| Submit your comments on this article |
| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Why a reinvigorated space program is a good idea |
| 2004-01-11 |
| Chas Martin knocks away the objections to a bigger, better space program: Gads, folks, wouldn’t an informed opinion be more useful? Cost: NASA’s total budget right now is only $15 billion. The total Federal budget is about 2 trillion. That about 0.75 percent of the federal budget; doubling it would be a rounding error. So let’s not panic about "how expensive" it is. (Cf. $22 billion for Iraq reconstruction -- and doubling NASA’s budget is rather more than Bush is really talking about.) Cost benefit: we’re talking about perhaps as much as $15 billion a year; the return is two whole worlds. If the long-term aspects of the investment bother you (why? It’s proportionally less than the government investment in the railroads in the 19th century, and much the same time scale) then consider just the commercial launch market right now. Loral is doing about $1 billion a year in revenues on satellites and satellite services, and it’s not like satellites have stopped going up. We’re talking about making an investment that would reduce launch costs -- necessarily; we’ve got to get much cheaper, better heavy lift for any of this to work -- that’s only fifteen times the current net revenues from one such company. (Yes, yes, this isn’t a complete cost-benefit study or anything like it; I’m pointing out that we’re talking about relatively small change in the current budget and perfectly reasonable commercial scales of investment.) Risks: Yes, people could die. People will die. Not to be callous, but so what? We lost more people in one helicopter crash in Iraq than have died in the history of space flight. It’s a shame. It’s a bummer. But somehow we’re managing to cope. Why not robots? The Shuttle program actually demonstrated this neatly not many years ago. The Shuttle was up to do repairs on a satellite and they were unable to grab it with the manipulator arm. The astronauts finally dealt with the problem by ... reaching over and grabbing it. Humans are the universal tool: we can do things that no one thought of needing. If we’d had a human on Mars in 1976, the question of whether there is life there would have been solved. As it was, we sent Viking, and brilliant as it was, the three life-detection experiments netted out to "Gee, we don’t really know." The easy answer to the results was "yes"; the results weren’t enough, though, and it was possible to interpret them as a "no". With people on site, you can say "hey, let’s try this." Finally, though, the real reason to go is because that’s what people do. The way we are treating the Solar System now is like mailing an Instamatic to cousin Francoise and claiming we’d "seen Paris" when the pictures come back. |
| Posted by:Zhang Fei |
| #6 |
| Posted by: raptor 2004-1-12 7:21:41 AM |
| #5 |
| Posted by: Damn_Proud_American 2004-1-11 11:51:00 PM |
| #4 |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-1-11 10:15:43 PM |
| #3 |
| Posted by: 4thInfVet 2004-1-11 10:03:35 PM |
| #2 |
| Posted by: Val 2004-1-11 9:47:46 PM |
| #1 |
| Posted by: .com 2004-1-11 9:41:00 PM |