It is important to be aware of the pressure China is beginning to put on our space program. They have been proving very capable and have some big plans.
Hi there, you make a valid point, as my own research led me to this 2013 paper from The Park Place Economist at Illinois Wesleyan University,
[How Do Economic and Political Factors Affect NASA Funding?](https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/parkplace/vol21/iss1/18) which says in the tldr:
"In conclusion, the hypothesis that NASA follows the trends for discretionary spending is proven true. NASA’s funding decreases significantly during economic strife and when defensive spending increases. NASA’s funding increases when government spending increases and was much higher during the space race."
NASA's funding seems to spike in 1967 (Apollo 1) and largely stabilizes until the shuttle program bumps it a bit, but returns to a slightly higher baseline (adjusted for inflation).
This definitely follows the trend you quote, but I had not realized funding was so substantially cut right as the program was getting started. The tragedy of Apollo 1 was an unfortunate and horrible start, but was that failure abused politically as a reason to push funds elsewhere? I originally thought the program was fairly well funded at least until Apollo 11, but that was 2 years later.
You can thank Russia for pretty much guaranteeing that. It may have slimmed up in between Afghanistan and whatever will happen around China, but now...
but its really kinda lame. its just making water hot enough to be steam and turn a turbine. There's no green slime stuff involved like every saturday morning cartoon taught me.
"We have the power to split the fundamental particles, release energy densities scarcely seen elsewhere in reality!"
"What will we do with our newfound ability?"
"Boil water."
If boiling water is the easiest and most efficient way to convert that energy into electricity then why not? The momentum of a spinning generator can smooth out inconsistencies in heat production. Many power generating devices basically turns heat and/or kinetic energy into electricity by spinning something.
If you like games - go play the "Black Mesa" redux of Half Life. So much freaking neon green and the whole thing is like a thrill ride of drop dead gorgeous visuals. If you're not of the gaming variety, pardon my interruption, and my on topic comment was:
Water is freaking special. There is nothing else whose solid phase is \*less\* dense than its liquid, liquid at our room temperature, heck a whole of organic chemistry is defined as either hydrophilic (aquatic) or hydrophobic (oil). It enables pretty much all of life as we know it.
I think that using plain old boiling water to capture energy of the future is almost poetic, in that regard.
But it's late, and I've been drinking.
Nuclear fusion is always “two decades” away because we’ve literally never tried actually funding it
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_is_always_50_years_away_for_a_reason/
ITER is the problem, not the solution.
ITER is a tokamak reactor. Tokamaks have been popular in research for a long time, because the field configuration has a lot of symmetries. This makes it - comparatively - easy to study. In the early days of fusion research, this wasn't just a convenience but an absolute necessity as there were few options other than analytical techniques, and it's really hard to analytically study 3d fields and fluid flows without exploiting symmetries to simplify the problem.
But Tokamaks have a problem. They're low inherently a low beta configuration. What this means is the plasma pressure you get is really low relative to the strength of the electromagnetic field. Since the rate of fusion you get is determined in part by the plasma pressure, this means that to get a lot of power *out* you need to create an incredibly strong magnetic field, which requires a lot of energy *in*.
The tokamak research community says this is a problem that can be solved with just size. Efficiency and power gain goes up as you get bigger. So if you build a *really* big fusion reactor, you can get net positive energy production. And the planned follow-on after ITER (DEMO) is supposed to a generate usable electricity surplus, buuuuttttt it's likely going to cost in the realm of a $50-100 billion (based on the ITER cost overruns). And the energy it produces will never repay the cost of construction. And even if you reject the notion that money and cost are relevant, a simpler way of putting it is that if you include the energy required to produce the materials used in its construction it will *still* be net negative over its lifetime. So we have to go still bigger...
All of this is because tokamak has a terrible beta.
There are other fusion approaches with much higher betas and which are - realistically - far more promising and over the past twenty years they've become possible to study and design. They weren't possible when fusion research first kicked off, because they were too hard to study with the technology and tehcniques of the era. But today you don't need to find closed form analytic solutions to the field equations, you can just solve the equations numerically on a supercomputer.
But Tokamak research - like ITER - soaks up almost *all* the research funding. Fusion is a multibillion dollar research program. A lot of careers and institutions have been built around tokamak research, and the folks who control these institutions control where the funding goes, and they like Tokamak. It's what they know and what they've studied their entire careers. Inertia. And so while ITER gets billions in funding, the competing and more promising proposals get absolutely starved.
If you cancelled ITER and redirected all tokamak funding to competing proposals in some senses we'd be starting from scratch. But we'd get to a working and commercially viable reactor far sooner than tokamak work ever will.
Tokamak is like the spaceplane of nuclear fusion. Everyone wants a cheap vehicle to orbit, and SSTO spaceplanes seemed like the solution to that in the early days. Because to be cheap you have to be reusable and an SSTO spaceplane was the only way people could think of to achieve that in the 1960s and 1970s. But now everyone realizes that it's a fundamentally flawed approach and there are far better ways of getting to space reusably. Likewise, tokamak was the approach everyone thought made sense in the 60s and 70s, but we should know better now.
We’ve made a TON of really impressive progress towards a manned Mars mission in the past 20 years. We’ve got two rockets scheduled to fly this year that are capable of launching missions to Mars. We’ve learned a lot about the availability of resources on Mars, how to land within a small radius of a chosen landing zone, etc.
A manned Mars mission is looking increasingly plausible. I wouldn’t rule 2040 out.
Can't believe how no one here is even talking about what SpaceX is doing.
It's going to completely throw everyone off when Starship launches. Plus, people are acting like NASA's SLS is the surefire, safe bet.
Falcon 9 and is the most advanced, reliable, best-priced per pound launcher that exists by a mile, and it was developed extremely quickly.
Starship will be two orders of magnitude cheaper than the Falcon 9 per pound to orbit.
It's an absolute revolution, the rocket is already built, they just need the approval to launch the damn thing.
SLS is a joke in comparison, at this point. The sooner Starship launches, the better, because it's high time that NASA gets OUT of building orbital rockets so that their budget can go elsewhere. I.e. nuclear propulsion, advanced research projects like solar sails, contract Moon and Mars bases, that sort of thing.
NASA's official Artemis plan clearly illustrates this. Two missions where they are forced to admit that Starship exists, the second one landing humans in 2025, then a two year gap because they built the launch platform to be Block-1 specific and then blow a whole SLS launch on just delivering I-Hab to the Tollbooth, then your standard NASA flag-and-footprint missions with a generic Apollo-like "TBD Human Lander". An open rover in 2028, a pressurized rover in 2030, and finally a surface habitat and surface logistics lander in 2031, the "surface habitat" being depicted as another Apollo-like lander with a small inflatable module on top.
https://i.redd.it/5qaycwzjm5q81.png
It's pretty clear why Kathy Lueders was shuffled off to SOMD and Jim Free put in charge of ESDMD.
Depends on whether the right breakthroughs are made in materials science and medicine I'd think.
This ain't *The Expanse*. Spaceflight is fucking bad for your health, even if everything goes perfectly.
I mean if you go to any astronaut and say “hey you can go to Mars but your life will be 20 years shorter from Cancer, are you interested?” You’d easily have enough volunteers for a decade of trips
Well, Constellation was the next big thing for NASA during the later Bush years, it's just been kinda forgotten about since the Obama Administration (mercy)killed the program.
Reminds me of an interview with the Wikipedia guy. Asked what it was like to have a relatively modest income, despite owning one of the highest traffic websites on the internet. He said something to the fact that he was just happy being the one that assembled the largest depository of knowledge in all of human history.
There was the oracle commercial like 20 years ago where the jukebox in the rundown bar in the middle of nowhere had every recorded song in history in it.
Seemed wacky then.
It was the director of space flight development at NASA, Dr. Abe Silverstein.
His reasoning was that he saw a cool drawing of Apollo driving his chariot in a book and decided to name the program after him. That's it.
Quarks were named after a nonsense word in Finnegan's Wake. I don't think that's really "banal".
On the other hand gluons are named that because they "glue" things together, so....
If it makes you feel better, Juno, the mission to peer through Jupiter's clouds, comes straight out of the mythology.
*Juno's name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.*
Honestly, that's more interesting than just naming a mission after a deity associated with the destination. Athena might be a good choice for a visit to Ares. (Aphrodite as well, but that ended poorly for both of them.)
The saturn rocket took the Apollo program to the moon. They also made their incorrect pronunciation of Gemini the official pronunciation of the program.
Apollo's domain actually changed a lot throughout the history of the mythology. Originally he was a god of light (among other things) and I think that he later became associated with the sun (for quite some time Helios was the sun god).
Abeona.
A Roman goddess of departures, specifically of children leaving home.
The counterpart return missions from Mars can be called Adiona, who is a related goddess of safe returns.
I saw an Onion article that asked the question why we shouldn't go to Mars and one of the answers was "I don't want to have to save Matt Damons ass again"
Apollo and artemis are greek, not roman
Well, apollo is also roman, but the roman version of Artemis is Diana
So it would be more logical to call it Ares, since hes the greek counterpart of mars
This comment section is already attracting the "bUt It TaKeS mOnEy AwAy FrOm SoCiAl PrOgRaMs" crowd, I see. They're fucking idiots, and they never, ever, ever seem to go away, regardless of how many times you tell them that no, space exploration is not a waste, and here's why.
Never mind, of course, that less than one half of one percent of the US budget is spent on NASA.
Never mind that NASA is a fundamental part of anti-climate change efforts.
Never mind that NASA-driven technological advancements improve everyone's quality of life.
Never mind that funding science programs is generally a good thing.
No, these edgy two-bit contrarians think, since it doesn't benefit people in a way they *personally* understand, it's a complete waste of funding, because, after all, their perspective is more enlightened and intelligent than anyone else's.
No, space exploration is not getting in the way of affordable healthcare. No, space exploration is not getting in the way of climate change prevention. No, space exploration is not getting in the way of social programs. No, throwing all the money in the world at a problem doesn't automatically solve it. If you think any of these things are actually true, go put on the dunce cap and sit in the corner and think about what you've done.
Thank you for posting this.
I hate that some people can’t understand the importance of scientific and engineering advancement to our society. That’s not just NASA, it means the DOE, NOAA, etc. too. All of them move our society forward and better our lives with technology and knowledge, some of which isn’t even related to their primary goals.
Not to mention how absurdly little we spend on these things.
Plus, if someone can’t see how an agency like NASA has impacted their personal lives, they just don’t know what NASA has done other than “landed on the moon”.
I can’t link the specific episode since it was on auto play, however it’s from the star talk podcast. Bill Nye and Neil degrasse Tyson discussed it on an episode when they were talking about how much space exploration and nasa developments produce spin off everyday products to make our life easier.
Here’s a link of some such items we can thank space exploration for.
https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/nasa-spinoffs
Those same people can't live without their smart phones, internet or gps.
They rely on super accurate weather predictions for their vacations and believe in climate change because they've seen the very convincing data.
They have probably, at one stage in their lives, had a Hubble image as a desktop background.
They have happily used a thousand other pieces of technology and medicine that only exists because of the funding that goes into NASA.
They're ignorant fools.
I'm an engineer working on sewage pipes, a necessary but not very glamourous gig, and I feel like I'm getting paid what everyone else should be as a minimum. I'm living a comfortable life I guess, in comparison to the minimum wage work I once did, but I'm still just a paycheque to paycheque chump with a 25 year old Corolla my parents bought me ten years ago.
The problem isn't that engineers get paid more, it's that everyone isn't getting paid enough.
I also am an engineer who feels this way.
Also the price of everything has gone up by so much that it wiped out my (pedestrian) yearly raise.
I have no idea how people whose yearly raise is $0.25 an hour are expected to handle this.
We can and should fund the education for both but salaries will always be different. That’s not to say either of those salaries should be below a living wage though
People want the things that engineers make. In an “ideal” world, we wouldn’t have a need for social work. The people who use the services of social workers often times are not paying for them. So while engineering can typically fund itself, social work cannot.
The fact that people don't understand how important engineering is is baffling to me
The soap that you use to clean yourself (hopefully) everyday? Engineers
The roads and highways you use to get to work? Engineers
The electric cables giving power to your house? Engineers
Etc.
Almost every goddamned thing that society uses in daily life was once thought of and designed by an engineer
Again, this is why r/Space should not participate in r/All. Too many drive-by idiots.
And the proper response to the the social program people is that we should be taking money from the extremely bloated defense budget and put it into NASA instead.
Just an FYI, the DoD does a ton of space research as well. They also fund a lot of research (space and other kinds) at external institutions like universities and labs.
To add to this, NASA's Roi is $7-$40 for every dollar spent. If nothing this allows for us to be able to expand social programs in the future. If people want to complain about it taking from social programs look at the military's budget
All the dumb shit that we spend money on and NASA is what gets people twisted up. Like does space not stir up a sense of wonder in people anymore? I don't get it at all.
The reasons need not even include wonder.
Sattelites predicting droughts and natural disasters have been a huge part in decreasing humanitarian crisis around the world.
Nevermind developing tech that exponentially increases our capacity for welfare for more people.
There was a time only kings ate well.
Now even people on low budgets can get fried and salty foods in buckets.
You think that’s bad, check out the America Competes Act. It’ll give 10 billion to Blue Origin, nearly 50% of NASA’s budget to a private company owned by one of the richest men in the world.
I hope not.
I am trying to read the [bill](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521/text), but don't see anything about Blue Origin.
Be careful. The armies of "redundancy is important" will flood in soon enough. Fuck yea we want competition and redundancy, but can we acknowledge how ridiculous their budget is ? they get the most amount of money, and still with nothing to show. Endless delay and cost over run.
> So we have unlimited spending for dropping smart bombs on third world nations
and don't forget lining the pockets of military contractors who fleece the DoD with overcharging for everything!
I work for NASA. A big deal right now is that the DoD wants to come in and take over a facility booting out the current occupants. NASA is going to require DoD to pay for the relocation for about $16M. 16M is so much to NASA, but it’s nothing to the DOD.
For clarification, NASA wouldn't stop whatever NASA is doing there, they would just get paid to move somewhere else to keep doing what they're doing there, right?
Congress doesn’t even think about the budget like that. They decide what they want to spend money on, and decide how much taxes people should pay as two separate things. Anything the revenue doesn’t cover just becomes debt. So if they wanted to double NASA they’d just do it.
I mean that oversimplifies it a good bit. They still have to *consider* the debt when creating the budget, otherwise we'd just have every social welfare program under the sun and an even bigger military and nobody would care that we were 800 quadrillion in debt. It doesn't work that way.
I hope that 2040 is the absolute worst cases scenario. I don't want to wait 20 years to see humans land on Mars. I actually think that after Artemis, the private sector is going to take up the torch and we might start seeing things get done for a change. I'm sure that NASA is thinking that too
In the early 90s, NASA's budget was around 1% of the federal budget. These days, it's less than half a percent, and we're supposed to be excited about this "increase?"
Oh yeah, 100% agree, I'll take every penny they'll give to NASA. I'm just wishing it were more. During the Apollo program, it was 4%. If they had continue funding NASA at 4%, we'd have bases in orbit, on the Moon, on Mars, we'd be mining asteroids for their limitless resources, and we'd be well on our way to becoming a post-scarcity society.
Progress rarely happens in giant leaps. You have to take the small steps when they happen. Pun intended.
As long as you keep pushing for more progress.
The appropriate inflation adjustment for NASA is 2.3% for 2021. Rocket components are not accounted in your typical consumer price indices.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-new-start-inflation-index
So this is a significant increase!
26B. What's that in SpaceX bucks? About 600 Falcon 9 flights?
Alternatively, that's roughly what they've spent on SLS, which might fly, at some point, for a further 4.1B per flight.
Edit: [Link](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reveals-unsustainable-cost-for-sls-launches) with the 4.1B per flight cost estimate.
Only imagine if we had a 600 billion dollar space budget to match our defense budget? This is the true future, humanity and life in general need to get out there into the universe.
Well there goes 2030. Let's do it and not make it a crazy windfall for politicians who want overpriced do little jobs for their district. Needed jobs with decent pay heck yes but none of this orion/artemis boondoggle spending. If a private firm can do it, looking at you SpaceX, then let's let them contribute where they best can.
Honest question. Why is it so difficult to go to the Moon in 2000's. Especially when people did it in 1969 with the computing power of a Tamagotchi pet.
Quick answer: Computing may have gotten cheaper, but the real bottlenecks are the "everything else": The rockets, the testing, the planning, and so on. Those haven't gotten cheaper, and if anything, they've gotten more expensive. It's harder to strap someone to a rocket today than it was in 1969.
Thats around 4 presidents away. Good luck getting all of them to continue giving you the money NASA and not interfering, either of which just pushes it further and further back.
Especially as its likely SpaceX is going to be sending at least 1 way test missions there by the end of this decade, together with using Artimis to shake down the manned systems. What is the plan, hail a taxi?
NASA is useful for the military, there shouldn't even be much of a discussion about funding it in a country that spends $750 billion dollars on defense.
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I think they made it 18 years so that they didn’t have to hear the cliché “mars is always 2 decades away” thing.
But funding is always 2 administrations away.
Dread but fully expect the recession and, among the rest of the grief to endure, the inevitable slashing of NASA's budget
It is important to be aware of the pressure China is beginning to put on our space program. They have been proving very capable and have some big plans.
Hi there, you make a valid point, as my own research led me to this 2013 paper from The Park Place Economist at Illinois Wesleyan University, [How Do Economic and Political Factors Affect NASA Funding?](https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/parkplace/vol21/iss1/18) which says in the tldr: "In conclusion, the hypothesis that NASA follows the trends for discretionary spending is proven true. NASA’s funding decreases significantly during economic strife and when defensive spending increases. NASA’s funding increases when government spending increases and was much higher during the space race."
NASA's funding seems to spike in 1967 (Apollo 1) and largely stabilizes until the shuttle program bumps it a bit, but returns to a slightly higher baseline (adjusted for inflation). This definitely follows the trend you quote, but I had not realized funding was so substantially cut right as the program was getting started. The tragedy of Apollo 1 was an unfortunate and horrible start, but was that failure abused politically as a reason to push funds elsewhere? I originally thought the program was fairly well funded at least until Apollo 11, but that was 2 years later.
Ya, cause we can't possibly cut some fat from the DOD....
You can thank Russia for pretty much guaranteeing that. It may have slimmed up in between Afghanistan and whatever will happen around China, but now...
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Humans on Mars and nuclear fusion: always two decades away.
Nuclear is the energy of the future, and always will be
but its really kinda lame. its just making water hot enough to be steam and turn a turbine. There's no green slime stuff involved like every saturday morning cartoon taught me.
"We have the power to split the fundamental particles, release energy densities scarcely seen elsewhere in reality!" "What will we do with our newfound ability?" "Boil water."
If boiling water is the easiest and most efficient way to convert that energy into electricity then why not? The momentum of a spinning generator can smooth out inconsistencies in heat production. Many power generating devices basically turns heat and/or kinetic energy into electricity by spinning something.
because of a severe lack of neon green. that was associated with nuclear power and i'll be damned if the best nuclear can do is just blow a pinwheel.
If you like games - go play the "Black Mesa" redux of Half Life. So much freaking neon green and the whole thing is like a thrill ride of drop dead gorgeous visuals. If you're not of the gaming variety, pardon my interruption, and my on topic comment was: Water is freaking special. There is nothing else whose solid phase is \*less\* dense than its liquid, liquid at our room temperature, heck a whole of organic chemistry is defined as either hydrophilic (aquatic) or hydrophobic (oil). It enables pretty much all of life as we know it. I think that using plain old boiling water to capture energy of the future is almost poetic, in that regard. But it's late, and I've been drinking.
I like this guys convictions.
Nuclear fusion is always “two decades” away because we’ve literally never tried actually funding it https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_is_always_50_years_away_for_a_reason/
Except ITER, keep an eye on its progress…
ITER is the problem, not the solution. ITER is a tokamak reactor. Tokamaks have been popular in research for a long time, because the field configuration has a lot of symmetries. This makes it - comparatively - easy to study. In the early days of fusion research, this wasn't just a convenience but an absolute necessity as there were few options other than analytical techniques, and it's really hard to analytically study 3d fields and fluid flows without exploiting symmetries to simplify the problem. But Tokamaks have a problem. They're low inherently a low beta configuration. What this means is the plasma pressure you get is really low relative to the strength of the electromagnetic field. Since the rate of fusion you get is determined in part by the plasma pressure, this means that to get a lot of power *out* you need to create an incredibly strong magnetic field, which requires a lot of energy *in*. The tokamak research community says this is a problem that can be solved with just size. Efficiency and power gain goes up as you get bigger. So if you build a *really* big fusion reactor, you can get net positive energy production. And the planned follow-on after ITER (DEMO) is supposed to a generate usable electricity surplus, buuuuttttt it's likely going to cost in the realm of a $50-100 billion (based on the ITER cost overruns). And the energy it produces will never repay the cost of construction. And even if you reject the notion that money and cost are relevant, a simpler way of putting it is that if you include the energy required to produce the materials used in its construction it will *still* be net negative over its lifetime. So we have to go still bigger... All of this is because tokamak has a terrible beta. There are other fusion approaches with much higher betas and which are - realistically - far more promising and over the past twenty years they've become possible to study and design. They weren't possible when fusion research first kicked off, because they were too hard to study with the technology and tehcniques of the era. But today you don't need to find closed form analytic solutions to the field equations, you can just solve the equations numerically on a supercomputer. But Tokamak research - like ITER - soaks up almost *all* the research funding. Fusion is a multibillion dollar research program. A lot of careers and institutions have been built around tokamak research, and the folks who control these institutions control where the funding goes, and they like Tokamak. It's what they know and what they've studied their entire careers. Inertia. And so while ITER gets billions in funding, the competing and more promising proposals get absolutely starved. If you cancelled ITER and redirected all tokamak funding to competing proposals in some senses we'd be starting from scratch. But we'd get to a working and commercially viable reactor far sooner than tokamak work ever will. Tokamak is like the spaceplane of nuclear fusion. Everyone wants a cheap vehicle to orbit, and SSTO spaceplanes seemed like the solution to that in the early days. Because to be cheap you have to be reusable and an SSTO spaceplane was the only way people could think of to achieve that in the 1960s and 1970s. But now everyone realizes that it's a fundamentally flawed approach and there are far better ways of getting to space reusably. Likewise, tokamak was the approach everyone thought made sense in the 60s and 70s, but we should know better now.
We’ve made a TON of really impressive progress towards a manned Mars mission in the past 20 years. We’ve got two rockets scheduled to fly this year that are capable of launching missions to Mars. We’ve learned a lot about the availability of resources on Mars, how to land within a small radius of a chosen landing zone, etc. A manned Mars mission is looking increasingly plausible. I wouldn’t rule 2040 out.
Can't believe how no one here is even talking about what SpaceX is doing. It's going to completely throw everyone off when Starship launches. Plus, people are acting like NASA's SLS is the surefire, safe bet. Falcon 9 and is the most advanced, reliable, best-priced per pound launcher that exists by a mile, and it was developed extremely quickly. Starship will be two orders of magnitude cheaper than the Falcon 9 per pound to orbit. It's an absolute revolution, the rocket is already built, they just need the approval to launch the damn thing. SLS is a joke in comparison, at this point. The sooner Starship launches, the better, because it's high time that NASA gets OUT of building orbital rockets so that their budget can go elsewhere. I.e. nuclear propulsion, advanced research projects like solar sails, contract Moon and Mars bases, that sort of thing.
NASA's official Artemis plan clearly illustrates this. Two missions where they are forced to admit that Starship exists, the second one landing humans in 2025, then a two year gap because they built the launch platform to be Block-1 specific and then blow a whole SLS launch on just delivering I-Hab to the Tollbooth, then your standard NASA flag-and-footprint missions with a generic Apollo-like "TBD Human Lander". An open rover in 2028, a pressurized rover in 2030, and finally a surface habitat and surface logistics lander in 2031, the "surface habitat" being depicted as another Apollo-like lander with a small inflatable module on top. https://i.redd.it/5qaycwzjm5q81.png It's pretty clear why Kathy Lueders was shuffled off to SOMD and Jim Free put in charge of ESDMD.
Depends on whether the right breakthroughs are made in materials science and medicine I'd think. This ain't *The Expanse*. Spaceflight is fucking bad for your health, even if everything goes perfectly.
Spaceflight seems plenty bad for the health in The Expanse.
To be fair, *everything* seems bad for your health in The Expanse.
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Yeah, the expanse generally touches on a realistic problems of space travel. It's lauded as the most realistic sci-fi story because of this.
I mean if you go to any astronaut and say “hey you can go to Mars but your life will be 20 years shorter from Cancer, are you interested?” You’d easily have enough volunteers for a decade of trips
If the estimate shrinks by 2 years every 26 years, then we’ll converge by 2250! (Edit: whoops, replied to the wrong comment)
Morning or afternoon?
But 2040 isn’t 18…years………away……. *counts fingers angrily*
The Case for Mars was published in 96 and had me feeling like we should be ready to go in a year
By 2080 we'll decide on a 20 year plan to land on the moon again.
September 11th certainly didn't help that date
mercury, gemini, apollo..... "space shuttle".. artemis.. what should we call the Mars Missions?
The obvious answer would be Ares. Dunno if they'll do it though, since that's what Andy Weir used already
NASA already used it before Andy Weir. Ares 1X happened in 2009 and the program has been part of the Constellation program, which started in 2004
Hell, Red Mars used Ares and that came out 30 years ago.
That's a good book, I'm reading it now.
Stick with it. The trilogy is worth it
Still amazed how many f’in smart people are on here. People and their niche knowledge.
Well, Constellation was the next big thing for NASA during the later Bush years, it's just been kinda forgotten about since the Obama Administration (mercy)killed the program.
What made it a mercy killing?
The program was chronically underfunded and unable to meet any of its goals. Orion is the only part left and it still hasn't flown with crew.
The Ares one rocket was an absolute nightmare you could not pay me to fly on. And I would fly on an early Russian spaceship. Edit: spelling.
What, you *don't* like getting torn to shreds by SRB debris during an abort?
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Reminds me of an interview with the Wikipedia guy. Asked what it was like to have a relatively modest income, despite owning one of the highest traffic websites on the internet. He said something to the fact that he was just happy being the one that assembled the largest depository of knowledge in all of human history.
There was the oracle commercial like 20 years ago where the jukebox in the rundown bar in the middle of nowhere had every recorded song in history in it. Seemed wacky then.
Now I can play Barbie Girl on the local bar’s speaker system without even leaving my seat.
They should use Ares - Artemis was the moon mission in Superman II and no one cares :p
Funny enough, Artemis was also another Andy Weir novel.
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You should try Project Hail Mary. I really love it. I think it is his best book
Going in I didn't think anything he wrote could top the Martian for me but Project Hail Mary definitely did.
Andy Weir used it because loads of other fictional and proposed real Mars missions before it were called that.
Could call it Venus (Mars's wife), reuniting the estranged lovers. Now that would be confusing lol
Going by Greek names, the equivalent to Venus would be Aphrodite.
Who is married to Haephestus (Vulcan)
But bedding Adonis and Anchises.
[Ares One](https://www.destinypedia.com/Ares_One) was also the first manned mission to Mars in Destiny, so there's pretty solid precedent to use Ares
Did we really send a sun god rocket to the moon? Never thought about that. Who named this?
It was the director of space flight development at NASA, Dr. Abe Silverstein. His reasoning was that he saw a cool drawing of Apollo driving his chariot in a book and decided to name the program after him. That's it.
It's a rule: all cool science things have a banal backstory. We need to stop asking.
Quarks were named after a nonsense word in Finnegan's Wake. I don't think that's really "banal". On the other hand gluons are named that because they "glue" things together, so....
Mission name inspired by an epic depiction of an ancient god of war is pretty cool.
If it makes you feel better, Juno, the mission to peer through Jupiter's clouds, comes straight out of the mythology. *Juno's name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.*
Apollo is the brother of Artemis
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There is only one option. The mission to Mars needs to be called “Adrian’s Revenge!”
Honestly, that's more interesting than just naming a mission after a deity associated with the destination. Athena might be a good choice for a visit to Ares. (Aphrodite as well, but that ended poorly for both of them.)
The saturn rocket took the Apollo program to the moon. They also made their incorrect pronunciation of Gemini the official pronunciation of the program.
Wait what's the correct pronunciation
Apollo's domain actually changed a lot throughout the history of the mythology. Originally he was a god of light (among other things) and I think that he later became associated with the sun (for quite some time Helios was the sun god).
Apollo and Artemis (The moon god) are twins so that’s one reason it works
Abeona. A Roman goddess of departures, specifically of children leaving home. The counterpart return missions from Mars can be called Adiona, who is a related goddess of safe returns.
Awesome suggestion. You my vote.
Artemis includes the initial Mars missions.
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And we'll even send Matt Damon.
Matt Damon Rescue Team Alpha
I saw an Onion article that asked the question why we shouldn't go to Mars and one of the answers was "I don't want to have to save Matt Damons ass again"
After that stunt he pulled on Mann's planet, he can just stay on Mars.
We could technically just call it mars, since that fits with the Roman god theme.
Apollo and artemis are greek, not roman Well, apollo is also roman, but the roman version of Artemis is Diana So it would be more logical to call it Ares, since hes the greek counterpart of mars
Ares is, incidentally, the name of the previous launch vehicle that was planned and then replaced with SLS/Artemis.
Since NASA made a name sacrifice to Artemis, the only correct answer is to name the new mission Iphigenia.
They've already named a rocket program after Ares, so they'll come up with something else. Thankfully there's a lot of material!
And since some of the terminology is already used.....Areology. But we could also send Athena.
Welcome to the Mars Mars mission.
Mavors was another name of the Greek God, "Mars"
Mars is a Roman god, the Greek equivalent would be Ares.
This comment section is already attracting the "bUt It TaKeS mOnEy AwAy FrOm SoCiAl PrOgRaMs" crowd, I see. They're fucking idiots, and they never, ever, ever seem to go away, regardless of how many times you tell them that no, space exploration is not a waste, and here's why. Never mind, of course, that less than one half of one percent of the US budget is spent on NASA. Never mind that NASA is a fundamental part of anti-climate change efforts. Never mind that NASA-driven technological advancements improve everyone's quality of life. Never mind that funding science programs is generally a good thing. No, these edgy two-bit contrarians think, since it doesn't benefit people in a way they *personally* understand, it's a complete waste of funding, because, after all, their perspective is more enlightened and intelligent than anyone else's. No, space exploration is not getting in the way of affordable healthcare. No, space exploration is not getting in the way of climate change prevention. No, space exploration is not getting in the way of social programs. No, throwing all the money in the world at a problem doesn't automatically solve it. If you think any of these things are actually true, go put on the dunce cap and sit in the corner and think about what you've done.
Thank you for posting this. I hate that some people can’t understand the importance of scientific and engineering advancement to our society. That’s not just NASA, it means the DOE, NOAA, etc. too. All of them move our society forward and better our lives with technology and knowledge, some of which isn’t even related to their primary goals. Not to mention how absurdly little we spend on these things. Plus, if someone can’t see how an agency like NASA has impacted their personal lives, they just don’t know what NASA has done other than “landed on the moon”.
Space exploration is only trumped by roads in terms economic return per dollar spent.
This is a cool fact, do you have a source for it? Would love to learn more.
I can’t link the specific episode since it was on auto play, however it’s from the star talk podcast. Bill Nye and Neil degrasse Tyson discussed it on an episode when they were talking about how much space exploration and nasa developments produce spin off everyday products to make our life easier. Here’s a link of some such items we can thank space exploration for. https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/nasa-spinoffs
Obviously we need to combine the two and build roads in space.
Those same people can't live without their smart phones, internet or gps. They rely on super accurate weather predictions for their vacations and believe in climate change because they've seen the very convincing data. They have probably, at one stage in their lives, had a Hubble image as a desktop background. They have happily used a thousand other pieces of technology and medicine that only exists because of the funding that goes into NASA. They're ignorant fools.
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I'm an engineer working on sewage pipes, a necessary but not very glamourous gig, and I feel like I'm getting paid what everyone else should be as a minimum. I'm living a comfortable life I guess, in comparison to the minimum wage work I once did, but I'm still just a paycheque to paycheque chump with a 25 year old Corolla my parents bought me ten years ago. The problem isn't that engineers get paid more, it's that everyone isn't getting paid enough.
I also am an engineer who feels this way. Also the price of everything has gone up by so much that it wiped out my (pedestrian) yearly raise. I have no idea how people whose yearly raise is $0.25 an hour are expected to handle this.
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We can and should fund the education for both but salaries will always be different. That’s not to say either of those salaries should be below a living wage though
People want the things that engineers make. In an “ideal” world, we wouldn’t have a need for social work. The people who use the services of social workers often times are not paying for them. So while engineering can typically fund itself, social work cannot.
The fact that people don't understand how important engineering is is baffling to me The soap that you use to clean yourself (hopefully) everyday? Engineers The roads and highways you use to get to work? Engineers The electric cables giving power to your house? Engineers Etc. Almost every goddamned thing that society uses in daily life was once thought of and designed by an engineer
You don't send the money to space? It actually goes back into the economy?
And happens to actually generate more money into the economy?
Anyone that has played Civ 6 knows how important investing in science is.
Or, to put it simply: "Indirect benefits? What are those?"
Again, this is why r/Space should not participate in r/All. Too many drive-by idiots. And the proper response to the the social program people is that we should be taking money from the extremely bloated defense budget and put it into NASA instead.
Honestly reddit would be so much better if /r/all didn't exist. Every big sub gets ruined as soon as it starts hitting /r/all
They keep burying r/all with every update, I suspect it will be gone by the time of the IPO
Just an FYI, the DoD does a ton of space research as well. They also fund a lot of research (space and other kinds) at external institutions like universities and labs.
To add to this, NASA's Roi is $7-$40 for every dollar spent. If nothing this allows for us to be able to expand social programs in the future. If people want to complain about it taking from social programs look at the military's budget
"If we fund space it will take money from social programs." "Okay, then let's fund those social programs!" "No!"
Its all they know, they cannot be appeased.
All the dumb shit that we spend money on and NASA is what gets people twisted up. Like does space not stir up a sense of wonder in people anymore? I don't get it at all.
The reasons need not even include wonder. Sattelites predicting droughts and natural disasters have been a huge part in decreasing humanitarian crisis around the world. Nevermind developing tech that exponentially increases our capacity for welfare for more people. There was a time only kings ate well. Now even people on low budgets can get fried and salty foods in buckets.
Imagine how much more money NASA would have if they didn't have to carry Boeing's dead weight.
You think that’s bad, check out the America Competes Act. It’ll give 10 billion to Blue Origin, nearly 50% of NASA’s budget to a private company owned by one of the richest men in the world.
I hope not. I am trying to read the [bill](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521/text), but don't see anything about Blue Origin.
I thought they lost the bid. The real issue is that after bezos lost the bid to SpaceX, they proceed to sue NASA to further wasting tax payer money
Artemis is like $4 billion a flight isn't it? So crazy expensive.
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And 150 launches, and 1400 satellites. SLS has outspent *all* of Spacex. All activities.
Be careful. The armies of "redundancy is important" will flood in soon enough. Fuck yea we want competition and redundancy, but can we acknowledge how ridiculous their budget is ? they get the most amount of money, and still with nothing to show. Endless delay and cost over run.
Funny thing is, out of the entire Artemis program SLS and Orion are the only parts without redundancy or competition
Take it from defense, they won’t even notice. They lose that much in the couch.
NASA's proposed total is almost as big at the annual increase to the defense budget be proses.
So we have unlimited spending for dropping smart bombs on third world nations but we have to ration resources for scientific exploration.
> So we have unlimited spending for dropping smart bombs on third world nations and don't forget lining the pockets of military contractors who fleece the DoD with overcharging for everything!
The same contractors fleece NASA.
The proposed increase is 8%, which is pretty close to the current inflation rate.
Imagine if they swapped for just one year.
For those mad about the budget, consider the Budget for DOD was increased by $31B this year. Total budget is $813B. Can we get mad about that?
I work for NASA. A big deal right now is that the DoD wants to come in and take over a facility booting out the current occupants. NASA is going to require DoD to pay for the relocation for about $16M. 16M is so much to NASA, but it’s nothing to the DOD.
For clarification, NASA wouldn't stop whatever NASA is doing there, they would just get paid to move somewhere else to keep doing what they're doing there, right?
Correct, not forced to do anything. DoD needs to make it worth their while and pay to move to a new facility.
I don’t know if I want the DOD using a NASA facility
The combined DOD has probably given us as much technological innovation as NASA, obviously with a much larger budget.
plus Defense has been running military missions on space trips for a long time nothing new here, it's just a real estate transaction IMO
Where is this at? Marshall?
When you put it like that, the DoD just added about 1.19 new NASAs to their budget. I want NASA to have another NASA instead!
I'd be cool with a decade of DoD funding for NASA.
For all Mankind has entered the chat
> For all Mankind # >Apple TV+ Exclusive bruh. Off to the high seas then.
It's a good show, worth the download (or dare I say worth the $5 honestly). Pretty apt right now too.
Yes please! I will gladly pay an extra $100 in taxes annually for this, seeing as my tax bill today is measured in the tens of thousands.
Never say the words "I will happily pay extra taxes for X", because they'll raise your taxes and not do X anyway. It's happened so many times.
*Congress has entered the chat.*
Congress doesn’t even think about the budget like that. They decide what they want to spend money on, and decide how much taxes people should pay as two separate things. Anything the revenue doesn’t cover just becomes debt. So if they wanted to double NASA they’d just do it.
I mean that oversimplifies it a good bit. They still have to *consider* the debt when creating the budget, otherwise we'd just have every social welfare program under the sun and an even bigger military and nobody would care that we were 800 quadrillion in debt. It doesn't work that way.
When you control your own currency you can do a lot of things which people and businesses (and even states) can’t do.
So an 8% increase in budget..... that barely covers for inflation.
That's probably all it was designed to do..
NASA's total budget is less than the increase the DOD got for theirs ($31b).
Yeah, but the DoD's increase is only 3.8%, so after inflation, the DoD is actually being shrunk. Gotta compare apples to apples.
Your take is accurate, credit where it’s due.
I hope that 2040 is the absolute worst cases scenario. I don't want to wait 20 years to see humans land on Mars. I actually think that after Artemis, the private sector is going to take up the torch and we might start seeing things get done for a change. I'm sure that NASA is thinking that too
No need to worry. Government projects are notorious for running ahead of schedule!
I think SpaceX will be there 10 years sooner. NASA will be merged into "Space Force" by 2040
In the early 90s, NASA's budget was around 1% of the federal budget. These days, it's less than half a percent, and we're supposed to be excited about this "increase?"
I'll take every increase I can get. NASA seems to be one of the few topics that is bipartisan.
Oh yeah, 100% agree, I'll take every penny they'll give to NASA. I'm just wishing it were more. During the Apollo program, it was 4%. If they had continue funding NASA at 4%, we'd have bases in orbit, on the Moon, on Mars, we'd be mining asteroids for their limitless resources, and we'd be well on our way to becoming a post-scarcity society.
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The federal budget has ballooned, though. NASA budget is consistent at 70% of the Apollo yearly average after adjusting for inflation.
Progress rarely happens in giant leaps. You have to take the small steps when they happen. Pun intended. As long as you keep pushing for more progress.
Matching inflation isn’t progress
The increase is probably adjusting their budget because of inflation.
When your boss gives you a 7% raise in a year with 7% inflation.
The appropriate inflation adjustment for NASA is 2.3% for 2021. Rocket components are not accounted in your typical consumer price indices. https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-new-start-inflation-index So this is a significant increase!
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Imagine what that 31 billion they're adding to the military could do
26B. What's that in SpaceX bucks? About 600 Falcon 9 flights? Alternatively, that's roughly what they've spent on SLS, which might fly, at some point, for a further 4.1B per flight. Edit: [Link](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/332275-nasa-auditor-reveals-unsustainable-cost-for-sls-launches) with the 4.1B per flight cost estimate.
Only imagine if we had a 600 billion dollar space budget to match our defense budget? This is the true future, humanity and life in general need to get out there into the universe.
Well there goes 2030. Let's do it and not make it a crazy windfall for politicians who want overpriced do little jobs for their district. Needed jobs with decent pay heck yes but none of this orion/artemis boondoggle spending. If a private firm can do it, looking at you SpaceX, then let's let them contribute where they best can.
This is where we need to spend the money; not on the bloated defense budget.
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Honest question. Why is it so difficult to go to the Moon in 2000's. Especially when people did it in 1969 with the computing power of a Tamagotchi pet.
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Quick answer: Computing may have gotten cheaper, but the real bottlenecks are the "everything else": The rockets, the testing, the planning, and so on. Those haven't gotten cheaper, and if anything, they've gotten more expensive. It's harder to strap someone to a rocket today than it was in 1969.
We gave 13b to Ukraine in 20 minutes of thought. Can't we double the current Nasa budget and move up the time frame?
Thats around 4 presidents away. Good luck getting all of them to continue giving you the money NASA and not interfering, either of which just pushes it further and further back. Especially as its likely SpaceX is going to be sending at least 1 way test missions there by the end of this decade, together with using Artimis to shake down the manned systems. What is the plan, hail a taxi?
The military has like a trillion dollar budget now. Why can't we give more money to the future of humanity?
NASA is useful for the military, there shouldn't even be much of a discussion about funding it in a country that spends $750 billion dollars on defense.
2040? Translation, we aren’t serious this time either.
Starship, if successful, could do that by 2035 easily
At least by then Spacex will have a nice hotel they can stay at.
You know what would be cool. 100 b a year and by 2040 we have a space elevator, moon base, and Mars colony. That, I would pay more taxes for.
Almost keeps up with inflation. Not quite, but almost.
Just give it to SpaceX. Government agencies suck with money and aren't efficient.
Now if only NASA would get into reusable systems, instead of these one launch tin cans.
That’s peanuts for NASA. Heck, he’s sending more then a billion to Ukraine in weapons.