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Space

Publicly Funded Competition For NASA? 130

Posted by timothy from the quick-somebody-call-the-justice-department dept.
Wigs writes: "There's a nice article on spaceprojects.com about NASA's current competition, or rather the lack of it. From the article: 'The Microsoft antitrust litigation, as well as the consumer benifits resulting from AT&T's break-up, have substantially raised public awareness about the negative impact that monopolies can have on society. Many people who know much about NASA distrust it as well ... It seems NASA would benefit from having publicly funded competition, resembling what Japan's two competing civilian space agencies have.' I've heard that companies like United Space Alliance have looked into the possiblity of purchasing a shuttle, but have been shot down by NASA officials. Other companies looking to get into the single stage to orbit competition are Rotary Rocket, Kelly Space, and Pegasus (actually 3-stage). However, these are all private companies. This article discussing public funding, namely the National Science Foundation."
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Publicly Funded Competition For NASA? More

Publicly Funded Competition For NASA?

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  • If the competitive model of the Japanese space program has so much to offer NASA, why haven't the Japanese landed on the moon?

    U.S.A. RULES!!!

  • It sounds like a good idea to me (Score:3)

    by leereyno ( 32197 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:23AM (#748347) Homepage Journal
    Space is the future. I know that sounds rather corny in this day and age but it is the truth. I have NO problem with my tax dollars being spent exploring space and paving the way for our eventual migration to places such as the moon or Mars. The international space station is only the very smallest of baby steps into space.

    If NASA has become bogged down with beauracracy and a monopolistic mindset, then it is time that we shake it up a bit and put it back on its toes. A two-tiered space exploration policy would go a long ways towards doing that and keeping America out front in the quest to explore and yes conquer other worlds.

    I'd hate to wake up one day and find that Japan or the EU has laid claim to the moon as soverign territory before we could. I'm not sure such a claim would hold water anymore no matter who made it, but still.

    I'd like to see human colonies on the moon or Mars before I depart this earth. I believe that if the human race stays put here on earth, we will stagnate. As Frank Herbert said, the question of ecology is not how many individuals can survive in an environment, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do. With the world population growing at an exponential rate I don't think a good existence is going to be possible much longer.

    Lee Reynolds
  • ...Considering it's been hanging there for 14 years, I'd say it's in pretty damn GOOD shape.

    I agree!

    The russians have done amazing things considering the lack of funding (and technology) that some projects have gotten. And considering that it mir is the only long term space research lab at the moment (The shuttle can only go up for 14 days iirc) I say that trying to keep it going until the ISS comes fully online is a good thing (tm)

    I also would have loved to see skylab put to better use. As far as I know, there was nothing wrong with it when they dumped it into the atmosphere. But I guess back in the '80s the economy was compleatly different (cold war etc.)

  • You said: "There are no fucking aliens you fucking moronic piece of slime."

    How would you know there is none? If there are blackholes in the universe, life form in one of the moon of Jupiter, then there will be a chance of the existen of alien.

    Do you know anything about Set Theory? Do you know that Universal Set is not that really universal? Do you know that there is no largest prim number?

    How can you elminate the chances of having another life form somewhere out there in the universe?

    It's not about TV, it's about possibility and the probability!!!

    Do you see who is the morn, ah? You should go read some articles and books about relativity. Also some of the Steven Hawkins' book too!!!


  • Yeah they know a lot about *living* in space. Its getting a ride home that they have problems with... Face it they are broke and no amount of money is going help the situation(unless of course Ross Perot decides to dump a load of cash for this mis-adventure).

    Mojo
  • thats the most sarcastic statement i've heard in awhile. or is it not. Fed needs to stay the way it is :) to keep America and other parts of the world that rely on the American economy moving.
  • And of course, every volcano eruption puts out more pollutants and hydrocarbons than man has ever produced in all the years combined since the beginning of the industrial revolution. What's your point? The earth is big.. in fact.. some would call it enormous. Man couldn't destroy this planet if he wanted to. Sure, you could probably create some bacteria to wipe out the population but the planet will still be here laughing at us. It's been here for billions of years and it will be here for billions more. The age of man has come and it will go. Another form of life with rise on it and the cycle will continue. Haven't you ever seen Planet of the Apes dude?

  • You're right. Maybe the military should stop advertising. I mean, if they don't get enough recruits, they can always just implement the draft again. Nobody would mind, right?

    Also, despite the link in the comment above about the USPS, from what I understand, the USPS never has to use taxpayers money. They are supposedly self-sufficient, operating off money only from their own revenue. I guess it's deciding what source you will believe after checking something like that out. Besides, I think the USPS does have competition. I know if I have to ship something important, I'm sending it FedEx or UPS. If I want to send a letter, I send email.


    Spooon!

  • Information wants to be a book

    Yes, I find it funny. He he.
    __

  • Space Isn't a Program, It's a Frontier (Score:5)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @05:39AM (#748355) Homepage Journal
    After an initial success in passing grassroots legislation to reform NASA [geocities.com] I helped promote another grassroots omnibus legislative reform in the early 90's to decentralize Federal space activities among virtually all the other agencies of the US government.

    Basically, the idea of the omnibus legislative reform was this:

    While NSF is one of the more obvious agencies that should have its own space program, just about any agency you can think of has some justification for engaging in some activity in space. Indeed, it makes more sense to move the Office of Commercial Space Transportation into it's own agency and disperse NASA's existing funding and programs to a wide variety of and Federal agencies for their own space activities than it does have a "space program" or even two "space programs".

    Space isn't a program. It's a frontier.

    Not only did we fail in this more ambitious legislative reform, we discovered that NASA was flagrantly violating our "successful" legislative reform, PL101-611 -- the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 (requiring NASA to procure launch services only from the private sector) -- and no one in either the executive branch nor in Congress cared enough to take effective disciplinary action against NASA when the NASA inspector general's office failed to do so. This despite the fact that the intent of PL101-611 was both executive policy, initiated under Reagan (carried on under Bush), and public law. Similar flagrant violation of law greeted the grassroots Launch Voucher Experimental Program when it was passed.

    In retrospect, the basic problem has been that people believed political action was the way to affect change in the US government's monopoly on frontiers.

    It isn't.

    The problem is the US government.

    The US government prevented Russia from offering their launch services at the most competative prices it could afford because the US government wanted to protect its pet "big 3" launch companies, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics and Martin Marrietta -- this at a time when the US government was decrying the potential abuse of underemployed Russian rocket technologists by "terrorist states" with money, and was trying to create make work programs for them to keep them employed under US funding.

    This situation is now changing, which is a very healthy sign -- finally Russia may be able to make some hard cash by putting the US government and the EU in their respective places when it comes to orbital launch systems.

    But if you, a nerd, really want to contribute to affecting change yourself, I have one thing to say to you:

    Change the tools and you change the rules.

  • NASA has been going downhill ever since they installed NT.

    --
  • You're incorrect. Shareholders have a direct (no matter how weak) influence over the company they own shares in. The US public has no direct influence over NASA whatsoever. We also have almost no indirect influence, unless you happen to be one of the rich and powerful with connecctions in DC.
    Take NASAs current Big Project, the ISS. It's a politcal show-piece, meant to garner home-district votes for some guys who can throw out high-dollar contracts, and as a nice "see how we can play together" boost for the rest.

    --"I can't see what's stopping anyone setting up private competition to NASA"

    The US government is. There's all sorts of rules and regulations about this sort of thing (including limiting all government contracts to NASA) that effectively block all private competition in the US. Up until a year or so ago, it was illegal for _any_ private company to bring things back from space, which set a rather obvious obstacle in the way of anyone trying to send up private manned missions. But don't worry, there's plenty more such left.

    AC
    "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
    -- Johnny Hart
  • The US government is a breading ground for monopolies and questionable practices... In my state gambling is illegal and yet the state runs a billion dollar lottery business. Often people refer to the lottery as a "poor mans tax" because the average income of people who participate is lower than the state average.

    Booze is sold by the state here..

    The US military ADVERTISES on national television!

    The US postal service, which could/should have competition ADVERTISES!

    There is a laundry list of things like these... I think competition in space is just another example..

    government makes more than the companies I want to support off my smoking habit...

    it just plain sucks... </bitch>
  • I don't know about the cost of fuel alone, but a good estimate of the cost is ~$10000(US) per pound.
  • What you have to remember is that if you have a monopoly, the only way you can reign them in is with laws. Legislation takes a while to go through and can come to all sorts of barriers ie. politics (big P). If you have competition, you can acheive the same results not with politics and laws but by selecting on the basis of the best deal. Shopping around for the better deal means that if a company wants to trade it needs good deals. But I'm just covering ground that everyone knows here. NASA needs competition because (from I can see - bearing in mind that I'm not an expert) there a lot of militaristic beurocracy. The way they handle things there is probably very rigid and topo heavy. They're idea of efficient very likely differs from the taxpayers. The way to make them change is to put them into a sink or swim situatuion, they change or they go under. The difficulties they have met so far have needed mostly changes in policy or what amount to no more than cut backs and lay offs. Competition will force them to do things differently cf. BT, they might not be so good now but thinkm about what they were like before they got competition. Laws did make competition grow faster but only because BT had 100% market penetration in a very large market. Any competition that came along could take massive amounts of customers and BT wouldn't even notice. Nasa has a few (very important) clients, if even 1 were to 'defect' to a new company, NASA would have to pull it's finger out and do better.
    I am aware though, that politics will still play a role in what contracts go to who. There is very much an old boys network running in the US, especially were large amounts of money are involved. A possible solution could be to separate some of their people. A couple of key personel - who have contacts, could be taken to start up this new competition and have some sortcahnce at getting the new contracts. But not enough to seriously affect NASAs operation. This might also have the added advantage that NASA will have to study how the loses will affect them and get to know their operation a little more.

    There are other considerations but I can't be bothered going over them. I think the main ones are here.

    dnnrly

  • Too much competition allready (Score:5)

    by KjetilK ( 186133 ) <kjetil@@@kjernsmo...net> on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:33AM (#748361) Homepage Journal
    No, we don't need more competition in science. OK, for launch vehicles, it's allright with competition, but there is allready sufficient competition in that field. Anybody who desires to launch a satellite like e.g. Ikonos can buy the parts on the open market and launch it, totally independ of NASA.

    In science, the competition is doing a lot of damage. Scientists compete to publish their articles, if somebody hears about what others are doing, some will rush to publish it before others do, and the consequence is that scientists keep their ideas and working plans secret as long as they can, with a huge loss for scientific progress as a result.

    What we need is rather cooperation. People need to give up their egos in the name of scientific progress, something that should be encouraged by funding agencies (those are the mechanism that drives the unhealthy competition).

    As for the space race, it wasn't the competition that made it so successful, it was that they threw so enormous amounts of money at it. If that kind of funding was provided for science today, it would have been a different story alltogether.

  • I am constantly amazed by the great lengths that government bureaucrats will go to to avoid the hated specter of free enterprise capitalism in Space. It must be the terror that haunts their nightmares. Rich Robins proposal is just one more in a long series of ideas to "fix" NASA, none of which fix the basic problem of socialism in space. I will admit that I do support transferring all unmanned deep space science missions to the National Science Foundation, I also propose transferring Earth observation satellites to NOAA and USGS, but I do so as part of a much larger scheme to dismantle NASA, reducing it to the status of a manned space flight institute. Further, I propose that NASA or any other government agency not own or operate any space asset, but rely totally on a private commercial space industry. The Idea is to spread space knowledge and operational ability throughout industry and society. The original concept of "one NASA" was to concentrate all knowledge, expertise, and assets into one organization to beat the Soviets into Space, avoiding competition and duplication of effort. I think we won that race, the Russian space program is now almost totally dependent on NASA support. Having won the war however, we need to go back to our normal operational method of free enterprise capitalism, with government agencies restricted to non operational basic research, which is the right way to do things. NASA bureaucrats, take a deep breath, trust in the American Free Enterprise System, and take that bold step OUT of the space transportation business.
  • Remember the follies that the Russian space program made. Like forcing a cosmonaut to manually navigate a Progress freighter by only using a faulty camera system. This situation ended in near-catastrophe; it took out an entire module of Mir, not to mention that it killed a large swath of solar cells and depressurized said module, making it useless.

    NASA's competition should be well-practiced in standard procedure. It's bad enough having those Russian "Jacks-of-all-trades" up there nearly giving the Earth a new asteroid belt of space junk.

  • Difference between public and private companies (Score:3)

    by beebware ( 149208 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @02:46AM (#748364) Homepage
    The way I see it, NASA is a public company - it is owned by the American population via their taxes. Whereas Microsoft is owned by their shareholders. There's a big difference.
    I can't see what's stopping anyone setting up private competition to NASA, but why should the American people have to pay to fund 2 space associations?
    Disclaimer: BTW I'm British so it doesn't matter that much to me anyway...

    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --
  • There's a problem with your logic... Basically with every space program, as opposed to military programs such as the JSV fighters and miscellaneous other systems, there's a 10-20 year lag for R&D... In other words, what's built around state of the art technology takes about 10 years to test and make sure it doesn't blow up (at least often)... The space shuttle was first penned around 1972, during the Nixon administration... NASA, which was still in the red with the Apollo missions, needed a low cost launch vehicle, and the shuttle was the closest thing, due to it's reusable nature...

    So it went through 10 years of development and testing, WITH 1970's technology, until it's first launch in 1980, which at the time meant that it's hardware was 10 years out of date... Continuing on to 1990, when the first glass cockpit upgrades were researched, and 1998 when the first ones were being installed... YET AGAIN, 10 year old technology being implemented... The fact of the matter is, when ANYTHING goes into space research, it has to be proven to be reliable, to survive extremes of temperature and vibration, to a factor of hundreds of times more strenuous than the average aircraft hardware... Furthermore, chances are, thanks to the neanderthals in power, they had to prove a valid need for an upgrade to the shuttle system...

    On a similar note, does anyone recall WHY NASA upgraded their 30 year old computer systems? Because a computer student was researching telemetry monitoring software on his li'l 386, at mission control (while they were using "tried and true" computer systems), and at that particular point, the ancient computers failed, RIGHT in the middle of a shuttle launch... So basically every technician was huddled around one desktop system, displaying every bit of telemetry previously displayed on dozens of terminals, and NASA finally admitted they needed to update that as well... And several hundreds of thousands to completely retrofit mission control sure as hell beat the cost of building the old mainframe...

    The trick, you see, isn't to completely scrap any particular system... Take the Russians for example, they've been using Soyuz capsules for HOW long now? And that's a 30-40 y.o. tech right there... When they tried to scrap it to bring out their shuttle (Buran), guess what killed the Russian economy?

    Even the X-33 project is built around 10-15 y.o. technology (even though it isn't even officially built yet), so lets scrap it now, it isn't even flying, it's costing us billions, and it's just as antiquated...

    Lets implement restrictions that if anything uses technology more than one year old, that we throw it away and replace it with a new version built on new technology (like we do already with our computers)!!! Yeah!!! THAT'LL bolster the economy, WOW!!!
  • "livre", which in the context looks like an unintentional typo for the expected adjective "libre" (free as in freedom of speach).

    That's the joke. It's intended. I know that "libre" is "free". But I understand that "livre" is very similar and still it makes sense. It's funny, laugh. "Un livre" is not funny, it is too far from the original slogan. You have ruined my life.

    I have even marked it out of the {EM} block. Are you reading it in Lynx?
    __
  • Note (and I get to say this) this isn't flamebait..

    A little of both.. :) I go through keyboards and I am extreamly lax about spelling...
    Hack it's the Internet...
    I gotta learn to relax a bit more when people point out the obveous.. :)
    A better idea BTW is to e-mail me not post on Slashdot.. lot's and lots of people can't spell becouse english is a second language to them..
    It's my primary language so I have no such excuse.. but then read my preveous comment about the education system and then look at my spelling.. Isn't it intresting the US education system says my spelling is good?
  • So Mir is a piece of junk eh?

    Tell me. How long has Mir been up there?
    Now tell me for how long Skylab was up there?

    Mir wins, by a long, long way.
    Skylab refused to deploy one of its main solar panels on launch, and a rescue mission had to be sent to salvage it by putting up a kind of tarpaulin because there was a bloody great hole in the insulation!...
    Skylab, the best the Americans had to offer, was a pile of short-term junk that didn't work from day one.
    Mir, however, is solid technology that keeps on working even when you crash a spacecraft into it! Takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'.
    I'm afraid, my American friends, that when it comes to long-term space travel, the Russians have more knowledge in their little fingers than in the whole of NASA.
    Lift your glass of vodka and drink a health to the cosmonauts.


    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • In my opinion the Us government could support half a dozen space agancies if it just cut spending in other areas ,(mostly military). We are never gonna get off of earth if we don't put some serious time effort and money into our space programs.
  • There are no fucking aliens you fucking moronic piece of slime.
    There's no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy either.

    Just grow up and stop watching crap TV shows before you lose your grip on reality even more...


    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems

  • If you have to have taxpayer support... (Score:3)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @02:51AM (#748371)
    ...the best thing to do would be to make investments in space exploration/development tax deductable, as well as making all capital gains on such investments tax-free. That's far better than having to go thru a politically messy grant project, and much more likely to get funding to projects that will actually work. The justification for these tax breaks would be that this is extremely high-risk work in America's (heck, world's) long-term national interest.
  • OK Private competition is good in most areas, but NASA is a GOVERNMENT agency. What is next are we going to ask for privately held and funded competition in the military. I know I personally would not want a joint Sun Microsystems, AOL-Time Warner, Lockheed Martin airforce around. There is a point at which we as the citizenry must allow our government (or any government) to do it's job. While space exploration is an important scientific venture it should be regulated closely to prevent abuse. I am all for public-private cooperation on missions and goals. But, to have a full on competing seperate agency could lead to very dire ends. Imagine the ficticious SATLM-SA (Sun, AOL, Time-Warner, Lockheed-Martin Space Agency) putting up it's own LEO satellites with the expressed purpose of interfering with government held communications satellites, to become sole controllers of media and information distribution. With only a mission statement instead of a constitution there would be little to no philosophical or legally enforcable road block to this end if the power of the uber-company rivalled that of the government. This is only one orwellian end but with the track record of corporate abuse of power in the past (Kodak, U.S. Steel, Microsoft) I feel it is better to have a more directly regulatable entity in charge of something of such importance. At lease there are checks and balance to an extent in our government.
  • The reason is it's a bitch to make space projects profitable. Sure you can sell rides for 10 grand but you aren't going to get enough takers to make it worth your while. Its expensive to get people in space... If it was't then everyone would be doing it. anyone want to figur out how much fuel would cost to get 1 250 pound person in orbit?
  • I don't think the math for your proposal works out quite like that. There are indeed rail gun efforts under way, but none of them aim to eliminate rocket boosters altogether. The best you can hope for is a good push that reduces the size of the booster, but I doubt you can completely eliminate it. It's a long way through thick atmosphere into space, and once the vehicle leaves the rail, it is no longer accelerating. So it has to reach its maximum speed at the end of the rail, after which it will only (strongly) decelerate. I'd love to be proved wrong on that, really, but I don't think it'll quite work out that way.
  • I agree 100%. Maybe NASA itself could be structured in such a way as to have competing projects or something (though I'm not sure that's a really good idea either).

    I think that the real problem with NASA is that its mandate seems really fuzzy, and in a way that competition will probably only make worse. Already there are huge commercial pressures on NASA. It seems that the way that they keep their funding is by up-playing the commercial benefits of the space program to such an extent (we invented velcro!) in order to get funding from congress that any science somehow has to fit into that framework.

    What I would like to see (as a tax paying American!) is guaranteed funding for NASA for an extended period of time, with a congressional mandate to pursue pure science.

    Of course we know how congress feels about science :(

  • Privatized police?

    Omni Consumer Products has a killer app for that. Half human, half machine, a whole policeman!

    Robocop!

    (Imagine Microsoft Police division.)
    __
  • With a publicly held competition, we might even find a company that does space travel better and cheaper (read: less expensive!) than NASA. Mind you I don't have anything against the men in white, but it stands to reason that if you have two or more companies vying for the same end results, they're going to try and find the best way possibly to acheive that with the least possible impact upon their own resources.

    "Homer Simpson for President! It'd be nice to have the intelligence finally!"


    --

    Vote Homer Simpson for President!

  • Re:NASA won't expose their fabrications (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Challenger was NOT a charade, it was an example of how normal government programs run: SNAFU.

    The Space Shuttle design was chosen because it was the _least_ expensive of the options offered when originally bid. That it was among the highest per-launch costs didn't factor into the equation, nor did the fact that it was one of the technically weakest plans. The O-Ring problem was real, and was known... by the engineers involved (see Feynmain's comments during the later investigation). Administrators involved "re-adjusted" various technical information so as not to have to delay a high-publicity launch.
    This sort of thing is exactly why we shouldn't be letting government have a monopoly here. Some twenty plus years after the Shuttle program was started, it hasn't lived up to more than one or two of the promises originally made.
    Gee, where have we seen that before?

    AC
    If space is warped, time is all that's weft

  • Despite what we might like to think, that space travel will come tomorrow, that the pace will quicken, but it'll be several hundred years BEFORE the space program really gets going.

    Now before you all scream, let me explain why I think the way I do. (ignoring historical exception cases like the Greenland Colonies and St. Bernard), large scale European Colonization/Travel to/of the the Americas took nearly 400 years to get going. Columbus sailed into town in 1492, but a hundred years later other than a few outposts like Vieux-Quebec, St Augustine, and Roanoke, not much else had been done. Large colonization didn't happen till the advent of the steamship, in the 1870s, when technology caught up.

    At this point we are still at the crown jewels stage... Isabella, err I mean Hillary hauks her crown jewels and a new expedition heads off to the new world. Before large scale travel and colonization (no point in travelling if there is no where to travel *to*) happens there has to be a technological jump. The cost of getting there, and the time to get there needs to come down to reasonable levels. Dumping a billion bucks out the tail pipe to visit an airless rock may get astronomy nuts like me excited but it's something that only the richest governments and corporations can even begin to ponder.

    The first change that needs to happen is that we need to find a cheap and efficient way to get large quantities of manufacutered goods into LEO that doesn't require sticking them atop a candle made of LOX and lighting it off.

    Flip over to another industry, the one that rights my pay check, and likely yours, the computer industry. EINAIC fired up in 1942? Altair put out the first "personal machine" in 1976? The PC followed when? We didn't see "revolution" though till the mid 1990s, 50 years afterwards?

    So be paitent while the industry gets going... but if it follows the standard development track, the age of government funded dinosaurs will have to come to an end and then it'll go into large "contractors" doing it, and eventually the technology will become so prevelant and everyday that everyone'll do it.

    Creating another government agency to compeet with nasa isn't going to do anyone or anything any good. Get it out of the public sector into the private sector... get technological innovation going. Robert Zubrin's Mar's group has a great idea on how to get that going. Rather than having NASA pay for hardware, have NASA award prizes. NASA wants a manned Mars mission. Award 2 billion to the organization that meets the correct set of criteria. AND I'm quite sure you won't have satellites crashing into Mars because of English/Metric conversion errors.

  • Isn't the possibility of industrial sabotage between competing space firms enough concern to prevent this idea coming to light, especially in an area where the lives of astronauts are placed into a delicate balance on a routine basis?

    The military industrial complex that had come to prominence in the space and aeronautical industries during the cold war and in the process giving them enormous political leverage should be allowed to come to dominate the direction of humanity's exploration in space. That direction should be made with a scientific mentality.

    Though far-fetched in light of humanity's current position, but do we really want the interests of a profit-driven corporation be placed before the scientific and diplomatic interests of a government agency if humanity encounters alien life in future?

    MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

  • And how do you suppose to compare the perfomance of one police with another?

    How many people they arrest?
    How many people are convicted?

    How do you think a profit orientated police with emphasis on the above goals would act?

    IRC, Belgium has several concurrent police agencies.
    The concurrency between them lead(s?) to serious problems.
  • One thing that NASA has over ESA is that NASA gets a lot of military contracts, ESA relies on commercial (ie. TV and comms companies) and on scientific payloads. The US military has to go for one provider. If it could go for a choice then NASA would need to change.

    My opinion: I agree.

    dnnrly

  • Also... Orbital [orbital.com]. The company, not the seminal and insanely great techno group.



    --
  • Wise man.

    I'm surprised though, that noone has pointed out that the NSF already funds space research. So does the NIH. So do a number of private foundations. They just all go through NASA because you can't pick up a space shuttle at CarMax

  • >What we need is rather cooperation.

    You sound like one of those 'open source' weirdos. Which in some respects suffers from fragmentation.

  • Re:NSA (Score:1)

    by Tower ( 37395 )
    Removing the A from NASA, I get NAS - Network Attached Storage... hmmmm, now if I could only get a NASA, I'd have room for all those extra mp3s...

    either that or NS (National Semiconductor, Network Support, or Nova Scotia...)...

    Last time I checked, Nova Scotia wasn'y spying on me, but... you never know...
    --
  • One. The welfare system is not relevant to the financial plight of the disabled. Those payments are typically made by Social Security [ssa.gov], which in theory has a separate budget and revenue/expense stream from the rest of the Federal budget. There may be additional funding for assistance for the disabled through Federally funded welfare programs, but I see it as unlikely that this will cause a sudden massive downgrade in the support for people affected by tragic accidents-- far more likely that this will hit the budget for the "willfully unemployed" or for supplemental programs not related specifically to housing and food.

    Two. The current DEA budget does not seem to be having a very positive impact on crack and heroin (not "heroine", that's a female hero) addiction. Further, if my child were addicted to either substance, how is the DEA going to be a positive influence? Last time I checked, their primary method of treatment involved violating the civil rights of drug users, throwing them in jail, and turning them into criminals. Suggestion: cut the DEA budget to zero immediately and give the money to NASA-- it can't be any more wasted there than it is at the DEA.

    Does this mean that I want to increase the budget for NASA without exploring possible ways for private enterprise to get in the game? I think not. At least not until I have a much better understanding of all the things NASA is probably doing that don't get on the news. Things that I'm probably benefitting from without realizing it.
  • about This guy [slashdot.org]. Seriously, anyone have an update on the soon-to-be-late Mr. Walker? Has he blown himself up yet?
    Bart: "So this means I'm going to be a failure, Dad?"
    Homer: "Yes son, a spectacular one."
  • I have seen several space exploration documentaries detailing how poorly funded the Russian space prgram is. That is why their program is inferior; their scientists are intelligent, but they don't have the $ todo things correctly. For example, on one space staion (not the Mir I believe) they had to supply it every so often, so they did this with a docking satellite. They just put it in orbit, and computer controlled it from the ground to docking, then dumped it into deep space. Howver, someone in charge decided they didn't need to spend the (considerable) amount of $ installing the remote-computer controlled system (which allowed precision docking from the ground) on a disposable satellite, and instead to use the people on the space station to dock it manually (using remote hand controls and looking out the porthole!). Unfortunately, it's really hard to judge speed in space, and when they tried this it hit the station at about 70 mph, causing serious damage and almost killing everyone on board.

    Anyway, the point of this rambling is that you can't privately fund a space effort; it just takes way too much $, and the only profitablity (at this point) is orbiting private satellites. There is NO $ to be made in exploring Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc.

    That's the whole reason for government, isn't it? To pay for things which are good for us all, but which nobody will do privately 'cause they just wouldn't make any $ doing it? Or to say it another way, to take more of our money than we would ever choose to pay, to fund something that will (presumably) benefit everyone but no-one is willing to pay for?
  • I think your time scale is a bit off. In the 1870s the US had been an independant country for almost 100 years and had already fought its civil war. I'd say wide scale colonization was brought about by advances in sail powered ships, not steam propultion. Steam ships also somewhat predate the 1870s.

    In 1864? 5? the Great Eastern steam ship was in New York harbor. That this was a double hulled all iron steam ship with enought range to cruise from England to Australia around the tip of Africa without refuelling. It was also about 7/8th the size of the Titanic.

    Early steam ships had to predate this by quite a bit. But they didn't have the range to cross the atlantic under steam until the Great Western (a precurser to the Great Eastern). Actually the USS Atlanta was the first steam powered ship to cross the atlantic, but it also had sails which it used for about half the trip.
  • > Not something I'd put a person in at first, ...

    Oh.. I could think of a few persons I'd like to put in there...

    //rdj
  • How long ago was that?

  • The redundency might not work (Score:3)

    by Felinoid ( 16872 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:43AM (#748393) Homepage Journal
    Nasa right now relys on results for it's budget. Some other agentcys (education) rely on a LACK of results (We need more money... we are doing soo bad.. we need more money) when poor results can equal more funding quallity drops through the floor.
    Nasa has to worry about producing results to justify it's existence.. It is not a self justifying entity. And it is a private entity..

    If two space agentcys were to compeate on budget they budget would likely go to the one who is worst off.. the successful agentcy dosn't need more money.. the failure dose...

    I don't know how to aproch the rewarding falure issue (if I did this isn't the right topic) but I'm pritty sure sence Nasa is allready fighting for a budget it is quite posable the alternitive could be the groundwork for turnning Nasa into a self justifying agentcy and use failure to prove it's need for more money.
    As long as Nasa itself is lone and continues to be reguarded as "helpful" as long as it produces worthy results.. it will not need to compeate on failure.

    In any case I doupt the budget exists for TWO space agentcys in the United States...
  • OT: but I think Spain is the European country which has concurrent police agencies which is causing some confusion in the Basque region. IIRC, there are three agencies: the national police, an anti-ETA police, and a counter-terrorism arm of the national intelligence group.

    MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

  • what company could waste so much money, and fail so miserably, and remain in business?

    a private company would actually have to be concerned that the money it spent wasn't just bundled up and shot into space never to be seen again.

    Nasa is long past it's usefulness. Privatize the space industry.

    ________

  • The trick, you see, isn't to completely scrap any particular system... Take the Russians for example, they've been using Soyuz capsules for HOW long now? And that's a 30-40 y.o. tech right there... When they tried to scrap it to bring out their shuttle (Buran), guess what killed the Russian economy? Simple phrase. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Apollo got people as far as the moon. Shuttle struggles into lower earth orbit. Hell, the Russians had to LOWER the orbit of MIR so the Shuttle could dock with it!
    Perhaps NASA should have built on the Saturn 5, perhaps added some kind of automated return mechanism to make them reusable. There's a site somewhere, I can't remember the URL, which shows us NASA's plans to develop on what they had back in the 60s.

    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • Precisely, that's why the maglev rail guns are under investigation. But eliminating the boosters altogether would be quite hard.
  • As a practicing engineer in the aerospace business working for a private company, I'm personally and professionally insulted that you would suggest that we would not build a safe and reliable vehicle.

    Aparently you lack the basic understanding of how to run a business. Yes, you have to make money. But you don't do it by killing people. If you've got four man rated spacecraft, and you loose one to an accident you face numerous problems. First, you kissed goodbye a large capital investment that can never be recovered. Second, you've brought upon yourself the hell known as the legal system, which may dog you until you're bankrupt. Third, if people believe the system is unreliable there is no way in hell they are going to fly on it, thus destroying that revenue stream. If your business is built on puting people in space, congratulations you've put yourself out of business, you're a failure and have no money. There is no incentive whatsoever to design and build an unsafe or unreliable vehicle. NONE.

    The flipside is this. What if it were completely left to the government? Would it be safe? Probably. Would it be behind schedule? YES. Would it be too expensive for all but the government to be able to afford to operate it? YES. What if the gov't looses one of four vehicles to an accident? You've still lost the large capital investment. Will legal troubles dog the program? Maybe, but they won't put the gov't out of business. Will the gov't shutdown if they loose a spacecraft and crew? Nah, build another and put more people in it (baring minor modifications, that is exactly what we did after challenger). The revenue stream is not dependant on paying customers, but on people's tax dollars.

    Noone forces you to smoke cigarettes. Noone forces you to drive an unsafe vehicle. Noone is going to force you to go into space. Oh, but if the gov't were left to selling cigarettes, they would be safe to smoke. Gov't cars would be high quality, safe, and affordable. Yeah. Right. Driven a Russian car lately? As bad as GM is, there are many more that are worse.

    If the US gov't depended on paying customers to fly the space shuttle, they would have suspended operations back in the early 80's.

    BTW, please tell me. What incentive does the government have in building a safe, reliable and affordable launch vehicle?
  • It's good that you bring up the Russian space program. Despite the monolithic appearence of the Soviet system, there was a great deal of infighting and competition for funding between the various branches of the program. The duplication of effort and high costs is the primary reason the US beat them to the moon (I read this in Scientific American once, but I'm too lazy to link it.)

    WE DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS HERE.

  • Re:I have a bettr idea. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have every BIT as much right to veto a bill as our President does

    Except for the fact that millions of people have expressed their desire to give this person the ability to veto a bill, saying that they trust his opinion and that they will allow him to have a say on the future of their lives for next few years. The same cannot be said about you.

    I'm not american, but I also live in an elected dictatorship, err, democracy, So I understand the idea behind it. Yes, I agree there is too little granularity. You may want to have the president share some of your opinions, but no one shares all of them, you have to choose the lesser evil. Still, It is a fairly good system, and until something better comes along, I like it as it is.

    AC (wondering if your post should've been moderated up as funny instead)
  • You got a link on that? I'd be quite interested in reading up on that...

    --
  • USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail delivery. It is illegal to set up a competing service.

    Competition is allowed in parcel delivery though.

    --

  • EU has a chance (Score:5)

    by uradu ( 10768 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @04:01AM (#748403)
    I think NASA's glory days are over. For the last three decades they've pretty much been coasting on the Apollo program success, the shuttles notwithstanding (which were conceived at the height of their success anyway). They've done little remotely innovative since then.

    The ESA operates on very different principles. From day one they were more of a commercial venture rather than a prestige program. Of course, part of the reason for that was that they knew it was futile to try to outspend the Americans. Europeans are notoriously reluctant to spend money on big technology without the prospect of ROI. I'm sure exceptions exist, but as a rule that's pretty true. So the ESA has slowly chipped away at the commercial satellite market, and unbeknownst to most, they're now the largest satellite launcher in the world. The fact is, until we start mining asteroids or what have you, satellites are the only lucrative space business.

    My feeling is that--like Airbus--the ESA will fairly quietly work away at it, until one day they'll just happen to be the number one player (ok, so Airbus hasn't been that quiet really, but the ESA certainly has). I think one key element of that success will be the development of SSTO technology. I've been reading the ESA web pages (in particular DASA), and more than NASA almost they seem to be under the impression that SSTO will be the only way to REALLY make money in the long run. They view the Ariane launchers as strictly a short-term money making technology, but nothing to base the future on.

    Basically, until we can literally take off into space from a runway and return with the exact same vehicle, space travel will still be in its infancy and considered brute force technology. The longer we fool around with concepts like the Venture Star, which fights the atmosphere every step of the way into orbit, instead of taking advantage of it, the longer it will take to REALLY get into space.
  • Whoever modded this crap to inssightful is a fucking stupid prick. Insightful. Go blow up a McDonald's to stop the "world corporate hegemony" Dickless moron. Both whoever wrote this and the treehugging jackal that modded it. Morons.
  • The idea of competition seems to necessarily imply duplication of effort. If two agencies are in competition, it's highly doubtful that they'd share research results or technology. This is hardly what I'd call a wise use of my tax dollars.

    How about this: as public agencies, both NASA's would be required to disclose their research and findings, and turn them over to the public. NASA currently has an aggressive technology transfer program. Also, the author suggests competition in the form of prizes, where the government puts up a purse for acheiving X, and several private sector companies compete for it. The overall spending would be several times the purse, but it wouldn't be tax dollars. Not only that, but the private sector would reap the benefits of any techological developments. Either of the NASA's could then outsource projects to the private sector that developed said technology. In most cases competition is economically more efficent than a monopoly. (that is, it does more for the same dollars)

    Just a few facts about NASA: The shuttle is 70's technology that has to be dismantled stem to stern every time it lands, and rebuilt. Every tile has to be reglued on the bottom, every engine removed and overhauled. It takes 6 months. Not exactly efficent or "reusable" in any reasonable definition of the word. The competition for the shuttle (DC-X, etc) can't find the funding to continue development...

    --Bob

  • Cool conspiracy theory! But isn't it a little circumscribed? What about the Trilateral Commission? And the Pope? Aren't they involved too? What about the Russian mafioso?
    -russ

  • Re:Buy the Russians (Score:3)

    by Accipiter ( 8228 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @04:35AM (#748409)
    Oh yeah, the same agency that brought us the Mir#!@Piece of Junk*?space station.

    If you weren't as ignorant as the rest of the sheep, you would know that Mir is in bad shape because it's been up there for more than double it's intended lifespan.

    It was launched in February of '86, and was designed for six years of use. Considering it's been hanging there for 14 years, I'd say it's in pretty damn GOOD shape.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Public funding cannot create competition (Score:3)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @04:35AM (#748410)
    This just won't work. It may help somewhat. But the reason that competition works in the marketplace is that customers choose which product to buy and which company to buy from based on which best meets their needs. Those needs may be the lowest price, the best quality, the most conveniently located store, or any of a number of other factors.

    Now, lets examine publically funded space programs. That's a good phrase, "publically funded". It tells us where the money is coming from. All of the tax payers foot the bill. Now, who decides where to make the purchase? Government officials. Note, I did not say "the government". I meant that this decision is made by specific people. Their motives may be laudable, but they cannot know the full and various motivations of the people whose money they are spending.

    David Friedman gives a good explanation of Public Choice Theory in the second half of Chapter 19: The Political Marketplace [best.com] of his book Price Theory: An Intermediate Text [best.com].

  • Re:Difference between public and private companies (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @04:36AM (#748411) Journal
    "as public agencies, both NASA's would be required to disclose their research and findings, and turn them over to the public. NASA currently has an aggressive technology transfer program."

    Good idea, but do you like NASA's current technology transfer program? The NASA COSMIC software distribution center has been down for two years [uga.edu].

  • Isn't the possibility of industrial sabotage between competing space firms[...]

    Um, when was the last time you heard of a Pizza Hut manager breaking into Domino's and disabling their oven?

    Though far-fetched in light of humanity's current position, but do we really want the interests of a profit-driven corporation be placed before the scientific and diplomatic interests of a government agency if humanity encounters alien life in future?

    Would these be the same government agencies that kill, imprison and wage wars? Or different ones?

    I can see world leaders freaking out and bombing any aliens we meet the same way they do other races today. Profit-driven corporations might actually have an incentive to be more diplomatic, since the aliens could turn out to be trading partners in the future.



    --
  • The Pegasus is just one of the launch vehicles used by Orbital Sciences Corporation (http://www.orbital.com). Competition DOES exist in this field already. Go look up the Commercial Space Act. True, there are no private companies using reusable or manned vehicles, but that's simply a matter of economics; there's no money in it right now. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, OSC, and Sea Launch are all conducting commercial launch operations in the US (or at least FROM the US, in the case of Sea Launch.)

    What would be gained by competition in the manned space arena? And how can competition possibly work when it's simply not profitable for ANYONE? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more manned space flight (and it still pisses me off that they cancelled the west coast Shuttle program), but I don't see competition as being realistic right now.

    There has been a continuous cycle in NASA between efforts to reduce costs, and demands to increase safety. The shuttle is designed with triple redundant systems (fail-operate, fail-operate, fail-safe I believe it's called) and in a competitive, cost-concious commercial environment there may be more of a tendency to rely on redundant systems to reduce operating costs, at the expense of safety.

    More manned space launch operators means more potential for accidents. Can you imagine what another Challenger would do to the future of America's manned space program in today's political climate?
  • also
    kistler [kistleraerospace.com]
    and
    beal [bealaerospace.com]

    and they actually have funding (although I'm sure they could use more )

  • Re:Difference between public and private companies (Score:4)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @04:07AM (#748418)
    Why the military?

    Military spending is just only getting back to 1992 dollar amounts - for it's size and structure the US Military is underfunded.

    I think NASA should be better funded - It has been cut every year under the Clinton Administration or had it's budget remain the same without even increases to offset inflation.

    Pull 15 billion dollars from Welfare and toss it to NASA. Better yet - Cut the entire budget of the DEA and give it to NASA.
  • I agree that NASA can seem a bit slow to make advances and they have had a few 'problems' with Mars bound missions.

    But,

    If we split the 'funds' between two large organizations I think we could start getting less results for the amount of money the Gov spends.

    Secondly, if it's a private company, we would have to worry about safety, I mean will human lives be put at risk at the 'Cost of doing business?' And what new organization will have to be created to 'police' the startups? Because, you better believe the gov. is going to want to watch who is touching that high tech low drag equipment!

  • From the NASA Workstation Management Guide [nasa.gov]:

    Windows NT
    Windows NT is where the majority of the INTEL workstations will be in about 2 years. It is expected most, if not all, the Windows 95 workstations will migrate to NT or be replaced by NT workstations. There is a group working to develop the necessary standards for NT. Getting manageable configurations established before NASA migrates to the new operating system, as opposed to playing catch-up as we had to do with Windows 95, should make the NT migrations much easier than the Windows 95 migration.

    A baseline configuration for NT 4.0 does not exist. However, this is being addressed through the Hardware/Software Lead Center at this time. The efforts of the Workstation Management Expert Center will be centered on the configuration developed by the NT 4.0 working group.

    One of the primary requirements of a managed workstation is to know what is installed on the workstation. This is the basis of any future modifications, and must be documented. The NT 4.0 working group will be identifying the basic components of a Windows NT 4.0 workstation. It is expected that each of the Expert Centers will provide this information as well for their components of the NASA workstation.

    In addition to knowing what is installed on a workstation, the service provider need to know where it is installed. By being able to assume a location of important files, the task of updating those files is greatly simplified. The job is hard enough without having to take into account multiple locations for system, application and data files.

    MAC
    At this time, there are no standards or configurations available for the MAC. As these are developed, by the Workstation Hardware/Software Lead Center and MAC Expert Center, they will be included in this document. It cannot be emphasized enough that until standard configurations are developed (even Center specific ones) workstation managementon MAC platforms should be limited to inventory activities.
    Philosophy
    Baseline Configuration
    Installed Components
    Directory Structure

    UNIX
    At this time, there are no standards or configurations available for UNIX. As these are developed, by the Workstation Hardware/Software Lead Center and UNIX Expert Center, they will be included in this document. It cannot be emphasized enough that until standard configurations are developed (even Center specific ones) workstation management on UNIX platforms should be limited to inventory activities.
    Philosophy
    Baseline Configuration
    Installed Components
    Directory Structure

    --

  • Runway? SSTO? that still misses the key technical lack and why the international space station is taking 20 years to put into Orbit. You need technology able to put up a 100,000 tons, quickly, easily, and cheaply (cents per ton) into Lower Earth Orbit at least, preferably out to Largrane Point 4/5 for Space Travel to take off. The biggest problem in space travel is taht we sit down here at the bottom of the earth's gravity well.

    Until you can do this, the space program remains nothing more than a rich mans dream. NO matter how technologically savy you are, or how much your able to reuse, you still have to build a billion dollar launch vehicle, and spend years ferry up equipment and supply for any large scale enterprise like a moon base. Space only becomes viable when the cost of shipping there drops from millions of dollars a pound to dollars per pound, and the sureity of your payload getting there increases to better than 3 sigma.

    The answers to this has been known since the 50s, and it's not build the better launch vehilce, it's get rid of the launch vehicle all together.

    Take a large mountain, build an electro-magnetic launcher up it's side. Second World War tech... but it works. Wrap your payload in a container that burns off as it goes up, fire it up the rail gun, and up into orbit it goes. Not something I'd put a person in at first, but certainly something useful for shipping equipment and supplies with. And suddenly your cost of putting a pay load in orbit is the casing to wrap it in for atmospheric protection (which could very easily be ice), and the electricity to accelerate it to orbit.

  • You don't fix a broken agency by creating another broken agency.

    This has got to be the absolute worst idea I have heard today.

    Maybe if we didn't make it nearly impossible for private companies to compete with NASA, this wouldn't be a problem.

    Seriously folks, anyone who even remotely cares about the size of government should be very troubled by this absurd proposal.

  • I get an even bigger kick out of advertising for Milk. Guess where the Milk Marketing Board gets its funding? Thats right!

  • Re:Difference between public and private companies (Score:3)

    by B'Trey ( 111263 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:00AM (#748427)
    The idea of competition seems to necessarily imply duplication of effort. If two agencies are in competition, it's highly doubtful that they'd share research results or technology. This is hardly what I'd call a wise use of my tax dollars.
  • Competition is what drove the space program. Now that there aren't as many "firsts" to achieve, NASA could use a good swift kick to go after those that are left (Mars, Pluto and the ISS).

    Goat - the other, other white meat.

  • I have a bettr idea. (Score:5)

    by spam-o-tron mk1 ( 237603 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:03AM (#748429) Homepage
    Why don't we open up competition for the IRS? For the FBI? For the CIA? Hell, why not the National Parks Service? Or the NSF? Or the Treasury Department? Who says Alan Greenspan should get to call all the shots; I could do a better job running this country's economy than that loser! Or Congress? Why do THEY get to make all the laws? Competition is what this country's based on! What about the police? Or the FDA: shouldn't drug companies get to CHOOSE who approves their products? How about the CIA and the NSA? Shouldn't there be some good, old-fashioned, American style sink-or-swim, eat-or-be-eaten among intelligence agencies? Or the military! What a terrible waste! Shouldn't private companies be bidding for that contract?

    The United States was founded on the principle that everyone should be able to do whatever they want, and that the government shouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. I have every BIT as much right to veto a bill as our President does, I don't have a SPECK less justification than the Atomic Energy Commission does for building breeder reactors, and I have every DROP as much privilege to assassinate foreign leaders as the CIA does. I should be able to shut down restaurants for health violations, decide who is mentally competent to stand trial, and set environmental regulations, and so should you!

    One mayor per city, one congressman per district, one governor per state, one president per nation: it's an absolute, monopolizing terror. So when the time comes to vote this November, don't let the instructions fool you into marking only one box. Competition's the name of the game: mark them all!

    Thank you.

    Bruce

  • Additional Private Launch Companies (Score:5)

    by meckardt ( 113120 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:03AM (#748430) Homepage

    In addition to the private ventures mentioned, here are some others:

    CFFC [thriftyspace.com]
    JP Aerospace [jpaerospace.com]
    Microcosm [smad.com]
    Pioneer Rocketplane [rocketplane.com]

  • The individual effort might be cheaper. But it seems to me that the sum of the costs all the individual efforts, including failed ones, will likelly be more than the cost of a single, concentrated effort. We taxpayers would be footing the bill for ALL of the efforts, not just the cheapest one.
  • I wasn't commenting on the Waco incident at all, merely pointing out that one (local) law enforcement agency was responsible for finding that another agency (national) had been inaccurate in their reports (when claiming that NO incindiary devices were used).

    Its just a decent example of one agency being able to independently check another (and high-profile enough that people would recognize it).

    No Waco conspiracies from me...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.
  • Suppose you have a child who becomes addicted to crack or heroine, would you like to see a reduction in funding of the DEA

    Well.. if I had a child who became addicted to crack or heroin, the DEA would gladly step in and throw him in a dark hole for the next 20 years, so.. I don't know.

    I agree with you on the welfare issue, but the DEA is not a humanitarian program. It has its reasons for existing, but they're more about making sure the citizens know who's in power than trying to help anyone. I could go into more detail, but then I'd be hit with Redundant tags left and right.

    My formula for success is, tentatively, to spend: More on the space program, the same amount on welfare, slightly less on the military, less on agricultural subsidies, and almost nothing on the DEA; and to make the tax stucture more progressive while raising tariffs juuust slightly.

    I may be wrong on several of these issues but of course there's no way to tell since we have a one-party system (The Almighty Corporate Party, with its Democrat and Replublican branches) who are adamantly opposed to change.
  • But if it takes a loss for the year, they make you pay, by siphoning tax dollars you should have kept in the first place. See http://www.nationalre vie w.com/comment/comment092700b.shtml [nationalreview.com] for more on the USPS.

  • Re:Difference between public and private companies (Score:3)

    by NullAndVoid ( 181397 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @04:20AM (#748442)
    Why the military?

    Because the military is primarily a corporate welfare/jobs creation program. Witness the recent proposal to spend *billions* on a missile defense program *just in case* somebody actually builds missiles which could hit the US. If they really must spend that kind of cash, why not spend it on something that might actually produce something useful? Many of the same companies and workers could benefit.

    Military spending is just only getting back to 1992 dollar amounts - for it's size and structure the US Military is underfunded.

    How exactly is this bad? The military budget pre-1992 was focused on the cold war, it's main achievement was to force the USSR into bankruptcy. It's over. We won. "Rogue nations" just aren't worth the same level of effort - so what if Qaddaffi and Castro and others still refuse to bend over? Do we really need to have every nation on the planet completely under our thumb to sleep at night?

  • Actually, under the Clinton adminstration, the NASA budget went from 15.8 billion in 1999 to 16.8 billion in 2000. That seems like more than an inflationary increase to me.
  • Hear hear. If we Americans could build things to last longer than their intended use, we'd have internet startups that would last more than 3 years. :)

  • Competition works well in a free market because the metric by which competitors are measured is both well-defined and easily agreed upon by all. Whoever makes the most money is the best competitor.

    I understand what you're saying, but private-sector does not necessarily mean for-profit. Competition is quite present among not-for-profit private organizations.

    Example A: Private, voluntary charities like United Way, Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, free clinics, etc.

    Example B: Private preschool and K-12 schools, and the growing national networks of charter schools, private schools and school management companies like Edison Schools, Success For All, Hirsch Core Knowledge schools, Thomas Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools, and Replications, Inc. Many if not most of these are not-for-profit.

    These organizations and not-for-profit corporations have to compete with each other for funding, a.k.a. voluntary contributions. They have to earn the trust and financial support of donors by showing integrity, effectiveness and fiscal responsibility.

    In contrast, government agencies are generally... how do you say in America? Wasteful and ineffective? NASA seems to be *slightly* better run than the average federal agency, but it would seem there is room for a lot of improvement.

    My point with this long-ass, sleep-deprived, love-the-free-market rant is:

    Why couldn't we have a space exploration effort run by a private, not-for-profit organization? Or even several competing ones? Set up a secure credit card form, get linked on Slashdot - boom! There's startup capital. I'm sure some heads here would also be into poring over some (non-critical :) code, and donating CPU cycles. We could do it up all international-like, get everyone involved open-source stylee, and do away with the silly 'national space program' penis-size contests.

    Is someone already working on this? Or am I just ahead of my time again? :)



    --

  • Buy the Russians (Score:4)

    by Pseudonymus Bosch ( 3479 ) on Thursday September 28, 2000 @03:07AM (#748453) Homepage
    There is a very capable space agency desperately looking for funding. For science and peace's sake, if you really want to fund space projects outside NASA, support the Russian sapce agency.
    __
  • Competition works well in a free market because the metric by which competitors are measured is both well-defined and easily agreed upon by all. Whoever makes the most money is the best competitor.

    Space programs, on the other hand, are not entirely profit-motivated enterprises. While a lot of NASA is commercially motivated in some way, there's a significant chunk that is better classified as a science organization. Private companies will do science to the extent that they can make money on it, but typically this leaves a lot of work undone. Here's a hypothetical: Would a private company have built and deployed the Hubble telescope? I think not. Hubble was (and is) very expensive, but fundamentally unprofitable, in an accounting sense. Yet I'd argue it's worth every penny and more for the scientific work that it's done.

    I think it's a great idea to privatise as much of the space agency as is commercially viable, but there's still a huge role for NASA to do work that is in the nation's interest, but may not be entirely profitable.

  • NSA (Score:2)

    by imh ( 66912 )
    Removing the A from NASA you would get ...

    Many people who know much about NSA distrust it as well ... It seems NSA would benefit from having publicly funded competition,

    So hey, lets set up a rival to the NSA, publicly funded of course! That'll make us feel sooo much safer!

    Err, no. Lets not. 2 sets of spooks would be so much worse.
  • Why stay within one country? Nationality should be open to competition as well.

    The states, no, the cities, no, everybody should be able to decide which country they live in.

    Have you forgot when the CEO of USA, Lincoln, used monopolistic techniques to crush the competition of the CSA?
    __
  • For starters, competition could result in lower quality to affect the prices to get the assignment. Of course this does not mean it always does but you can guess that with sums of money as large as they are now to get something into orbit the choice for a cheaper competitor looks very appealing.

    Second, what would the competition do? Bringing satelites into orbit ? Or manned spacemissions as well? In the latter case the technologie needed should be aquired at what cost? Could we get patentwars in space propulsion techniques or heat resistant shield usage? There are too many angles to this than meets the eye. Far more than what i point out here.. If money rules space aviation than things could get worse then ever.

    Besides. Who will pay for all the different projects and "space agencies" out there? The tax payer? Wealthy industries / persons? And if the wealthy industries / persons pay for the ride who would control what they do with the satelites up there? No-one to check if things are done correctly..

    I would like to see government enacted space agencies for the moment. They probably abuse the system as well but at least it is for a common goal and not for something else. Maybe a coordination effort like the ISS is needed to propel space exploration to unknown hights (pun not intended) and not comercialising the playing field...
  • The popularity of the TV show 'Survivor' gave me an idea on how to fund the space program:

    Put a bunch of astronauts into a big space station filled with lots of TV cameras. Every week, they vote on one astronaut to kick off the station, and blow him/her out the airlock. I guarantee that the TV ratings would be so insanely great that the advertising revenue could fund the space program for years!
    --
  • Competition in law enforcement? You mean more than we have now?

    We have county sheriffs, city police, state police, and the FBI (national police). Their jurisdictions overlap significantly, so they ARE constantly competing for investigations, as well as checking each other.

    Don't forget it was the [sherriff|state trooper] in Texas who brought out all the evidence of the FBI using incindiary devices out in the open. Checks and balances, baby...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.
  • The private sector would be better for safety? That's so funny it's sad. Hmm, let's see: Tobacco Industry - nope

    So you are asserting the existence of safe tobacco products produced by the public sector, then.

    Please document this claim, I was previously unaware of such products.
  • We should get the DOJ's antitrust division to sue NASA for being a monopoly and split it into two pieces.

    --

  • Re:Buy the Russians (Score:3)

    by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Thursday September 28, 2000 @05:14AM (#748465) Homepage
    For science and peace's sake, if you really want to fund space projects outside NASA, support the Russian sapce agency.

    Uh, buddy, we HAVE been funding the russian space agency. You'd be shocked to find out how much of the US NASA funding goes to russia both directly and indirectly.

    Quite frankly the ISS could have been finished years ago if we weren't hell-bent on including the Russians, throwing money at their space agency and watching it get embezzeled out the back door. They have been late on everything because the money disappears. Feel free to send them a check, though -- I'm sure they'd love to get it!...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.
  • Hate to tell you, but you unknowingly stumbled upon some truth.

    The Challenger actually was originally something of a mock-up. From the beginning, it was STA-099- thats Structural Test Article 099. It was built to the same specs the Enterprise (OVO-101) was built to. Subsequently, the Enterprise (which was originally going to be called the Constitution- the trekkies got the name changed) was found to be too weak for actual operations (specifically the wings), and was grounded- it's now more of a display piece than anything. They then replaced the wings of the Challenger with up-to-new-spec wings and used it as an orbiter, changing the designator to OVO-099. Didn't have anything at all to do with the distruction, but just kinda interesting.

    Not that I'm under the dilusion that anyone will read this, except perhaps the author (nice troll, sx). Just a little bit of interesting stuff.


    What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?
  • So they have not kept up repairs on Mir, whos' fault is that? And now someone wants us to bail them out?

    Mojo
  • >It seems NASA would benefit from having publicly funded competition, resembling what Japan's two competing civilian space agencies have.

    Perhaps a look at Japan's space agencies is in order. Their home-grown rocket program has been a disaster, and the blame is often placed on lack of a single agency.
  • Competition is what this country's based on! What about the police?

    Actually competition in law enforcment is not a bad idea, since it could make it easier for corrupt police and officials to be prosecuted.

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