JWST Cost Overruns vs SLS Cost Overruns at Orlando Sentinel
Mike Thomas at the Orlando Sentinel doesn’t think the SLS will ever fly. There will be delays and cost inflation, as usual. Since this is also true for JWST, he argues “in for a billion, in for a zillion” on the telescope and just cancel the rocket.
From The Orlando Sentinel-
A House spending committee wants to whack NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
It is the planned super-duper replacement for Hubble, which is an orbiting toilet-paper tube by comparison.
Astronomers say the Webb scope could pick up light waves from the very first stars. It would take us back 13.7 billion years — or 6,000 years if you’re in the Republican presidential primary — to when it all began.
So what are a few measly cost overruns compared with that?
We have a big decision to make: We can either go billions over budget on mismanaged science projects, or we can go billions over budget on even more mismanaged manned-spaceflight programs.
But we no longer can go billions over budget on both.
And so I choose the mismanaged science projects.
James Webb certainly qualifies. In typical fashion, NASA sold it by underestimating the cost and the launch date.
NASA understands that after dollars start flowing to aerospace contractors and congressional constituents, nobody will pull the plug. There may be shrill Government Accountability Office reports and perfunctory political showboating about costs, but the bucks must go on.
This is how we ended up with a space shuttle that cost $1.5 billion per launch…
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Without the SLS, NASA will have no beyond LEO space program. And that will set NASA up for huge budget cuts by Congress in the near future which was probably what Obama and Holdren wanted in the first place. And anti-government political extremist will spin this as another failure of a government agency.
China will probably end up as the biggest winner in all of this since they have no inhibitions about using whatever government and private resources necessary to achieve their goals both on Earth an in the New Frontier. The US, however, will continue to demonize and paralyze the ability of government institutions to do anything while our corporations continue to invest more and more in China and other countries– while America continues its economic decline.
I wonder if Al Gore had won the election in 2000, if he would have continued funding the X-30 program which he was partially responsible for creating under the Clinton administration. The Air Force reportedly still thought this single stage to orbit vehicle would work.
Marcel-
I agree on your first comment.
With or without SLS, the US is done with beyond LEO for exploration. Let’s just face the facts. It’s history, and it’s a budget chop waiting to happen. It could be 1 year, 3 year, 5 years, but it’s going to happen.
The USSR didn’t have so much domestic politics to deal with during the space race. The order just came from the top and they did it. China will be the same way. Ain’t democracy awesome?
Oh well, at least we had STS, and it was cooler than anything China is going to do for the foreseeable future.
@Space
The US may be done period. Failure to invest in the future is a sign of a country in decline.
Marcel, you mean empires don’t just last forever? Dangit, just my luck. I just put my 401K in chariots too!
Possibly you’re overreacting. It’s not likely that a future Gibbon in some sort of DECLINE AND FLUSH OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE is going to devote much attention to the manned space program during the 2000-2020 period. There have been other things going on, after all. More importantly, nobody else in the world has much of a manned program going right now, and it’s not likely anyone else will during this period. That includes the Chinese. There are world-wide economic problems and it’s much too early to predict what shape different nations will be in in ten years.
NASA is just a symbol of what’s been going on in America for several decades now. Its been a few decades since a brand new nuclear power plant has been built in the US. Currently, China has about 29 reactors under construction, Russian has 11, India has 5, and South Korea has 5 currently under construction. The US has just one nuclear power plant under construction:-)
There is no high speed rail service in the US at all and it looks like Republicans will try there best to stop any attempt to have such a system that most of the industrialized world already enjoys.
Of course, the US stopped manned beyond LEO missions nearly 40 years ago and the current administration cancelled the latest attempt for beyond LEO missions.
Meanwhile, American business in the US continues to be plagued by multi-trillion dollar a year public and private health insurance system that is two to five times costlier per capita than any other system on Earth.
Corporations can’t wait to export American jobs to China, India, or other low wage countries costing Americans millions of jobs.
We continue to waste hundreds of billions on foreign wars.
We continue to send hundreds of billions of dollars of US wealth to hostile foreign nations for oil and we even spend $30 to $70 billion a year on average protecting the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.
We continue to have one of the worst K-12 educational systems in the industrialized world.
We use so many illegal drugs in the US and sell so many illegal weapons that we’re seriously destabilizing the nation to our south.
We have a domestic crime rate that is so high that some estimate it cost the US economy about $1.7 trillion annually.
And we have a political system that is so polarized that we could possibly have two failed presidencies in a row!
And we’re sitting on $14 trillion in debt which neither party has a realistic plan how to stop from growing even larger.
So I think we should be a little concerned:-)
Quoting Winston Churchill, “There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Things look very bad, I know, but a good part of it is simply the product of being in a very bad recession. The wars are tapering off. The crime rate has been dropping for the last two decades . The health care system is being worked on. The school system isn’t all that bad. Unemployment will fall, or a lot of Republicans are going to be out of office. The debt will shrink as the economy improves.
And we’ve got an ever-improving definition of the human genome. By midcentury, affluent couples will be tinkering with their sperm and eggs to produce offspring with greater stamina and intelligence and attractiveness and longevity. By the end of the century, we’ll all be modifying our progeny. Intelligence is going to rise, probably by 5 IQ points per century, for the next 5 to 6 centuries.
Things WILL get better.