NASA has such a tiny budget in comparison to other stuff....so they really have to stretch that money as far as they can, and especially considering spacecraft....its a very unforgiving production environment.
Am I making a joke about deploying in production? Yes, yes I am. But I also know NASA really does the best they can and I am amazed at the insane work and effort that they do to make sure spacecraft they send actually work.
Naive question: Today, smartphones use microscopic gyroscopes based on MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) technology. Would these also work on Hubble? I suspect they'd work fine in space, perhaps while also being more durable (the failing Hubble gyroscopes were only installed in 2009). Though I guess their precision is not good enough for a telescope.
You are thinking of the sensor in smartphones, in this case it is a spinning disc that uses gyroscopic torque to rotate the spacecraft.
So there are two different technologies that are both called "gyroscope"? One a sensor detecting rotation, the other an actuator inducing rotation?
The sensor you’re describing is usually called an accelerometer.
No, accelerometers detect acceleration in linear direction (up/down, left/right, forward/backward), while gyroscopes detect rotation (pitch, yaw, roll). Smartphones have both, to detect all six degrees of freedom.
Edit: Apparently, for smartphones, all these sensors are integrated into a single MEMS chip, one sensor for each degree of freedom, three accelerometers and three gyroscopes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9X4frIQo7x0
And the reason accelerometers can be used for sensing orientation here on Earth is, of course, because of the constant force of gravity :)
Interesting point. I guess this is much less precise than gyroscopes though.
BTW, smartphone acceleromoters are also packaged for hobbyists; a board like https://www.adafruit.com/product/2019 can be easily used to make any number of applications when coupled with a microcontroller. https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-mma8451-accelerometer-br...
No, the comment you're replying to is confused. These gyroscopes are entirely used for determining Hubble's orientation. Reaction wheels effect the actual rotation, and Hubble's are fine.
I think the confusion is a result of imprecise language talking about how they are used to slew the telescope. They are "used" but as feedback, in conjunction with other systems. Also, there have some prominent reaction wheels failures on other missions, and that contributes to the confusion.
Thanks, this makes sense. I guess I should look up the difference between gyroscopes and reaction wheels next.
Per your name: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n_6p-1J551Y&pp=ygUG
FWIW I think 2 of the Hubble's 4 reaction wheels are dead, which also requires some interesting workarounds
No, these are actually referring to the gyroscopic sensors on the spacecraft. This article [0] makes it a little bit more clear. While there are actuators that use gyroscopic torque, referred to as Control Moment Gyros (CMG) Hubble uses reaction wheels for pointing the spacecraft.
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/observatory/design/h...
The accuracy of MEMS gyros is orders of magnitude worse than the gyros on Hubble. I suspect based on this article [0] that Hubble uses hemispherical resonator gyros (HRG [1]). The really high accuracy rate sensors that you find in spacecraft are usually HRGs or Fiber Optic Gyroscopes (FOG).
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/observatory/design/h...
Oh, this made me worried about JWST (as it can't be serviced once the gyroscopes break), but I found this:
To detect changes in direction JWST uses hemispherical resonator gyroscopes (HRG). HRGs are expected to be more reliable than the gas-bearing gyroscopes that were a reliability issue on Hubble Space Telescope. They cannot point as finely, however, which is overcome by the JWST fine guidance mirror.[18]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_bus_(James_Webb_Spa...
So Hubble uses gyroscopes that are more precise but less reliable than the HRGs used in JWST.
Interesting, TIL that Hubble uses gas-bearing gyroscopes. I been struggling to find any other spacecraft that use those gas-bearing gyros. The only other one that seems to be using them (that is still operational) is the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Pretty incredible what they are able to do with a i486!
We used to get quake and Warcraft running on them from memory.
It was - is! - a great chip.
I had a hard time getting Doom to run on my 486. I only had something like 4MB of RAM if I recall correctly so I had to restart my computer, edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT to remove options that I would use to load Windows, and then boot back into DOS to launch DOOM each time I wanted to play it to get that last bit of memory I needed. Then, when I wanted to run Windows, I had to edit the HIMEM.SYS stuff to get it running again. (I was a teenager with no Internet access. I have no idea how I figured out this stuff or where I got information from.)
My friend had a 486 (We only had a 386), but it would play doom really well.
However, the first step of any gaming session was to reboot the machine with the boot floppy in, which had the right boot settings for gaming performance.
Starting with DOS 6.0 (which came out before DOOM), there was an option to create a menu where you could choose different CONFIG.SYS (and AUTOEXEC.BAT via a variable) options. No need to edit it every time or use a floppy just to get different settings![0]
[0] http://smallvoid.com/article/dos-multiple-configurations.htm...
I recently installed DOS 6.22 on an old laptop. By old, I mean a core2duo with 4GB of ram. It was hilarious to me that I needed to google the correct settings to use to get a game that requires 4MB to work on a machine with 4GB.
My actual goal was to setup QBasic for my son, which I did-- but he thought it was stupid and refused to even let me show him how to code a Hello World app on it. :(
I'm sorry this happened to you. If you were my dad, I would have thought you showing me QBASIC would have been the coolest thing ever.
It kind of reminds me of my dad when he built our first whitebox 486 PC in 1992. Getting to sit on his lap while we messed around in DOS and some games from the era really stuck with me forever. He also loved to mess around in a BBS and would show me how cool it was that we could communicate with other systems at a long distance via modem. :)
"norton commander" shell had a user defined menu where you could create short scripts, basically just a chain of DOS commands. As a fellow teenager with no Internet access, I've made a "game" submenu which replaced normal autoexec.bat with a slim one curated for a particular game and rebooted computer right into the game. After you exit the game it'll replace autoexec.bat with the backup of normal one and reboot again back into norton commander.
I have no idea why I needed that level of automation, of course.
Quake was the first game to make heavy usage of the FPU and thus require a Pentium. You could run it on a 486 DX, but the performance would be atrocious.
Luckily the processing for this sort of control loop is usually very simple mathematically. It's gonna be a few multiplies and a bunch of adding and subtracting most likely. The challenge is designing that mathematical formula, and making sure to take the readings from the sensors and output them to the actuators on time.
It's not just designing the formula, getting the parameters right is going to be a right pain. You might have meant that as part of "designing" but it's a significant challenge in its own right, over and above having a formula that's the right shape.
Not to mention numerical accuracy in the implementation, but I'd assume that's mostly known patterns at this point.
The beauty of using a Kalman filter is that its constantly refitting the model parameters to match the observed state.
Is it though? All you'd need to control some gyros is a microcontroller. I can't imagine it'd be more than a couple hundred lines of code implementing a PID controller or something. In fact, you could probably do it with standalone controllers, some sensors and relays.
Okay, now add in the fact it can practically never fail in any condition
Hell, even the JWST is powered by the same CPU as the first iMac running at half the speed
Hubble is such a productive piece of an equipment. What a shame there has been only one pointing outwards all these years.
What a shame there has been only one pointing outwards all these years.
Let's not forget that initially it was considered a massive failure. There simply was no way for NASA to build another in the 90s. What's truly remarkable is how the ROI went from unknown, to negative, and then was a massive long-term success.
Let's not forget that NRO donated multiple Hubble level satellites. NASA had no budget to utilize them, so they were not used. Of course there were other logistics involved that made the "gifts" not so practical. However, the thing that gets me is that if the NRO was willing to donate these satellites tells me that they have better than Hubble quality imaging looking inwards and absolutely have multiple of them.
Aren't they using one right now? [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
I guess you can say "using right now", but from your link:
"October 2026 (contracted) – May 2027 (commitment)"
So more like, in the works to use one of them. It does appear that it is beyond the planning to use stage. I did not see the word Boeing once in that link, so maybe they have an actual shot of hitting those dates.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is one of them. They still had to change the optics for astronomical purposes.
Let's not forget that initially it was considered a massive failure
Why was that? Were fewer discoveries made than hoped?
Spherical aberration in its primary mirror (and other issues) discovered shortly after launch.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/what-was-w...
It initially was a massive failure? They made a preventable mistake that cost ~$1B.
It's not quite that bad.
Hubble is primarily optical wavelengths. The other Great [space-based] Observatories are in IR, X-rays, and gamma rays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Observatories_program
The notion of grouping them as "Great Observatories", AFAIK, came circa the mid-1980s, after Hubble was already getting underway in earnest.
*were, for spitzer and Compton
JWST took 20 years to build. Could be many more but still not bad at all.
It's a sad state of affairs that we as a society have only been able to prioritize sending up one single Hubble, while the US alone has sent up several dozen equivalent KH-9 and superior KH-11 satellites to look at Earth for classified military purposes.
I know there are other space-based telescopes (James Webb being larger and superior, others being much smaller and more specialized than Hubble) and lots of ground-based telescopes. I don't dispute that keeping an eye on Soviet missile development and other spy satellite tasks was and is an important mission that has significant, immediate consequences for our species than the informative and gorgeous photos of space that the Hubble mission produces. I'm just disappointed that the combination of human nature and politics makes this a reasonable outcome.
I just think it's sad that they're doing fixes on a 34 year old telescope instead of sending up a new improved model every 10 years.
Well the JWST is in fact a thing. Why not keep getting science from the old ones while they're still working?
NASA really needs to just fill their telescopes with gyros upon gyros, like just plaster the things with gyros and reaction wheels for 50x redundancy since that's always the mission critical thing that fails first. Or maybe a xenon powered ion reaction control system or something that would last longer then hydrazine.
NASA really needs to just fill their telescopes with gyros upon gyros
It’s an interesting tradeoff. Missions are designed (and costed) for a nominal mission lifetime; adding more redundancy increases costs. But it’s true that the successful missions tend to stay in operations much longer than their normal lifetime.
The builtin gyros didn't even reach the original mission lifetime of 15 years.
There's a limit to how much redundancy you can put in a satellite, but with how consistently these parts fail it would make sense to put in a lot. If 1% of the Hubble's weight was extra gyroscopes it would have 30-40 of them.
JWST is an infrared telescope though, which doesn't really replace the Hubble. It is suited for the interesting science of our times though. An upgraded optical space telescope would probably be less groundbreaking but still very valuable to science.
I think its sad that single use consumerism culture is so pervasive that anyone would actually bemoan a thing as extremely niche as a cutting edge scientific instrument getting over tens years of use.
What was cutting edge in 1990 is very far from it today.
Sending up Hubble II and Hubble III would of course not mean that Hubble I stops being used.
That’s a bad faith take. The OP is clearly expressing their opinion that space exploration is underfunded. No one is unhappy the Hubble is going on 35 years. Think how much we would be learning if we had additional similarly scoped astronomical missions in 2000, 2010, and 2020 though.
Why not both? Send up new telescopes and keep the old ones running.
If feasible, sure.
But I'd expect it's often cheaper to send up a new telescope than to repair an old one.
On the contrary, I think it's great.
Are the two other gyros broken?
Breaking gyros are a recurring issue for Hubble. Hubble has 6 (3 spares, 3 for full operation). They replaced them 3 times with space shuttle missions because they kept breaking. Now Hubble is down to 2 functioning gyros again and we no longer have a space craft with the capability to service satellites. They decided to shut one of the gyros off so they still have a slightly used spare once this one breaks.
Dragon has capability for a Hubble servicing mission. It would need more development than a Shuttle visit, but it's not a huge hurdle since the last visit installed a soft-capture mechanism. (It'd probably cost less than an equivalent Shuttle mission, just due to Shuttle's high launch costs.) SpaceX even prepared a proposal in a Space Act Agreement but NASA declined it recently. Sierra Nevada also has looked at doing it with Dream Chaser.
Sure, Hubble's way past its design lifetime, and it can probably limp along for another decade as is, and maybe something besides gyros will fail soon. But also there's no equivalent capability successor that's more than a study, and even if they manage to build HWO or something like it, it won't be operation for at least 20 years. A Hubble servicing mission would be a relatively cheap way to get a decade or two more time on a high-capability instrument.
Servicing Hubble require EVA. Does Dragon has an airlock?
Old-school space-walks involved depressurising the capsule. Soyuz, Gemini.
Some of the Apollo missions had an EVA during the return transit to recover cameras on the exterior of the Command Module (CM).
Those spacewalks occurred on Apollo 15 (see: <https://www.space.com/20565-al-worden-apollo-15-astronaut.ht...>) and Apollo 9, which didn't land on the Moon (see: <https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_9/>).
According to this Stackexchange post, the entire CM was depressurised: <https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/38239/how-did-apol...>
During lunar landings, EVAs also required full depressurisation of the Lunar Module. Repressurisation took about two minutes:
Okay, can Dragon be depressurized and then repressurized back? Somehow I think it will require a lot of additions to its construction, and also alternative hatch instead of docking module (was already done with transparent dome for Inspiration4 mission.
SpaceX have announced an EVA suit, so they do apparently have plans to support such missions.
This article states that the entire capsule would be depressurised and repressurised, as there's no integrated airlock. It also specifically mentions the prospect of servicing Hubble (though with no details).
<https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/spacex-unveils-eva-spa...> (May 6, 2024)
That strikes me as both the most basic approach and a capability which would be useful for other reasons as well. Another option might be to carry along an airlock, perhaps stowed in Dragon's trunk, and mounted during flight, though that itself might require an initial (full-capsule-depressurisation) EVA.
The Nancy Grace Roman telescope is a replacement in most respects, though it doesn't have the deep UV capabilities (HST could go down to 115 nm, Roman goes down to 480 nm). Not sure why UV isn't as important to newer telescopes, but if it was as critical to have high-spatial-resolution UV measurements, they'd probably have flown one in addition to Webb and Roman.
The others are broken, two theoretically work. They're disabling one to keep as a spare.
Hubble was down to three working gyros, but one broke. This new single gyro mode, lets them take the other offline so that they can hold it in reserve for when this one breaks
There's a technical description of how the one gyro control system here https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20080023344/downloads/20...
Essentially using other sensors (star tracker and magnetometer) and kalman filtering for sensor fusion.
Very cool that they were developing the one-gyro control mode all the way back in 2004, and had in-flight tested it by 2008. Seems like they were well prepared for this eventuality.
That's because this isn't the first time Hubble has been down to two working gyros. It happened before in 1999 (replaced a few months later), and they were worried it would happen again after 2003 when the Shuttles were grounded (actually got down to three/six working before replacement in 2009).
I wonder if after Polaris Dawn proves out spacewalking from Dragon, SpaceX will develop the capability to repair the Hubble once again.
I doubt it'll be from spacewalks on Dragon, given they probably can't support something as big as an MMU (unless they pull a really cool hat trick), but maybe with Starship.
I get that at some point it's more worthwhile to launch a new telescope (maybe one of those donated KENNENs from NRO), but Hubble is a big symbol of space exploration, and SpaceX is all about big symbols...
The hardest part of this is actually grappling the satellite. Shuttle had the arm, how will spacex capture?
Dragon Arm(tm)?
Nah. The successor to Dragon will be Trogdor. They'll put one of those beefy arms on it for good measure.
Who would notice if they just quietly switched Hubble out with its military equivalent? /s
Everyone would, as the Hubble's mirror and instrument spec is ever so slighly different from the ground pointing espionage satellites. There are lots of failure modes that are acceptable in ground pointing operations but not in space pointing operations.
As a symbol, I think the best thing to do with Hubble is boost it to a long term orbit until it can be properly preserved for history.
Hey SpaceX, here's an idea: put a few of your 'Atlas' robots on one of the upcoming Starship test vehicles - maybe the one where you plan to test in-orbit refuelling since it probably takes a bit of extra fuel to get to Hubble's orbit - and get the thing to meet up with Hubble. Have the robots replace the failed gyros, replace the batteries and whatever other consumables that old relic contains. Have them take back the old parts in Starship so they can be studied. The result would be revived Hubble as well as one of the biggest PR coups imaginable. Or, maybe, one of the biggest hits against human space flight if it turns out robots can do the job well enough not to have to send up their meat-based masters, take your pick.
What even is the point of looking at space if we give up the pretext of sending people there? It just turns into an expensive way to mint PhDs on the taxpayer's dime, studying things which cannot have economic relevance on Earth (which is why they can't be studied on Earth.)
There's more important things in the universe than those which have economic relevance.
In fact studying things which have no apparent economic relevance is one of the best uses of government dime and has been so, to the great benefit of humanity as a whole, for centuries if not millennia
Would Hubble fit in Starship for a return flight to ground? Would look nice hanging in the Smithsonian. Flight proven space observatory.
Or a bigger challenge - safely deorbit Hubble so it could be fixed/refurbished on the ground. Or maybe put in a museum if they didn't feel it was worth it the cost of sending it back up again
Jared Isaacman and SpaceX already made a proposal to NASA to do a Hubble servicing mission. NASA recently responded with "no thanks". NASA feels the risk of potentially damaging Hubble in some way (eg, gas from thruster getting on a mirror) outweighs the benefits. Basically a high probability of worse performance is chosen to be more favorable than a lower probability of better performance.
I’d love to see some actual data on this - what’s the impact on resolution, maximum exposure time, etc.?
“Once Hubble is on target, the steadiness of the telescope in one-gyro mode is almost comparable to that of a full three-gyro complement… Although one-gyro mode is an excellent way to keep Hubble science operations going, it does have limitations, which include a small decrease in efficiency (roughly 12 percent) due to the added time required to slew and lock the telescope onto a science target… If Earth or the moon block two of the fixed head star trackers’ fields of view, Hubble must move further along in its orbit until the star trackers can see the sky and its stars again. This process encroaches upon science observation time. Second, the additional time the fine guidance sensors take to further search for the guide stars adds to the total time the sensors use to complete the acquisition. Third, in one-gyro mode Hubble has some restrictions on the science it can do. For example, Hubble cannot track moving objects that are closer to Earth than the orbit of Mars. Their motion is too fast to track without the full complement of gyros. Additionally, the reduced area of sky that Hubble can point to at any given time also reduces its flexibility to see transient events or targets of opportunity like an exploding star or an impact on Jupiter. When combined, these factors may yield a decrease in productivity of roughly 20 to 25 percent from the typical observing program conducted in the past using all three gyros.“ [0]
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/observatory/design/h...
The impact on Jupiter bit seems strange to me. Unless it's something that just pops up out of nowhere, it seems like we'd have been tracking the impactor for some time to be able to have plenty of lead time for Hubble to use its walker to slowly get into position.
Impactors are indeed not seen that far ahead in comparison to the Hubble time allocation time scale, so for scheduling purposes they do more or less pop up out of nowhere.
Since its not very likely that you happen to have a scheduled science target lying close to Jupiter around the time of impact, you would have to do a long slew which now takes such a long time you likely have to cancel some other science. But I think this is a general issue that will discard most targets of opportunity that Hubble could otherwise have observed.
It was launched 34 years ago with a 15-year expected service life. So that it's still operating at all today is quite an achievement.
Missing from the article: Jared Isaacman offered to fix Hubble for free, and NASA turned him down.
It basically seems like the risks involved aren't necessarily worth taking right now, seeing as Hubble is technically doing just fine.
*https://www.space.com/jared-isaacman-hubble-space-telescope-...
In case anyone just wants the download: https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/hubble-n...
I thought NASA was using Drupal, not WordPress.
This thing went up when I was in Kindergarten! It blows my mind that it's still running.
You think that's amazing, read up on Voyager!
It's pictures like this that seem to make Dark Matter not all that mysterious. It's clear that the galaxy is surrounded by a lot of dust, and you can clearly see that even as you extend outward and the light drops off, there is still a lot of dust that is just not illuminated.
Dust that isn't in light is accounted for, and is a different thing from non-baryonic dark matter.
This is amazing, though not quite as amazing as how I first read the title (sandwich, not device).
What will happen when the last gyro is out? Will it spin out of orbit and crash?
Tangentially related (taking pictures of things on spacecraft with impaired systems for tracking the objective)...
https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/394
The Voyager 2 scan platform, on which are mounted the spacecraft cameras and several science instruments, is rotated in elevation and azimuth by actuators. Near the end of the Voyager 2 Saturn encounter, the scan platform azimuth actuator exhibited an anomaly. This anomaly was evidenced by the azimuth actuator seizing, causing a scan platform pointing error that resulted in a loss of some data. Through a series of ground commands, the problem was alleviated to the extent that the scan platform could perform its function. ...
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/27/us/camera-swivel-on-voyag...
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...
Voyager engineering improvements for Uranus encounter - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19860063178
Finally, engineering improvements made in order to enhance scientific findings at the Uranus encounter are reviewed in detail. The two most important were the increased gyro drift turn rate capability to accommodate image motion compensation for the close fly-by of Miranda and the reduction in spacecraft rates to accommodate increased imaging exposure times without incurring excessive image smear.
"My kind didn't really slither out of a tidal pool, did we? God, I need to believe you created me: we are so small down here." Lillie Emery
What a beautiful image
Scott Manley recently did a video on Hubble's single gyro mode.
The magic of hot fixes in production.
That’s a really spectacular image.
It baffles me that nobody in the US Government can see opportunities and take advantage of them.
SpaceX's Starship could house one huge telescope. If I had a say in NASA's appropriations, money would flow into building a Starship-sized telescope for every spectrum we could think of.
There are other scientific instruments that Starship can house.
It's not too late to start. Congress could appropriate money to build and many Starship-sized instruments as they can come up with. Follow KISS principles and use the same steel Starship is made of instead of carbon fiber where possible.
If on-orbit refueling works, Starship can place them on the far side of the moon or at Lagrange points.
Lossless PNG and TIFF versions available from this site: https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2024/026/01J0P4...
It's a nice image but it looks like there are some FPN issues.
Who needs proper gyros, just give nasa three rumble packs.
Except you look at what they are spending on the entire SLS infrastructure vs what they are getting (vs other science options and/or space exploration options) and basically your mind is blown at how wasteful NASA is.
SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.
I don't think NASA would have chosen the SLS platform though. It was basically mandated by Congress.
Same story with shuttle and that's why it looks the way it is and was as expensive as it was. It would have been a completely different vehicle if Congress weren't meddling.
Congress is the owner. Want a different management ideology? Get different management.
NASA is wasteful, eh? Maybe that's because they have no incentive not to be wasteful..
I think the point being made is that NASA is wasteful because the people in charge (Congress) told them to be wasteful.
You are in charge. Congress is your employee.
Except I can't do anything about Senator John Jones from Arizona who wants to keep the couple thousand jobs he brought to his constituency. He won't budge on it because non-Arizonans didn't vote for him.
You’re probably thinking about the former senator of Alabama, Richard Shelby. There is no current or former senator by the name John Jones in Arizona. Additionally it is Alabama that benefits from the SLS program, not Arizona.
Sure. It doesn't change anything, though.
NASA's doing what they're told, and Congress is doing what we asked them to.
If that's true, then I'm officially notifying everyone in Congress and the Senate, they are terminated immediately and need to clear their offices by the end of the week. Let's see if it happens or not, and then we'll know whether you were correct or not.
The leadership and composition of Congress has changed numerous times over the years without change to management ideology. It does not seem likely that electing mildly different people will change the management ideology. Management acted in accordance with the incentives they were presented with.
I can't say NASA seems particularly wasteful outside ways in which they are mandated to be so.
I think this is because local state concerns are so prevalent here. Political colour doesn't even matter, but getting the pork barrel for the state manufacturing locations is.
This won't change no matter who you vote in. It's like hardwired into the system.
Exactly. There's not actually much of an incentive for a congressperson to create something broadly positive for the US as a vague whole, like an independently-operating excellent space program.
The incentive massively is instead in favor of that congressperson to have a space program that is meets some minimum bar of competence, and past that point do everything to benefit that congressperson's voting district such as mandate certain things be manufactured there, etc.
NASA is neither a public or private company, but rather a government agency. Congress is an employee of the US taxpayer. I think that makes them more of a manager of NASA and we should hold Congress accountable.
What NASA wanted was a space station, a small tug to move stuff in space, and a small shuttle to move people and cargo from earth to that station.
The whole point of the space shuttle was to have it service the space station, but the station wasn't greenlit. Instead we got a much bigger shuttle that was useful as a military asset but was a money pit with terrible safety record. Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations).
It's the first time that I heard this theory. Do you have any sources to read up on it?
That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only.
We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars.
What do you think this _should_ have cost?
NASA also thought the Space Shuttle was going to get cheaper per-launch after a couple years of service, and they turned out to be completely wrong. Why should we trust that this time will be different?
NASA's own Inspector General says, "... NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic" and "... a single SLS will cost more than $2 billion through the first 10 SLS rockets ... " [0]
[0]: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pd...
There were a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong. The chief among them was launch cadence and satellite capture and return missions. When these assumptions changed the cost values changed significantly as well.
Do you understand the details of this specific contract? It's limited to 10 launches. It's structured quite a bit differently than the shuttle program was.
Yes and did you read the recommendations and follow up from that same report? Or is this just a "haha NASA is dumb" rant that's become common around here?
NASA is dumb. They are funding this thing (SLS) at cost+ - and despite paying for it don't own it! That is totally ridiculous. If I hire someone to build a website for me, at the end I own it. NASA has given away the rights to SLS. So they can only do a deal for SLS with current contractors. WHATEVER price those contractors want to charge, they can't let anyone else compete to build it.
I also think there is almost no chance anyone of these folks is going to do fixed price for EUS or whatever. Contractors are getting something like $600 million / year on this thing and have been hoovering the gravy for 7-8 years.
Remember that these types of forever contracts that take 20-30 years are also liked by the NASA centers who work with the contractors - it's very stable career / funding (ignore the waste). So NASA at the centers level is not fighting against this stuff (ie, it's not just congress that pushes this stuff).
All these pork projects got a huge win with Biden picking Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Do wonder if a bit of SpaceX hate played a role there :)
SLS as currently launched doesn't have enough delta-v to even really get to the moon with Orion.
That's why SpaceX is supposed to fly an absolute gargantuan amount of mass both into lunar orbit, then down to the moon, then back off the moon! They are supposedly going to do 5,000 tons out to the moon, orbit, land and take off the entire 5,000 ton starship. Payload may be 100 tons +. It's a big if, but if they can anything close to this it'll be crazy.
Orion is weirdly heavy for the SM, and the SM is weirdly weak (I don't think it got redesigned when SLS came along).
They are trying to fix this at $600m - $1B / year with the Block 1B upper stage.
But SLS after $20B (+ another $20B for orion) definitely CANNOT get folks to moon and back. Orion payload is truly tiny.
I think SLS will be good for maybe some flyby missions to the moon? One way to keep it going would be to do a one rocket mars sample return option / dump Orion totally... That actually seems like a useful approach.
But its not clear to me that old space can do a fixed price contract, they are so used to cost+ they really need to be able to overrun budget. All these projects had initial budgets that are fractions of what they are now but with cost+ that actually is a positive for the contractor. And the headaches on a mars accent and return vehicle would be high.
I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing.
I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).
I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.
I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!
The issue here is a couple of things:
- Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat.
- The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations
- NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System").
So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy!
So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)!
Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.
This will be a bit off-topic, but I can't resist.
"The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded... got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations"
LtCdr Joseph Rochefort, leading a team in Hawaii during the early months of WWII processing Japanese encrypted messages about an impending attack, got both the location (Midway Island) and the date (early June) right, while other cryptanalysts near Washington DC got both wrong. Rochefort was recommended for an award by Admiral Nimitz (CINCPAC, in Hawaii), but this was turned down by Admiral King in DC. Eventually Rochefort was re-assigned to command a floating drydock in San Francisco, about as much of a demotion as he could get. At the end of the war, Rochefort did get a medal, still over the objections of Admiral King. Some think this bad treatment was because Rochefort and his team in Hawaii embarrassed the crypt analysts in DC.
She first headed commercial crew which outperformed tremendously by comparison to almost all NASA programs (in terms of budget and execution).
She then got promoted to lead Human Exploration and Operations - which is absolutely a promotion. In terms of putting US Astronauts in space, her crew dragon program as significantly outperformed SLS at an absolute fraction of the per seat cost. So yes, very embarrassing.
I'd have to look at timelines, but my instinct is Nelson likely came on and that pretty much marked the end of her career at NASA as a result.
She wasn't afraid to make the calls she thought were right, she was pushing towards fixed price awards even on things like HLS, and having her in Exploration Systems Development would just have ruffled too many feathers over time.
The whole lunar landing architecture was so comical. SLS launching Orion to lunar gateway? Lunar gateway in a nonsensical orbit that would have needed an an entire separate transfer vehicle to get to LEO where it should have been to start with?
“Why would you want to send a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down?” asked Buzz Aldrin, who called the Gateway concept “absurd.”
Kathy was involved in HLS selection I think - and when I saw they were going to maybe leave gateway out of architecture for first lending... you knew that common sense couldn't last!
The ihab module on gateway (currently getting maybe 800 million per year in funding) is going to have 53 cubic feet for FOUR PEOPLE!! The entire module has a diameter of maybe 4 feet BEFORE life support? And gateways orbit mean you can only get to it at a very specific time once a week basically .
NASA's manned mission division does seem to have the bigger problem with bloated contracting budgets and inefficiency, relative to the rest of the organization. I'd guess that's due to direct political influence (the Richard Shelby - Bill Nelson effect in that case). From 2010:
https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html
Yep, the whole SpaceX thing was unpopular with Biden admin - I think they brought Bill Nelson back from retirement - he'd really fought for SLS and fought against "wasting" money on SpaceX. The Biden admin have some kind of beef with Elon.
They also needed to get Kathy L out who had started to push down manned mission cost (crew dragon etc) and I think they succeeded there - there was a push to get her off new projects and into just operations I think to keep her from disrupting the pork - even just by showing the contrasts to other approaches.
NASA looks efficient because you’re comparing it to the rest of government.
I love the work they do. I wish they did more with what they have. And then I wish they had more to work with.
When they are constrained, like they are with spacecraft already in flight, their ability to problem solve with the tools and systems they have available is absolutely impressive.
I'm sure at NASA as at all government agencies there are teams who work very efficiently and do more with less, and other teams whose mission does not have that characteristic and constraint.
The majority of inefficiency seems to leek into NASA via our Congress.
This isn’t specific to NASA or Congress. U.S. Government agencies will utilize whatever budget they are given, period.
There is no incentive to be efficient. If there is leftover money in the final fiscal quarter you are highly encouraged to use every penny, even if that means buying new furniture and office supplies that you don’t really need. Any leftover money will be given to someone else and you will receive a smaller budget the following year.
I think they are commenting on the requirements imposed on NASA with regards to where parts are made (what states), etc.
I've have personally seen instances where it is recommended to go over your budget, so it appears your budget needs to be increased.
This isn't specific to the US Government either, it applies to almost any government agency in the world.
I agree, NASA would be much further along without that bunch of turnips.
Perhaps if they used Raspberry pi, they wouldn't be in such a pickle? (Sorry)
Pork-barrel politics are ugly and make federal programs like NASA less efficient. But in this case it serves a strategic value in preserving a geographically distributed aerospace industrial base. This ensures we won't lose too much capacity from a single disaster or enemy attack. If that "insurance" means fewer space missions then it's a premium worth paying.
NASA also looks quite efficient when you compare it to many tech companies. NASA has 18k employees and $25bn budget in 2023, let's compare it with some companies:
Spotify and Stripe are each equal to half of NASA both in terms of employees and budget.
Snapchat and Airbnb are both approx 1/3rd of NASA in both employees and budget.
Yahoo has 1/2 the employees and 1/3 the budget of NASA.
ByteDance is 6x larger than NASA on both metrics.
Meta is 6x larger in budget and 4x larger in head count.
These are just companies making social media apps and selling ads.
How do I read this employees/budget metric to properly rank efficiency?
Is 1,000 employees each with an average burn rate per employee of a $1,000,000/y supposed to be more or less efficient than 2,000 employees with an average burn rate per employee of $500,000/y? If so, why is that a sign of an inherently more efficient company when we haven't even mentioned things like output yet? E.g. some of the companies in the list post a large loss, others post a large gain. If a company doubled it's employee count and posted a 10% change in profit due to staffing budgets why should that result in 100% or 50% change in this metric?
Is 1,000 companies with 1 employee each and a budget of $1,000,000/y inherently supposed to be the same efficiency as 1 company with 1,000 employees and a budget of $1,000,000,000/y even if the other company is posting a profit and the small company just spending it all each year?
I'm generally on the side of NASA but in this case I just don't understand how to apply this metric in a meaningful way. It seems almost everything else about the company is more relevant to overall efficiency the "amount of money spent in the last year for a given number of people working there". I.e., at the end of the day in terms of efficiency I don't really care if 1 person works at NASA or 100,000 people work at NASA I care how quickly they get meaningful missions completed at a given budget.
I'm not saying look at those two numbers divided by each other. In fact the ratio seems to be quite constant across companies.
What I'm saying is, take what Spotify is actually producing, and compare that to half of what NASA is producing. Or compare Snap to a third of NASA, etc.
Similarly just because you and I don't like what Spotify produces as much as what NASA produces doesn't really help weigh their efficiency without a whole lot of other data that's more important (before even getting into the debate of what everyone considers worthwhile output). The most efficient pasta producer in the world could premix their pasta with pesto and I don't get to claim it's the same efficiency as every other place just because I despite pesto.
I mean I get wanting to shit on adtech over NASA, the latters is... significantly more cool. I just don't get why it's related to explaining how efficient or inefficient NASA is at the significantly cooler stuff.
I think the point was these massive ad companies have similar resources as NASA and don't do anything particularly useful* for society.
* For some definitions of useful
Spotify has a 12bn budget? What are they spending it on? Does it include licensing fees?
Spotify doesn't have a great bargaining position against the record labels, they don't make much profit.
This is why they've been trying to move into all the other stuff like podcasts
Employees is a horrible metric to use since NASA contracts out nearly everything.
The NASA budget is $25B, or about $75 per American.
That’s an average for the year 2024, but as income taxpayers we only pay around half of that, or around $36.40 per American (using the $24.9B 2024 budget and 342M for the 2024 population), or maybe about one week’s morning Starbucks habit for some of us. :P The rest is paid by businesses and other sources. Of course, compared to the amount the military costs & spends, NASA’s really small.
The treasury receives 85% of it's income from individual income tax payers, 7% from business taxes, and 7% from excise taxes.
Around 50% of your taxes go to social security and medicare, and the other 50% are available for program revenue.
I guess we both need to cite our sources. Mine is this one, which shows the federal budget revenue being comprised of 50% individual income tax in 2023: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
NASA’s budget comes from the the federal budget, managed by congress, not directly from the Treasury. I don’t necessarily think that matters, but I don’t know if the federal budget’s revenue differs from the Treasury’s for any reason, so it seems worth mentioning.
That said, I just looked and the Treasury’s own website matches the congressional budget office’s claim, and says that 52% of the 2024 revenue was individual income tax … so where did you get the 85% number?? https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
From your own link. What's 52% + 34%? 86%. That's where it comes from. The money you pay in income taxes is divided between these two categories. So, 60% of what you pay as an individual in taxes goes to programs.
They like to break this up so that it's harder for average people to apprehend that 86% of all government spending comes out of their pockets and very little from businesses.
In the 1950s it used to be 50% was from citizens, 25% from business and 25% from excise taxes. This is why I think about the problem this way, but these facts only tangentially intersect with your original point.
Yes, but where are those actual accounts held? At the Treasury. Which is why you pay your taxes to the Treasury or receive refunds from the same.
Are you adding in Social Security and Medicare taxes? Those don’t go to NASA.
The OP posted:
I'm saying using half is incorrect because the ratio isn't as simple as the OP assumed. The correct figure would be 60%, or $43.68 per _citizen_, this because a large chunk of your taxes go elsewhere, and because business pays so very little.
Anyways.. it's a parsimonious point about how taxes are intentionally obscure and widely misunderstood and miscalculated.
I don’t know where 60% comes from since you didn’t explain it, but the percent is a subjective matter of what you choose to include or exclude, and I think you’re still including revenue sources that are not used to fund NASA, and being nonspecific about what spending you’re talking about. If you want to claim which number is “correct”, you need to explain it fully and carefully. Do note the difference between 50% and 60% is smaller than the percentage deficit, so we’re debating something smaller than the margin of error, and there’s no such thing as the “correct figure”. For example, 50% is the revenue portion of the budget that is comprised of individual income taxes, but if we look at the individual income tax revenue of $2.2T versus the total spending of $6.1T, then individual income taxes are actually only 36% of spending, so it can legitimately be argued that the average NASA share per citizen is closer to $26.50. Since that’s an average, it’s always incorrect relative to any given citizen; we haven’t even touched on income brackets and regressive/progressive taxes.
I agree that businesses pay too little, and yes taxes are a bit complicated. I’m not seeing intentional obscurity at this level, just that there are multiple different valid ways to frame NASA’s budget. The top comment was correct that the average per citizen cost to fund NASA in 2023 was slightly under $75. This is already very low, so that was the point from the top. Mine was simply that the actual amount we pay is even lower. Whether it’s 36% or 50% or 60% or even 85% doesn’t matter much, that ends up being about 1 or 2 cups of coffee either way.
I wonder if this spending split is common in all other highly developed nations (think: OECD level). My guess: Yes.
Compared to the cost of the by far most powerful military organization in human history, which is the foundation for the security order of the planet, pretty much every cost is really small.
There's a billionaire who has offered to do a repair mission. NASA considers this too risky to let some random guy go up there and fix it. If they worked together on a plan I feel like they could get this done in a way that reduces the risk, but it seems like they just don't want to.
It's worth adding that the proposal was mainly for reboosting the telescope, which can still be done later if needed.
Trying to EVA and work on Hubble would be very risky right now with Dragon since you have to vent the entire capsule first, and this creates all sorts of optics contamination risks.
They're also balancing this against upcoming technologies, possible cost reductions and the much improved capabilities of ground based telescopes due to advanced adaptive optics.
Couldn't they vent the capsule well before docking with Hubble? I assume the contamination comes from venting the capsule nearby the telescope.
They could, but it might be considered risky or maybe outright not possible with the current design, since the EVA hoses would be different from the ones normally used within the capsule.
It isn't that the problems can't be solved, just that NASA doesn't think it's worth working on just yet. Tbh I wouldn't be surprised if they're hoping to get government funding so that they can be the controlling party (vs a private mission, where, ultimately, they have to compromise with the specific things Isaacman would be willing to fund and within the timeline within which he's willing to keep funding).
Imagine the leaps the humanity would see if the US spent a tenth on NASA as it does on "defense" (it'd likely still outspend the next 10 countries, combined, even then on the war-dept.).
JFK, come back.
Used to do radio astronomy before switching to software, and we would joke that you could fund all of US science grants for a decade by driving to the local airforce base and stealing couple of jets and their loadouts. It wasn't that far off from accurate, sadly.
Its insane how far quality can push things, even with a tiny budget. And yes, Im also making jokes about burning money.. tech is a strange world!