Remember when on Interstellar there’s this whole prologue about the collapse of the US, the dismantling of NASA and the family getting on an argument with the school because the official stance now is that the moon landing never happened and mankind never went to space (despite there being still people alive who went there)?
So, anyway, life imitates art …
Recently there was a rerun of interstellar in IMAX at our local IMAX theatre. Rewatched it and had some pretty shocking revelations that I did not think of when I watched it for the first time. The rewriting of history being prime amongst them
One of Trumps supporters even got punched by Buzz.
We ain’t getting Interstellar, we’re getting Don’t Look Up.
The Republicans are still holding out for the earth getting destroyed to make room for a bypass.
I remember when that movie came out people argued with me that the Democrats were the party that was going to create the world of Interstellar and the Republicans were “standing up for science”.
It was obviously nonsense then so i have little illusions that those people have changed their view on it–or if they have, they’ve simply changed to believe the moon landing was faked.
NASA, like the post office, is such a public benefit that we should be funding it well.
I don’t think people understand how much value we get from NASA… Like, $7 for every dollar spent, or more, in economic benefit and technological advancements. So many solutions they have to come up with to make space flight possible are incredibly useful here on Earth too
Value that we won’t get if we’re paying a private company to do it
NASA does research. They push the boundaries corporations can’t.
Depends where the funding goes! And then musk can take a cut.
Corporations cannot carry the risk involved. Because else it would be similar to the medicine industry, but there is no large market to sell to.
We’re going to Mars is not something you can sell in a boardroom, because why? What is the ROI?
What I’m saying is musk wants to divert all of the government funding from NASA to spacex. ROI is all the funding from the government, every year for decades. It’s not a sell a product and profit model in the regular sense. And this way musk can personally take a cut of all that funding.
He doesn’t even need to take a cut. If more money is regularly flowing to SpaceX, the value of the company goes up, which means more money for Musk.
SpaceX has been a huge success for NASA. For much less funding than NASA doing it themselves or a fraction of the cost of ULA, NASA has a very reliable and much cheaper medium launch vehicle launching much more frequently, and a heavy launcher pretty far in development.
This is great, turning “routine” space operations over to cheaper private companies, while focussing on research and stretching the envelope
Easy to do when you pay people shit, don’t care about things blowing up, when you get to build on the already established knowledge, and use their facilities. Government on the other hand could never allow anything to fail and had to forge the path.
Not with that attitude…and probably will be able to change that with the upcoming administration deregulating everything. Or did you mean won’t instead of can’t?
Deregulation means private businesses won’t research anything that doesn’t make their quarterly numbers look better. Accelerated capitalism, woohoo!
Yes, so it’s won’t and not can’t. Words matter.
Okay. Explain how his point changed now that you’ve been overly pedantic?
I wasn’t being pedantic for its own sake, but because the Corp has the capability yet refuse to use it for people’s benefit as they value shareholder profit more. They absolutely could, but won’t. To me, this is worse than not having the ability (won’t).
We get it Corp, you would if you could. Good effort. Wait, you actually can but won’t?
That’s not worse to you?
Not always. There is some research that they could not do without going broke because up-front costs are too high, and there’s no tangible return on investment. In these cases, it makes sense to fund publicly because there is still value to society at large. Accelerators, for example. It doesn’t always have to be some conspiracy.
God, I love how the incoming cabinet has zero redeeming qualities amongst them.
They are predictable
I think I would rather be pleasantly surprised.
The challenging thing here is that NASA does have deep, systemic problems and is in need of some overhaul. SLS is a breathtakingly expensive boondoggle, lunar gateway has no reason to exist, Orion is underpowered and overweight, Mars Sample Return’s entire mission is in question, JWST was a decade behind schedule and an order of magnitude over budget, and the list goes on. Extreme risk-aversion and congressional meddling have resulted in a bureaucratic quagmire of an organization. It’s hard to find nasa projects that are going well.
Of course I don’t think a gorilla with a sledgehammer as we’re sadly going to see from Trump will make things any better, we need a surgeon with a scalpel.
Most of the things you listed are directly related to Congressionally mandated specifics for funding those programs. The money is only there if NASA does it the way Congress dictates, not necessarily the way it should be done.
The entire SLS program is essentially a Congressional jobs and legacy aerospace grifting program post-Shuttle.
If Congress would. Keep their hands off, and just allocate budget, most of the issues would likely disappear since the people that actually know what’s going on could make the decisions instead of a Congress critter that is an imbecile.
It’s the whole reason SLS is the train wreck it is. Congress wouldn’t let them not keep shoveling money to the same people who made Space Shuttle parts. So instead of the best design possible, we got the best design using old parts.
It’s always depressing to me that there are pretty obvious ways to fix problems but absolutely no way to enact solutions.
Publicly funded elections (so corporations cannot buy their way in), and a ban on post-career employment for politicians fixes it immediately. But fat chance of that.
The way I’ve heard it described is a lot of the NASA funding is intentionally spread out across many states, funding many jobs in those states, to get the support of many representatives to vote for the funding. This also means that trying to optimize costs would get a lot of push back, since it will cause jobs to be lost in many states. And these are states which voted for Trump: Alabama, Texas, Florida, etc.
You’re absolutely right, though the extreme risk aversion is harder to blame on congress.
You kill a half dozen people in a space ship explosion that could have been avoided and you will reasonably get a cautious culture.
There’s a happy medium somewhere between Lord Farquad and “nothing happens until 18 committees in 23 states have determined there is less than a 0.00001% chance this unmanned probe will fail in any way”
This is such a common theme.
There are huge systemic problems which the “establishment” will demonstratably not address and Trump appears to be the answer to many voters… but him effectively addressing them is a wild fantasy.
We are about a decade plus into the current political theme of “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. It’s scary. These people have no plan. It’s the levellers and the diggers all over again.
You’re absolutely right, which is why I don’t want the left get tricked into defending a status quo that doesn’t deserve it.
They did not get tricked, they chose to defend the status quo.
That being said much of the messaging about change did not get through because, well, they campaigned conventionally… keeping the status quo.
NASA budget shouldn’t matter on the scale that it does. It is <2% of the US military spendings
Honestly I think lunar gateway is a decent idea, Its the easiest thing to do thats new as far as space is concerned and thus potentially the cheapest way to gain international co-operation, public interest, and potentially ignite another space race. Looking forward it can can potentially act as a life raft for any future lunar colonies in the event of a mishap. And while a moon colony isn’t as impressive as a mars one its much safer to practice on given that emergency re-supply can actually get there before the crew are already skeletonized. A moon base itself can then act as support for moon based telescopes (which have significant advantages, and disadvantages of course) and if you can get some kind of manufacturing going its far easier to launch from the moon than it is from earth, even if the moon just ends up as a glorified space gas station.
Moon base on the surface is a great idea, I’m 1000% in favor.
Lunar gateway is in NRHO, which means rendezvous windows are a week apart. This makes it pretty useless for any kind of emergency. It’s in this crazy orbit because Orion is a pig that can’t transport a crew to low lunar orbit and back.
SLS should definitely be on the chopping block. It was a good idea to fund two possibilities for heavy lift rockets but SLS is clearly going nowhere. At this point, Bozo’s rocket seems like a better choice despite being so much farther behind in development.
But lunar gateway would be pretty useful if we really are going to establish a long term presence. It would allow:
- having the lander and the transportation be different vehicles
- keeping a backup lander convenient
- having a secure place to store extra supplies until a base can be built
- having a possible backup place for astronauts in case the lunar base has problems
Any sort of problem on lunar base would go bad real fast if the nearest help is two weeks away.
Having a place to park and transfer lets them not only use different vehicles for traveling and landing but also differently sized vehicles
…. But it’s only worthwhile if we’re establishing a long term presence
I had a lengthy argument with someone that Musk couldn’t possibly be kissing Trump’s ass for money - he’s a billionaire after all and “has all the money he needs”. No no, Musk is doing this out of the goodness of his cold billionaire heart. Isn’t it obvious?
Why are so many people so stupid? WHY?
Elongated Muskrat is a billionaire who wants to become the first trillionaire. That’s what these people aren’t getting. It’s all just a game to him. He thinks that he lives in a simulation and everyone else is an NPC. He now wants to set a new high score.
Ah yes, the essential personality traits to becoming the richest person: integrity, and stopping once you have all the money you need.
I had similar arguments and the synopsis is that people can’t admit being wrong because it makes them look weak. It’s a toxic masculinity and ego thing.
You basically double down on the bet and ride the boat right into hell over the waterfall.
Dead, but you never had to admit the other person was right about the waterfall!
That’s how kids were taught to think when I was in school. Did you get something wrong on your first try? You’re a failure! Take your F and move on, you’re not allowed to try again unless you fail your entire grade level. 12 years of my school system taught many people to have that ego you mentioned, myself included. I graduated high school 10 years ago and still struggle accepting my failures. I have to remind myself that in real life I can actually learn from my mistakes. Unfortunately many people never have that realization.
Ok I definitely got a different vibe from failing tests. I routinely would have to deal with that stuff again so it was a “you failed, we aren’t going to revisit it but you need to not make the same mistake again
Good things have happened to Elon, therefore he must be a good person, otherwise my worldview is destroyed and there is no point being good.
They have a sense of “enough” and the concept of a thousand millions for someone who barely had a thousand hundreds or even just a thousand is so far out of their realm of understanding that they think “enough” must be a concept for capitalists too
Also dumb as rocks.
As we all know, the ultra-rich are famous for getting to a certain level of wealth and saying, “NO MORE! I RENOUNCE THIS CAPITALIST SOCIETY AND NOW ONLY WORK FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY!”
I comfort myself by saying I have something Musk and his ilk never will: ENOUGH.
^ Brilliant comment.
Yet another page from Trump’s playbook. People insisted that Trump couldn’t be bribed because he was so rich, and that he was financing his own campaign, so he could be the only non-corrupt politician. Obviously these people are quite naive and don’t understand how wealthy Kelle tend to operate - always wanting more, more, more.
We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.
Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn’t care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.
SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing’s rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.
SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.
NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.
Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can’t grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.
We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.
Give the power to the people. All of them.
Space travel is exceptional in that you need an incredible amount of cooperation to get a project into space. The supply chains are insane, the component parts highly specialized and hugely expensive, and the range of expertise and knowledge required is simultaneously focused and intense and broad and varied. If human society ever does manage to transition to a genuine people power, space flight will be, to my knowledge, the very last thing we achieve, because it takes so many people working together to get it done. The scope of these projects makes you realise how easy it must have been to build the pyramids. Two brothers can build a plane that just about works, but to get a vehicle to orbit needs a city of people working together.
That’s all the reason it should be easier to distribute power. More people to distribute it between!
Remember when we paid people to do those things directly?
We, the American people, paid a lot of people each a reasonable salary to get to the moon.
Privatized spaceflight has we, the American people, pay a single entity less total money (they can make it more efficient, of course!). This concentrates decision-making and power.
That vehicle going in to orbit needs a city to work together. I want my taxes to pay that city and the people in it, not Boeing’s shareholders who aren’t helping put the vehicle into orbit, not Musk to build a second smaller city in Texas he is king of.
Thank you for your points. I completely agree that we should be paying the workers on the ground who get us to space instead of the wealthy who claim to own it.
Yes we should, and I hope we will. I would love to be able to imagine some kind of smooth, consensual, non violent transition to a society where we keep doing the same stuff but are fairly treated, but I have difficulty with that. And I think space would be the hardest industry to revolutionise because of the above. Not saying it’s impossible and I’m definitely not saying it’s not preferable!
Almost like Jim Bridenstone was a bad pick….
Regarding rocket propellant
Methane is more dense than hydrogen
Methane makes more thrust than hydrogen
Hydrogen rockets need to have huge fuel tanks, hydrogen rockets have low thrust - the space shuttle needed boosters to lift off
Everything in space is a trade off, kerosene is better in all those ways than methane, but you can make methane on Mars. The global warming potential isn’t much as there are so few rocket launches, and hydrogen fuelled rockets use fossil hydrogen (made from fossil methane (aka natural gas)) because it is cheaper than alternatives
Saturn V didn’t need boosters to lift off with hydrogen.
Hydrogen from Earth comes from fossils, but at least the carbon can be responsibly sequestered in a controlled environment rather than spewing it out the back of the rocket. Once we leave Earth, Hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the universe.
Saturn V stage 1 ran on kerosene (RP-1) and liquid oxygen
Stages 2 and 3 were hydrogen.
The rocket you want, to use space hydrogen, is the bussard ramjet, which unfortunately isn’t expected to work
Well, the Ramjet collects protons in-situ while flying through the interstellar medium for use as fusion fuel.
Putting aside that fusion rocketry is very different from combustion rocketry, even the solar wind isn’t dense enough for that, which is the medium in question for interplanetary travel.
At 1AU, solar wind has ~1 proton per cubic centimeter, moving at about 500 km/s, per current readings at time of writing. That’s 1e6 protons per cubic meter, and a flux of 5e11 protons per second passing through each square meter.
Now let’s move in to Mercury at ~0.38 AU (+/-eccentricity). Mercury receives on average ~10x the flux of particles assuming 1/r^2. Suppose we make a ship with a collector for solar wind the size of Mercury, with a radius of ~2.5e6 m. Our ship then collects 2e13 square meters of flux, or ~1e26 protons per second. A proton is ~1e-27 kg, so that’s almost 10% of a kg per second to power our now dwarf-planet-sized collector infrastructure.
Oh, you wanted an engine? Good luck having anything leftover. You can’t collect the solar wind and use it in real time. But wait an Earth year, and now your collector has collected a million kg, which is about enough to fuel a single one of these. Looks to me like all stages and boosters here burn H2, from what I’m reading. This seems like the appropriate place to say TIL about Saturn V stage 1. Thanks.
Collection at background solar wind levels is not possible. The time to go proton fishing is during a CME. A single CME ejects billions of tons of protons, per NASA’s space weather prediction center’s page explaining them. A billion tons is a trillion kg, and enough to launch a million of those Delta IV Heavies from a single flare event.
I understand that “catching a solar flare” may be easier said than done.
And absolutely no one paying attention was shocked.
it won’t be though. spacex tech is massively reliant on NASA. if they do it they’ll hurt spacex in the long run. which means they’ll probably do it because musk is a fucking moron.
“… in the long run”
These aren’t people who understand what “in the long run” means.
This quarters profits must be higher than last quarters. Fuck anything beyond that
Surely he’ll strip NASA, put the bits he wants up for sale, then buy them for cheap.
Sure the best staff might leave, but he’ll probably keep enough of the organisation to get something out of it.
he’s gonna have to find more indentured slaves
indentured slaves can actually work though
Haha yeah, those bots are garbage. But the Figure 2 bots are already testing in BMW plants. And Elon won’t even have to threaten Open AI with regulation to get new tech. He can prolly just take from Boston Dynamics military contracts.
When has that stopped them when they have the Congress and the courts?
Hey now… it’s not like it’s something heinous like a peanut farm.
Some other country is gonna have the new nasa, and the united states is going to fall even further behind. It’ll just be a brain drain and most of it isn’t going to go to space-x.
Any suggestions on where to emigrate? Asking for a friend
If you’re a fundamental researcher, engineer, etc. come to the UK. We’ve got SO many job openings for those roles and would love to bring in talent to fill those roles because the local gammon isn’t up to the job.
Max pay is around 50k. Its better than most, for sure, but academics get treated way better in US or Germany
I wish I could, but good grief I’d be cutting my pay down to 25% if I moved to the UK
How much is your health insurance & car repayments cutting into your pay? What are your legal minimum days off? How many maternity/paternity days off is your employer legally required to give you? What are your employee rights? How walkable is your current city or do you require a car to literally go anywhere? It’s a trade-off.
While you raise good points that should be kept in mind for anyone considering this, in my case (a very specific and incredibly in-demand type of data management) my last position was a great deal better than any offering for the same job in the UK, even including all the public benefits you guys get.
I left that job for personal health reasons (and I got a full year of unemployment from it). I’m lucky, I’m very aware of that. Most people don’t have it anywhere near as good as I did. But for my field, even factoring in all those benefits from the public sector you get in the UK, I was doing way better here than I could have been in the UK (ex: I was making 4x the maximum wage for my field in the UK (tops out at £45,000)). Also my state has a requirement for 4 months of [ma/pa/xa]ternity leave, which isn’t great but is still a huge improvement. And I get 5 weeks leave. And I was union. And and and
'muricablahblah I’ll spare you.For all the many many problems America has, this is one of the few areas where the UK is somehow even worse than us. Your wages for skilled technical positions are absolutely criminal for the value you produce for employers, and for such a
sometimesprogressive country it’s mindboggling to me that you haven’t made a bigger issue of it. It’s a huge contributor to the brain drain so many EU countries are experiencing (even Germany, who is much better about this than the UK, is feeling this) - the US is a backwards country slowly imploding into fascism, but who’s country isn’t? At least you can come over here and make bank in the little time before everything burns down around them, instead of having a somewhat comfortable lower-middleclass life in some subdiv row house.(This me being defensive I confess: my city is one of the most walkable in the world. I think the “americans can only drive anywhere” thing gets a little bit blown out of proportion because people don’t understand the magnitude of the rural/urban divide in the US.)
Paternity: time your pregnancy to coincide with the start of an X year contract, or they simply won’t renew it.
And if I’m not one of those things? 🫣
Nurse, doctor, I’d say come to the UK because there’s a shortage in the NHS but the pay and conditions are better in Australia.
He efficiently using the government to make himself richer. What more did anybody expect?
Well… that, but inefficient.
This is what losing a space race looks like.
NASA has already sent out emails to their teams and contractors about what implications this can have on their departments. Shit’s bad.
People poke fun of Musk as being a idiot. But he had us Kaiser Soze’d by pretending to be dumb so that he could implement his self-serving ideas.
Musk is not the smart person behind any of the companies he is part of today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
… is why I would have invested in SpaceX pre-Russian aggression against NATO and their allies.
Now … no, thank you. They can keep their private equity to their little NAZI hands.
That’s why Musk is smart, because he is a scammer.
