The Senate Launch System strikes again.
Now, it seems like even that might end up not happening. What a shitshow.
The US government has pivoted to animal husbandry of the populace through techno police state, and handing sycophants to power their own title, land and serfs
Your ex workers goto work whistling Star Trek TNG theme song?
Come on… the shit people believe? Some people just “believe” to make money but so many many more believe in American civil religion, or whatever stream of consciousness they simmered in early on.
I’m not hating. I’m saying direct experience is truth not our visual syntax. Still waiting for my nuclear powered… everything. Where’s my mini commuter helo and …etc etc etc
It’s a government job with extra steps. No hate. Good grift if you can get it.
That deadline is never going to hold - too many things are just nowhere near ready. By now, I expect NET 2030.
Exactly the opposite of what they should be funding..
Want to get paid, by the US Federal Government, for pursuing science or technology?
From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
This sounds like a joke, but it's 90+% real.
For years early in my career in applied math and computing, far and away the best parts, funding, technically advanced work, growth in expertise, and working conditions were on US military work, e.g.:
(1) The FFT (fast Fourier transform) and power spectral estimation (as in the book by Blackman and Tukey) for analyzing ocean audio, close to parts of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Also, the movie uses magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), and the specialty of the guy I was working for was MHD.
(2) Some optimization using Lagrangian relaxation for nuclear war.
(3) Given many ships at sea, some Red, some Blue, and some Blue submarines, war breaks out, and how long will the ships last, in particular, the Blue submarines? Sounds impossible or nearly so, but in WWII there were some cute derivations on search at sea and some Poisson process math by a guy Koopmans, and I did a little more on the math, in assembler wrote a random number generator starting with an Oak Ridge formula, and wrote some Monte Carlo code for the whole thing -- yes, used the speeds of the ships, their detection radii, and for each Red-Blue pair the probabilities of none die, one dies, the other dies, both die.
Surprisingly, a famous probability prof was flown in for a fast review. His remark was: "No way can your Monte Carlo fathom the huge sample space tree." Well, maybe, but so what?
"After some days, say 5, let X be the number of Blue submarines still alive. Then X is a random variable and is bounded, that is, is >= 0 and <= the finite number at the start. Then the law of large numbers applies, and can do 500 independent and identically distributed sample paths, add, divide by 500, and get the expected value for the 5 days, and each of the (times) days, within a gnats ass nearly all the time." The prof agreed but was offended by the gnats remark!
Sure, it was simple, but maybe not fully too simple -- was liked, passed the review, and helped my wife and I get our Ph.D degrees.
Also the military funding let me sit alone for some days learning PL/I that later, with a tricky feature of PL/I calling back into the stack of routines called but not yet returned, used to save IBM's AI product YES/L1! Ah, military worked again!
Ah, the military may (still) be interested in computer and communications security and reliability, system design and development methodology, system monitoring, and management, and now in AI, drones, etc. A commercial server farm or network doesn't expect to be attacked by long range missiles, but DOD systems have to be robust in a war!
Once I was at the David Taylor Model Basin (big tank of water to tow candidate ship hull designs), and they were seriously interested in the Navier-Stokes equations -- maybe they still are! Uh, do they have good solutions yet?
Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.
Just a reminder from 2012: [Neil deGrasse Tyson: Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degr...)
There's over a dozen! They're blatantly ripping off SpaceX, which is very smart and what everyone else should have been doing. It's absolutely insane that the US is going to throw another $10 or $30 billion at SLS. Our leaders will go on TV with a straight face and say "China competes unfairly, everything is state run!" but China is probably doing FIFTEEN reusable rocket projects for less than the amount of gov't money we're lighting on fire with SLS rocket to nowhere.
The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not.
As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
geuis•9h ago
Should be noted that many of NASA's programs are situated in predominantly conservative areas of the country. Brings lots of jobs and resources to the local economies.
BlackjackCF•9h ago
kelnos•3h ago
Iwan-Zotow•8h ago
With level of debt and borrowing, cannot afford more spending
mindslight•8h ago
mousethatroared•8h ago
clipsy•8h ago
mousethatroared•1h ago
readthenotes1•8h ago
Pushing the cost burden on subsequent generations is a cowardly way to deal with our financial problems. When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars).
The #4 cost currently is paying off interest (not principle) on old debt.
fn-mote•5h ago
I agree we are spending too much now, but the solution should not be to stop all spending.
The problem is deeper than just a deficit.
blitzar•4h ago
If the economy is in the shitter you are perfectly entitled to run a deficit.
sethammons•49m ago
Doing good? Pay down debts. Need a boost? Invest and incur debt. Where is the flaw?
msgodel•4h ago
mindslight•8h ago
mousethatroared•58m ago
Larrikin•8h ago
lumost•8h ago
It’s a policy choice that these returns are not taxed at comparable rates to income. The trend of nation-wide capital returns vs income is telling.
mousethatroared•53m ago
Instead of looking at where the tax revenues can come from, which I don't necessarily disagree consider what proportion of the nations economic activity is government spending.
I consider govt spending/GDP a much better indicator of economic health. In fact, tertiary_sector/GDP is better still.
The US government has too much presence in the economy and can't even provide health care and free tuition.
KPGv2•8h ago
It doesn't matter how much debt you have if taking on the debt raises your revenue by more than serving the interest payments.
Imagine telling a corporation they can't borrow money at 3% to grow 15% because "debt is bad." Or telling someone who needs a car to get to work that they should go without a car (and thus not become employed) rather than taking on a car payment because "debt is bad."
And on this front, the US has been doing great (but is currently shooting itself in the foot under the new administration)
unethical_ban•8h ago
hello_moto•8h ago
Their wealth grow unchecked depressing yours.
insane_dreamer•6h ago
but instead we're giving a massive tax break to rich people and increasing the military budget by $150B
somenameforme•8h ago
And mind you it's not some amazing technological marvel that's driving these ridiculous costs. It's essentially a really expensive refactoring of the Space Shuttle program to the point that it will be using the literally exact same rs-25 engines.
And you already hit exactly on why they're not being cancelled - there's going to be a very short degree of separation between Congressmen and the people charging absurd costs for simple tech that's being used in this project. To me, this is perhaps the purest embodiment (and reason) for governmental dysfunction, at all levels. It's simple pork and corruption.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•8h ago
Also, not to say it isn't a time to start acting, if we are another decade out still adding funding to SLS with the current balance sheet, we have major issues.
But $30B over 10Y isn't that crazy when we spend ~$900B a year (with much more in 2026) on defense.
somenameforme•8h ago
That's for a system that is aiming for an initial payload of 95k kg (to LEO). By contrast the Falcon Heavy costs $0.097 billion per launch and can send 57k kg to orbit. So in other words, 1 SLS launch will costs more than 25 Falcon Heavy launches, with a payload capacity that's 67% greater.
saulpw•8h ago
somenameforme•7h ago
riffraff•7h ago
I don't believe that likely, but it does seem like something similar is a good reason to keep options open.
zamadatix•5h ago
The two main stated aims of fostering competition are contingencies for any single provider and hopes that funding competition lowers cost in the long term (which is separate from preventing cost from going up). I used to be much more supportive of this policy... but nowadays I find myself on the fence. It's hard for me to believe however many billions of dollars we funnel into SLS per launch will ever result in cheap alternatives being developed. It may even have the opposite effect of "SLS got funded through all of its overruns on this policy, we should have no problems doing it again". On the contingency side it's a bit harder to navigate... but it's starting to feel like programs like SLS don't produce realistic alternatives anyways so how much of a contingency is it really providing to fund things like that.
saulpw•6h ago
elzbardico•2h ago
Money is powerful, but never under-estimate the power of having the coercive apparatus of state at someone's hand.
ethbr1•1h ago
Both from the Republican base, to whom government is anathema and private industry the best.
And to corporate interests supporting the Republican Party.
Want to see where the real power is? Follow the political money.
XorNot•6h ago
There is absolutely no company that is actually "too big to fail".
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/spacex-to-invest-2-billion-into-elo...
Panzer04•7h ago
If there was a genuine possibility of SLS being competitive, that's one thing. It's another when it's worse in basically every way.
ginko•6h ago
fn-mote•6h ago
In view of the launch economics, this argument still doesn’t make sense of SLS.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
ginko•5h ago
How do you know that they can feasibly be launched separately? Do you think NASA would have asked for a launch vehicle the size of SLS if could have done a manned lunar mission with something less then half its size?
ACCount36•4h ago
Saturn V was less powerful than SLS - but it could send an entire mission in a single launch. Capsule, lander and all.
A lot of what NASA has been doing with SLS is just trying to... rationalize its existence. This is what gave us NRHO, Gateway and others.
Reportedly, some of the people at NASA just believe that having an inefficient, wasteful and corrupt space program is better than not having it.
ginko•4h ago
That's just not true. Saturn V had a paylod of 43,500kg to TLI. Only the largest configuration of SLS(Block 2) exceeds that with 46000kg. A Falcon Heavy is far below that.
mastermage•3h ago
perihelions•3h ago
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•6h ago
I think the current administration puts it at $4B, but those estimates seem to include current and future development costs.
IMO, there are plenty of subsystems of SLS that weren't a waste to develop, and it surely fostered a generation of talented individuals, bolstered other companies, etc.
I doubt the Artemis program (as planned) survives a full four years of this administration anyway. The majority of "good work" for SLS seems to be completed, and hopefully, the talent, knowledge, resources, and so on will (has?) spread elsewhere.
georgeburdell•8h ago
somenameforme•7h ago
The idea we need to compete against ourselves is something that came straight from Boeing after they lost their bid for commercial crew, leading to them to use their connections to Congress to force NASA to make an unprecedented decision to give bids to 2 different companies. SpaceX succeeded at commercial crew putting astronauts on the ISS in 2020. Boeing, by contrast, was allowed to skip parts of the testing phase (for Commercial Crew), failed others, and was still greenlit because of corruption. And that's precisely how you ended up with the two astronauts put on their first human launch stranded on the ISS for months, only to end up getting rescued by SpaceX.
It's a nonsensical argument - we didn't create two Apollo programs, because there's no justification. And in any case, Boeing is clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a "horse" for this race. Instead we get a 3-legged mule sold at 5-time Kentucky Derby winner thoroughbred prices.
ginko•6h ago
You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.
adastra22•4h ago
ginko•4h ago
mastermage•3h ago
somenameforme•3h ago
ginko•2h ago
somenameforme•14m ago
Everything NASA does is trying to shoehorn in Boeing one way or another because they have tremendous political influence, but there's really no reason for them to be involved at all from a technical point of view. And in fact if they weren't, then we indeed probably would have long since already put boots on the Moon again. But because they are involved, I suspect an appropriate timeline for success is: never, with a whole lot of money spent getting there.
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/nasa-chief-says-a-fa...
mjamesaustin•8h ago
7e•7h ago
wordofx•5h ago
inglor_cz•4h ago
adastra22•4h ago
somenameforme•7h ago
But Isaacman? Well he's already a billionaire, and highly ideological towards progress in space. Yeah 0 chance he gets appointed.
adastra22•4h ago
somenameforme•3h ago
That craft was not even remotely fit for humans and there was far too high a chance that their 'test pilots' lost their lives in something that never should have been allowed to have a human in it to start with. And that all happened under Bridenstine.
gonzobonzo•6h ago
esseph•6h ago
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-...
gonzobonzo•5h ago
It does if you actually look into at the facts instead of just taking a PR listicle at face value.
For instance, the very first thing mentioned on that list is Alzheimer's. Go ahead and look into what the ISS actually did with regards to Alzheimer's, and you see a lot of "this has the potential to teach us more about the disease," without any evidence that anything was ever learned. There's a reason why you don't hear researcher's working on these diseases go "well, we expect a huge breakthrough once this ISS experiment is done!"
This is the problem every time this gets discussed. People just run a Gish Gallop of copying and pasting a big list of vague claims from the NASA PR department, without bothering to look at the actual claims to see if they're accurate. When you do, they're invariably far less than they're made out to be.
esseph•3h ago
It used to be that in the 1960s we were spending about 4.4% of the total federal budget on the space program.
Since the 1970s, it's gone down to around 0.71%.
Since the 2010s, it's gone down even further to 0.3% - 0.4%.
We've also not pushed much for talent in the federal government by way of salary and perks.
Despite these challenges, there are a whole host of technologies, medical treatments, navigational advancements, etc. we would not have without simply being in space. Even accounting for inflation adjusted dollars, the amount total spent in the history of NASA, across all programs, is absolutely miniscule to the technological and economic advancements that have come from it.
There are around 1,600 published papers with data from the ISS, and those have been collectively cited over 14,000 times by other papers.
That is a significant impact and can only be done by having people there.
actionfromafar•3h ago
pfdietz•2h ago
What are these? If you say "integrated circuits" I'll point out that's largely a lie, unless by "space program" you mean "Minuteman II ICBMs".
"Comes from NASA" ends up meaning "NASA was tagentially involved early on". And really, how could it ever be concluded NASA was essential? You'd need to argue the counterfactual that a technology would not have been developed otherwise, and how can one do that?
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•6h ago
There are many arguments that the space shuttle program's side effects helped win the cold war, foster modern communications, inspire generations to study science, ...
Those are good things, without stating its known direct accomplishments.
gonzobonzo•5h ago
In 2025 dollars, the cost for the Human Brain Project is just under $2 billion. In 2025 dollars, the Space Shuttle total cost is $311 billion. NASA spends about $3 billion every year on the ISS - more than the entire Human Brain Project.
The problem is that people are able to look at the Human Brain Project, and say that despite important research coming out of it, it might not have been a good idea (again, this gets debated). But people act as if some research coming out of NASA's endeavors entirely justifies them. When people refuse to look at things critically, resources almost invariably end up misallocated.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7•5h ago
jajko•4h ago
Those are definitely not money wasted - for waste look at things in ballpark of trillions like meaningless wars for made up reasons that destabilized whole parts of world and killed millions of civilians, look at various ways ultra rich and their companies avoid paying even bare minimum taxes and contributing back to societies form which they siphoned those vast amounts of cash.
These are peanuts which keep giving back to whole mankind and our future, instead of destroying it.
gonzobonzo•3h ago
Because resources are limited? Any money going to, say, SLS is money that can't go to another project. This would be true even if NASA's budget were 10x bigger.
I'm not sure what it is about NASA that leads people to pretending that we have infinite budgets. In just about any other area, we can have a discussion about whether or not this is a good allocation of resources (for instance, the Human Brain Project I mentioned before). But when NASA comes up, this goes out the window and we're supposed to believe projects like the SLS are tantamount to being free, and that they aren't diverting resources from other potential NASA projects.
somenameforme•3h ago
But if we look the future, the possibilities are even more enticing. Richard Nixon effectively cancelled human space flight after a series of Moon landings. Had he not, we could very well have a civilization on Mars today, industry in space, and who knows what else. I mean there's no realistic argument for why these things should be impossible given what we know today - they're certainly far less to strive for than putting a man on the Moon when starting from effectively nothing.
And these achievements are no longer just flag poling, but stand to genuinely revolutionize humanity - to say nothing how inspiring such achievements will be. Perhaps we might live in a world where our grandchildren will again want to be scientists and astronauts, instead of YouTubers.
gessha•42m ago
Because the Americans have such an amazing propaganda department and had to rub it in to the Soviets even after flunking every other “space race”.
As for canceling the space programs, if it wasn’t Nixon, it would’ve been done by any of the politicians following Hayek/Friedman economic policies - basically everyone after Nixon.
IAmBroom•13m ago
Well, that's an interesting take. Fantasial, but interesting.
throwawaysleep•6h ago
rsynnott•2h ago
Falcon Heavy: Claimed payload to LEO (though it has never done anything like this): 63 tonnes.
SLS: 95t, 105t or 130t depending on version.
These are quite different capabilities.
pfdietz•2h ago
This is why the congressional porkmeisters have been so adamant about NASA not developing in-space propellant storage and transfer.
sandworm101•2h ago
A name also thrown around for shuttle. Do a little digging and a surprising number of shuttle crews had ties to the US congress, either as relatives or who themselves would later become representatives. They even flew a handful of serving reps (ie John Glenn, aged 77). Nasa has always known how to foster relations with political power families.
IAmBroom•15m ago
That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.
sandworm101•5m ago
giingyui•6h ago
IAmBroom•9m ago