Did anyone watch the launch yesterday? They should be docking with ISS in a few hours. It's been pretty cool to watch the USA (thanks to SpaceX) reclaim the leader's role in space technology.
ROI for who? SpaceX obviously is getting an ROI on it, they're turning a tidy little profit with each reuse of a first stage. SpaceX's customers are also benefitting, by gaining access to cheaper orbital delivery services. For example: https://www.space.com/spacex-boeing-commercial-crew-seat-prices.html
The SpaceX part of that argument is't good enough, as making SpaceX profitable by spending millions of tax dollars on them is clearly not a federal objective. It my further some objective, but it isn't one in itself. However, we are getting chearper launch capability. And, that is important for our exploration of the universe. I think the ISS is a legitimate objective in that there is a LOT of science going on in microgravity there. The near future seems likely to involve private sector additions essentially owned by individual corporations for their own progress in science and engineering. This is WAY different that the stupendously expensive (and in my opinion pointless) objective of briefly landing humans on the Moon - an activity that is an engineering challenge, but doesn't further any science objective or make any science objective easier to accomplish.
Interesting oint. Apollo 7 astronauts came down with colds on their missione - which turned out to be an issue with running out of medications, no tissues, etc. Since then, astronauts have been quarantined for two weeks before flights and with careful medical examination at specific points - like 10 days before launch. Remember that an astronaut was scrubbed from Apollo 13 because there was a chance of illness that turned out to be a false positive. I'm not sure how this has changed since COVID, but it's more like living with close family members without so much as going to a grocery store with a mask on - only, astronauts don't get to be with their actual families during that period.
I'd contend that the millions of dollars spent on SpaceX has been some of the best space dollars spent by NASA in decades, at least from an ROI perspective. Let's look at the other things NASA has been doing with their funding: - buying Soyuz seats (at $86 million a pop) - dumping it into the SLS ($17B spent so far, with zero launches to show for it) - underwriting ULA in a similar (and perhaps more egregious) way to how SpaceX has been contracted With a relative pittance of federal funding, SpaceX has already returned manned spaceflight to American soil, developed the best rocket engine in the world, taken rocket reusability from (what some considered) pie-in-the-sky delusions to practical reality, slashed the cost of orbital delivery services, and they're in the process of building a better rocket than SLS and returning us to the Moon and then on to set foot on Mars. I tend to agree with you about stopping off at the Moon not adding a lot of science value, but man, the money the government has spent on SpaceX is a model of efficiency and effectiveness compared to the vast majority of government spending. If we could get even half our bang-for-the-buck out of the rest of the federal budget that we've gotten out of the sliver we've spent on SpaceX, there'd be no limit to what we could accomplish.
ROI- sooner colonization of space. We have many many steps to take to get there, and every single one will havebeen worth it once we arrive.
Absolutely on all points. My only comment here is that these are capabilities for doing something else rather than being fully justified expenses in and of themselves. Musk definitely has a track record of getting stuff done - absolutely no doubt about that. His progress on battery backup is amazing. I think people don't even know what he did to save tens of millions of dollars for an Australian power grid by installing a huge number of Tesla battery packs - used to hold off for very short periods of time the need to buy HUGELY expensive power!! And, he's on his way to launching 42,000 communication satellites that are intended to bring internet connectivity to the entire world - something that we've failed to do even just inside America. The importance to bringing internet access to the entire world is a stupendously powerful idea he's doing on his own dime. I do believe there are a good number of important objectives in space that our government should work toward, but I see them being oriented to science, not of landing spacemen on moons and planets.
Velcro I think has been the largest contribution to society from the money wasted on manned space missions. It's never gonna happen without developing proper shielding and artificial gravity. Zero gravity kills humans, simple as that. Spend a year in zero g and your core pelvic bone structure will be depleted by 12-24% Add in radiation and space is nothing but death. https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/sciences/osm/bones.asp https://gizmodo.com/how-long-humans-can-live-in-space-and-what-happens-if-w-1632091719
I think the "all things" answer isn't good enough. Here's what NASA thinks we learned in 2019: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/what-we-learned-from-space-station-2019 Of course, that's not the only year.
Good points. I think we've learned more more than that. Corporations want to add private sector modules to ISS so they can do their own science and engineering there. So, its not just the gov that believes there is important work there. My own view is that our objective of exploring our universe requires larger equipment in space - telescopes, unmanned landers, etc. These seem required for objectives like reconciling our two incompatible models of physics, protection of our planet from flying objects, finding life, etc. What we need in space won't fit inside vehicles launched from Earth anymore. The Webb telescope is an example. Besides doing direct science on a space station I think we're going to need to start assembling launched parts in space, so we're not so horribly limited by the violence of launches and the confined spaces of nose cones. We've reached the limits of what can be launched for scientific exploration.
Yes, excellent points, but then we're back to the ROI question whether it's worth it or not. I'd like to see manned spaceflight shelved for taking care of higher priority projects. For example, I think that an international project to build a global equatorial solar array with longitudinal power distribution would really benefit humanity, and it would be massive and epic stuff and so much fun to engineer and construct. *** And if folks have to have a fix for aerospace projects then as long as we're choosing to let science fiction set our goals, I'd prefer an asteroid defense program. I reckon a properly designed array of megaton yield nukes could pulverize a good sized asteroid enough to mitigate any chunk large enough to cause an extinction level event. And for smaller ones that might just threaten a large city for example, probably one megaton nuke would do it. Another epic project that would be super fun to engineer and construct. *** In the US, we have a massive problem with the age and integrity of our bridges. Federal fuel taxes were supposed to be used to fund maintenance of the US interstate highway system - how many federally funded projects do we have active on interstate maintenance? The I-10 bridge at Lake Charles, LA is a top candidate to be the next major bridge to fail. Here's a couple of epic recent US bridge failures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collapse *** Healthcare, how about healthcare? All in favor of government programs to spend our money on missions to Mars you are, but god forbid we entertain the idea of the government spending our money on our health? Rural communities across the country with no hospitals available in any direction for a hundred miles? Oh, but we make sure rural areas have subsidized internet access! I would make a point here about 3M 8210 masks, but then I'd be getting lost in the weeds a bit too much.... *** Manned Space Mission Federal Budgets - Pffffttt.
Amen. Sending spacemen to moons and planets is STUPENDOUSLY expensive compared to science missions. Think of the difference between Apollo, which let a couple spacemen hop around on the moon for a few hourse and Hubble, which has been hugely beneficial to science for 30 YEARS now, with a lot of life left. A Mars mission could devestate the whole NASA budget, which includes a lot of Earth sciences. I do defend some amount of science spending. The entire NASA budget covering their aspects of ISS, Earth forcused stuff, near Earth object (asteroid) tracking, low Earth orbit space junk tracking, stuff done for the military, current "man on the moon" work, and all telescopic exploration of the universe, scientific outreach/education support is 0.5% of the national budget. There is a LAW that says NASA has to build the "SLS" rocket that is absolutely HUGE, is terrifically expensive, isn't reusable (like SpaceX rockets) and doesn't even have a concretely planned payload. Congress should eliminate that stupid law. That's an $8.6 billion dollar piece of fireworks. You COULD fix a bridge or two for that! Surely there are other places to look for our much needed infrastructure money.
Ah, the Hubble and the Webb, I fully support these, not to mention Landsat, GPS, etc.... https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/comparisonWebbVsHubble.html I might have to research these a bit. I don't understand why these satellites are constrained to such small slices of the spectrum.
The JWST is scary. It has to get folded up into a nosecone, get shaken HARD due to launch, and then perfectly unfurl in space. The parts that unfurl aren't just the mirrors and the solar panels. There are also the sun screens that protect it from solar radiation. It will be traveling off to a "la Grange point" where it will stay in station with minimal fuel. Then, if it doesn't all unfurl, it's garbage - outside the range we can go to fix it. And, the JWST has been a gigantic investment. It's not like Hubble, which flies in Earth orbit near enough that it could still be reached for repairs. This general problem is why I think we need to be working on space based assembly.
Reasonable conclusion I think. Build the Webb in near earth orbit where any kinks can be lined out and then propel it to the L2 orbit is what you're suggesting, eh?
Velcro would never have been invented without space flight? That contribution occurred when the U.S. could afford such nonsense.
Good question. Apparently Velcro was in fact invented without anything at all to do with Nasa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook-and-loop_fastener
Not exactly, just one off the top of head, launching interplanetary missions from the moon would reduce fuel consumption significantly.
There isn't anything on the moon to launch! Maybe it would work to make some hydrogen and send that up to some orbiter. But, that doesn't sound like a big win to me. We have a LOT of fuel here on Earth. The Apollo strategy was pretty smart - only put stuff on the moon that REALLY needs to be on the moon. Then use the smallest possible vehicle to get back up to the orbiter. I think combining the requirements for multiple launches and landings and interplanetary travel is likely to be suboptimal. In general, I'm no fan of landing stuff into gravty wells when it just has to be lifted back out of the gravity well. As they say, gravity wells suck.
