You may have to clarify the relationship between your skepticism about this process and your final sentence, I’m not sure I understand your point. While the budget is loosely a zero-sum game, individuals making the tradeoffs are motivated by political incentives, and among these incentives is popular support. Nor are we in any obvious ‘stable attractor’ in budget-space; new programs with new funding are included, and existing programs often have their share of funding increased, with each new budget. As I mentioned to ChristianKI, there is already precedent for NASA receiving a larger share of the federal budget than it does today (that is, the years 1962-2012). There doesn’t seem to be any obvious disconnect between a demonstration of popular support and an increase in funding.
Further, this is not like voting; political support for NASA is on a continuum, rather than being a binary proposition. If only a small number of people show support (or a large number of people do), then an additional email still has value.
I should have been more clear: do you believe that ceteris paribus a candidate who supports (more) space programs has an electoral advantage over one who does not?
The zero-sum game remark hints at the fact that “We should give a foozillion dollars to NASA” can be (and routinely is) countered by “No, we can use that foozillion dollars better by giving it to {somebody else}”.
Thanks for clarifying. This paper present a fairly coherent view of the nuances behind that question, I think.
The answer to your question is not obvious, which is presumably at least part of the reason that NASA funding has languished so badly in recent decades. It has a broad base of support (~80%), but the general public has a surprisingly poor understanding of that agency’s size and scope. People overestimate its share of funding to a huge degree (a nontrivial percentage think it takes up half of federal spending!), and consequently think we spend too much; it’s not clear what would happen if the majority of the population actually found out how little we actually spend on the problem, as they would in an election that prioritized NASA as an ‘issue’. It’s a bit like a candidate with low familiarity among the voter base, in that it’s generally seen as an opportunity to ‘frame’ the message more completely.
Well, I doubt I’m representative of US voters, but to my mind NASA suffers primarily from not having a realistic medium-term mission that anyone (beyond science geeks) cares about and from being a bloated, sclerotic, and highly inefficient government organization. Neither problem can be fixed by more funding.
Sure, but those aren’t the problems I’m hoping to solve using this funding. I’m hoping the funding will help solve the interplanetary civilization problem.
(They do impact the efficiency of dollars spent, of course- so they are important to solve. But those are efficiency concerns, not solid barriers.)
These barriers look pretty solid to me. Not that my opinion matters, but I wouldn’t give any more money to NASA until it demonstrates the ability to find its gold-plated ass with both hand faster than in a decade. In more formal terms, it’s not that NASA is just inefficient, I wonder whether it’s capable any more...
Given the obvious fact of ongoing space exploration (Curiosity being the most prominent), NASA is obviously capable to some degree. Current missions demonstrate success and competence in areas that few other organizations have even attempted.
In other words, the machine is still running- put money in one end, and a space program comes out the other. If that’s not a good enough ROI for you, that’s one thing. But I think a group of people that are running daily experiments in their Martian science laboratory qualify as functional.
The first electric cars were made in the 1880s. Is Tesla Motors using old technology?
The Mars rovers use lots of new technology (the aerobraking system and “skycrane”, to name one). NASA has certainly experimented with new propulsion technology like VASIMIR and ion drives, it’s just that these are high-specific-impulse low-thrust platforms unsuitable for launch but good for maneuvering once in orbit. Not all aspects of a field will advance at the same rate. Compare processing power to battery capacity, for example.
Will it—do you think it’s a correct belief? That’s not obvious to me. Remember that allocating budgets is a zero-sum game.
You may have to clarify the relationship between your skepticism about this process and your final sentence, I’m not sure I understand your point. While the budget is loosely a zero-sum game, individuals making the tradeoffs are motivated by political incentives, and among these incentives is popular support. Nor are we in any obvious ‘stable attractor’ in budget-space; new programs with new funding are included, and existing programs often have their share of funding increased, with each new budget. As I mentioned to ChristianKI, there is already precedent for NASA receiving a larger share of the federal budget than it does today (that is, the years 1962-2012). There doesn’t seem to be any obvious disconnect between a demonstration of popular support and an increase in funding.
Further, this is not like voting; political support for NASA is on a continuum, rather than being a binary proposition. If only a small number of people show support (or a large number of people do), then an additional email still has value.
I should have been more clear: do you believe that ceteris paribus a candidate who supports (more) space programs has an electoral advantage over one who does not?
The zero-sum game remark hints at the fact that “We should give a foozillion dollars to NASA” can be (and routinely is) countered by “No, we can use that foozillion dollars better by giving it to {somebody else}”.
Thanks for clarifying. This paper present a fairly coherent view of the nuances behind that question, I think.
The answer to your question is not obvious, which is presumably at least part of the reason that NASA funding has languished so badly in recent decades. It has a broad base of support (~80%), but the general public has a surprisingly poor understanding of that agency’s size and scope. People overestimate its share of funding to a huge degree (a nontrivial percentage think it takes up half of federal spending!), and consequently think we spend too much; it’s not clear what would happen if the majority of the population actually found out how little we actually spend on the problem, as they would in an election that prioritized NASA as an ‘issue’. It’s a bit like a candidate with low familiarity among the voter base, in that it’s generally seen as an opportunity to ‘frame’ the message more completely.
Well, I doubt I’m representative of US voters, but to my mind NASA suffers primarily from not having a realistic medium-term mission that anyone (beyond science geeks) cares about and from being a bloated, sclerotic, and highly inefficient government organization. Neither problem can be fixed by more funding.
Sure, but those aren’t the problems I’m hoping to solve using this funding. I’m hoping the funding will help solve the interplanetary civilization problem.
(They do impact the efficiency of dollars spent, of course- so they are important to solve. But those are efficiency concerns, not solid barriers.)
These barriers look pretty solid to me. Not that my opinion matters, but I wouldn’t give any more money to NASA until it demonstrates the ability to find its gold-plated ass with both hand faster than in a decade. In more formal terms, it’s not that NASA is just inefficient, I wonder whether it’s capable any more...
Given the obvious fact of ongoing space exploration (Curiosity being the most prominent), NASA is obviously capable to some degree. Current missions demonstrate success and competence in areas that few other organizations have even attempted.
In other words, the machine is still running- put money in one end, and a space program comes out the other. If that’s not a good enough ROI for you, that’s one thing. But I think a group of people that are running daily experiments in their Martian science laboratory qualify as functional.
Yeah, but it’s all old technology. Launching rovers using plain-vanilla chemical rockets was first successfully done by Russians in 1970.
The first electric cars were made in the 1880s. Is Tesla Motors using old technology?
The Mars rovers use lots of new technology (the aerobraking system and “skycrane”, to name one). NASA has certainly experimented with new propulsion technology like VASIMIR and ion drives, it’s just that these are high-specific-impulse low-thrust platforms unsuitable for launch but good for maneuvering once in orbit. Not all aspects of a field will advance at the same rate. Compare processing power to battery capacity, for example.