occidental
Registered Senior Member
Could you please post a link to the "actual figures" the DOD came up with?
A cut too far.
- Thread starter Trippy
- Start date
Could you please post a link to the "actual figures" the DOD came up with?
Billions of US tax dollars go to waste every year growing corn in Nebraska so they can convert it into ethanol, while burning even more fuel during the manufacturing and shipping than what they get back in ethanol at the end. The money would be better spent by converting the dollar bills into urinal cakes. Why don't you tell those farmers to "go find a better way" to piss US tax dollars down the drain, instead of saying that to a bunch of NASA scientists and engineers when you don't even damn well know what those scientists and engineers are doing in the first place, nor why they're doing it?
Yeah, Trippy is right. We need to rename this thing the "James Webb Communist Crusher" looking for WMD's on Mars, and that might hold the public's attention span for enough seconds to get the money.
occidental
Registered Senior Member
Still waiting for the link to the DOD's "actual figures" on the cost of air conditioning.
You do realize that the guy who came up with this claim, Steven Anderson is now in the private sector, selling technologies branded as energy-efficient to the Defense Department.
LOL
As NPR said themselves:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning
LOL
As NPR said themselves:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/25/137414737/among-the-costs-of-war-20b-in-air-conditioning
How about some evidence that a dramatically reduced telescope will be deployable in the near term, substantially less expensive than the current proposal, and that it will meet the astrophysical community's scientific goals for the coming decades?
I didn't know the whole process involved getting thousands of highly trained scientists, engineers and theoreticians to study things, determine avenues for future study, design an experiment to explore some of those avenues, and finally pass it on to a frigging bureaucrat with a cigar who then tells them "I think you can fulfill your scientific goals on 60% of your proposed budget and a dramatically less capable design. You eggheads are smart, I bet you can find a way, especially if I threaten to scrap the whole project."
I didn't know the whole process involved getting thousands of highly trained scientists, engineers and theoreticians to study things, determine avenues for future study, design an experiment to explore some of those avenues, and finally pass it on to a frigging bureaucrat with a cigar who then tells them "I think you can fulfill your scientific goals on 60% of your proposed budget and a dramatically less capable design. You eggheads are smart, I bet you can find a way, especially if I threaten to scrap the whole project."
More Urban Legend.
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/hof/HofJuly07.html
Could these be the SAME NASA scientists who screwed up the Hubble Mirror?
So yeah, I'm reasonably up on what they are doing and why and also know about their track record:
Or how about the recent Genesis Probe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhCrOdbOUkY
The parachute didn't open because the gravity sensor which was supposed to sense the braking effect of the atmosphere was mounted upside down.
Or one of their more recent Telescope endeavors:
So in light of all this, why don't you tell me what you think the dollar return on the Space Telescope is and how assured you are that we will get ANY return on our investment?
Choose either the Hubble or the new JWST.
Give me ONE SOLID EXAMPLE of how the Hubble has improved the health, safety or well being of the average US citizen.
What scientific advance has it led to that has made any difference at all to the lives of the average US citizen?
The public's attention isn't the issue.
We have a representative government and the decision to cancel came after a serious review of the program (see previous link to the report).
There is no way to rationally put a "value" to many of these programs, and a program like that, that advances our understanding of the Universe (which I think is COOL and love to read about as well) is STILL not time critical to our annual budgetary cost of running the US government.
If it was your home budget, and you had to restrict your spending, and you had to decide over Food, Clothing, Doctor bills, repairs and maint, education and retirement or a telescope 100 times better than the one you already had, after the company making it for you jacked the price over 400% from what it was orginally priced at and told you though they promised it for your son's 10th Birthday party (next year) that indeed it would have to be a Graduation present 7 years from now (maybe) and that if it was destroyed during shipping (a real possibility) you would still have to pay for it, wouldn't you cut back on that far in the future, big, risky and hugely more expensive new telescope till your budget improved?
Arthur
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occidental
Registered Senior Member
Great. Now could you please provide a link to the dod's "actual figures" that you claim "quickly showed he was wrong"
Nice, you cited a report from a state university intimately tied to the corn ethanol industry. Well here's a quote from the same report:
I have seen plenty of estimates that at worst, corn ethanol wastes more gasoline than it produces, and at best, it adds an enormous amount of monetary waste and pollution to produce only about 33% more gasoline than what the process consumes in the first place. Nearly double the pollution, possibly more than double the production cost, and what does it gain besides votes?
I see, your argument seems to be that unless it generates an immediate profit, it's not really worth anything. Well guess what? Billions of people around the world waste their money on things like Harry Potter novels, going to war over fake pretenses, and promoting factless superstitions. Billions of people around the world also believe it's worthwhile to conduct scientific investigations to understand how our universe works, even if it doesn't actually give us a way to crush communists.
If you don't want to fund something you don't find profitable or worthwhile, that's totally fine, and I'm sure plenty of others feel the same way about many of your own pet causes. But to step in there and tell the eggheads they can do whatever it is they want to do with a reduced scope and a lower budget, because you've just got this hunch... Give me a break, dude. I don't pretend to know what they really need or what improvements could be made on the existing proposals- those decisions are made by the top experts in the field, not bureaucrats stumping for votes.
You would have a perfectly sound point, except for the fact that this is not how the US government operates, nor any other government I know of. Of all the things they could do to cut expenses and fix the economy, like not bailing out failed Wall Street tycoons, they decide it would be more wise to cut billions of dollars from the space program, cut back on the jobs and motivations for Americans to acquire technical and scientific know-how, and outsource more of their future scientific endeavours to the Chinese.
Why don't they just shut down every military project that's ever had a cost overrun, since apparently these scenarios are to be avoided under all circumstances? The F-16 still works great, why not just stick with that rather than some stealth or drone fighter which could be decades away from actual operation? I can understand if they feel NASA has gone well beyond the scope and budget that it initially committed to, and that this might not be the best time to continue with this project, but it's frankly quite insulting to pretend that the US government is axing this specific program out of a general, across-the-board concern for fiscal responsibility. Sheesh!
So?
Show where the data is wrong, not the source of it.
It reduces CO2 produced from our transportation system.
A lot of people think that's worth doing even if the net energy gain was zero.
Not at all, but it does make it DISCRETIONARY spending. I'm all in favor of committing a reasonable amount of our budget to discretionary spending in the Sciences.
Between NASA, NOAA, DOE, NSF etc we spend a LOT of money on pure science.
Indeed, we spend FAR more on NASA per person than the EU does on the ESA.
Not bureaucrats stumping for votes at all and not done on a hunch either. They did a very long, indepth study on it (see previous link) to come to the conclusion that it was going to take far more money and far more time than NASA was claiming just last year. So it got axed because this discretionary project was WAY over budget and WAY over schedule. Indeed, to complete the project now, would take MORE money and MORE time than they thought it would take when they started it 9 years ago.
BS, in this TOUGH economic time they cut NASA's funding but 10%.
BUT, because there are no shuttle launches during the next fiscal year (~4 @ $500 million per) NASA actually has a bit more to spend this year than last.
Why don't they just shut down every military project that's ever had a cost overrun, since apparently these scenarios are to be avoided under all circumstances? The F-16 still works great, why not just stick with that rather than some stealth or drone fighter which could be decades away from actual operation? I can understand if they feel NASA has gone well beyond the scope and budget that it initially committed to, and that this might not be the best time to continue with this project, but it's frankly quite insulting to pretend that the US government is axing this specific program out of a general, across-the-board concern for fiscal responsibility. Sheesh!
They do cut military projects that have this LARGE of cost overruns/delays.
This think is costing FOUR times what they originally claimed and taking a decade longer, few pentagon programs get that far in the hole, and ones that do, probably should be cut.
But each program has to be looked on it's merits, you just don't like the fact that they cut this project but you haven't given one reason why we need to fund this bloated and mismanaged project this year.
Arthur
If you ever worked for a government program, the nit picking of office politics tend to rule the roost. It is not about efficiency and ingenuity, but more about constant foot dragging defensiveness needed to maintain political favor for promotions. It is always safer to maintain the inefficiencies that work, than to attempt an unknown change that might pay off. That uncertainty of even good change is a threat to prestige/position, causing long winded defensiveness to result.
I like the idea of reducing the budgets, so the old and inefficient ways can't function. The only time the poliitcs will be put aside is during emergencies. Necessity will result in altering the direction of the political paranoia. During emergencies it goes from top to bottom, with bottom needing to act. During peace is it bottom to top, with bottom trying to look pretty for promotion; no risk means not mistake.
I remember working on a large project at the R&D level. There was a risk to try the concept in the field, even though the payoff was high and the necessity was going to happen sometime in the future. In typical political paranoia style (look good) the fear of the unknown and being partially accountable if it doesn't work out, resulted in the R&D limbo; pleasant words that kill.
As fate would have it, a local newpaper ran a story about the pollution problem that I was trying to solve. The crap hit the fan, much earlier than anyone expected, so there was an emergency situtation due to an EPA verdit. Now the necessity got kicked to the top, with the big guy needing resolution to the problem. Although the same foot dragging began to occur, to proect prestige, the nature of the fear changed, where doing the same or nothing, was worse than trying anything new. Afte than meeting I was allowed to by-pass the snail paced political system and get the operation going in weeks with very little budget needed. Normally you can't do that, since that would be too efficient and makes the system look incompetent and wasteful. It all worked out with politics figuring out how to come out as the smelling clean.
I like the idea of a major budget emgency, but across the board. I assume there are competent people who can take advantage of the dog and pony politics having to step aside and lend support to efficency. But you need to thin the herd at the top since too many chiefs, foot dragging, only works in a wasteful environment.
I like the idea of reducing the budgets, so the old and inefficient ways can't function. The only time the poliitcs will be put aside is during emergencies. Necessity will result in altering the direction of the political paranoia. During emergencies it goes from top to bottom, with bottom needing to act. During peace is it bottom to top, with bottom trying to look pretty for promotion; no risk means not mistake.
I remember working on a large project at the R&D level. There was a risk to try the concept in the field, even though the payoff was high and the necessity was going to happen sometime in the future. In typical political paranoia style (look good) the fear of the unknown and being partially accountable if it doesn't work out, resulted in the R&D limbo; pleasant words that kill.
As fate would have it, a local newpaper ran a story about the pollution problem that I was trying to solve. The crap hit the fan, much earlier than anyone expected, so there was an emergency situtation due to an EPA verdit. Now the necessity got kicked to the top, with the big guy needing resolution to the problem. Although the same foot dragging began to occur, to proect prestige, the nature of the fear changed, where doing the same or nothing, was worse than trying anything new. Afte than meeting I was allowed to by-pass the snail paced political system and get the operation going in weeks with very little budget needed. Normally you can't do that, since that would be too efficient and makes the system look incompetent and wasteful. It all worked out with politics figuring out how to come out as the smelling clean.
I like the idea of a major budget emgency, but across the board. I assume there are competent people who can take advantage of the dog and pony politics having to step aside and lend support to efficency. But you need to thin the herd at the top since too many chiefs, foot dragging, only works in a wasteful environment.
I've worked for the government twice in my life. Once in the military and another time as a plumber. When working as a plumber for the government the people in charge were always finding ways to take whatever funding was available for raises for the employees and giving it to themselves. I've seen the middle managers take ALL of the money allocated to raises and increase their own salaries and leave nothing for those at the bottom of the workers there. This type of misappropriations isn't a very good way to show that you want to help those that are working hard everyday for those in charge but only want to push them down and have no respect for them. I found it very difficult to work for these people and quit after my 3RD year at the place and am very happy that I did. Those who remained there were still used and abused by the managers and had to put up with it because of the length of time they already had invested for retirement.
If you're going to cite some of NASA's recent failures, how about citing some of their successes as well - for example the Epoxi mission, and the MER's (Spirit and Opportunity).
As for this...
In fact, here's five.
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/345977main_Hubble_Flyer.pdf
Better, cheaper computers.
Better, more efficient medical technology.
As for this...
Sure.
In fact, here's five.
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/345977main_Hubble_Flyer.pdf
Better, cheaper computers.
Better, more efficient medical technology.
The public's attention is precisely the issue.
A telescope, incidentally, that you've already decided to retire, that might have as little as three years worth of operational life left to it, and which, even if you did change your mind, you've retired the one space vehicle that you have that's capable of servicing it... :shrug:
A telescope, incidentally, which was also launched over budget and late (2.5B on initial projections of 400M, 7 years late), and was also threatened by congress cutbacks.
A telescope, incidentally, which was also meant to be available to amature astronomers but that part of the program had to be ditched due to, you guessed it, budgetary constraints.
As far as the mirror goes, that was Perkin-Elmer's screwup, not NASA's, NASA's main responsibility in that instance was a lack of oversight of what their contractors were doing, even then, back to the mid eighties, there are reports, by NASA questioning Perkin-Elmer's competence in the matter.
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Maybe, since the JWST wasn't ever going to return any need optical pictures like the Hubble did that made people go OOOH and AWWW, though they had no idea WTF they were looking at.
It would cost a friggin fortune to keep running that's why because the Shuttle's mission, to build the Space Station is complete.
The last repair mission for the Hubble cost a Billion dollars, but since we don't need the Shuttle for routine supply to the Space Station and it's too expensive to keep ready for just servicing the Hubble, it's 30 year run is over.
Don't you hate budget constraints?
Don't you wish we had money to do everything everyone wanted to do?
Doesn't matter.
Just goes to show that the JWST is NOT a sure thing even if we spent the money and time to launch it.
As to the MINOR spin offs that Hubble helped with, they hardly make up for the enormous cost of Hubble, nor were any of them really not going to happen anyways they were all just slight advances in existing technology.
As of 2007:
I'm curious though.
The ESA budget is 1/4th the size of NASA's so why are you ragging on the US for not spending money when ESA spends so little for space exploration?
http://www.spacenews.com/civil/110121-esa-budget-rises.html
Arthur
And if you want to get in to a pissing contest over European's riding on American coat tails, let's talk about INTEGRAl, XMM-Newton, Herschel, Cluster, GOCE, Envisat, Cryosat 2, all of which are ESA missions, for which ESA footed most of the bill, but from which the American public, and American scientists have benefited - seeing as how that's so important.
And while we're at it, let's take a moment to stop and consider the Deep Space Network - an international collaboration without which NASA missions wouldn't be worth jack shit.
So piss all you want, just try not to get your shoes wet.
And while we're at it, let's take a moment to stop and consider the Deep Space Network - an international collaboration without which NASA missions wouldn't be worth jack shit.
So piss all you want, just try not to get your shoes wet.
You missed the point.
I didn't say ESA didn't do good missions.
They do, so does NASA.
(my pointing out the failed NASA missions was just to point out that nothing is for certain in the space business, we could spend all that time and money on the JWST and STILL get nothing for it)
But still it's 4 Billion for ESA vs 16 Billion for NASA, but you are saying we need to spend more.
It sucks that they are cancelling the telescope.
BUT - right now we have to do stuff like that. Right now we are almost fifteen TRILLION dollars in the hole. And we're in that position because every voter, politician, company and special interest out there wanted just two billion, twenty billion, a hundred billion for their own special project. And in general it's not because people are trying to defraud anyone else - they just feel very strongly that THEIR expenditure is worth it.
In this case I think the Webb telescope is worth the money, too. But we can't afford it right now. After we cancel this (and many, many other programs) and pay down the debt, then I'd be all for reinstating it.
What, ostenssibly, is a Senators Job, Arthur?
Beside the point I was making - you're the one that bought the Hubble into it.
See though, that's th thing. It's there.
It's just the killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq is a higher priority - how much is being spent there?.
They're cutting 1.6 Billion dollars from NASA, forcing them to shut down the JWST, meanwhile, for example, spending 11.4 Billion on the F-35, which is behind schedule, and over budget.
Or, how about the Virginia class submarine, again, which is over budget, which is getting an extra 1.1 Billion dollars spent on it - what's being cut from NASA's budget is less than the cost of one of these.
Bull.
Yes, that's it. Dismiss less invasive surgery techniques as being minor.
You asked for one benefit for the US public, I gave you five.
You mean the same ESA on which the US is now reliant to get supplies and equipment up to the ISS?
Maybe the real question you need to be asking is why American companies are so inept at getting things done on time and to cost. Maybe that's your answer right there, maybe European companies are simply more efficiently run than American companies.
It's the US congress that I'm ragging on, because as far as I'm concerned, canning the JWST is absurdly short sighted. Actually, it's not even the congress, specifically, that I'm ragging on (or, for that matter that anyone else in this thread has been ragging on). It's the sidelining of Science in favour of War mongering that I'm ragging on.
Because I don't see the ESA canning major projects (If I did, I assure you, I would rag on them just as happily).
Because each ESA nation also maintains its own individual space program.
Because although (to use one example) the French are spending 2/3rds as much money per person on Space exploration (CNES spending, they're also spending half as much money in their military (so they're budgeting more science dollars for every military dollar than the US is).
Because (again) to use one example, the total French space exploration budget constitutes 0.5% of the French Governments total expenditure - which is comparable to NASA's proportion of the Federal budget.
Because the French budget for space exploration includes development of the Ariane 6 Heavy Lift which will directly benefit the US and NASA as well as the ESA.
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No, I didn't.
That wasn't the point I was making.
Perhaps if American's were less phobic of federal oversight of private projects, it wouldn't have happened, because that is, in essence, what we're talking about.
I'm saying you need to finish the JWST, as for the rest of this - see my next post. The French spend Less on space, but they also spend less over all, so the French space exploration budget constitutes the same proportion of their Total expenditure on space exploration as the NASA budget does of the Federal budget.
You complain about 10 Billion having been spent on Hubble, and yet 3 Trillion have been spent on Iraq and Afghanistan.
You complain about spending an extra 1.6 Billion on the JWST over the next 12 months, and yet you spend 15 Billion on Energy alone for the military.
The 2010 FY US DOD budget was signed into law at 680 Billion - 16 Billion more than Obama asked for - That's the entirety of NASA's budget.
In the FY 2012 budget, US DOD spending has increased to 707.5 Billion USD.
So, since 2009 DOD expedniture has increased 40Billion USD, or 6.4% and they're begrudging NASA 1.6 Billion dollars to finish a telescope.
Meanwhile, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost 900 Billion USD, and there's a bill before the house of represntatives requesting a supplemenatl 37 Billion dollars to spend in that theater.
Which goes back to my original point - If the US was genuine about reducing debt, then there are better places to look for money than cutting science, however, making war is easier than doing science.