A cut too far.

LOL, RADAR was discovered accidentally but developed by DIRECTED research.
Nuclear weapons were developed by the largest directed research effort yet done at the time and "All the other toys", including Planes, and Carriers and submarines and weapons were developed by directed research.
Clearly there is a role for pure science but in general we get more bang for our buck with directed research.
More to the point, even in the pure sience world there are areas of research that are much more likely to have tangible value, like particle physics, but Astrophysics is not one of them.

Strawman.
I'm not against giving NASA money for projects, including pure science. This one is simply off the rails and is sucking money form other worthwhile projects.

Quit lying, I've made no such statement.

Why yes I do.
So you want to de-orbit the ISS?
What a fucking laugh.
We spent over $100 billion to build it, and it's just now ready to be used for what it was built for and you want to de-orbit it?
Get real.

BS
We are in for about 10% of its cost.

The Department of Energy will invest $450 million in services and goods for the Collider, while the National Science Foundation will contribute $81 million in services and goods. This is about 10% of the total cost of the Collider and detectors.

Our investment will enable about 25 percent of the U.S. experimental high energy physics community to take advantage of the unique research capabilities of the Collider
http://www.aps.org/units/dpf/governance/reports/lhc.cfm
http://newsline.linearcollider.org/readmore_20090108_ftr1.html

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Nope.
The last servicing was in 2009, the previous was in 2002, so we KNOW it will stay in orbit at, AT USABLE HEIGHTS, at least 7 years between missions.

More to the friggin point, the Hubble is 380 miles up, over 100 miles higher than the ISS, so NO, it's orbit will NOT degrade that far in just 2 years.

The batteries the shuttle replaced in 09 were 18 years old and it replaced all the Gyros, so it could easily last another decade. The article you referenced was about when they were thinking of bringing Hubble back to earth (to put in the Smithsonian), of course at the time they thought that the JWST was about to be launched. As of the 09 mission they knew that wasn't going to happen, hence the refurbishment of the telescope.

Arthur

 

Nope, I can't tell you what has to be done because NASA doesn't publish it, but I can tell you that NASA says there are 7 more years of work, which is nearly 50% of the time they have been working on it, so clearly it is not "mostly ready".

 

And no one would have had a clue where to direct the research, if a comprehensive and highly descriptive theory of electromagnetism hadn't been developed and explored in the decades prior. For that matter, we wouldn't even have radio, let alone radar. You can't just decide you want a new super death ray and then direct the research accordingly, you need some theory of how things actually work so you know what's worth even bothering to develop in the first place.

Quality airplanes wouldn't have been possible without substantial funding for theoretical and experimental research in fluid mechanics. Nuclear weapons wouldn't have been possible without substantial funds for the development of modern theoretical physics. Science doesn't just take wild leaps of faith hoping for a miracle breakthrough, you start by studying the problems which aren't well-understood, and then if a potentially useful application pops out of those studies, you can focus development in that area. If America had cut its funding for quantum physics research during the Great Depression, it's almost guaranteed someone else would have gained an insurmountable advantage in a massive range of technologies, nuclear weapons and electronics being just two of the more spectacular examples.

Particle physics is the area I'm personally specializing in, and I can tell you that aside from the stream of new technologies and capabilities we're constantly developing to perform our experiments, i.e. undirected spinoffs, the subject of the research itself does not presently indicate any potential changes in your everyday life. On the other hand, you give up research in particle physics and not only do you lose all the spinoffs, you might miss out on a potential breakthrough such as nuclear fusion (we still have lots of gaps in our theoretical understanding of nuclear reactions).

There's also the possibility of things like detecting and pinpointing nuclear reactors anywhere in the world by detecting the neutrinos they emit, applications to medical radiation therapies, and many other areas where you simply won't know the exact benefits until you actually try. Those areas need huge budgets, since we're well past the stage of tabletop experiments for the most part. With your attitude, none of these things would ever get done, because regardless of the economic climate there will always be other priorities for spending the money, and combative citizens who will scream increasingly louder and louder until their demands are met.

No, how about you get real for a change. You want to ditch a telescope that's half built and intended to fill a major gap in present capabilities because you don't want them to receive a few extra billion in funding, yet you're ok with a $100 billion jungle gym in space whose biggest return to date is proving to the Chinese that America's still ahead of them in the space race. How about you name some of the economic returns the world gets on this $100 billion investment, instead of asking for Hubble spinoffs? There is nothing the ISS can do for physics research which can't be done cheaper and more effectively on the Earth or using a small, specialized orbital apparatus, even when it comes to microgravity research.

If it's biomedical research, we're not going to build 100 000 space stations to supply worldwide demand for whatever it is they discover. Learning to live in space is only important for the few thousand people (at most) who will be spending time in it in it over the next century, and most of those people will only be there as low orbit tourists in any case. And again, if it's physics research, there's this thing experimental physicists tend to employ called ingenuity, which eliminates the need for a $100 billion orbiting junk pile. The ISS is there to satiate the Star Trek junkies and Ronny Raygun types, not to answer deep fundamental questions about the nature of our universe.

And hey, I didn't say de-orbit the ISS. I believe projects like JWST and ISS are all worthwhile endeavours even in times of recession, but in terms of scientific merit, the ISS will never hold a candle to the knowledge that would be gained from a new telescope with 100X the magnification/resolution.

You are aware that the LHC is one of the only remaining means of gaining new knowledge about particle physics, right? The Tevatron is done, it's like a black and white cathode ray television compared to the LHC's 80" plasma. There are a few alternative approaches still being utilized, but those projects have massive budgets all the same, and the data coming from the LHC will be by far the most detailed and important. And you only want America to have a 10% cut of the action? Goodbye dominance in the field of theoretical physics, and all the spinoffs it generates.

A drop in the bucket. Hopefully someone like France or China will step in to fill the gap- the progress of science should not be halted just because a nation which dominated its developments for 60 years decided to refocus its efforts on appeasing stupid, crazy, violent people who believe Saddam had nukes under his bed and that their own elected president was born outside the country.

Sugarcoating the reality. The reality is a major segment of the American particle physics community is being snubbed and placed at the bottom of the access priority list, and at the moment that's exactly where they deserve to be, because you gotta pay something in order to receive something.

 

But when thousands of other world scientists were using the Fermi Lab, they weren't put at the bottom or snubbed, so what makes anyone want to snup American scientists now? :shrug:

 

From boards like this one, but with more military types on it.

And yet you favor cutting defense before space telescopes.

That's the point. We're way beyond the point where no one has to get fucked. We are so far in the hole that EVERYONE is going to have to get fucked to avoid a much bigger fucking later.

This reminds me of an old Walter Matthau movie where Matthau, a trust fund baby, runs out of money and is going to have to give up his mansion, his limos etc etc. His butler tries to explain this to him:

"Sir, you have no more money."

"So sell some stocks or something."

"You have sold all your stocks."

"Well, get a loan for chrissakes."

"You have mortgaged this property to the hilt. All your cars were purchased via loans. You have no money. You are broke. You are destitute. You have nothing left to sell. You have no money to buy food, maintain your property or pay your staff, and I do hope you rectify that situation very soon."

That's the situation we're in now. And like that former millionaire who is now destitute, the last thing we need to be doing is spending money on optional programs, no matter how good intentioned.

You have several suggestions on how to save money. Great, implement them. Then, once we have the money to spend, launch that telescope. Until then, we're no better (and arguably a lot worse) than all the idiots who bought houses they couldn't afford, only to lose their homes and start a recession when they reneged on their loans.

 

The inefficiencies of government contractors is based on how the government works. Industry does not norally work that way within the free market. But if it gets a government contract, then compaiens need to act by the rules of their host. Waste is an important part of government culture, so when in Rome. It is only being polite.

Part of this waste philosophy has to do with unions. The union bosses are maximized if they have a lot of union members. Members means dues and more members means more dues. This money is leverage during negociations. The goal is to add as many people as possible.

This can be done effectively, by defining union job descriptions in a clever way. For example, if we have one guy whose job is to turn screws to the right, and another guy whose job is to turn the screw to left, we have two jobs and two people paying dues. Although one person can do both, that would mean loss of a job and the loss of dues, which is a double no-no for union bosses. If we can add another person whose job is to control the tool box 5hat houses the screw driver, that is another job and more dues. All hell breaks loose idf the left turner reaching into the tool box.

Slowing the pace of the job is also important to collecting dues. If someone works to fast, usually a newbie, they are told to slow down. It makes others look bad and may cause management take away the toolbox job when the contract is up. But more importantly, if you can stretch a two year job into three years, that means more manhours increasing dues by 50%. With $millios in hand you can make more jobs such as each draw in the tool box has its own person with a key.

There is also another side to the inefficiency, but at the management level. If I am not mistaken, some government contractors will get cost plus a certain percent to be there. Although this deal is not great in terms of free market profit margins, there is nevertheless a major hidden benefit that makes it worthwhile. That benefit had to do with the generation of ideas and inventions as a government contractor. The contractor gets first shot at the technology it invents and creates as the contractor, which is fair. With that in mind, such a contract is an investment in R&D, since it is a good way to make create corporate R&D savings, which could pay dividends down the line.

Boeing might try to a new wing design only to realize this has problems. This is good to know, before it goes into free market production of this idea for commerical airlines. The overrun will generate additional R&D savings, since a new wing design can also be tried. If you have 1000 engineering and scientists coming up with ideas, that is a lot of useful suggestions. It saves tons of money down the line, for commerical applications, but at the tax payer expense up front. But again the cost plus 10% is not all that great so you need to sweeten the pot in other ways.

 

It's a very simple principle- whoever pays for the project gets to choose the subject. Sure, a collaboration in Europe can decide to conduct an experiment, and then American scientists can sign on to contribute some of their own funds and expertise, but they won't get to influence the nature and scope of the project. If a team at U of Michigan wants to use a section of the LHC tunnel to conduct a certain experiment, but a team from Annecy (in France) wants to do something different with the same section, who do you think gets the priority?

I have a very hard time believing it was any different for the work conducted at Fermilab, but my brief searches haven't revealed any details about the annual funding contributions and where they came from, nor which universities headed what projects.

 

Right and that's why I said we need both.
However NOW (not back in the 1860s when Maxwell was coming up with the theory of Electromagnetism) the need for pure science is not as great as it once was, and with what we know there are HUGE opportunities for directed research to solve existing problems and in comparison the NEED for Astrophysics is negligable at best.

You go on and on about how much JWST will do for us and how little the ISS will do, then answer the question, what ONE benefit is the science of the JWST predicted to do to benefit us?

And that's the hilarious part.
Now I'm just a "combative citizen", but you think you are so much smarter you want to decide for me what I fuckin need and what my priorities should be.
Well sorry, but if you can't even justify to me why you want to spend my money (I pay a lot of taxes) then just STFU until you can at least articulate a justification.

Yup
Because they haven't met any of their deadlines or budgets and just a year ago they were so far off from the actual time to launch and budget to complete that Congress no longer believes they will even meet the 2018 launch date.

Well based on your calling the ISS nothing more than a Jungle Gym in space why should I pay any attention to any of your other moronic ramblings? You are obviously not up on what we are doing and now are just pontificating about what you are clueless about.

You LIE about what I post, I have the right to lie about what you post.

Talk about being inconsistant, just a few sentences ago it was a $100 billion orbiting junk pile

Make up your friggin mind.

BS, just total BS.
What critical piece of knowledge that enhanced humanity did we gain from the Hubble?

What's that I hear?
Crickets?

They have just finished building the ISS and so are moving on to the use of the Natl Space Laboratory.

Some INITIAL areas they are working on:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/487816main_10_09_22 ISS National Lab ProOrbis Reference Model.pdf

Yup

How did come to the conclusion that I was against funding the LHC?

A hundred nations are involved in the building of the LHC It was built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. so 10% seems a pretty big share to me.

 

Firstly, the theoretical research into electromagnetism didn't just end with Maxwell. Took a hell of a lot of additional scientists, mathematicians and delicate experiments to work out the fine details and apply the basic equations to all the different situations of real life. As for astrophysics, it's not critical, but particle physics wasn't critical 150 years ago either. It's not like they're asking for 5% of the national budget, it's one frigging telescope, and tons of investment and manufacturing have already gone into the thing.

What benefit is there to studying ancient Roman ruins? Do you think the interest in dinosaurs is towards building a real-life Jurassic Park? Some people are curious and don't like summary fairy tales and fibs being fed to them as explanations for how things came to be the way they are. If we didn't have hugely expensive telescopes like Hubble and enormous ground-based arrays, there really wouldn't be f*** all to study in astrophysics and cosmology, which means progress all but freezes for decades, unless other nations take over the lead.

A lot of new, unexpected effects were discovered in the last two decades from astronomical measurements, many of them involving Hubble itself, and we don't know what kinds of technological benefits might ultimately come from understanding the causes of these effects. Dark matter and dark energy ring a bell? If scientists never placed a premium on astronomy, we wouldn't have had the Galilean revolution in the first place.

Astrophysics also helps greatly with our understanding of nuclear physics and chemistry, because there are certain processes that are much easier to spot in a young galaxy or star as opposed to lab conditions on Earth. You won't know if you don't bother to look, and there should be a basic effort to cover the bases that can be covered when it can be afforded without bringing the country down.

No actually, I'm merely observing that the spending priorities of your government are being dictated by some very aggressive, combative voices and citizens. The kind who think their president got elected by a majority of the country, with all the requisite background checks performed by their most trusted officials, despite having an allegedly fake birth certificate to mask his foreign upbringing.

You can spend your money however you like, and other taxpayers should have an equal voice to how their own tax dollars are spent. Some people just happen to like pure science regardless of how many or how few species of bird it ends up driving to extinction, just for the sake of possessing the knowledge.

If you consider yourself a lover of pure science, or applied science, the ISS delivers little of either. You serve the country a whole lot more by teaching all the kids to whittle than you do by studying how to exercise and drink milkshakes in space (but who wouldn't want to know what to do if they were ever trapped on a space station in low Earth orbit?). It's all about the show business- look, humans in space using zero-gravity toilets! Lots of people are happy to spend a hundred billion on that, but not so much on understanding the birth of the known universe.

So in your supposed spirit of results-based decision making, why don't you tell me some of the benefits the world has seen for its $100 billion ISS investment? I don't see them anywhere, haven't heard much of anything about ISS except on slow news days at Discovery Channel.

The technical recommendation wasn't to completely scrap the program. Fire the managers who didn't do their jobs properly and discipline tardy contractors, but it's a bigger waste of money in the long term to mothball this thing. I pointed out major cost overruns with other major US projects, but that didn't/hasn't led to their cancellation, even though the true benefits haven't proven themselves worth the cost (for example: the B2 spirit has never even been tested in combat against a nation with advanced radar capabilities. It could be completely useless in the one area where it's needed the most).

Why don't you tell me how their activities up there benefit your everyday life, Arthur?

Well at least you're honest about your own part. Me, I just take your arguments to their logical conclusions. As to the ISS, I just said if you want practical bang for your buck, ISS isn't going to do it for you. At least JWST's development will have some major technological spinoffs relevant to what ordinary people actually need, on top of all the unpredictable discoveries whose practical consequences won't be understood until much later.

I did. JWST serves a vastly more useful scientific purpose, whereas manned space flight does not have any substantial practical benefit at this time and drives up the cost of space operations a tremendous amount. So go ahead and experiment with manned space flight so we can at least maintain some general progress in the field, but not at the expense of something with far greater scientific benefit that might not sound as cool to the layman.

Well it's a much more practical expenditure of resources for the sake of knowledge than all the money that's been spent on idols and temples to date.

Haha! I have to admit, I love your partisan punditry.

Yeah, for $100 billion I'm not terribly impressed. When you can give me an example of how it's made your life better or how I can expect it to make your life better, let me know.

I didn't. I concluded the US government isn't interested in providing the funds needed by the various universities to have a dominant role in the collaboration and its decisions and objectives. Also there was the previous, devastating cancellation of the SHSC.

Not when you consider that the EU as a collective is contributing a great deal more, the bulk of the remaining cost in fact. EU collaborations get priority over US collaborations, you get what you pay for.

 

Drug Design and Vaccine Development: Results indicate that the
microgravity environment facilitates an array of alterations in microbial gene expression which have been linked to pathogenicity of some bacteria. By examining the differences in gene expression of microbes grown in microgravity relative to the 1G environment of Earth, it is possible to identify the genes important for infection of the host. The ISS platform can uncover and accelerate new targets in organisms which can lead to the successful development of new vaccines or therapeutics. An example of this approach is currently in work for Salmonella and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria. The microgravity environment also facilitates better macromolecular crystal growth enabling crystals to grow larger with higher quality. This new, three-dimensional structure can lead to an enhanced ability to target drugs very specifically, which can minimize off-target side effects.
Research Possibilities: Development of accelerated vaccines or therapeutic development protocols which could be used to address issues such as pandemic illness.
Cell Lines: Research results indicate cells can exhibit large changes in gene expression as many genes are observed to be up or down regulated in their expression when exposed to microgravity. This altered gene expression may allow for the development of new varietals of plants and crops to suit environments previously considered hostile and to increase production and quality of product. This could be achieved by exposing cells to microgravity as a unique stressing factor that alters gene expression, which could encourage the change in characteristics desired. The acceleration of changes in plants could provide valuable survival tools for the future (disease and pest resistance; tolerance for temperature and moisture conditions).
Research Possibilities: Formulation of accelerated cultivar development protocols for plants that can be adapted to various environmental conditions. Material Science:
 External (exposure to extreme conditions): Research using the external platforms of ISS has been performed through a series of materials experiments known as the Materials on International Space Station Experiment (“MISSE”). The external platforms allow for the testing of combined environments at one time. The testing conditions include exposure to extreme heat and cold cycling, ultra-vacuum, atomic oxygen, and high energy radiation. Testing and qualification of materials exposed to these extreme conditions has provided data to enable the manufacturing of long-lived, reliable spacecraft and satellite components.
 Internal (exposure to microgravity): The absence of gravity leads to an absence of thermal convection, sedimentation, buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure and the gradients inherent in these one-G phenomena. It also reveals other mechanisms which would not be apparent under one-G conditions, such as Marangoni and capillary forces. Finally, it allows the measurement of critical thermo-physical properties that cannot be measured under one-G conditions. This research has lead to improved alloys of high-strength glassy metal materials which are now being used in consumer electronics applications.

 

Well thanks for copying and pasting straight from the report you already linked to. How do these purported benefits, at a price tag of $100 billion+, compare to the spinoffs cited by Hubble? You do realize that a poster can only fit a fraction of the info that a 100+ page report can include, right? You think Hubble only had 5 technological spinoffs?

Did you not notice that all these purported benefits are speculative? Even if microgravity lets scientists develop an improved protein of some sort, how the heck does that benefit the 99.99999% of us who get our proteins from places with gravity? You think your $100 billion is going to cure frigging cancer or something?

And again, you don't need humans to do a lot of these experiments. You can design little modules and machines to take care of the work as needed and launch those into space without having to bring gallons of liquefied potato chips along for the ride.

 

Nope!

Now that I agree with. During this time everyone is going to have to go a little hungry. We shouldn't be giving _anyone_ dessert.

Hmm. I have seen literally thousands of posts (and hundreds of news stories and political speeches) criticizing the amount of money we're spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I don't think that's correct.

============
Defense secretary announces billions in budget cuts
January 06, 2011
Charley Keyes, CNN Sr. National Security Producer

Defense Secretary Robert Gates staged a pre-emptive attack Thursday in Washington's looming budget battles, announcing cuts of $78 billion to the U.S. military and defense department, including reducing the size of the Army and Marine Corps.
=============
Defense secretary proposes cutting 124 F-35 purchases
Posted Thursday, Jan. 06, 2011 33 Comments Print Reprints
. . . .
At a Pentagon news briefing, Gates expressed serious concern about continued problems with the F-35B, the short-takeoff-vertical-landing model designed for the Marines.

The technically challenging aircraft "is experiencing significant testing problems." That, Gates said, "may lead to a redesign of the aircraft's structure and propulsion -- changes that could add yet more weight and more cost to an aircraft that has little capacity to absorb more of either."

The F-35B is "on the equivalent of a two-year probation," Gates said. "If we cannot fix this variant during this time frame ... then I believe it should be canceled."
=================

I agree. Military programs should face the same sort of axe that NASA is facing.

 

first off i think they cancelation of that tele is retarted! the only way we will ever know anything about the universe we live in is with telescopes as of now. its really a loss to mankind as a species if you ask me and the knowledge we could gain.

as for the AC number thats fucking idiotic. that would mean we spend over 54million a day! in AC alone and i dont even have to research that to know its a bullshit number