1. SpaceShipOne barely merits description as a spaceship. Flying an airplane to 2000-3000 mph and then pointing the nose up and coasting is old tech.

2. The shuttle that NASA wanted was rather different than the one NASA was directed to fly, and that had little, if anything, to do with the Pentagon’s need to launch reconnaissance satellites. NASA wanted a fully recoverable two-stage vehicle, about the size of a 747. Neither Congress nor the Nixon Administration could stomach the cost. Basically, NASA was given a dollar figure and told to come up with a shuttle to match. The design did include accommodations to the Pentagon’s needs, but Dod is not responsible for the Shutle’s compromised design.

Human spaceflight will really begin when we realize that real spaceflight begins and ends at LEO. Getting to and from LEO is an unfortunate necessity.

Many of the people on this board were not born when man last walked on the moon, and the space shuttle is a lumbering white elephant because of the capacity to launch spy satilites that the military demanded, then refused to use.

Don’t get me started. We’re reaching the end of the fiscal year at the school and just as they had to do at uni when I was there, everyone is scrambling to use up their budgets. Any surplus and you 1) have to pay it back, 2) will get that amount less next year.

It’s ludicrous! How can anyone think this is a good way of managing reasearch and education?!

Let’s be honest, the space program exists because the U.S. military built the launch capability that the US space program needs. No argument you can come up with would ever have allowed NASA to convince the short sighted and self centered American public to spend billions developing the launch capability NASA has today thanks to the military. We very likely never would have made it to the moon without military backing of the early space program. Hubble never would have made it into orbit without the military backed launch capability we have. The shuttle would be far smaller and far less capable, if it even existed at all, without the military backing that went into its original production. Without the US military, Spaceship One just might be the greatest US space launch accomplishment. Spaceship One was a great accomplishment for private industry launch capability, but I for one am glad that we’ve done better than that so far.

I know many of you won’t agree with this, but think about it and do a little research on the history of US and world space launch capability. Make sure you know how we’ve managed to get as far as we have so far.

I agree, although I’d add that NASA didn’t really have a blank check in the Apollo heyday. Even while its budget grew during the late 1960′s real constraints existed.

The primary difference between NASA then and NASA for the rest of its existence is that the President gave NASA a directive — to travel to a specific destination within a specific timespan — that had broad political support throught the nation. NASA’s role was to fulfill a mission that was created and assigned to it from outside the agency.

Following Apollo’s demise, no President has provided similar leadership for NASA. The agency has been burdened by wishy-washy goals that no longer involve actually travelling much of anywhere in space. It has spent much of the last 30 years repeatedly doing what it has already done. No wonder public and political support has eroded.

NASA needs a mission and that mission must come as a directive from the President. In the 1960′s, its mission was to go to the Moon. (Go on the street today and ask people what NASA’s mission is.) A President must be willing to lend his his or her commitment and prestige to a project, generating public and political support for NASA.

I.e., NASA must been seen as an agency carrying out the will of the nation. We’ll go to Mars when our leaders generate and sustain that will, not before.

People talk about how much NASA has fallen since Apollo, yet don’t seem to talk about how NASA was given free-reign and blank-checks back then to do whatever was necessary. And it was also allowed to fail. Three astronauts died in a fire on the ground, and the program kept racing forward. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it would never happen now. You cannot simultaneously tell an agency that it has to live within constrained budgets and also rake them over the coals over any kind of failure or cost overrun. If you push engineers to do a normally expensive job for less money, you have to accept risk. Both technical risk (failure) and programmatic risk (overruns).

When you squeeze budgets more and more, people get pressured to underbid projects – often without even realizing it. High-return projects with a reasonable chance of success cost what they cost. I believe the problem has more to do with expecting an agency to do those kinds of missions for unreasonably low price-tags than with NASA not knowing how to manage its budgets. In Stern’s NASA, projects would get pressured into tighter and tighter cost constraints. They would bid high-risk missions for lower price-tags. Some of them would succeed. Many of them would fail. Many of them would overrun. And Stern would blame it all on the projects themselves, never on his own unrealistic expectations.

The point has also been made that those managers who are involved in projects that over-run are not held accountable.

However, no-one has yet mentioned the sunk-cost fallacy (although one commenter may have vaguely alluded to it). Take the scenario of Mars Science Laboratory (which I think someone mentioned but I can’t now find the comment), with its over-run of goodness knows how much. Apparently, it was judged at one point better to spend an additional $200 million than to scrap a project that had already cost $1.8 billion.

This is a classic example of the sunk-cost fallacy. The question should not be “how much have we already spent?” because this money is gone, spent, and ain’t coming back. The question should be “what are we going to get for our $200 million?”. Only thus can a rational decision be made about whether or not to spend that money on that project.

However, the sunk-cost fallacy is often ignored, because the public perception of a scrapped project is that it is a waste of money. So it is “better” to scrap a project that has barely got started than to scrap a project that has cost $1.8 billion (or whatever). However, the logical way to look at the decision is to consider what each project offers to give you for your $200 million.

Apparently, humans are the only animals ever recorded to fall for the sunk-cost fallacy.

“It’s more than this world can possibly afford for at least the next 3 or 4 decades.”
If you consider it a valid “answer”, you are good material to be politician, lawyer or other liar in white collar.

Question was “What’s it cost to send a crew of six to Mars for a 6-month stay and then back to Earth?”. Answer. In 2008 dollars, not handwavy, murky remarks.

Then, cash will magically rain out of the sky on them . With zero accountability.

Fixed that for you.

Also agree that NASA needs, and should have more money.

Substantially less than it will cost to bail out Wall street.

Why not? They gave the financial institutions (i.e. crooks) 700 billion and counting with little or no oversight, why not NASA? Surely they are infinitely more deserving…!