/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.4372543]

/sci/, what the fuck is wrong with NASA? 90% of their activity seems to be "spend five years and five billion dollars on something, then cancel it and start over. Repeat until everyone is so sick of whatever you were trying to do they stop caring about getting it done. Anything that manages to actually get off the ground ends up costing at least ten times what they originally budgeted and took five times as long to finish. Why are they so god damned horrible at estimating how difficult it is to do something?
"That'll be $4.50. Your order will be up in ten minutes."

"Sorry sir, your hamburger is now going to take five hours to make and will cost you ninety dollars."

"We know you've been waiting six hours, but we decided it wasn't going to taste good enough so we cancelled it and planned to develop some kind of steak-based sandwich sometime next year. No, you still have to pay us for the ground beef we wasted in development."

[Anonymous No.4372548]

why don't you show them how it's done then, dumb faggot.

also look up sunk costs. if something is likely to fail there is no point in going through with it for the sake of going through with it.

[Anonymous No.4372550]

NASA only employs a bunch of bureaucrats nowadays. Their only goal is to occupy a position and receive money, they don't have the technical skill to develop anything and therefore just let projects go overbudget and overtime so they'll have an excuse to cut them.

NASA needs to be shut down, and some heads should roll for what happened.

[Bruised No.4372558]

What actually happens.

"I want a hamburger for $0.10 and I want it within 20 seconds"

"OK we'll see what we can do."

"What the fuck $4.50 bill? And it took 5 fucking minutes!"

[Anonymous No.4372562]

>>4372558
Still doesn't explain why NASA doesn't give a semi-accurate price/time estimate at the beginning.

[Anonymous No.4372569]

>>4372548
>>4372548
Start with what works and go from there. Wanna go to the moon? Start with a Saturn V. Replace the materials with modern ones. Replace and engines with modern ones. See how much weight you save. Alter the structure to allow for greater lift capacity at the same level of confidence.

Going from scratch to the Saturn V cost 45 billion in modern dollars. Improving on that design would cost a shitload less, and it would be better spent than the meaningless bullshit NASA spends its money on these days.

[Anonymous No.4372570]

NASA has no plan, basically.

in the sixties it was simple: "there's the moon, here's a blank check, start doing science, eggheads."

Don't worry, as soon as the Chinese plant their flag on the Moon it'll be space race part deux: electric boogaloo.

[Anonymous No.4372582]

>>4372570
I fuckin' doubt it. The private sector is already kicking the shit out of NASA when it comes to manned spaceflight, even though there's practically no profit in it. In thirty years NASA will be cancelling their fifth "get us back to the moon" project while a Virgin Galactic ticket to Mars costs less than a luxury sedan.

[Anonymous No.4372591]

NASA really lacks direction to be honest. Their plans are either opposed or unfunded by the white house so they end up investing their money into stupid shit that goes nowhere.

They have no short term goals ando road map for long term goals so they really don't know where they're going. I think politics has a bit too much to do with it seeing as the president has influence on their focus despite knowing nothing about NASA's research.

[Anonymous No.4372606]

>>4372591
What nasa wants to do: pure science
What everybody else wants nasa to do: FUCKING SPACE TRAVEL

NASA does its best spend to spend its money collecting volumes of climate and life-sciences research, and maybe launching a probe or two, as long they don't have to cut the telescope budget to do it.

Personally I would mandate that 90% of NASA funding must be used to directly develop and launch manned missions. If that requires nasa to do absolutely nothing else for ten years except design and test a Mars vehicle, then too fucking bad. Get it done.

[Anonymous No.4372611]

>>4372582
Actually there's massive profit to be made if private spaceflight is avaliable. Especially, you WILL get government contracts if you prove yourself.

[Anonymous No.4372612]

politics

[Anonymous No.4372615]

True, true. Why blame the agency when you can blame the politics? They're much easier targets and you're not wrong 85% of the time.

And to note: Bush's Constellation program whad a roadmap to Mars, starting with moon landings, and using a revamped Saturn V (the Ares launch vehicle). It was all bogged down due to some technical and directional arguments, and the white house unfunded it because of "What has NASA done for us lately?" attitude.

[Anonymous No.4372622]

NASA keeps hiring scientists when they should be hiring engineers.

Engineers are the guys who get people to the moon and shit done. Scientists are welfare whores and spend billions on the most stupid shit.

[Anonymous No.4372643]

>>4372622

Incoming shitstorm of butthurt scienticians

[Anonymous No.4372660]

1. Close down NASA
2. Reroute funding for NASA as grants for private companies
3. Companies build and innovate in a competitive environment for grant money
4. PROFIT... in space!

[Anonymous No.4372690]

Nasa tries to do 5 year projects on a budget that changes every 6 months or whenever the next election is up. So, they have to deal with 2 launch schedules: orbital and political.

The other large source of funding is private. But unless Nasa finds an asteroid made of cocaine, Wallstreet sees no immediate need to pursue space exploration.

The only way a permanent space presence is guaranteed is if you can produce a valuable good in space that you can't make on earth, or if space tourism catches on enough.

[Anonymous No.4372698]

nasa goes nowhere because they are government funded.

[Anonymous No.4372702]

>>4372660

Or alternatively:

>1. Close down NASA
>2. Reroute funding for NASA as grants for private companies
>3. CEOs cream off large salaries and embezzle funds while claiming their company is doing research but not sharing details because of 'corporate secrets
>4. Company goes bankrupt and the directors say "Oh well, sometimes things just don't work out"
>5. Execs trouser millions of dollars.
>6. LACK OF PROFIT......ON EARTH!

If you don't think this will happen, you're naive as fuck. Companies don't have to be successful for suits to pay themselves millions, and in fact, rarely are.

[Anonymous No.4372708]

>>4372660
>3. Companies build and innovate in a competitive environment for grant money
Corporations do short-term, silly things, because they have to please short-sighted, silly people.
You want high-altitude tourism? That can be done.
You want a space station, mars mission, moon colony, lagrange station, long-distance probes, space telescopes, observatories, or exploration? You need an entirely different plan.

>4. PROFIT... in space!
Well, a few _other_ people profit -- YOU are left sitting right where you are now, and still paying for it!

[Anonymous No.4372713]

The waste that people tolerate with NASA is uncalled for. The ISS is scheduled to burn up in the atmosphere, as was also done for Skylab and Mir. Didn't it cost something like $10000/kg just to launch all that hardware, never mind the cost of the hardware in the first place? The aerospace contractors are laughing themselves silly over our naivete.

SHUT. NASA. DOWN.

[Anonymous No.4372727]

>>4372702
This is actually how the military already operates. Companies like Northrop Grumman and Boeing design and promote new technology to receive government contracts.
>>4372708
>Corporations do short-term, silly things
There's a very simple solution for that which the US military already does with private companies; set the guidelines yourself. If the US military demands a new jet, companies will fund R&D for those, not other things as the military won't pay for them.

[Anonymous No.4372751]

>>4372713
Yeah, manned space and ISS are essentially a jobs program. Only military sats, comm sats, and earth observation are profitable.

Though without the military's need for heavy launch, we wouldn't have had the capability to do the Voyagers, Mars rovers, and other amazing science probes. We certainly wouldn't have funded big lifters just for science!

Honestly, NASA isn't that bad. Most of the budget does go to science. A bunch of the remainder IS going to commercial crew and ISS resupply, which is going to give us some great post-shuttle capability for modest investment. But then there's the Senate Launch System which is nothing but pork. Superheavy lift is sooo last century. The ISS has shown we can use existing launchers to assemble bigger missions in orbit. Propellant depots are where its at!

[Anonymous No.4372845]

What NASA needs to do is add some kind of manufacturing module to the ISS. We need to work out the problems involved in building stuff in space, and work out what kinds of things we can do up there that we can't do down here.

If it turns out that micro-gravity and a near vacuum makes it easy to build 10 terahertz processors, you can bet people will want to get a bigger presence up in space.

Also we need better launch systems. Trying to build more and more efficient rockets will only take us so far. We need horizontal-take-off-and-landing, launch from a aircraft, work into some kind of megastructure, anything that isn't the glorified fireworks we use currently.

[Anonymous No.4373422]

>>4372562
>astronomy
>semi-accurate price/time estimate at the beginning.

fucking lol'd

[Lunatic !!IE/X7lbCDOY No.4373442]

>>4372543
>>spend five years and five billion dollars on something, then cancel it and start over

Why? Because there is a 4 year political cycle and congress decided that they know how to build a rocket better than NASA does.

[Anonymous No.4373451]

>asteroid made of cocaine

FUND IT

[Anonymous No.4373667]

i fail to see the relevance between the expert renetry capsule and nasa?