I should have qualified that last part. That DOD needs the giant budget it gets. Wasteful spending is a hallmark of the DOD, billions are wasted every year on programs that have shown little utility on the actual battlefield. The DODs ability to move from the Cold War stalemate to a 21st century warfare environment has proved poor, and that’s being generous.

I think your wrong, there is absolutely no way the Bush administration could have justified the astronomical (pun intended) amounts of money to be spent in Iraq if it were spent on other things. Only pointless war could ever attract that amount of spending. But if your so sure that it would have been spent elsewhere, then what would be so wrong about giving some of it to NASA? Space exploration is like rock climbing, it shouldn’t be done with equipment simply because it was the cheapest available that fit within budget. If we can’t afford it we shouldn’t do it, though I suspect we could easily afford it if we would prioritize better.

The problem with people who think that NASA money is a waste is that many of them don’t actually realize the tiny amount of the federal budget NASA consumes. You give it a rest, find a necessary war we have fought since 1945. DODs necessity is a myth, like the myth that NASA spends huge chunks of the budget.

“Radwaste” is my job. I will assume you have one, because you are posting here, but I must also assume that it has nothing to do with Federal funding or politics.

In the meantime, when you merely feed people who are unemployed, you get more unemployed people. Look around and count the project housing. Has it gone down? No.

Since Apollo was quit, different forces are at work producing the rich, the poor and the in-between. What Apollo and similar projects do is inspire people to be other than a simple wage earner. That’s the value of manned missions: showing people what can be done. Alas, most of the things the Apollo astronauts were doing remains a mystery to apathetic Americans, clamoring yet again to know what a politician can do for them.

[[The pols just lined their pockets, putting people working on Apollo out of a job to feed people who wouldn’t get one.]]

Yeah, right, Rad, all those unemployed people were unemployed because they wanted to be.

Have you ever considered trying to live in the real world?

While the DoD gets most of the criticism for its size, the DoHHS (Health and Human Services, the “welfare” department, formerly HUD) is more than half of the national budget all by itself. It spends more than twice NASA’s annual budget EVERY DAY.

I use this to counter the “starving people” argument. If NASA’s entire budget was cancelled and put into HHS, it couldn’t even be measured.

Remember, too, that a large chunk of the DoD budget is R&D, and a lot of that technology filters into civilian space programs (the HST optics owe a lot to some PR satellites of the ’70s) and eventually into consumer items and medical treatments.

- Jack

The first is the result of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s work on that disaster (you can Google for the Board’s report, and it’s in Barnes & Noble and Amazon). NASA crippled itself by not determining what the end use of the funding it received would actually be. Apparently, depending on the fiscal year, “use it or lose it” fundraising produced an environment with dozens of projects underway that had no hope of reaching space. Thus, the National Vision for Manned Space Flight. As Roger Tetrault said in his visit to Savannah River Site (producer of the isotopes for Cassini’s RTGs), “I don’t care if you agree with the ‘vision’, it’s important that we have one.” This is because it establishes a purpose for any funding.

The second is that if you really, really want to free up funding for your project, you should get it from assorted other Federal agencies, like HUD, not the DoD. Check their budgets. When Edmund Muskie and fans gutted Apollo with visions of starving Americans, the result was abandoned hardware for complete missions through Apollo 20 or so and the exodus of enthusiasts in the space business (can you imagine Gene Kranz or Kurt Debus on vacation over the Valentine weekend while Columbia’s wing was holed? Not me. But I guess that’s because I went to school with the sons and daughters of KSC ground crews).

And we still have starving Americans. The pols just lined their pockets, putting people working on Apollo out of a job to feed people who wouldn’t get one.

Back to the future of manned space flight: don’t forget that many of the costs may be reduced with automation there, too. The Russians did nicely with Buran.

NASA also got a big boost from the Cold War grandstand stunt to get to the Moon before the USSR. Most likely thanks to von Braun again.

NASA isn’t the only government agency to suffer this problem. DoD has it a bad case of it too. A large part of the problem is in the way government funding works. A situation will continue until the Congress starts demanding real accounting and accountability. However, the fact remains that overruns are convenient on so many levels. The contractor gets more money; the bureaucrats can use it to justify asking for more money (more money means more power and status in the bureaucratic world); and the congressman can promote a pet project for only X dollars knowing full well that is only a quarter of the real cost. The real nightmare of the bureaucrat is underrun! Of course, overrunning is publicly “abhorred” by all

NASA’s continued commitment to astronomy is encouraging. Public funding can be fickle, though. Keep your fingers crossed.

I am so sick of NASA not having enough money, if we had spent even a tiny fraction of the money we spent on Iraq on NASA they would have more than enough money. The United States is super lame, no sense of priority whatsoever.

Welcome to democracy. Keep in mind there are many who think the money spent on NASA is a total waste when there are so many needy. As an institution, DoD will always be with us and will always get the lion’s share because far more people accept its necessity. If it wasn’t spending money on Iraq it just would be spend it elsewhere. Give it a rest.

Thanks for the tip on the book Jennifer!

The book is a sardonically funny description of just what exactly goes wrong in all those aerospace programs — in other words, how NOT to run military R&D. There are also charts and statistics to back everything up. One of the topics is overruns, and the data used suggests that before 1983, only 10% of programs met their estimated costs. Want an 80% chance of not going over? You need to double the budget.

This means, of course that one in five programs spend twice as much money as they expected. Granted, this was written twenty-five years ago, but I’d like to know how true it remains…

“It turns out, according to Marcus Vitrivious Pollio, the architect and engineer, that the ancient ancestral law in the Greek city of Ephesus demanded engineers to file a formal cost estimate with the magistrate prior to initiating work on a public project. If the work was completed for the specified amount, the engineer was rewarded with decrees and marks of honor. An overrun of up to one-fourth was financed by the treasury without the imposition of penalty. But excesses over one-fourth were drawn from the engineer’s personal property which had to be pledged as security at the time of response to the RFP (Request for Proposal). As seen from figure 3, were such a practice to be reinstated some 25 centuries later, approximately 55 percent of the engineers would be spending their nights on the steps of the Parthenon.”

Augustine’s Third Law, AKA the Law of Apocalyptic Costing:

“Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.”

Of course, its much better to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on killing each other than it is to actually, say, advance our civilization. Here’s to more astronauts being strapped to underfunded ICBMs and blasted into space to perform underfunded missions. Space travel: on sale this week at Wal-Mart, prices still dropping.

I’d love to be there, but can’t. So I live vicariously through your postings.