What's Wrong With NASA?

[Japher]

Seriously...

Those Mars rovers have been kicking up dust long after NASA said they should bit the dust.

They try and catch solar collectors with helicopters and stunt men.

The blow up shuttles like nobody's buisness.

The hubble was a serious disaster when first sent up.

No idea what happened to that gravity measuring device they were suppose to send up earlier this year.

And now, they giggle wires to get the shuttle to work, and yet it breaks just like the last one!

My theory: aliens are running NASA and don't want us to discover them until they can get one of their spawn into a position of political power... The failed with Gore, but Hilary is next... watch out guys.

Whatever the cause, NASA hasn't gotten anything right in a long time. Gives a new meaning to the phrase "it ain't rocket science"... yeah, I hope not.

[Berzerker]

My theory: aliens are running NASA and don't want us to discover them

Or NASA is run by bureaucraps.

[Mr. Harley]

NASA has been running on a shoestring budget since Nixon. So you have big sky folks trying to run as much as they can on budgets much too small.

The Space Shuttle is a special case. It is an example of an elephant - a horse designed by committee. Nixon pulled the funding in the middle of the program, and a series of compromises were made. Unfortunately, when making compromises on something with more explosive potential that any non-nuclear weapon made by man (except maybe Tallboy, I'd have to do some calculating and it's my bedtime, I'm too tired) when you do have failures, they will tend to be catastrophic. Add in the fact that they will often occur in extremely hostile environments (i.e. reentry temperatures as one example) and even the non-explosive emergencies will tend to be fatal.

What made it worse, and this is where NASA gets blame, they used their budgetary power to threaten anyone who talked about develping private lift capability. That was the beauracratic part - protecting their turf and funding. The blame for a lack of alternatives to the Space Shuttle can to a large degree be put on NASA's lap, and the fact Congress and the President have let the program limp along with no funding.

[Spiffor]

Re: What's Wrong With NASA?

Originally posted by Japher
Those Mars rovers have been kicking up dust long after NASA said they should bit the dust.

Actually, that's a good thing...

[Tingkai]

Space flight is also only about 45 years old, with a very limited number of actual flights.

A lot of the technology used in aviation was developed through decades of trial and error - learning from fatal crashes.

The shuttle has had one accident in 117 flights. That's actually pretty amazing for something created with less than 20 years of space experience, and incredibly good for something that never existed before.

Same goes for a lot of other NASA projects.

Instead of critizing NASA, Americans should be proud of what their country has accomplished. The things that NASA has done have been incredible and a tribute to the greatness that the US can be.

[Donegeal]

When the Shuttle first came out in the early eighties, they said that these babies were going to last 20 years! We were delighted.

But guess what? IT'S 2005!!! IT'S BEEN OVER TWENTY YEARS!!!

Time to get a new design.

[DanS]

NASA is a broken institution, Japher. They would do well to scrap the organization and start over.

NASA has been running on a shoestring budget since Nixon.

That's complete BS. NASA's spending a cool $16 billion per annum.

The shuttle has had one accident in 117 flights. That's actually pretty amazing for something created with less than 20 years of space experience, and incredibly good for something that never existed before.

That's not incredibly good and by no means amazing for a program that has cost over a hundred billion dollars in today's money for the 117 flights. And for those hundred billion dollars, the shuttle is less safe than Soyuz, for instance.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by DanS
NASA is a broken institution, Japher.

It was the GOP what broke it.

[DanS]

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by DanS
NASA is a broken institution, Japher. They would do well to scrap the organization and start over.

With what?

Originally posted by DanS
That's complete BS. NASA's spending a cool $16 billion per annum.

That's not much given all that they do. NASA is more than just space shuttles, eh.

Originally posted by DanS
That's not incredibly good and by no means amazing for a program that has cost over a hundred billion dollars in today's money for the 117 flights.

NASA did what no one else had done before. It involved incredible complex engineering.

The development cost of the Joint Strike Fighter is about $40 billion. That's to produce an aircraft based on decades of previous flight experience.

A hundred billion for the shuttle isn't much.

[Mr. Harley]

DanS - learn the history of the Space Shuttle program, before you throw out a number with no context. As other posters have made a point, these are not cheap easy missions. In the context of the Space Shuttle, it has been well documented that there was not enough money to fund all the functions and missions everyone wanted the Space Shuttle to be able to perform, including the military.

Do you want me to cite? Will you be willing to admit error if I can find you three independent anaylsis that the Space Shuttle program, during the critical design and production stages, was underfunded? This is like our Laffer curve argument, Dan - when you get deeper into the arguments that have been presented you find that many of the statements so cavalierly thrown around out there are false.

Now if you want to indict NASA managers for short-circuiting private development, I cannot argue with facts based on the record (and the truth). NASA has done wonders within it's limited budget given what they have both attempted to accomplish, and what they have been tasked to accomplish. But don't blame them for the short-sightedness of politicians, both liberal (how can we waste money on space when there are so many needs on earth) or conservative (taxes are bad - it's their fault they can achieve miracle with all that funding (inadequate by all professional estimates) we give them).

[mrmitchell]

That's complete BS. NASA's spending a cool $16 billion per annum

From 1998 to 2004 NASA had the second smallest budgetary increase if I'm reading this right (next to the Department of Labor)...

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/tables.html

Btw, don't you think $16 billion is a little small for, oh, exploring all of outer space? Spreading humanity to the furthest reaches of the universe? For its goals (which are grand and should be strived for), NASA has enough funding to maybe if they're lucky toss up a couple satellites every now and then.

Accounting for inflation how much were annual NASA expenditures in the 1960s?

[DanS]

Give me a break, shawn. I know the history of the Shuttle. It was a mess from the beginning. Throwing another $100 billion at it wouldn't have made the program any better.

[Japher]

I'll be the first to defend the space program, and I'm not meaning to dis it. My problem is that they seem to not be sweating the small stuff. When you spend a billion bucks on a vehicle why skimp on the sound system? It just seems to me that they are half-assing some things that I normally would be taken as "accidents" if there wasn't something significantly wrong with everything they do.

And, while I see the rovers survival as a good thing, it does nothing to credit the scientist who worked on it.

The only thing that seems to have gone well lately is crashing a probe into a asteroid.

[DanS]

Btw, don't you think $16 billion is a little small for, oh, exploring all of outer space?

Not at all. $16 billion is an amazing sum of money here on planet Earth, where normal people live.