[X] My Assistant

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I agree with Peter59's main point. The government has made it clear (with justification) that there will be no more money for NASA as a whole than there is now, which means that what it's getting should be spent as productively as possible -- and that means a huge deemphasis of manned flight and an increased share of funding for unmanned missions, whose scientific and economic productvitity has always been tremendously greater and will continue to be for decades to come. Comments on the relatively huge sums spent on defense, Katrina, etc. are irrelevant -- quite apart from the fact that those are usually a hell of a lot more justifiable in sane terms.

This will no doubt open me up once again to the accusation that, if you cut out funding for manned spaceflight, spending for unmanned spaceflight will also be obliterated. I remain skeptical of this. There have always been three reasons for NASA spending: concrete benefits, public enthusiasm, and flat-out pork. The first one will of course continue to be provided by unmanned programs to the same extent it already is -- and, in fact, the total concrete return from NASA will greatly increase once the white elephant of unnecessary manned flight is lifted off its back. As for the second: I've noted before that the public seems to be more interested in the actual results from the more generally interesting unmanned missions (Hubble, the MERs, Voyager) than it is from the manned missions -- and switching over from ISS to a manned lunar program won't change that. (The Moon, let's face it, is a very dull place.) And as for space pork: the Congressmen who want that for their districts will want it no matter what form it's in: manned or unmanned projects. I have no doubt that eliminating NASA's manned programs would lead to a nosedive in overall funding for the agency (which I have no objection to), but I still think that total spending on its unmanned programs would actually go up to some degree.


And, yes, the ISS is a useless atrocity and always has been; every bit of the $100 billion the US actually has spent on it has been flushed right down the toilet -- and the "experiments" that the US actually has conducted on it have been every bit as useless and ridiculous as the Russian Suitsat. The only thing that's keeping it going at this point (as NASA realized and planned from the start, when they deliberately and ridiculously lowballed their initial cost estimates for it) is the fact that legislators don't want to admit that they were wrong in supporting the thing previously and will therefore keep flushing more money down the same toilet until absolute disaster comes or those particular legislators retire, whichever comes first. That's just the way the game is played in any conceivable human system of governance. (Gravity Probe B is seriously questionable on grounds of scientific cost-effectiveness -- which is why it almost got cancelled several times -- but it shines like a nova compared to the ISS, the Shuttle or the Apollo program by that standard.)