NASA Gives Up on LISA(blogs.discovermagazine.com) |
NASA Gives Up on LISA(blogs.discovermagazine.com) |
http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...
I've always wondered, we have rich foundations doing all kinds of good - do any of them try to step in and fill budgets of this sort?
So many interesting research projects have been stopped lately, education is being crippled, and other avenues of education and research are being killed for religious reasons.
We owe so much to science in our daily lives, why are (common) people so reluctant to see that?
Or is the issue deeper. Do people hate the current, fast, technological era on some level and hope that stifling science will bring back older, more gentle times somehow?
I don't get it anymore, honestly.
At least here in Australia, a common comment on something like this is that we shouldn't spend money on this sort of thing when there are people starving and dying in the third world. Then the typical comments on, say an article about, the plight of the poor in the third world are critical of throwing money abroad when we have problems of our own at home. Then the typical comments on those problems (say, gap in life expectancy between that of the Aboriginal population and the average) find another excuse.
It frustrates me too. I'd love to see military budgets (as one example) plowed into aggressive space research and exploration (as well as third world problems) and uniting the planet.
Maybe the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox is just the tendency of the masses towards selfish, lazy, basic instinct-driven behaviour.
2)The astronomy community unfortunately can't pay for LISA, JWST, and all of the other smaller projects at the same time. The other solution, as opposed to keeping lisa, would be to cancel the small stuff. But, I think it is more appropriate to go after this large cost item first before the smaller items.
3)You're forgetting that science isn't just composed of these huge projects, there are still tons of smaller projects that have money poured into them. Radio astronomy still receives money and builds nice telescopes (I think the MWA is the most recent). And let's not forget that for Gravitational Waves, LIGO is still being upgraded to LIGO advanced and is expected to directly observe some gravitational waves. Since its arms are much shorter than LISA's, it studies different frequency waves. LISA is expected to study waves from merging black holes while LIGO studies those from merging neutron stars and supernovas.
Like others have said, this is just a low point in the fluctuations of a large budget. It's not the first time we've had to cancel expensive projects, and cool science can still be done.
I'm also an outsider, but I think this is really a money problem. The same thing happened in the USSR in the late '80s, suddenly there was no money for science anymore, it didn't matter that the Soviet scientists had helped produce great things.
Right now there is a massive pullback, but when the economy recovers things will restart.
Take a longer view.
There's no real hurry. Gravity waves will still be there in twenty years time if we feel like building LISA.
I'm impatient with space exploration and research obviously because the scales involved make it likely that many great achievements won't occur during my lifetime.
So that and your line remind me of:
"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."
Hmm. I'm not too familiar with that research area. Isn't the point of detectors like LIGO is that we don't know how big they are typically?
How do we make one hundred percent sure that gravity waves exist? What do you propose as a way that would convince ourselves that they do (or don't), and how do we estimate their size? Has the research community done this already?
However, LIGO/VIRGO aren't a replacement for LISA, as they look at gravity waves of different frequencies: the sources they'd expect to see are different.
Why would you give away money to charity while you could sponsor LISA?
That said, private money for technology development efforts or data analysis could likely be well-used.
It's just that its $6.5B price tag is overwhelming the whole astrophysics science effort. The original design was supposed to come in around 0.5B. See
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/71607/title/Star_...
rinse, repeat.
I simply don't believe it. The USA is still the biggest economy of the world, which makes this a resource allocation issue instead of a resource issue.
The current crippling of science and education will only hurt the economy more. The economy is not like the weather something that just happens, and that will improve if we just "wait it out".
If anything, it would be helped by massive investments in science and space projects. It injects money in the constructive and innovative parts of society. The focus is too much on Wall Street which are basically toll takers.
I don't think it's about "the economy" at all. A lot of research has been done during periods of much bleaker economy than there is now. Maybe it was the cold war (and earlier country-level competition) keeping people sharp.
Look at the situation with nuclear energy, over the past two decades noone in their right mind (without tenure) would have gone into nuclear energy research. The result is that now, when people are once again talking about the need for new reactors and whatnot, the field is a pale shadow of what it was 30 years ago.
This is why long-term efforts like research can't be subject to the year-by-year fluctuations. "Disinvesting in the University of California is like eating our seed corn," is what the UC researchers said about the cuts to the UC budget, which applies equally well anywhere else.
Interesting example - because they are. The military is responsible for a lot more research than is immediately obvious. All you have to do is come up with some plausible military use (offense or defense), and you have a chance for funding.
I've seen projects with just the barest hit of possibly being militarily related get funded by the military.
I get the feeling the military knows they are overfunded, and they try to make up for the lack of funding in other places.
Or perhaps the military likes being over funded - so when they need it, they have it. But the rest of the time they can fund other things (and presumably cancel them in an emergency).
The space shuttle, for instance, persisted not for the scientific or technical advances, but that it sent money to lots of political constituencies, which alone made it viable. The Hubble, while giving us spectacular images, was still horribly overpriced and NASA ended up paying for it twice over (once to send it up and twice to send the shuttle after it).
There wasn't a lot of opposition to the shuttle and the ISS from within NASA (for 'eating up the budget') because they were aware that budget only existed because of these high-value items. They might have liked to have the money for other things, perhaps, but political money doesn't work that way.
If the construction, deployment, staffing, etc was pointed towards space research and exploration, we'd be able to push forward all sorts of projects.
In my question I was going to add that if it's less than 5 years you are not waiting long enough, and 10 is more realistic. (But decided to just leave it as a question.)
The last internet bubble was 10 years ago, and only now are we are starting to talk about about an upswing again. Economic cycles are measured in decades.
Look at this graph: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp?...
Notice the downturn right before you gave up? Even today we are still not higher than we were in 06. When you start to see the graph look like it does in 88 to 99 then things will turn around.
Otherwise: There is a new upswing, all new projects, talk about going to Mars. Then a new crash, it's all cancelled again.. and so on.
I found this graph: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Real+Gross+Domestic+Pro... (Switch it to logscale.) The most obvious thing I notice about it is the totally flat result after 2000, then improvement (but not as fast as before), and now back where we started.