go, which is precisely why SLS is focused on missions beyond Earth orbit. With the progress SpaceX is making, it's likely that SLS will be the last NASA rocket program.

> Just leave them alone and let them to their glorious work.

Believe it or not, this does largely happen on the micro scale.

[kwelstr]

I've been reading the life of Napoleon III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_III).

He <<commissioned the grand reconstruction of Paris. He launched similar public works projects in Marseille, Lyon and other French cities. Napoleon III modernized the French banking system, greatly expanded and consolidated the French railway system and made the French merchant marine the second largest in the world. He promoted the building of the Suez Canal and established modern agriculture, which ended famines in France and made France an agricultural exporter. Napoleon III negotiated the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier free trade agreement with Britain and similar agreements with France's other European trading partners. Social reforms included giving French workers the right to strike and the right to organize. The first women students were admitted at the Sorbonne, and women's education greatly expanded as did the list of required subjects in public schools. >>

But then, he was Emperor of the French (the last one) and had absolute power... What you propose we do with NASA is something similar in long term vision, but then again, we live in a (?flawed) democracy where any long term investment is hotly contested and annihilated. I wish we could find a better way, a new age of enlightenment so we could finally do great things again.

[oh_sigh]

The investment wouldn't be contested if it was fully funded immediately. But, if every year you need to decide what to do with newly collected revenue, what right do old generations have to lock new generations into paying for programs that they don't believe in?

[ryanmercer]

>Finally for gods sake, the current budget is 0.49% of the total spend. Increase that to 5%

A couple years ago I wanted to just create a proper multi-national politics-free space organization (I know, it would never happen with the way things are).

At the time if we took 1% of the GDP (presumably via a tax) of the top 5 nations you would have created a 408 billion a year budget. Staffed by academics, create a board that has heads of industry, experts in various fields (various types of engineers, test pilot, medical doctor, etc) and scientists in relevant field and set a max term they can serve with the initial ones picked in varying intervals (3 year, 5 year, 7 years) so that you are only replacing a percentage of your people at any given time so you can stay more focused on long-term goals. Also try and keep relatively equal numbers of representatives from each financially contributing country on the board.

Also allow other countries to contribute 1% of their GDP unless they are an economically disadvantaged country then allow them to contribute at a much lower scale with scaled benefits.

As far as the 'benefits' allow every country contributing 1% of their GDP to have 100% royalty free access to any technologies/discoveries/data that is a result of this agency. Countries that were sliding-scale members, pay 1/10th of the royalty/fee that non-contributing companies would and still keep the non-contributing country fee relatively low (even 1% fee on something that might result in a profit of 100 million a year globally could extend a given mission a year or more).

It's a massively unrealistic dream but it's probably the closest we could get to something like Starfleet.

[hackeraccount]

I don't want to "that guy" but my first instinct is to say this wouldn't happen not with the way things are now but with the way things are ever.

That's not really my root cause objection. It's the "politics free" part. It's not in my mind that that isn't achievable I have doubts as to wether it's desirable. Politics in my mind is about who or what gets hurt and who or what gets helped in any endevour.

Trying to get rid of politics seems to me like trying to get rid of pain. It's feedback. Try running any system without that - it won't work. I know a lot of the time the feedback is inaccurate but the fix is more inputs not less.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Politics and regulations and changing goals are still going to affect funding decisions, whether that funding goes to private or public organizations. Instead of deciding cut NASA's project XYZ funding this year, it would be a decision to cut WhateverCorp's project XYZ funding this year. Then there'd be a hugely expensive, bureaucratic, and likely corrupt bidding process. Think about the healthcare.gov debacle, with all the federal contractors involved.

[wuunderbar]

> simulating gravity without needing a spinning chassis

What how? Do you have links or literature on this?

[simonh]

There’s no such thing, I think this is in the genre of “I wish there was a solution to this problem, and I’m sure throwing billions of dollars at it will solve it, so let’s try and see what happens”.

[isostatic]

Sounds trivial to me - just accelerate.

[zaroth]

As they say in The Expanse, “Flip and burn!”

You accelerate toward your target at 1g. Ship is built with the floors toward the engines. Halfway there, you flip the ship around and decelerate at 1g until you reach your target.

The point being, also according to Musk; “The best part is no part. The best system is no system.”

[papito]

Until The Expanse, I never really thought if there were G-forces in space. What other TV show OR movie even models that?

[Gabriel_Martin]

imagine the boredom of a game which simulated what actual space combat would be like. No more 50-G maneuvers anakin sorry

[travisporter]

Please rephrase your first statement. I broke trying to parse it multiple times.

"A bit of a contrarian opinion. But nasa, whilst lauded for their achievements thus far. Due to the issues like:"

[soperj]

That would have resulted in no money for SpaceX in the first place and the company would have gone under.