NASA Watch quotes from a TV interview with Barack Obama:
“I’ve got a strong belief in NASA and the process of space exploration. I do think that our program has been stuck for a while – that the space shuttle mission did not inspire the imagination of the public – that much of the experimentation that was done could have been conducted not necessarily with manned flights. I think that broadening our horizons – and looking at a combination of both unmanned satellites of the sort that we saw with the Jupiter launch – but also looking at where we can start planning for potential manned flights. I think that is something that I’m excited about and could be part of a broader strategy for science and technology investment … The only thing I want to say is that I want to do a thorough review because some of these programs may not be moving in the right direction and I want to make sure that NASA spending is a little more coherent than it has been over the last several years.”
It would be good to have a President who understood the difference in science payoff between manned and unmanned spaceflight. The former is exciting and inspirational, the latter gets enormously greater results per dollar. The Bush administration, with their magical ability to screw up everything they touch, has been killing off science at NASA in favor of a misguided Moon/Mars initiative (despite public apathy). But the situation is not hopeless. The way we fund science in this country is completely irrational, starting up a ten-year project one year and canceling it (leaving international partners high and dry) the next. The good news is that we can use such capriciousness to our advantage, pulling the plug from expensive boondoggles that were initiated for political reasons rather than scientific ones. I would rather have a thoughtful system of setting research priorities and a track record of commitment to long-term projects, but you go to war with the army you have.
To try putting this discussion in a larger context;
If half as much attention was paid to the potential side effects of the melt down of a derivatives and credit market that is many times the size of the world economy as has been put into global warming, the level of public consternation would be quite high. What if those little pieces of plastic just don’t work anymore?
Paul Volcker was credited with bringing the last round of stagflation under control with higher interest rates, but the logic of reducing an oversupply of cash by causing a recession that reduced demand for it eludes me. The ballooning deficit spending of the time seems the more likely cure. Inflation was blamed on those wanting more money and cured by borrowing from those with more then they needed. Neat trick. So this house of cards has really been building since the sixties.
The reason no one takes the time to think these things through, is that no one is being paid to, since those running the show don’t really want it looked at.
My guess is that a lot more PhD’s are going to be wondering why their particular little niche dried up, before this is all over.
After the dust settles, maybe we will start treating the monetary system as a form of public utility, like roads. Rights and responsibilities have to remain in balance.
Ryan (#20) — The Moon/Mars initiative has certainly been taking away money from science. Neal Lane has said that, at meetings between Congress and OMB, money was slashed not only from NASA science but also from NSF to help fund Moon/Mars.
Peter (#25) — Obama does think that cutting Fermilab’s budget was a mistake.
Sean,
I see nowhere in that letter he cosigned any acknowledgment that he and his staff made a mistake in not fighting the cuts made to the HEP budget by the Congress in the omnibus legislation. It’s a letter to the Bush administration, with no reference in it to decisions made by him or anyone else in Congress. A lot more effective and convincing would have been a letter saying “I and my colleagues in Congress really screwed up at the last moment under time-pressure and made a big mistake. Here’s how we suggest fixing it by reallocating FY2008 funds from X to stop the layoffs at Fermilab, and we are asking you to support the legislation we are introducing to do this.”
As we saw this past year, publicly saying you support large budget increases for science is meaningless if when push comes to shove, it’s low down on your list of priorities and you sign off on cutting it to fund other things more important to you. This is what happened last year, and there is nothing in what you link to that gives any assurance the same thing won’t happen this year.
Scott (#5) said:
“the solution seems clear: the scientific community needs to come up with some national objective that really would best be achieved by astronauts — for which trying to do the same thing with unmanned spacecraft would be an expensive, irrational boondoggle — and then present its case to Congress in a clear and compelling way.”
I think that’s the strategy behind pushing for the Vision for Space Exploration to be redirected from Moon/Mars to exploring and understanding potentially threatening near-Earth objects (NEOs).
Adequately protecting the Earth from asteroid and comet strikes probably will require manned missions to NEOs. An added bonus is the eventual hope of developing ways to mine these objects for valuable resources.
I am in 110% agreement with this post. High-cost, low-payoff manned space flight is a travesty of ill-considered national “pride”. It needs to be excised from the research body, and privatized by leaner and meaner entrepreneurs, who know damn well that manned space flight, for the foreseeable future, will provide humanity with little more than entertainment.
Policy makers often look at what a science or technology is going to accomplish for the nation. Particle physics got its “boost phase,” to use a space rocket term, from the atomic bomb. For better or worse the atomic bomb was a big payoff that physics delivered to the federal government. Back in the 50’s it became known that the proton was composed of constituents because of its magnetic moment. There was some idea that maybe the proton could be “split” and energy released. The dream of getting more out of E = mc^2 played loudly then. Of course now we know that protons can’t be split and that particle physics is largely an energy sink. You throw lots of energy into slamming protons and antiprotons together to get measurements of the high energy excited states produced.
The sciences which have had given paydirt of late have been with solid state physics, genetics and molecular biology, laser physics, and the like. Particle physics has yet to deliver up the Higgs particle, which will probably contribute … well the Higgs particle. Of course there is the argument for the intellecual value that knowing the structure of matter and energy brings. Yet that does not motivate most people who are decision makers who look at balance sheets. It also has to be noted that such people can often spend money on things that in a few days cost as much as a year’s operating budget for FNAL, such as this dang Iraq war. A science is likely to keep its gravy train filled if it can produce something which sits on a Wal*Mart shelf, becomes an ARMY issue, a hospital device, keeps the transmission lines running, or produces food. A science which after decades of expensive effort fails to do this is simply headed for trouble. It might sound unfair, but hey! who ever said the world is fair?
Maybe look at it this way. I just heard a report that the outsourcing of jobs has doubled since 2004. So with the European LHC the US is doing the most American of things: Particle physics is being outsourced. Get used to it.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Lawrence,
Bravo!
To think that physics needs a reality check! The world turns.
The Bush administration, with their magical ability to screw up everything they touch, has been killing off science at NASA in favor of a misguided Moon/Mars initiative (despite public apathy).
I don’t believe this particular screwing up was accidental. What programs at NASA have been cut or postponed because the Moon/Mars effort is eating all the money? Climate studies satellites.
Interesting point on the climate studies satellites – the most promising one was the Deep Space Observatory (originally called Triana, then DSCOVR), to be positioned at L1 where it would have a continuous view of the sun and the sunlit face of the planet.
The amazing thing here is that the satellite is built and ready for launch, but no funds were forthcoming. The estimated cost for launch? Free! The Ukrainian government offered to launch DSCOVR for free – and NASA turned them down!
Then, in the last years of the previous Congress, over half a billion dollars was stripped from the NASA budget. NASA cited this as the reason for cancellation of the project. Why say no to a free launch on a reliable rocket?
By comparison, the budget for the International Space Station from 1995-2005 was ~$25 billion, excluding the cost of all shuttle flights.
The whole situation mirrors the recent changes in NASA’s stated goals, which are stated at: http://www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/what_does_nasa_do.html
“NASA’s mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”
That is the new statement, which used to read, “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers…”
(From http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/science/22nasa.html)
The real question is what NASA’s mission statement will be in any future administration.
Just wanted to say I followed your link here from Shakesville since it dealt with a candidate and NASA issues one of the folks over at the PowerWatchers forum talks about occasionally. I’m not a scientist myself, but the NASA program is very important to me. In the mid-90s I got to read all the Spinoff publications as they came through my publishing office and was amazed at the number of products and technologies NASA research led to. I don’t think a lot of people realize this — especially since Spinoff is no longer made, perhaps because funding problems have caused fewer technological improvements and breakthroughs? — and hope we get a government in 2008 that really pushes NASA the money and builds the excitement to get back on track.
Thanks for an interesting read!
What do we need astronauts doing on earth? What kinda of statement is that? Astronauts should be doing what their name implies, not merely talking to grade-school kids at museums.
NASA hasn’t picked up any of the pure science missions in the last two years, leaving many scientists unemployed! And manned missions? Since it’s just been an unfunded mandate to go to the moon and mars, we don’t have a spacecraft, we don’t have a mission to do there, and we have expenses… But no results, yes.
Without forward thinking funding for manned missions, NASA can’t expand its targets at all. Only humans can do detailed geology and extraction on the Moon and Mars. What takes a rover days to try to take a picture of would take an astronaut minutes to examine and process and ready for return to Earth.
The risk is a stupid worry. There’s probably thousands of people, scientists, even, who’d give their lives to go to Mars.
…Also, I feel foolish typing in a thread that ends on April 1st.
John Merryman on Mar 3rd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Lawrence,
Bravo!
To think that physics needs a reality check! The world turns.
———–
We might also say the stomach turns as well. Particle physics is entering into a position similar to the arts, and I mean the fine arts that require patronage. Without that the fine arts would dry up and we’d only hear country music, angry heavy metal bands and rap. Oh boy, wouldn’t that be special?! Unless some possibilities that quark-gluon plasma/condensates and their duality to black holes give us unimaginable energy sources, or the Higgs turns out to be a matter to energy catalyst or … , particle physics will be high brow aspect of physics that struggles as a high dollar version of general relativity. Physics departments do in some cases have their token GR guy who is a bit off in their intellectual corner, crowded out by the solid state and laser physics groups who have all the money
As for space and it possible near term future resource we might want to look at a “massless resource.” Already the business of space is with communications, which is massless. I’d say that if there is a future economic frontier in space it is with solar power satellites. The resource is massless, and there is no cost is hefting minerals back to Earth. In geostationary orbits these could radiate solar energy back in microwaves which are received and the EM fields “transformed” for grid transmission. Who knows, for deployment and intermitent maintenance there might be need for short duration manned missions.
Minerals from space will not happen soon. Consider that a 3000 ton rocket was used to return a few hundred pounds of lunar rocks. Review the rocket equation!
$latex
v~=~Vtimes ln(m/M),
$
v = final velocity, m = payload mass, M = initial rocket mass and V = rocket plume velocity. That logarithm is a killer.
Politics is often motivated by what I call FGHI, fear, greed, hate and ignorance. The Republican party has a pretty good hold on all four of these. When it comes to ignorance the GOP with its religious-theocratic wing wants to promote bronze age mythologies about the nature of the world. So space science that aims to unravel the nature of the big bang doesn’t register well on their radar. Also global warming is not good for business for many of their patrons, in particular the oil companies. So dropping programs for Earth sensing helps put that issue “outta sight, outta mind.” Whether the Democrats rectify this situation is anyone’s guess. Remember, the Democrats are beholden to the same corporate patrons the GOP is. At least they are not the same pack of complete psychopaths.
George Bush learned geopolitics by playing the Milton Bradley game “Risk.” He sees the world in these elementary terms, and I suppose he really thinks we can start colonizing space. I find it amazing that this nation put such a goof-ball idiot in the Whitehouse, along with the mafia of psychopathic dunces that surround him.
Lawrence B. Crowell
opps, the rocket equation should read
$latex
v~=~Vtimes ln(M/m)
$
Uh, well, the missions are thought out, that’s how we got to the Moon to begin with. It all comes down to funding, and the acquisition of those funds. The point of NASA at its advent was to beat the Russians to technology that could put us on the moon. Done.
What the focus now is what to do with the organization we had for that single mission. Either extend its applications to something along the lines of government funded scientific research, experimentation, and application in a general sense– with each specific department (high energy, aero/astrophysics, observation, exploration, engineering, genetics, nanotechnology, food science, geology, etc.) submitting an annual report to a committee (like Congress) that reviews the statements, and direct funds proportionately– OR– privatize.
The only way technology gets off the ground, either physically or ideologically, is money. How do you channel funds? Public/Private organizations/donations. You want more money for the space program? Send in a tax deductible donation. Rather have government spending on high energy physics? Send in a tax deductible donation. Or, rally enough public support, kind of like a Presidential election, and get funding. Make the research you want done known, and get the money that way.
People don’t want to pick what to fund, they just want the government to do it. Therein lies the problem. We have so much we could be funding, so much we could actually get done when we channel our focus (and money), but we end up with a bunch of half-assed research from half-assed funding in a plethora of different disciplines because we don’t. Democracy becomes a big “Here, take my money, you deal with it,” when one has been around long enough. As long as people aren’t bitching about where their money is going, it’ll keep being spread like too much butter on too much bread, and you’ll never have a decent bite.
Wayne
That first line was for Crissa, not you Lawrence.
Another point, we’ve reached the apex of this country’s capacity for putting ‘things’ in space, from here on out its an international effort or a waste of time. Pool resources, get something done. Spread global resources out over 10 different international space agencies trying to get to the Moon and you’ll have 10 shoddy Moon bases, 10 shoddy flags, and a lot of nothing practical to say for it (except of course that each of those countries would have their own version of “That’s one small step for a man…” in each language respectively).
Wayne
Lawrence,
Some of us like country music….and rap…as well as rock, classical and jazz.
e.
Paraphrasing some of the above, going to Mars in the near term is too hard (read expensive and dangerous) in light of incentives to go there. However, we probably will see a need for space travel in the far future (say 10^8 years, or maybe a lot sooner) when the neighborhood goes to hell. Assuming the race survives, there’s plenty of time to develop many imagined and unimagined space drives (think Alcubiere). Known physics ought to give us antimatter propulsion (and maybe Bussard drive) in a few decades, and that would make interplanetary (and maybe a start at interstellar) travel actually practical.
Should human space travel research be kept alive until good propulsion is developed? Yes, if we can do so without doing crazy stunts like a manned Mars trip now appears to be. How about ROV or AI Mars trips? Send robots to prepare the way for humans, who could come when it’s not a multiyear adventure with no hope of rescue or even help when things go wrong. Apollo was less extreme, and then our incentive was powerful, and we were young and foolish and had the best people and the enthusiastic backing of the whole free world. Even then, the program was cut short and there was a huge sigh of relief that things had gone so well.
“Known physics ought to give us antimatter propulsion (and maybe Bussard drive) in a few decades”
Known physics won’t even give us a cost-effective replacement for burning coal in the next few decades.
Lawrence,
You have fallen into the trap of distinguishing government as separate from the people. Think about that. Where I’m from, Baltimore, the sort of people who like fine arts, tend to also donate lots of money to it, as well as any number of other purposes, so that the local symphony receives some public funding isn’t a big deal. That many of the other forms of music you mention are best appreciated through an alcoholic haze might reflect on the fact that a lot of their funding is generally channeled through the sale of alcohol.
The people who call themselves conservative these days are not real conservatives, in the sense of adhering to some stable civil philosophy that balances rights and responsibilities. Government is the essence of real conservatism. A nation without a government would be like having a body without a central nervous system. It’s called a vegetable. Which explains the organizational abilities of our current administration.
John Merryman on Mar 3rd, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Lawrence,
You have fallen into the trap of distinguishing government as separate from the people.
——————-
Our current President has been hard at work for over seven years to do just this.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Lab Lemming on Mar 3rd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
“Known physics ought to give us antimatter propulsion (and maybe Bussard drive) in a few decades”
Known physics won’t even give us a cost-effective replacement for burning coal in the next few decades.
—————–
Sadly this may be the case. A replacement for oil is a tough call as well. It is impossible to know what the future holds, but right now there seem to be serious barriers to our progress along these lines.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Lawrence,
It was Reagan who verbalized it, with, “Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.” But even Carter ran as an outsider, coming to clean up Washington, so the problem runs deep. Relations between people and their government have been an issue throughout history. The reason we keep trying to improve them and not get rid of them is because the alternative is worse. All I can say for Bush is that he provides the opportunity for a fresh start, since he has mortally wounded the financial underpinnings of this current order.
Won’t Bill Foster help FermiLab?
Obama endorsed him:
http://www.foster08.com/
http://www.foster08.com/2007/12/meet_bill_foste.html
Melusine,
Since Foster is the Democrat running in a special election against a Republican, it’s not exactly surprising that Obama endorsed him and not his opponent, and says nothing about Obama’s interest in Fermilab.
If Foster wins, that should help Fermilab, since at least they will have one person in Congress who is willing to fight a cut in their budget. It would be helpful if it were a prominent Senator like Obama, but lacking that, a Representative who has just managed to take a fairly safe seat away from the Republicans might be the next best thing…
Peter,
I think it’s safe to say that many politicians don’t deeply understand the importance of FermiLab and the like. Poll people around Chicago and many probably won’t even know FermiLab exists. Whoever said particle physics is becoming like some esoteric field along the lines of the fine arts, is probably correct. It’s up to Foster and others to sell it. (I can’t even get my father to look at the stars, and he’s no dummy.) It’s just not going to impress like a cancer cure.
But like Wayne said, and Obama has said in a recent speech, there’s a lot of chaff to cut out: grants for studies on female orgasms and the like – c’mon, I think people can figure that out for themselves. (: