NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable(arstechnica.com) |
NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable(arstechnica.com) |
SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for in order to achieve its mission goals… it’s the rocket they were forced into using due to lobbying and senate shenanigans, there’s a reason it has the nickname “senate launch system”.
The fact the pork barrel project is so bloated it’s “unaffordable” is irrelevant as far as the senators who are voting for it are concerned.
My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.
The US can spend this kind of money .. with not much progress .. and no real consequences for failure. Adversaries see this as weakness because that is what it is.
This has real world consequences … when people see the US spends 10 times more than any other nation on its military and its space program it becomes apparent this doesn’t equate to necessarily a 10x factor in results. So yes we may have the best tech/gear in the world but may be spending way too much to only get a slight edge and find this edge is not even sustainable.
I've heard just the opposite about the similar SDI/"Star Wars" - that the US pouring billions into this blatantly impossible and pointless programme, and suffering no real consequences for doing so, was what finally convinced the USSR they couldn't win.
That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.
I donno about this. Adversaries might just as well conclude the opposite, that the US can blow that kind of cash on SLS and other dumb stuff all over the world without major problems. IIRC, UBL's thesis was A-stan is/was the graveyard of empires and would also be the US', but it turned out to be an otherwise forgotten Pentagon rounding error.
Isn't this already known though?
The US has such vast resources it can afford to squander them freely due to corruption and incompetence without the people involved ever really being held accountable. This is true of civilian infrastructure projects as well. Yet at the end of the day the country is still so massively wealthy, it makes no practical difference.
Accurately
Me and GPT had a good discussion about it: https://chat.openai.com/share/828cb390-dac0-4f3b-a556-f02972...
A phrase I learned at NASA: "With enough thrust anything can fly".
The fact that SLS isn’t designed for reusability, making its per-launch cost something like $4billion, means it’s effectively already outclassed, outcompeted, and obsolete.
Any source?
For twenty years now they have tried to build a launcher based on recycling as many ~parts~jobs from the Shuttle program as possible and thus far have flown exactly zero people and exactly zero kilograms of cargo. The Senate doesn't mind, because the STS is a jobs program, not a spaceflight program. (Although it's not like the market for SRBs in particular has been very hot lately given how few of them have been in fact launched, so I dunno. Probably the govt is paying ATK just to keep the plant running so they'll be able to build/refurbish a pair of boosters every two or three years which is the expected STS launch rate.)
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/08/24/...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasas-artemis-del...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Developmen...
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to develop a new rocket called the Space Launch System. It set performance requirements for the rocket (use just two stages to lift 70 tons into low-Earth orbit, use a third stage to lift 130 tons to LEO, carry cargo and astronauts to ISS, carry deep-space crew capsule, support gradual increase in performance by "evolutionary growth" with new stages), and required that, "where practicable", NASA should maintain existing Space-Shuttle and Ares contracts, workforces, infrastructure, and technologies, and that the rocket be scheduled to launch no later than the end of 2016.
The precise requirements were written to force NASA to design a rocket that maintained lucrative Space Shuttle-era contracts.
https://spaceref.com/press-release/hatch-passage-of-nasa-rea...
Also, the requirement to upgrade existing infrastructure ensured that billions of dollars went into Bill Nelson's district in Florida. (He is now the highest-ranking official at NASA.)
The law did not establish long-term funding for the development of the rocket. As with all NASA projects, money is granted one year at a time in Congress's annual budget. In 2011, NASA announced the plan to build this rocket. In accordance with the law's requirements and intention, it re-used almost all core technologies, infrastructure, and major subcontractors of the Space Shuttle. There was actually some fuss about this at the time:
https://spacenews.com/shelby-nasa-hold-competition-sls-boost...
but the strategy of "give Congress what they want" has worked: the Planetary Society shows that Congress has consistently granted NASA more money than asked for to fund SLS.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
In particular, Richard Shelby (senator from Alabama, which is home to many NASA facilities, and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 2018–2021) was a powerful political supporter of the SLS, ensuring its continued funding, and attacking anybody who even suggested it might not be necessary.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...
We like to pretend that political influence on government institutions is a new "bug" and not something build into the system from day one.
If their engine is between 5-100x more expensive than an equivalent engine from competiting companies. Why is it so impossible to be a little bit more agile and consider the other engines?
Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place, but it's not as if an efficient way of performing a pointless mission is going to get us better results.
The sea dragon concept from the 60's is completely impossible today because they literally don't make the kind of cheap steel plate it was designed to use anymore. We can't build saturn V engines anymore (despite extensive blueprints) because those who knew how to do the extremely long, perfect welds involved are all dead and that kind of weld has fallen out of fashion so the skill no longer exists.
You frequently end up re-engineering each bit of "old technology" for the current era's materials and skills, unless you literally maintain an unbroken chain of continual manufacturing all the way along. We stopped building new space shuttles 40+ years ago.
Not all R&D is amortized.
The comparison in space enthusiasm and planning is ... significant.
Wernher von Braun wrote a 281 page engineering text masquerading as a fiction novel to pitch Mars.
Current NASA leadership wrote:
- Stabilize the flight schedule
- Achieve learning curve efficiencies
- Encourage innovation
- Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
Political types love these announcements they’re going to get something for nothing.
It could have though.
Imagine a world where SpaceX burnt out in the late 2000s, and all that talent and energy moved to Boeing/Lockheed et. al.
Point being that they were far from a sure thing in 2008. The traditional contractors were seen as a safe bet by everyone involved. And the speed at which federal government moves means these things are measured in decades.
It's essentially the "Emperor has no clothes" story, but nobody believes the little boy telling the truth, because the "emperor is naked" is such an absurd statement to make. That's just silly, so of course there must be a deeper truth, a greater story, a hidden meaning.
Or just trade each $2 billion [0] SLS launch for a mix of 2000 $1 million [1] Starship launches to orbit, from orbit to destination, and/or returns.
Even if Starship launches have a significant likelihood of costing more than that, just 2 Starship launches per SLS seems like a bargain.
20 would be fantastic.
200 would be surreal.
2000 would be … what on (off) Earth could NASA do with 2000? Put all of NASA, its entire supply chain, and the Senate on Mars! O_o
Then achieve a further cost reduction for trips to Mars surface: just the cost of the electrical current required to operate a Mars habitat airlock.
Talk about time and cost efficiency!!
What is ridiculous is the crazy logic of all this is fairly sound, due to the beyond ridiculous (for today) SLS costs.
I have a funny feeling that the SLS’s days are numbered.
I don’t think these mega empires are good for the world, too much central power and too many management layers between those who rule, and those who do.
A lot of rules to follow that often seems arbitrary.
The budget is written by Congress, and the President doesn't have any direct power in Congress. They often have friends there, especially if they used to be legislators. They have some carrots and sticks, but those are actually weak and indirect tools.
If the President's party controls a house, they can usually invoke party discipline (the general sense that doing something will be good for the party and a whole and therefore good for the individual members), perhaps with some of those carrots-and-sticks for recalcitrant allies. But it's rare for the President's party to control both houses, especially considering the filibuster.
If a President made it their top priority and it were something that the party got behind them on, they could perhaps make an all-out push, calling in favors and making deals. It would come with a lot of ill will, from their own party as well as the opposition, because that's not how Congress likes to work. They see themselves as a deliberative body and don't like outside interference -- especially when it upsets the balance of their own dealmaking.
So the short answer is no, the President doesn't have that kind of power. Even if they wanted to, which they generally don't. Nobody is going to jump up and down to say, "Yay, look how efficient this President is, saving .01% of the overall budget". And while they might score a few political points off of hurting somebody that their allies don't like, it's generally not something Democratic presidents are into.
(I'm afraid there's no non-partisan way to say that the culture war is asymmetric.)
Now the trajectory (no pun intended) of SpaceX was good back then and you might have guessed they would grow rapidly in capabilities and capacity, but it wasn’t a done deal.
I’m no fan of SLS, but it was a very understandable safe bet 10 years ago.
The SLS has not launched a human.
NASA's problem is lack of funding. That is something that can't be fixed in today's world. Because the US just does not have the amount of spare cash lying around like it did in the 1960s.
That lack of NASA funding is why I predict that the US will never again put men on the Moon, no matter what all the pundits try to tell us. There just ain't no spare cash, period.
.
You can't just swap engines without a significant redesign of the rocket and ground support equipment to match.
the RS-25 burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen; the BE-4 and Raptor burn methane and liquid oxygen, but the Raptor uses supercooled densified propellants while the BE4 takes them at closer to their boiling point. Switching between BE-4 and Raptor would require nearly as much work as a switch from RS-25 to either.
The varying density, temperature, and fuel-to-oxidizer ratios mean the propellant tanks would need to change size, and that may have some tricky structural implications with respect to the side boosters of the SLS. And the ground support equipment (launch pad, tower, etc., ) would of course also need to be adjusted to match.
For a moment there I thought that Low Earth Geostationary Orbit might be a thing.
How quickly we forget that just a few years ago the space industry looked very different from how it does today.
Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us. For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward, even if it doesn't lead to cancer cures or longer-lasting batteries.
In the same way, sending people into space connects us to all those nameless explorers who sailed into the Pacific in rickety boats, or conquered the Americas (the first time) via the Bering ice bridge.
When I think of the Apollo 8 astronauts seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time, I can almost feel what they felt: awe, perspective, loneliness, and maybe even that primal fear that we all get from being so far from home. I truly cannot wait to watch (and to have my kids watch) astronauts walking on the Moon.
Sure, we can argue about whether we should spend more money on X and less money on Y--that's what democracy is all about. But to say that NASA shouldn't be sending humans into space is, in my mind, missing the forest for the trees.
But is putting humans in a low Earth orbit really gaining knowledge about the universe at this point? Surely we've hit the point of diminishing returns by now.
If you ignore the huge difference in efficacy and results, sure.
That's true only in a very strained and tautological sense of "inspire".
Science has quantifiable results. There are facts that we know and theories we've understood (and discarded!) because of telescopes and probes that we would not know had they not flown. Whether that knowledge has value or not is, I guess, subjective. But it's not only "inspiration" except insofar as you declare that the only reason for wanting to know about martian geology or the early universe or whatever is "because it inspires us". Which is to say: you're making a semantic argument, not a profound one.
Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?
We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight.
The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorers of all kinds. Even if a child doesn't end up being an astronaut, they end up more curious than if we only sent rovers. Because we are human.
It just seems sadly cynical to hear people think "there is no utility to human exploration".
I'd go farther and say humans must gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably, and eventually out of this solar system, if humanity is to survive long term.
However, just because a problem must be solved for humanity to survive doesn't necessarily mean any effort should be spent now on it.
Sometimes a problem is so far beyond current technology and theory that instead of having your best people spend their lives trying to make tiny advances toward solving it you are better off if they work on things that can actually be solved now, and in a few decades or centuries our general level of technology and theory will have advanced enough that the work that took our best people their whole careers to accomplish will be something that would be a decent homework problem in college.
I have no doubts - even a mars mission where you'd send people to interact with things in person and be able to react instantly and not 45 mins later with whatever the camera and sensors happen to show you.
Now, whether that scientific information is worth the cost? Hard to say. As much as people like criticizing public programs for "pork barrel" this and "bureaucrat red tape" that and whatever.... publicly funded programs are usually run with penny-pinching oversight and angry politicians wanting to get their day of glory by killing programs.
Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.
What if we made this third party (I'm guessing blue origin/space x) bear the cost until we have a proven result so they put their money where their mouth is...
They promise USD 1M per engine, they have to deliver at USD 1M per engine. Not a cent more.
No, we are figuring out - how do you survive in space? How do you take a shit in space? Toilets would constantly break on ISS and it was a huge problem.
And people can get shit done. They are designing robots for mining lunar regolith, but they are all less efficient than a guy with a shovel. You could send 10 dudes to the moon with a shovel and a 3D printer, and they could produce aluminium parts on the moon.
I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true.
If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?
To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house.
I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.
One still can see it as a "jobs program" from the individual states' point of view. From the NASA link [1], I found out that the prime contractor is in Huntsville, Alabama, and important subcontractors are in New Orleans, LA, and in Northern Utah. Highly trained engineers would certainly find jobs somewhere, but maybe not in the same states, and that would be a hit to the local economy.
So, I can see how some senators and representatives from those states could put pressure for a make-work program to continue without regards for costs and results. But still, the Congress has lots of other members, and there is a pretty good chance that those other members did not mount a strong opposition because they saw the defense implications of keeping the SLS alive.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/fs/sls.html
Basically, if this is a know-how preservation program, it is horribly mismanaged. And there's no reason why you couldn't have a know-how preservation program that also produced useful results. As with so many things, they're not playing 5D chess, they're just playing poorly.
I also found out (afraid I don’t have a source to hand) that re-engineering the A10 (is that right?), the darling of F35 criticisers would cost more to retrofit up to modern requirements.
Yeah that's because every time the price of the programme goes up, they "buy" more planes so that the per plane cost goes down. Any plane can be "cheap" if you agree to pay up front for a million of them to be delivered "eventually, nudge-nudge, wink-wink".
I'm sure some people only look at "omg look at how much it costs to buy one!" and then forget that there's a life after the purchase that costs mind boggling amounts of money that, by simply not buying even a single jet, can actually fund a stupid amount of societal progress, from paying teachers to funding an entire NASA project.
But of course the comment itself wasn't about F35s. It was about "maybe spend less on death toys and more on the parts that make society a good thing like space exploration, the arts, education, health care, etc."
In the same way, we send humans into space because it makes us feel good. We like to see people strap themselves to a controlled explosion and head out into space to explore.
Just as seeing pictures of the universe makes us feel awe, inspiration, and perspective, seeing humans in space gives us perspective on our beautiful, fragile world, and our role in the universe.
If all you want is to collect data on the cosmos for the sake of pure science, then absolutely human space flight is a waste of money.
If your goal is to inspire, create an atmosphere that instills interest in a space program (of all types, including manned and unmanned), promotes STEM fields, and is a jobs program, then you'd probably find it very useful and cost effective to sink money into a human spaceflight campaign.
Guess which one of those goals is NASA's true mission.
These sorts of conversations so often ignore that NASA is an organization controlled by politicians and is ultimately responsible to them and the US public who elects them. It's not the engineers and scientists employed or using the data that NASA creates. At the end of the day, those politicians want to have their name connected with inspiration, not just data on the water content of mars.
How many kids do you know that say they want to be an unmanned rover on mars when they grow up? How often do you hear JFK saying "We go to the moon, not because it's hard, but because sending rovers is really cheap and we'll get a much better bang for our buck." How often do you hear someone replaying "Surveyor 1 has landed, one small step for a robot, one giant leap for mankind."
You don't. And there's a reason for that.
You don't have to like it, but you also can't ignore that in reality, NASA has goals that are not just about the science.
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/649377main_PL_111-267.pdf
Which can also be found here:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-bill/372...
The key part is:
> (2) MODIFICATION OF CURRENT CONTRACTS.—In order to limit NASA’s termination liability costs and support critical capabilities, the Administrator shall, to the extent practicable, extend or modify existing vehicle development and associated contracts necessary to meet the requirements in paragraph (1), including contracts for ground testing of solid rocket motors, if necessary, to ensure their availability for development of the Space Launch System.
Which explains why NASA isn't necessarily getting engines from Blue Origin or other cheaper new comers for example. The senate law dictates that they should continue using existing contracts. Now, could a NASA administrator argue that they should drop Aerojet (as cited in the ars technica article)? Potentially, but Aerojet could possibly sue, claiming that NASA is in violation of the law.
-- From the Shadows
It actually sort-of was, because slow aggregation of knowledge about anatomy helped undermine a lot of the old Galenic dogmas.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/03/nasas-nelson-competitive-con...
(though yes you could fix that with a small kick stage)
https://spacenews.com/spacex-seeks-to-accelerate-falcon-9-pr...
In the US system (oligarchic democracy) the wealthy needs to earn their hefty share, otherwise the thing in question likely won't happen at all.
Now, as always happens, actually completing the human-rating of Dragon required more work than expected, and Dragon 2 is quite different from Dragon. But, as far as I know, Falcon 9 did not require nearly as many upgrades to be human-rated.
Well maybe buying a lot more F-35s would save us money then! :-)
There doesn't appear to be too much of a reason that shouldn't be possible, particularly since both HLS vehicles are meant to be able to perform orbital refueling, but the idea has oddly remained absent from official public documents.
My personal theory is that like with orbital fuel depots, the idea is being kept out of official public communications until the HLS vehicles are operational (and thus uncancellable), at which point the political will can be more easily gained to cancel SLS without risking another waste-of-life threatening to kill the entire human spaceflight program if it didn't directly buy him votes.
However I think a lot of the criticism focuses on things that aren't really true. The price is one aspect, where the amortisation is now paying off and it's no more expensive than alternatives. Another is the capabilities of the plane – it's not designed for warfare from the movies or from the age when many armchair onlookers were growing up, and so it's easy to make it sound like a boondoggle, when in reality it's a modern platform built for how war works in the 2020s.
So it's a pilotless drone?
Right now it looks and smells like corruption.
When SLS was being architected 10+ years ago, I believe the idea was that the RS-25 engines would be cheaper, and there were spares around. Also there were no $1m engines, not even close. Perhaps there might have been a competitor for 1/2 the price, but would that be worth it over an engine that you already have flight ad maintenance experience with? Probably not, it's certainly not a convincing argument.
Lastly there weren't any Methane engines – both of the hottest engines in the market now (pardon the pun) are Methane based, the Raptor and BE-4, but the decision to use Hydrogen as the fuel for SLS was set in stone years ago and unrealistic to change.
Basically there weren't convincingly better options at the time the decision was made, and changing that decision now would mean basically going back to the drawing board on the entire rocket.
The first SLS flights will use available Block II RS-25D engines left over from the shuttle program, and when those run out (and if SLS is still flying) the rocket will switch over to the RS-25E, a cheaper, expendable version.
The F-1 engines used on the first stage of the Saturn V were built to burn Kerosene, and the RS-25 series has no common heritage.
> The RS-25 is related to the J-2
It boils at a lower point than oxygen, so you have to insulate the tanks from each other, it's very.. undense (sparse?) per volume so you need bigger tanks, and it's the smallest molecule that exists and makes leaks and shipping harder.
Methane is slightly less efficient but way easier logistically.
'Let’s be very honest, We don’t have a commercially available heavy-lift vehicle. The Falcon 9 Heavy may some day come about. It’s on the drawing board right now. SLS is real.' - Charles Bolden
Note the reason given here isn't that the Falcon Heavy didn't have as large a payload capacity - that excuse came after it started flying years before SLS, because apparently we're supposed to pretend things can't be assembled in space over multiple trips rather than sending up a multi-billion-dollar rocket.
I'm just wondering what the excuse for keeping SLS around will be after a cheaper vehicle that can beat its payload is here. Jobs, for sure. What else?
Imagine being told to design Google in 2000, but in order to save money you have to reuse old software: database from Oracle, OS from IBM, and design around the code from AltaVista. That should only take a few hundred man-months, right?
I find this attitude "It's just obvious" to be generally unhelpful. Your sibling comments do a much better job at helping the grandparent get up to speed with context about the SLS program, and associated Senate Legislation.
Being able to cite documents in support of your position is a valuable skill and both helps your own understanding, by clarifying what your understanding is based on, and that of the questioner.
-- From the shadows
The top level comment did not achieve this art, but I've seen worse.
Perhaps the US economy (and politics) is resilient enough to handle it and not crash outright, but poorer folks in the US feel the squeeze of inflation and lowered wages due to cantillion effects.
US debt in 2000: $5.6T, in 2022: $30.9T [1]
The larger wars of this century drove about a quarter of debt growth. Major but not the majority. That more people will risk life and limb to immigrate than emigrate indicates to me that as bad as inflation is, living elsewhere is still worse.
0. https://time.com/3651697/afghanistan-war-cost/
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...
Sure the US may still have a higher quality of life than many others, it doesn't mean that Americans lives couldn't have been better. Also I believe the US recently actually had decreases in both life expectancy and younger generations prospering fincially. So we didn't collapse, but we're not healthy either.
We'll give them three quarters of a trillion dollars every year no matter what they spend it on so in reality it doesn't matter if they're war fighting or not, they own us, well 50% of our discretionary tax dollars anyway.
UBL may not have achieved his primary goal but he got many concessions: Americans lost many freedoms, trust in government is significantly lower compared to pre 9/11 and given what happened on Jan 6 and everything that led up to it, we may look back at 9/11 as the point which set the stage for the eventual breakup of the union.
It's more about the political economy where funneling through certain well connected companies generate a lot of goodwill among the middlemen who then funds pac's and pay for advertisements then it's about a direct relationship between the senate and the employment status of their workers.
Is it a senate cultural thing that they all tell themselves despite tenuous links to reality?
Is it kickbacks?
Why doesn't the logic apply to infrastructure projects which seem more marketable?
The way it works is, the politicians who got the plant created out there earned some cachet with voters, and politicians today would get crucified by voters and the unions if they tried to move the plant. It's important enough that presidents give speeches there. (to put that fully into context: there is absolutely no other reason for politicians to give speeches there or even to be there, except perhaps some obscure form of self-flagellation) And of course voters in the entire surrounding state are pretty sensitive to the notion of losing industrial jobs, which earns the plant some protection from the state's US senators as well. People on the other side of the state might not be talking about it today, but they'd be talking about the plant if it got closed. Politicians understand this.
You never see a senator take credit for a plant opening/expanding on their re-election blurb/townhall? You must be in an incredibly safe state.
> Why doesn't the logic apply to infrastructure projects which seem more marketable?
It applies to them, too. Again, if you're not seeing this, either your senator isn't doing much of it, you're not paying much attention to their campaign, or they are in such an incredibly safe district that their only challenger is Bozo the Clown.
A development of the J-2 using a high-performance high-pressure chamber engine. "Technology led to Space Shuttle Main Engines".
Edit to add: "In essence, the HG-3 concept eventually became the space shuttle main engine."
https://web.archive.org/web/20051115064042/http://history.ms...
Also if you’re willing to count facts like “details of Martian geology” as potentially valuable, then one can also say that by doing manned space flight we have learned a lot about how to transport humans to space and keep them alive there, no?
The simple truth is that there are quantifiable justifications for preferring spending finite resources on science instead of manned space flight. The metrics used might be subjective (because at the end of the day everything is subjective), but that doesn't make them merely "inspiration".
Again, what you're doing is playing a semantic trick with words to respond to what is clearly an almost wholely objective opinion held by other people. That doesn't work. You declaring something "inspiration" does nothing to convince me that launching humans into orbit isn't a ridiculous waste of money.
The ISS cost $100 billion to launch and assemble (and $3 billion to maintain). Tiangong about $8 billion, reportedly. Mir, some $4-5 billion.
The total project cost of Dragonfly mission to Titan (to be launched in 2027 and landing 2034) is projected to be $1 billion. Even the JWST, which had massive cost overruns, still only cost $10 billion. If the NASA built a Tiangong instead of an ISS, who knows what they could have done with the remaining $90 billion. Maybe for a few billion, they could have sent a probe to Europa to search for life under the ice.
We agree exactly on this: "Whether that knowledge has value or not is...subjective."
Ultimately, we're talking about whether spending money on X has value. If you agree that the value of both crewed spaceflight and robotic probes is "subjective", then by definition there is no objectively correct answer.
We support Hubble because it yields knowledge, and having knowledge is something that we (as a society) value.
We support crewed spaceflight because we (as a society) value seeing humans explore space.
And since the US Congress is currently funding both, it's actually you who needs to convince people to stop funding "meat cans". Good luck with that.
It's not just jobs. It's also relevant to US interests to keep industry skills sharp. Manufacturing insulin doesn't require the same skills that manufacturing a rocket requires.
On the flip side: if the skills are so expensive that private commercial entities are doing it for one or two orders of magnitude cheaper then it's arguable that the skills being paid to be kept sharp aren't really so sharp as they're paid to be. That is: at this price, why can't they deliver while private commercial entities can for cheaper?
So it's almost certainly just for the jobs and not really for the skills then.
The contractors making the SLS are private commercial entities. That's the mad thing about it.
Could be private commercial entities don't have to pay to train up the workforce but can just poach. Which is fine, system working as intended.
We complain about China brainwashing its citizens when the US is the OG offender.
Could things be better in the US if it did not spend the way it does? That is a difficult counterfactual. The well adapted US political system never voluntarily decreases taxes, so a safe assumption is that spending/deficit/debt would be the same.
A significant amount of war funding was spent on the MIC, which employs upper middle income US persons in engineering, logistics, HR. The rest is spent on consumables (also from the US) and bribery, which eventually finds safe harbor by holding large bricks of US $100 bills on the low end or US luxury dwellings on the high end.
In the counterfactual, what would have happened to all those white collar suburbs and Miami penthouses?
As for their kit, Myanmar bought some of their planes but none of them are operational. The planes were a joint project by China and Pakistan, but 8 years after the deal was signed apparently have persistent unsolved technical and structural issues.
Meanwhile Thailand bought three of the new Yuan class subs from China, but they aren’t operational either. Problems with the engines so bad that they need replacing.
Meanwhile China now has two aircraft carriers, but still hasn’t committed either of them to long range operations. They have only conducted experimental night takeoffs and landings, their carrier assigned planes are still largely land based, and they have yet to operate the boats beyond range of land based airstrips. Modern carrier operations are as complex as it gets, and they seem to be struggling with it.
Peacetime armies are generally bad, but turnover tends to be high when the fighting starts, and the second or third set of generals is often much better.
The most important advantages China has are pretty overwhelming- a giant population, and they own the global supply chain for microchips and batteries, meaning they can replace smart munitions and systems while their opponents can't.
They also have the best setup for doing go it alone, vertical industrial production, much better than the US or Russia. They're fine in any scenario where they don't get totally blitzed in a week.
I see that as a good sign. Why fight wars if there is no need to. I hope they stay that way and don’t get themselves involved in Taiwan
Pretty much all negative coverage of JF17 (joint PRC+PK manufacturing but so far SOLD by PK) are sourced from Indian tabloid rags with no credibility. Myanmar airforce has 100+ PRC airframes, variety of models in the last 30 years with little issue. Pretty much the only useful piece of info so far is Myanmar doesn't have adequate experience operating tech in 4th gen fighters, most of their fleet is 3rd gen. IIRC Myanmar got the jets before they even got simluators, and then bought 4th gen trainers (JL9) from PRC.
>Thailand
Yuan subs aren't operational because PRC couldn't acquire original specified German engines after EU sanctions. There's a period where Thai Navy was deciding whether to accept PRC engines, which they did. Some analysts implied if Thai did not accept PRC engines it would imply they were unsuitable, even more retarded media then spung that as technical issues with PRC engines. Both complete misinformation narratives since there's no basis for evaluating those unintegrated PRC engines at all.
>aircraft carriers
Training carriers based off RU design that analysis suggest PLAN has more or less maximized sortie potential vs when USSR was running carrier ops on similar flight deck. Late 2022 USNI analysis on PLAN carrier ops is they're basically reached "true" blue water deployment, i.e. a few hundred nms near Guam, 1000nm+ from mainland, with no divert airfrields or aerial refueling as backup. Which is about as far as PRC none nuke carriers need to deploy given strategic considerations. Caveate being conservative sorties and pretty clean (light) load outs to compensate for lack of divertion and ski jump. The struggle with PLAN carriers is they won't have catapults and capabilites that brings until 003 and training was hectic because they only had 1-2 carriers training 3-4 crew rotations, somewhat alleviated by converted cruise/barrack ships. TLDR is I would not characterize as overall carrier ops capabilities as struggling as limited by hardware, which TBH is expected since carriers does not seem particularly high priority outside of prestige - given PRC ship building capacity, they could have rushed 10 carriers like US did Forrestal class. Basically most US analysis of various PRC military modernization is they're lacking and focusing on XYZ, but should get there in a few years. Occasionally throw in the word struggle because they watch CCTV7 where miltiary propaganda talks about how hard they work. A few years later, new analysis that they got there (i.e. asw, jointness), something something evolving, modernizing at astonishing rate, but here's the new struggle. Rinse and repeat. Combined with customary but no real combat experience (which no one has in modern peer warfare). But the underlying pattern if you look at meat of improvements year by year is PLA modernizing fast.
Achievement: You can do anything you set your mind to when you have vision, determination, and an endless supply of expendable labor.
Get the poster at https://despair.com/products/achievement?variant=2457295683
I’m wondering how you determined this?
I'd read a long time ago about how the Taliban basically formed a shadow government in parts of Afghanistan that provided justice, schools, roads, and other services because the current government couldn't do it. Just found a good article about it:
https://odi.org/en/publications/life-under-the-taliban-shado...
Here's the PDF it references:
https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/12269.pdf
People flocked to the Taliban's shadow government precisely because it was (at least seen as) less corrupt and more efficient than the services propped up by U.S. and its allies. In the PDF above if you search for corrupt you find the word 7 times in the body of the article, and 6 of those are in regards to how the Taliban fought it.
The article is old (2018) but I think that's the point. They were very organized in how they built their network and we saw the results of it as they ran circles around the U.S. in negotiations both with Trump and Biden administrations.[1]
To me it's a crystal clear example of a less corrupt, less wasteful force completely schooling one with exponentially more resources.
[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal...
There's no contradiction. The argument is that Gorbachev felt the need to set those policies because he saw how much more successful the US was being economically.
i dont think they were convinced they couldn't win - they just realized their economic laggardness.
The remnants of the USSR is still trying to win!
For a real example of "they couldn't win", you'd have to look towards Japan. And is it such a bad thing to "not win"?
They're going to say "we can build our outpost on the moon for way less" and then they'll do it.
And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.
You'd be surprised. See, e.g., steel tariffs costing $900,000 per job saved. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/07/trumps-st...
> And thats one senator in one district it takes 50% of both senate and congress to pass a bill and not everytone gets contracts that big assigned to their district so the system is not individual senators all trying to secure the biggest employment gain for their district, it's much less rational.
I am a bit worried about naval officer training though, there have been damaging cutbacks and compromises made on that front. Nothing that's likely to have long term consequences yet, but they need to fix that before it gets worse.
Re: infra, you're right, I guess I'm just letting my personal bias in when wondering why they don't do more of that compared to the weapons. It seems like such an easier sell to voters, but the emphasis seems to go the other way.
(Also, in my limited sample size, all of this has taken a smaller and smaller back seat to culture war stuff in modern day campaigning)
Although I'm guessing that was an uncontested election, sounds like <10% turnout. Still, it's material.
IMO US pretty much understands this as well, for as much reporting there is on dysfunction of navy and urgent need to fix, there hasn't been much actions instead we see doubling down on distributed land based fires and increasing aviation standoff range, and ultimately long range bombers strait from CONUS to reduce basing dependencies abroad.
For an invasion of Taiwan numbers are important, sure, but it's a wide channel and amphibious assaults are absolutely the hardest kind of operation an army can attempt. Technical competence, and I would also argue operational flexibility at every level, are absolutely crucial.
In terms of supply chains, that matters for an extended conflict, as we can see in Ukraine. However an invasion of Taiwan would either work in the first week or so, or it's over. I suppose they could try a long terms blockade, but that doesn't seem to be their strategy.
China is extremely vulnerable to a blockade themselves though. They have no control of their essential seaborn supply routes, and are highly dependent on external sources for energy, raw materials, high tech parts, and maybe most importantly food and fertilisers. The US can turn all of that off like a tap at a moment's notice.
The sorts of sanctions levelled at Russia since last year would have China on it's knees in months. The only way to mitigate that would be for the PLAN to go toe to toe gobally with the US, UK, French and Australian and Japanese Navys all at the same time. Also maybe India. The Indian Navy is small but it's no joke, and they have two fully operational carriers.
He's too absolutist for my tastes, he talks about China 'going away' due to demographics. That's just silly, they'll suffer for sure but 1.4 billion people don't just disappear. Also his line about Russia needing to control geographic access points or 'they're finished' is equally silly. They have nukes.
As for allied ports and rear support, US basing that enables operations against PRC in theatre, which basically US force structure requires at this point (hence all the wargames trying to convince JP to distributed basing), is IMO even more forgone. Various US partners signalled they wouldn't directly contribute to TW war but will provide rear support, but that's enabling US war regardless, so very likely they're going to get glassed. PRC systems confrontation and system destruction warfare is structured around destroying the softer/easier targets like support ships, tankers, ISR infra etc. Hitting them is doctrine. And ultimately, it's in PRC's long term interest to destroy as much US forward presence as possible, because that's historically how outside hegemons get kicked out, through sufficient force to demonstrate their strategic posture is no longer viable. And US having decades of build up abroad has more dependencies and more to lose if their security architecture becomes unsustainable.
As for unsupported carrier operations, IMO if you consider the sorties numbers their effects are close to negligible. Boat might be nuke powered, but there's only enough supplies (fuel/ordnance) for low hundreds of sorties, 50%+ of which will be buddy tanking / support due to how far PRC A2D2 has pushed standoff range, which leaves a even lower 100s of actual hitters. Assuming no interceptions. Barely enough to dent the 100,000s of targets from mainland. It's not that US CVGs are weak, just PRC operates on another scale, more targets, more concrete, more counter measures etc. Without constant replenishment carriers become single deployment assets with limited use and cost:vunerablity ratio not in their favour. And even then nuke propulsion need to return to dock, where they can be promptly hit with global strike.