Ah, Jay, but if you listen to the right people, that's simply explained: only the Giza pyramids were built by The Aliens/The Atlanteans/The Time-Travellers/Your Auntie Bertha, while the others are evidence of Mere Humans trying to learn to copy them. See, they're proof that ancient Egyptians couldn't have built such perfect structures, when they couldn't even copy them correctly.

That's why Orion's Belt doesn't have 70-some-odd stars in it, only three. No, wait, that's back'ards, ain't it? [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

The (the voices in my head can out-rant the voices in your head) Curtmudgeon

Or taxpayers just assume that every NASA mission costs a billion dollars or more. I've had a number of online discussions with people who talk about the "billions" wasted on the failed MPL and MCO missions without realizing that the two of them together cost about the same as Pathfinder (which in itself was much less than Mars Observer, which was much, much less than Viking).

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

You've also got to figure out at what point this ceases to be useful: it may be better to have ten Escorts than one Lexus, but you're probably better off having ten Escorts than fifteen Yugos. I think that's effectively where the recent Mars missions got into trouble.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

So when a mission costing "HUNDREDS" of millions of dollars goes bust, it's seems immesurably huge.

Yes, people have a hard time evaluating such immense budgets.

There is also a qualitative difference. Grab someone off the street and ask him which mission costs more: a Boeing 601HP communications satellite or the Mars Pathfinder. The answer will likely be the Mars Pathfinder, when in fact the Pathfinder mission cost about $150M while construction and launch of a Boeing 601HP costs between $175M and $250M depending on customer-specified configuration.

Because the Pathfinder mission is unique it receives more media coverage, and rightly so. But we tend to believe that one-of-a-kind things are inherently more expensive than a similar commercial product.

People often apply personal budget principles to national finance. That is, we start out with a fixed amount of money each month. We allocate that fixed amount with the idea that if there is a cost overrun in some area of our budget, it will have to be compensated for by subtracting funds from some other area. When it comes to national finance, we fund we believe is worthwhile to fund, to the extent we believe it's worthwhile. There isn't as much compensatory shifting of allocation. The U.S. doesn't have a fixed income.

The entire Apollo project is estimated to have cost $30G in 1970 dollars. By comparison, funding for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was on the order of $75G per year during that time. Social aid is generally held up as the natural opponent of space exploration, but if we had not decided to spend the $30G on Apollo, don't think that HEW would have received a $30G budget increase.

Consider also the visible effects of funding. An STS orbiter costs about $2G. If NASA wanted another orbiter, it would have a very hard time selling the need for it to the American public. That's mostly because the $2G is concentrated into a single piece of machinery not much bigger than a Boeing 737.

But if it were announced that HEW's budget has been increased from $75G to $77G, people would see the figure, nod their heads, and then turn to the sports page without another thought. Another sobering thought: the war on terrorism is estimated to be costing us a billion dollars a day. We spent half a space shuttle yesterday, and most of us probably don't know what was accomplished with that money.

Because NASA deals with single pieces of equipment with enormous price tags, the public perceives NASA's spending differently than it does other kinds of government spending.

Then there's the difference between the perception of success and the perception of failure. Mars Pathfinder was an enormous success. We cheered for a few weeks and then went back to watching sitcoms. We never really thought, "Wow, the did all that on only $150 million."

But when another $150 million spacecraft plows into the surface, we lament for years about how $150 million was wasted for want of a little testing.

It's all perception. Goldin didn't correctly anticipate how the public would react, nor did he anticipate the difficulty contractors would have translating the new paradigm into a mode of operation.

This is a problem even within NASA (as I know from personal experience). It's a lot easier to get a budget approved for something that costs a moderate amount per month for a long time than something that has a big initial cost but is a lot cheaper in the long run.

And a nit: the Pathfinder lander cost $150 million; the whole mission (including launch and operations) cost more like $265 million. Still a bargain, IMHO.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

You're suggesting NASA is more careless with it's failures than back then.

Closer, but not quite.

Every NASA mission, regardless of budget, carries a distinct chance of failure. Even a Lexus can break down. At a certain point it stops being a matter of funding and effort and starts looking like the inherent properties of any complex system.

You don't put all your eggs in one basket because if you drop the single basket you lose all your eggs. Goldin's idea was to put NASA's eggs into several baskets so that the loss of any one basket wouldn't disastrously affect the egg supply.

"Careless" isn't a word I would use for this. It implies that NASA is not interested in mission success. That's not precisely the idea. NASA accepts a greater probability of failure for each individual mission and compensates for it by placing less responsbility on each mission for the success of the entire program.

If you graph programmed reliability on the vertical of a graph and budget on the horizontal, the curve looks something like an inverse proportion, or similar to 1/x. (Reliability is probability of failure; low numbers are desired.) The point is that at the high end of the budget scale, huge additional expenditures buy only small increases in reliability.

The goal is to move the budget line back toward zero and find the ideal cost-benefit breakpoint. Scaling back accepted probability of failure from, say, p < 0.01 to p < 0.05 may reduce cost by half an order of magnitude. If by doing that you increase the number of possible missions from, say, three to 12, the overall reliability of the program (encompassing all missions) is increased.

(There are qualitative procedures for scaling back costs too, but I don't want to bog this down.)

In engineering-speke, this approach decouples the system. The failure of any one component (mission) is limited in how it can affect the system (exploration program). This is a desirable circumstance.

So where did it go wrong?

As I already explained, Goldin was not able to communicate to Congress and to the public what I've just explained. I'm sure he did the best he could, but some people just never get it. That's not necessarily Goldin's fault.

Second, moving the cost line on the graph until a suitable reliability is obtained doesn't translate well into the procedures of an aerospace corporation. They achieve reliability in their product by following procedures and employing processes they've spent years or decades developing. They've found a way to consistently produce good results, and that comes at a predictable cost.

When you tell them they have to meet the same goals with an order of magnitude less money and half the time, they have to come up with new processes. They can't usually just scale them down. If a design process takes ten engineers one month to do, you can't just assign one engineer to it and expect an answer in two weeks. You have to invent a new process that can produce a usable result in two man-weeks.

It can be done, but it cannot be done painlessly. Goldin did not anticipate this, either. He didn't fully realize that if you force the industry to reinvent itself, it will have to go through all those Apollo-era growing pains again. It was hard for smart people to do it back then, therefore it will be hard for smart people to do it now. That means the reliability curve flattens and his carefully established global reliability estimates are no longer valid. The probability of failure increases for each individual mission, and the probability of overall program success decreases.

Finally you have to consider the linearity of the system. This is another way of organizing systems so that component failure is contained and manageable. Mission planners didn't fully account for this when implementing Goldin's program, so there are nonlinear elements in the Mars exploration program, such as the shared communication system.

Unfortunately here's where you get to a catch-22. You can only linearize the system by enhancing each component, and that's contrary to the component design philosophy of "better, faster, cheaper". So again you have to find a happy medium and again that requires another iteration through the design paradigms which historically take years to complete a cycle.

It's not a matter of being careless. It's a matter of how you distribute your capacity to care. You concentrate your efforts on where it does the most good. The only hard part is trying to figure out where that is. We're witnessing NASA undergo that process of discovery, and unfortunately the fickle and impatient public isn't cutting them much slack.

This is a problem even within NASA (as I know from personal experience). It's a lot easier to get a budget approved for something that costs a moderate amount per month for a long time than something that has a big initial cost but is a lot cheaper in the long run.

NASA has matured into a federal agency. In the 1960s it was primarily an organization for engineers, managed by engineers or ex-engineers. Nowadays it's a government organization managed by accountants and bureaucrats.

Still a bargain, IMHO.

No question about that. It's difficult to get hard-and-fast cost estimates for the Boeing 601HP too. When you're spending that much money, Boeing doesn't necessarily want its future customers to know how much it either gouged or coddled its previous customers. They're surprisingly tight-lipped. And now they're pushing the 701 series, which I've heard has a spacecraft sticker price of about $300M.

Jay, you know plenty more about NASA than I do, so I guess my statements would be pointless. I'm not an engineer or a scientist; I just read astronomy books.

Jay, you know plenty more about NASA than I do, so I guess my statements would be pointless.

I don't think your statements are pointless. We may disagree on interpretation or some insignificant technical detail, but your opinion is just as worthy of being heard as mine is.

I hope you don't think I'm trying to swamp you into silence. I just get excited when someone demonstrates interest in things I know about. Engineers aren't invited to parties because system decoupling is not a fun topic of party conversation. So for the sake of social compatibility we spent a lot of time pretending to be interested in things that don't interest us. When someone implies that he's interested in the behavior of complex systems, that's an engineer's dream come true. Don't take it personally. I talk everyone's ear off.

I'm still willing to have my ears talked off. To everyone I know, my talking about the Moon, Apollo and engineering is about as welcome as a talk about Anthrax. It's a welcome change to be able to disapear into cyberspace for a couple of hours a night to discuss stuff I'm interested in, intsead of everyone else's problems of the day and how their kids are doing. Thanks for that, Jay.

4me currently I see the problem of having
to link thru a Lookup central for every
move on the BB Like post or jump
ITS just not right. Thats the only problem
I see left however. the EDIT Delete solved
many problems..now where was that post of mine with the NaSa link

<a name="20020130g"> page 20020130g
On 2002-01-29 18:33, johnwitts wrote: To: 4 IK 0 PAX
Well for me the tail goes to the Link
of the Video of the Lunar Landing Touchdown
Beginning with the Line "Drifting Right"
to the moment of contact.. as I recall
there was talk about dusk being kicked UP
and i recall watching the TV and wondering
How you get a landerr to drift right without
a cross wind.. I dont recall the shadows but I would calculate there should have been Earth Shine shadows visable at that camera angle

<a name="20020131a"> page name 20020131a
On 2002-01-30 23:49, HUb' wrote:
<a name="20020130H"> page 20020130H
Well? allright I admitt having trouble doing
THIS 1:First do this to link to your post:
2:<a name="hubspost">
3:Then put this link anywhere you want there to be a link to your post!
4:This is a link to my post!
5:There you go!
6: Now i need to finger in the.....
7:.........threadURL# 6:28 A.M. see line after next1
8:which right now i donno just a second "TRYING"
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/vi...0&51#20020131a

Jay -
I agree with “johnwitts” – While I am somewhat intimidated by the intellectual level of the discourse – I thoroughly enjoy the information. What I’m always amazed at is no mater how inane the start of these threads, they always seem to evolve into interesting discussions.

Just to weigh in on the actual cost vs. public perception issue – one of the biggest problems is that a lot of people don’t feel there is any benefit to the “masses” from the dollars expended by NASA. “Why waste all that money in space” (I hear it from my better half all the time!). Spending billions on pure intellectual research is seen as unnecessary and that is the way a lot of the big NASA projects are presented to the public – what good to the general public comes from Hubble, NEAR, Pathfinder, or the Space Station.

No matter how hard I try I can never win the argument that NASA money is well spent – I’m just the “space nut” who had his Dad get him out of bed to watch Mercury launches!!

Well, there are a lot of ways of responding to this, from pointing out that NASA doesn't spend a cent "in space" - it's all here on the ground - to the spinoffs to the pretty photographs.

However, my ultimate conclusion is along the lines of "Who wants to spend their entire life being practical?" If we can't dream and strive and expand our horizons, then what's the point of existing?

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I am in complete agreement with you on this, but the other side does have a good point. If a chunk of NASA money was spent on providing free medical care to low-income kids, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, either. As I see it, this oversimplifies the situation, but one must admit that such an argument does have some pretyy decent face value.

If a chunk of NASA money was spent on providing free medical care to low-income kids, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, either.

Yes, it is an oversimplification because it falls back into the "either-or" mindset which doesn't accurately describe national finance. You can explore the solar system and provide free medical care to low-income kids. It's a matter of the taxpayers deciding what they want to fund, not deciding how to apportion some fixed amount of money.

Well, there is the separate but related question about what the government should spend its money on. I could certainly understand a fellow taxpayer saying, "Well, if you want to spend your money on that, go right ahead, but don't make me spend my money on it." (Of course, I have my own list of government programs that I would rather not be contributing to.)

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Another example of specious reasoning: roughly the same amount is spent on NASA every year as Americans spend on their pets. Why not take that money and put it towards feeding the poor? Which is more important?


When people use this type of argument on me, I tell them that there is money enough to go around, if people stopped wasting it. The military's budget is quite a bit bigger than NASA's, so why not start there?

Alas, I don't think most people will ever be convinced of that, even if they are shown the published Federal Budget.

Does anyone still argue that humans should not go into space because it is somehow unnatural or against the will of some deity?