mises.org — In its 20 year lifespan, the shuttle program has a failure rate of around 1 in 50 launches, writes Tim Swanson. Yet with this abysmally low success rate, its ever-increasing budget requests are approved annually. Could you imagine the economic impact on the domestic airline industry if there was a 1-in-50 chance of your plane crashing?
Jan 2, 2007 View in Crawl 4
brainwipeJan 3, 2007
Politics aside, I think there is a few orders of magnitude difference in the complexity of a Space Shuttle and an airline. Furthermore, there are many more airline flights than Space Shuttle ones so the knowledge is much greater.
0sirisJan 3, 2007
and one can only imagine what they are doing but not telling us.
jimxugleJan 3, 2007
Was ist das?!A small-governmet, conservative article on the front page of Digg?!The end of the world is near!
Closed AccountJan 3, 2007
If it weren't for NASA, your life would be a hell of a lot less luxurious than it currently is. Besides a multitude of consumer goods that many people take for granted and that exist as a direct result of NASA research, your and your family's life expectancy would also be cut by several years, as a lot of modern medical equipment (like MRI scanners and a multitude of other things) was pioneered by NASA without realizing that these products and services might some day be profitable.I don't give a s**t how much you want to hold on to your tax dollars. You're living in a Democracy, and the people have decided that we SUPPORT spending our tax dollars on NASA. My income is only slightly above minimum wage, and I am glad that a part of my taxes goes into funding such a great organization with such great goals and fantastic results.A lot of what NASA does is pure research. The only way you'd get private companies to fund it is if they saw profits from the funding (or as a charity, which is unlikely with such expensive goals). Unfortunately, many of the profits possibilities from space exploration and accompanied research are side-effects and COMPLETELY unpredictable. This unpredictability will ensure that, while private businesses may start creating for-profit space travel (tourism, etc), they will likely never spend the money to discover what the origin of the universe is. A tiny percentage of your personal income spent answering the biggest questions humanity has ever asked is A SMALL PRICE TO PAY, and you're either intellectually bankrupt or completely devoid of philosophical contemplation if you think projects like NASA, or Europe's CERN (also a government-funded science operation) should only exist if they can make someone some cash, or that they would be handled better by a private business (never mind the fact that they employ the smartest, most educated people in the world).
gigglestickJan 3, 2007
1 in 50 eh. Sample size anyone?
zedikerJan 3, 2007
I thought the bankruptcy was because of a flawed economic model that couldnt sustain itself.
rhawk301Jan 3, 2007
"And while some urban legends claim the original purpose for ARPANET was to allow institutions to communicate with one another in the event of disastrous war, this is a myth."Although the DARPA project itself was not started for this reason, the packet switched network design was developed by Paul Baran at RAND just for this reason.Paul Baran's research led RAND to the 1964 report which then intrigued DARPA to find a practical application for the research.<a class="user" href="http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html">http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html</a>So in fact, the Internet WAS created out of the government's need to find highly survivable and distributed packet switched networks in the case of a large disaster. This should not be misled in any way.
cdlavalleJan 3, 2007
"In case you haven't noticed... the USSR isn't much of a threat anymore."Yes, I know but they were our main space supremacy rivals if you remember, that's why I used them as an example."I thought the bankruptcy was because of a flawed economic model that couldnt sustain itself."It couldn't sustain itself because of trying to keep up with American spending on programs like defense (the arms race) and space exploration. Otherwise they were doing fine (well as fine as a top heavy bureaucratic mess could do, but they were sustainable). Look at Cuba. Miserable but still existing. Private industry has a way to go in the space arena, I'm afraid. The way the system is set up right now rewards short term gains and thus discourages infant technologies and long range research. Besides, I doubt, say, the Hubble program could've been funded by private interests. What would they do? Sell postcards and screen savers? Doubt that would cover it. But who can argue that humanity isn't better off for having Hubble around allowing humanity to glimpse the awesome universe we inhabit?