The federal government seems to have an almost inexhaustible willingness to waste money. At the same time we are experiencing a pandemic with a completely inadequate testing system, the government is contemplating spending many billions to send men back to the moon in 2024—55 years after the first moon landing. That would be about as exciting as flying a crude airplane a few hundred yards along a North Carolina beach in 1958.
Boeing Co.’s Space Launch System, the largest rocket in NASA’s history, will carry a price tag of at least $9.1 billion — or 30% more than the previous estimate for a key element in the agency’s plan to return to the moon.
Additionally, the costs for new ground infrastructure at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to support the deep-space exploration program has jumped to $2.4 billion, Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for human spaceflight, said in a blog post Wednesday. That’s also a 30% increase, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said in an email Thursday.
America has a far more dysfunctional society than in 1969, so I predict more delays and cost overruns.
I’m actually a big fan of having a space program, just not a manned space program. Manned space exploration is several orders of magnitude more expensive than unmanned probes, which means that spending money on manned space exploration is actually negative value added in terms of science. Congress is willing to spend only so much on NASA, and if we do more manned exploration then there’s much less money for the truly exciting stuff, such as searching for life on Saturn’s moons with an unmanned probe. (I’m not saying that all the money is being diverted from other space activities, but surely some of it is.)
There was a psychological benefit from the 1969 moon landing that went well beyond the scientific payoff. I was only 13 at the time, but I still found the moon landing to be quite inspiring. On the other hand, I can hardly think of anything less inspiring than a moon landing attempt in 2024, which would demonstrate that NASA has made almost zero progress on manned space exploration in 55 years. Are there any other high tech industries where there has been virtually no progress in 55 years?
READER COMMENTS
Airman Spry Shark
Sep 1 2020 at 2:52pm
The point of the Artemis program is to test technologies for a future Mars landing, not to go to Luna for its own sake. And scientific knowledge is only part of the purpose of manned space exploration; blazing the trails to make humanity an interplanetary species is far more important in the long run.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 3:25pm
Manned space exploration does not get us any closer to being an “interplanetary species”. For that you’d want to research new types of spacecraft, which made it far less costly to set up facilities on other planets. This mission will use the same sort of chemical rocket that is pointless for interplanetary exploration.
I’d also argue that there’s no real point in being an interplanetary species, at least with current technology. Some think it might shield humanity from a disaster on Earth, but that’s almost certainly not true. If the disaster were so catastrophic that it even wiped out scientific stations in remote Antartica, then colonies on other planets would likely fail as well. They can’t survive without support systems on Earth, unless there were vast improvements in transport technology.
Jairaj Devadiga
Sep 1 2020 at 4:00pm
To add to this, making humans an interplanetary species involves more than just new types of spacecraft.
Current astronauts are trained, at huge expense and in small numbers, to survive in low or zero gravity. Scientists would have to devise a way in which ordinary people can survive in such environments with minimal or no training, in order to transport large numbers of people. Artificial gravity can be generated during spaceflight, but can’t be on the surface of a planet (with current technology). The other way would involve heavy genetic modification, which is another can of worms.
It would be great to have humans living on multiple planets, but it is simply not cost effective right now. We will know it is cost effective when a private firm is willing to fund an interplanetary mission without any government support.
Jairaj Devadiga
Sep 1 2020 at 4:03pm
You write:
“They can’t survive without support systems on Earth, unless there were vast improvements in transport technology.”
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Unless there are vast improvements in transport technology (making it faster and cheaper), colonies must be self-sufficient.
After all, faster and cheaper transport will make it feasible to send supplies from Earth, while slow and expensive transport will hinder it.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 10:13pm
Yes, but for the time being they will have to rely on Earth. A completely self sustaining colony would be very difficult to achieve.
anonymous
Sep 2 2020 at 9:50pm
Difficult, sure. Lots of things are difficult, that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth doing. How do you learn if you don’t even try?
Warren Platts
Sep 1 2020 at 3:49pm
Huh? What would demonstrate that NASA has made zero progress in manned exploration would be to NOT do a Moon landing. In fact there has been huge progress.
Granted, the SLS is a crony-capitalist boondoggle that should be canceled. Moon landings can be easily (relatively–nothing is easy in space) accomplished using SpaceX and other commercial outfits.
As for the scientific value of manned exploration, it is huge. Compare the scientific results of Apollo versus all the unmanned missions to the Moon.
Also, there are strategic, geopolitical considerations as well. We cannot allow the Moon to become a Chinese, South China Sea-like colony in space.
AMT
Sep 1 2020 at 4:50pm
LOL, why are you so worried about China claiming a barren, useless rock? Give me just two examples of the “HUGE” scientific value you expect.
Warren Platts
Sep 1 2020 at 5:56pm
(1) There is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that liquid water aquifers exist at relatively shallow depths (<1000 feet) within some of the lunar maria. As the astrobiologists say: follow the water. If you ask me, it is a waste of money to search for life around Saturn when there is likely life within our sister planet.
(2) There is also evidence that there are electrostatic placer deposits of gold within certain, cold polar craters. If true, this would represent a completely new form of placer deposits–in this case based on differential transport of dust particles. Gold dust particles are efficiently charged by ultraviolet light, and thus, according to the theory, get preferentially levitated by electrical fields that form on the Moon due to incoming solar radiation.
AMT
Sep 2 2020 at 11:35am
Wrong. There is no “huge” value in determining if there might be some water on the moon. We cannot inhabit a barren rock with no atmosphere. Similarly, since we cannot inhabit the moon, there is no way to efficiently harvest any potential mineral deposits, much less transport them back to earth given our current technology.
No one here criticizing the massive cost of traveling to the moon with current technology was ever advocating going further, to Saturn, to search for possible single celled organisms.
Warren Platts
Sep 2 2020 at 12:28pm
You are the one who is wrong, of course. FYI, the International Space Station has been continually crewed for literally 20 years. That proves that space (a place with no atmosphere) is in fact habitable.
As for searching for life on Saturn’s moons with an unmanned probe, that was what Scott called “the truly exciting stuff.” However, imo, NASA should not be in the entertainment business. Leave that to the National Park Service. NASA should be the USGS of space.
AMT
Sep 2 2020 at 1:10pm
Obviously implicit in my statement about habitability is that it is either SELF-SUFFICIENT or at least COST-EFFICIENT (so that it is worth inhabiting despite being not self-sufficient). Otherwise, according to your definition, literally all of space is “habitable,” which is just absurd.
Clearly the international space station is not self-sufficient. Is it cost-efficient?
“The ISS has been described as the most expensive single item ever constructed.[389] As of 2010 the total cost was US$150 billion…Assuming 20,000 person-days of use from 2000 to 2015 by two- to six-person crews, each person-day would cost $7.5 million.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Cost
I would say 7.5 million dollars per day is not extremely cost-efficient. Or any number that ventures into the MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER DAY, PER PERSON.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 10:11pm
Warren, You said:
“We cannot allow the Moon to become a Chinese, South China Sea-like colony in space.”
Sorry, but this is almost like a line from Dr. Strangelove. In what possible sense could the Moon ever become a Chinese “colony? The Moon is huge; it’s hard to imagine more than an isolated Chinese space station in some lonely spot on the Moon. At least with current technology.
Perhaps in a few hundred years, but we don’t even know if China will still be our “enemy” in a few hundred years.
Brett
Sep 1 2020 at 3:57pm
I used to think that robotic space exploration in the US depended on the human spaceflight program, since the bigger budget meant more money to go around as spending in key Congress districts and states. But given that the EU’s space program has a pretty similar robotic exploration budget to that of the US, I’m not so certain anymore.
If we really want people in space, the best thing is to make getting them into space as cheap as possible.
AMT
Sep 1 2020 at 4:48pm
Overall I agree that it is a massive waste of money. It’s not necessarily true that “a moon landing attempt in 2024…would demonstrate that NASA has made almost zero progress on manned space exploration in 55 years,” but maybe it’s close enough because our technology is still basically useless for any kind of beneficial space travel. Obviously we should spend all that money on inventing some actually useful technology.
Brian
Sep 1 2020 at 5:06pm
So, Columbus’s voyage in 1492 was worthless because the Vikings had already gotten to North America hundreds of years earlier? Likewise Jamestown because of Columbus, etc? Plus, they all used wooden sailing ships, so what’s the point?
The point of going to the moon again is to develop a permanent human presence in non-terrestrial environments. Why? Because we haven’t done it yet. Because we’re curious. Because pushing ourselves to the limit as a species is how we learn new things.
I suppose one can debate whether such large-scale curiosity is worth the money. But one can hardly question whether there’s new things to be learned by living on the moon, or whether the prospects are interesting or exciting for many people.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 10:05pm
It’s hard to think of a worse analogy than Columbus. Columbus “discovered” America; the Apollo program did not discover the moon, nor did it lead to colonization of the moon, nor does it have any commercial value. The science could be done at 1/10th the cost with unmanned probes.
Warren Platts
Sep 2 2020 at 9:38am
Scott, I’m beginning to understand how you feel when interlopers like me make comments about economics! 😉 The Moon has vast commercial value! As I mentioned above, there are potentially lucrative gold deposits where the gold is measured in kg/tonne versus single grams/ton these days on Earth. (I myself wrote the original paper on that here.)
More importantly, there is what is called the “tyranny of the rocket equation”. To get anywhere in space, you first need a positive change in velocity (delta v) and then you must slow down. To do this you have to burn rocket fuel. However, the fuel requirement increases exponentially with delta v. If you want to go 1 km/sec, your mass ratio ([payload + fuel]/payload) is ~1.3–not bad. But if you want to go 10 km/sec, your mass ratio is roughly ~13–it rapidly gets out of hand.
However, if you can refuel in space using locally produced propellant, you break the rocket equation in two. In the above example, if you can refuel, you can achieve 10 km/sec with a manageable mass ratio of ~3.5 for each leg.
Surprisingly, the Moon has quite a bit of economically recoverable water that can be converted into rocket propellant. (cf. MIT Tech Review here–note that the “NASA estimate of 600 million tonnes” of water ice is based on a spreadsheet error. The correct value is 6 billion tonnes.)
Bottom line: to put this in terms an economist can appreciate, the ultimate purpose of lunar exploration is neither because of the science, nor colonization, nor even to make money; rather the goal is to increase the net welfare of humanity by transforming the economy of Planet Earth from the current autarky into an open economy!
Brian
Sep 3 2020 at 11:09am
“the Apollo program did not discover the moon, nor did it lead to colonization of the moon, nor does it have any commercial value.”
If your argument is largely based on the idea that we will not establish a permanent presence on the moon in the future, your argument is almost certainly wrong. It is only a matter of time before permanent habitation of the moon begins.
Warren Platts is correct. The moon will be used as a convenient jumping-off point for space travel, both manned and unmanned. Even without the presence of water, the moon will serve as a place to slowly collect large amounts of material, which can then be efficiently sent into space because of the low gravity. Larger rockets with larger payloads can be set from there. There are many long-term advantages to using the moon, if we wish to expand our presence in space.
Jose Pablo
Sep 1 2020 at 6:20pm
“I can hardly think of anything less inspiring than a moon landing attempt in 2024”, … it can be even (far) worse: the attempt could fail.
Failing in an enterprise like this cannot be rule out. Can you imagine the impact of failing to land in the moon 55 years after the first successful landing?
Even worse, what if the Chinese 2024 attempt (let´s imagine there is one) is successful, while the American one is not?
Isn´t kind of asking your wife again to marry you 55 years later … and risking she, this time, says “no” to you and “yes” instead to your most hated co-worker? (whom you, unaware, invited to the “re-engagement” party)
And you would still have to pay for a very expensive “not-to-you-engagement” party!
The risk-reward trade-off seems a little bit unappealing to me.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 10:07pm
Yes, that would be even more depressing.
john hare
Sep 1 2020 at 6:45pm
Actually, the numbers for SLS are far worse than the article. The SLS is derived from the Ares V effort which as canceled before being immediately reincarnated by congress. Several billions there. Add in the Ares program to the ground equipment and the $9.1B about doubles. Plus the Orion capsule that carries a similar cost and $30B is quite nervous if not exceeded. And this is for a vehicle unable to actually get humans to the moon in the advertised single launch. Plus the landers and other Lunar required equipment start making it look like real money. (Dirksens) And all this for a vehicle that might eventually launch once per year.
And it is still worse than that. There was an architecture available near term that could have accomplished the purported missions by a decade ago if started in 2005 like the program of record for a fraction of the cost. In space rendezvous existing by Delta and Atlas vehicles with help from Antares and Falcon vehicles when they entered the field.
The point of the article is based on the pork bloated program of record that many of us think incapable of doing the mission. Speaking as a spaceflight fanatic, shut it down.
SLS and Orion are pork programs and are considered a criminal waste by those of us in the Alt-Space crowd.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 10:07pm
Thanks for that info.
mike shupp
Sep 1 2020 at 9:32pm
You ask “Are there any other high tech industries where there has been virtually no progress in 55 years?”
Well, yes. Supersonic commercial air transport comes to mind.
There’s oceanography and related matters. Deep sea exploration and marine fisheries haven’t changed much in a while. Sea bed mining and other schemes for extracting resources from sea water haven’t advanced much past the handwaving notions of 50 years ago. Nobody’s dreaming of undersea cities anymore. Most of the handful of underwater shelters built by Jacques Cousteau and others since the 1960s have been abandoned to the waters. Oil drilling might count as an exception, depending on how friendly one is toward British Petroleum. And I should note that libertarians speak a bit about sea steading, but this doesn’t seem to be on the immediate horizon.
Nuclear power plant technology hasn’t advanced much lately; in the USA people were complaining about stagnation in the field even before Three Mile Island came around, and a number of critics have kicked the Japanese power industry since for copying American designs. On paper, newer and better and maybe safer designs keep being developed — it’s one of Bill Gates’ interests — but regulatory agencies have been saying “No” for the past forty years. Not In American Back Yards, buddy!
Thanks to the oil business, deep drilling used to be a thing, and for a time visionary geologists dreamed to drilling a hole down to the Mohorovicic discontinuity. thirty miles down, where the earth’s crust meets the mantle — where this surface scum actually touches the REAL Planet Earth. There was talk of doing this back in the late 1950’s, as part of the IGY, but it never happened. The Soviets at some point dug down 8 kilometres or so; I don’t recall where or when, and I haven’t heard of anything deeper or more recent.
Then there’s nanotechnology, visualized by Richard Feynman in 1959, expounded since the mid 1980’s by Eric Drexler. The notion was that very small robot devices could be built which would build even smaller robots and so on … until these tiny machines were directly manipulating atoms or at least individual molecules, making possible all sorts of miracles. There actually is a Nano Institute somewhere in the US government which is supposed to be facilitating this marvelous future, but it’s been hard to see much evidence of it since the Reagan era. Maybe we just need really small, really powerful magnifying lenses.
Finally, fifty years ago science journalists were publishing articles about self-driven trucks and automobiles, just like the ones in science fiction stories, which were coming along Real Soon Now. Didn’t happen, as we know — I think there were some legal problems associated with who would bear responsibility for accidents, drivers or manufacturers? And yet, the silly old idea’s still being kicked around.
Scott Sumner
Sep 1 2020 at 10:06pm
Good points.
Brett
Sep 1 2020 at 11:45pm
Cost killed civilian supersonic air travel more than anything else. Even aside from the noise complaint issues, the reason why we didn’t have decent-sized trans-oceanic fleets of supersonic air transports is because they’re much more expensive to design and fuel compared to subsonic planes. Once airlines figured out how to do on-flight internet and fully reclining seats in business class (so that business travelers could catch red-eye flights and sleep, and be on time to their meetings the next day at the destination), what was left of the supersonic air travel market opportunity disappeared.
Same for nuclear plants. Safety isn’t really the issue – it’s the upfront cost and time to build them (even assuming no delays) that is the problem. New plants can’t really run profitably and pay down the debt necessary to build them at the price of the electricity they sell (and the small reactor designs are actually worse on the cost-per-kilowatt-hour metric than the big ones). That’s the case even with subsidies and special liability protection in the US.
Self-driving cars seem to have gone through the Peak of Inflated Expectations on the Hype Cycle back in 2018. Now we’re in the Trough of Disillusionment, with maybe a few companies climbing back out with trucks designed to drive themselves on highways and so forth.
Alan Goldhammer
Sep 2 2020 at 9:01am
Until somebody figures out a way to violate the basic laws of physics and get interplanetary vehicles up to “warp speed” there really is not a point in carrying out this manned/womaned space research.
Warren Platts
Sep 2 2020 at 9:43am
Back in the days of wooden ships and iron men, sea voyages were measured in terms of years. Yet that did not stop them.
Capt. J Parker
Sep 2 2020 at 11:24am
For a long time NASA has believed that in order to secure continued funding from congress it needed to do manned missions because the public (and hence congress) wasn’t much interested in robotic space exploration. If NASA’s singular mission was to generate scientific knowledge then a manned mission to anywhere is a waste of money. But, if your goal is to generate a funding stream then a manned mission is money well spent – From NASA’s perspective anyway, assuming that NASA’s belief that funding depends on manned missions is correct.
Private sector efforts like the SpaceX mission to ISS, complete with Hollywood style space suits , would seem to validate NASA’s assumption of the importance of manned missions to secure funding even if the funding source is from private interests and not government. Perhaps in the marketplace of scientific exploration manned space missions are no more dispensable than are marketing or industrial design activities in the marketplace for consumer goods.
So, if you acknowledge that you need to deal with how resources get allocated for space exploration, rather than treat the allocation of those resources as a given, you might conclude that a government funded space exploration economy that mandated no manned missions might have the appearance of being more efficient but, in the end, similar to other socialist endeavors, might result in less output of scientific knowledge overall.
Warren Platts
Sep 2 2020 at 12:44pm
Respectfully disagree. Just look at the comments here: lots of people don’t care about crewed exploration. They think it’s a waste of money. Even during the height of the Apollo program, polls showed that half of Americans thought it was a waste of money. The attitude at the time was well-encapsulated by Gil Scott Heron’s proto-rap tune, “A rat just done bit my sister Nell, and Whitey’s on the Moon…”
The way NASA gets its money is by having research centers spread out in Congressional districts all over the country. Then the representatives of those districts make darned sure that the $$$ keep flowing to their districts. SLS is a prime example of a jobs program that keeps rocket engineers busy in Houston and Huntsville. Actually flying said rockets is of secondary importance. But hey, keeping a supply of such uniquely talented people gainfully employed is not worth nothing!
john hare
Sep 3 2020 at 4:19am
The way NASA gets its money is by having research centers spread out in Congressional districts all over the country. Then the representatives of those districts make darned sure that the $$$ keep flowing to their districts. SLS is a prime example of a jobs program that keeps rocket engineers busy in Houston and Huntsville. Actually flying said rockets is of secondary importance. But hey, keeping a supply of such uniquely talented people gainfully employed is not worth nothing!
Keeping a large supply of uniquely talented people occupied with a negative sum jobs program at high cost is destructive of national wealth. I happen to believe that manned spaceflight is of supreme importance to the human race in the long run. SLS does not contribute to that in either the short or long term.
Capt. J Parker
Sep 3 2020 at 9:56am
Mr. Platts,
You are welcome to disagree with the belief that NASA needs to promote manned missions to secure funding and you may well be correct. But the fact that NASA does in fact promote manned missions to secure public support and funding is well established. It remains to be seen if robotic missions can generate the same buzz as manned missions. I doubt they can. NASA has been at the PR game from its beginning. They may have learned a few things.
Austin Vernon
Sep 2 2020 at 4:02pm
Trying to develop space vehicles on a cost-plus basis, which is how the SLS contract is structured, is a horrible waste of money.
On the other hand, fixed-priced commercial contracts for Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew have been enormously successful. They are allowing private companies like SpaceX to learn and invest in future products of increasing capability.
If you wonder what someone like Jeff Bezos is thinking about in building Blue Origin, try reading The High Frontier by Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill lays out the physics and math showing that if you can escape the tyranny of Earth’s gravity well, there is a lot of possibility. Jeff was a student of Dr. O’Neill at Princeton.
Space is going to be the new frontier.
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