5 comments

• Gary

  April 13, 2023 at 6:23 am

  I know Musk has a million things on his plate, but it would be interesting (and paradigm shifting) for him to work with some of these planetary scientists to break free from NASA. The lead on this project laments that NASA won’t “allow the Venus team to get on an even playing field” with other projects. Maybe NASA shouldn’t be the only game in town.
• David M. Cook

  April 13, 2023 at 8:30 am

  So Bill Nelson squandered $60 Billion on an unmanned flight around the Moon, but he won‘t spend a few million on a Venus probe? What an IDIOT!!! He should be removed from office immediately! We don‘t need dopes like him running anything!
• James Street

  April 13, 2023 at 12:48 pm

  The norm has become that little of the American taxpayers’ money goes to their stated uses, including NASA. Most money is actually used against Americans. These are just a few headlines I came across this morning:
  • “Matt Gaetz: Big Pharma Has Figured Out How to “Monetize” Adolescence”
  • “Underreported Bombshell: Seymour Hersh Reveals Massive Skimming of US Aid in Ukraine and Claims CIA Knows All About It”
  • “Leonardo DiCaprio Testified About a Secret $30 Million Foreign Donation to Obama, And No One’s Talking About It”
  • “Fraud-Prone Poverty Programs Are Ripping Off Taxpayers Nationwide”
  • “Biden to announce free and taxpayer-subsidized health care for 580,000 DACA recipients”

  This 2 minute video is about a former U.S. military base in Panama that’s now being used by the UN and leftist NGOs funded by the American taxpayer to traffic illegal aliens, drugs, criminals, etc into America:
  Ben Bergquam @BenBergquam
  Former US Army base in Panamá transformed into leftist NGO hub, housing many of the organizations that are aiding the invasion of America! The United Nations, OIM and the rest of these leftist NGOs need to be defunded and investigated for their role in the largest human trafficking operation in history!
  https://twitter.com/BenBergquam/status/1645633780282019840
  8:44 PM · Apr 10, 2023

  Think what could be done if America’s government was limited and what taxes were collected went to their stated use, and not a communist tool of wealth transfer from the producers to the non-producers as well as America’s enemies.
• Edward

  April 13, 2023 at 9:04 pm

  In the Twitter thread of the Venus link, Paul Byrne writes: “It means there won’t be a Venus proposal in the next New Frontiers competition. And, because of the problems with the Psyche mission, JPL, and NASA’s decision to delay another Venus mission, VERITAS, there might not be another planetary mission competition for quite some time.”

  This is an example of how problems and cost overruns on one mission can affect other missions, even to the point that other missions may never be proposed, so that we don’t know what are the costs of lost opportunities due to those overruns. In the case of Psyche, its problems contribute to possible losses of planetary mission competitions. Without those competitions, there is no planetary mission.

  Every time we look at a Webb picture and read or hear about what that tells us about the universe, we are going to say, “What a good thing the James Webb Space Telescope is.” However, it cost 20 times as much as its original budget. For that amount of money, we should have had twenty similar missions and twenty times as much science as we are getting from the Webb telescope. Because of the mismanagement of the Webb project, it took twice as long to build Webb and get it on station, delaying the timing of the science it gives us and reducing the time that it has for coordinated science with the Hubble Space Telescope.

  I don’t mean to denigrate the science we get from Webb, but we have to understand the cost of that project’s mismanagement, poor budgeting techniques (similar to mismanagement), and schedule slips.

  We may lose the Hubble Space Telescope due to the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the resulting loss of repair and maintenance missions. The Shuttle, too, had mismanagement problems. It was retired because NASA and Congress did not take safety seriously enough. After the second lost Shuttle, the project was retired. But there is another lesson to the Space Shuttle, too. Its costs were so great that we lost out on a lot of science, exploration, and advancement in space. Because of the costs, we didn’t fly at the promised launch cadence, reducing the science and lessons to learn. Because of the reduced missions, fewer space stations were possible, further reducing the science and lessons. Because of the reduced missions, it continued to be difficult for commercial endeavors to occur in space, and we are still waiting for the benefits of space manufacturing.

  The ISS is a similar story to the Shuttle. To reduce the initial cost, the cost of construction, by about 3%, modules were cancelled and the amount of science performed was reduced by around 30% due to the lack of onboard resource, including a reduced occupancys. It cost too much, not enough science is performed, and commercial endeavors continue to be difficult to perform. The most promising increase in commercial endeavors is happening due to the advent of inexpensive commercial manned spacecraft and their inexpensive commercial launches. More and less expensive commercial space stations are in the works.

  This brings us back to the advantages of having missions that are not overpriced and are effective at what they do. It is one of the many benefits of commercializing space. Robert wrote a policy paper demonstrating that the commercial space industry can do what NASA, the Air Force, NOAA, and other government agencies want, and it can to these things for much less cost in a more timely manner.

  An advantage that Robert did not focus on in his policy paper was the benefits to the rest of us. Things such as space manufactured goods. Improved medications and materials can improve our lives, but the lack of commercialization of space, the control of space by government, has resulted in a lack of manufacture of these goods. Now that we are getting inexpensive launch services, these are becoming possibilities. Similar to the lost science due to the expense of careless government project management, we have lost other benefits from space that would have been possible and would have been done had the mismanagement costs been less. Lost opportunity costs can be very expensive.
• Richard M

  April 14, 2023 at 5:23 am

  “This is an example of how problems and cost overruns on one mission can affect other missions, even to the point that other missions may never be proposed, so that we don’t know what are the costs of lost opportunities due to those overruns. In the case of Psyche, its problems contribute to possible losses of planetary mission competitions. Without those competitions, there is no planetary mission.”

  The real killer here is Mars Sample Return, which, like the JWST, is a flagship mission seeing its cost growth threaten to swallow up more and more of the science mission directorate’s budget. Veritas took the hit because it was, frankly, the least politically protected planetary science mission on the docket.

  But the planetary science community really, really, really wants Mars Sample Return. They’ve been working toward it for 30 years. And with ESA involvement, all that makes it very hard to kill.