I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason" why NASA takes so long to do anything. I doubt funding is a top 3 reason.
NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money for each launch than it should. (almost two?)
Have to +1 this. A lot (most?) of NASA's funding is directed toward keeping people employed and skilled, as opposed to accomplishing goals, as with a lot of government money. NASA could do a LOT more with the funding they already have, if they were willing to divest from older technologies and vendors, but the politics of its funding doesn't allow that.
I agree however that culture was caused by a lack of funding.
You can't be swift and lean when you are given very limited, budgeted funding. You can't take risks or you risk putting people out of a job and killing the program.
That leads to an overly conservative culture that restricts any risk taking and over-engineers everything to the point failure is effectively impossible.
This slow movement, overly conservative, design by committee approach helps limit risk but it absolutely balloons costs in the long run and horrifically delays progress. Of course if they were a company they'd eventually run out of money but that's not really an option for gov orgs so when the overly conservative, limited run designs end up encountering production issues, the projects explode in cost with nearly no upper limit.
TLDR: The political climate is a direct consequence of the lack of budget and continued restriction of that budget only worsens the problem.
> I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason"
> NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics.
Why doesn't the political environment allow for it. What could happen. What could regulatory bodies do to NASA for taking a risk and failing. What sort of constricting change could political bodies do in such a situation.
The funding senator became the administrator of the current moon attempt. The funding insist on using the old technology in the funding. All these sounded bad. If nasa has more freehand. But then the fund will not get back to the states …
"Funding" isn't really a good answer IMO. I don't know a ton about Fusion research specifically, but NASA is horrifically inefficient with money compared to private competitors. Giving them more money won't magically make them more efficient. Reasons why include:
- Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton of inefficiency from poor communication and the need to constantly ship things around
- Public approval is the goal and failure is the worst possible option, so things tend to be optimized to take as few engineering risks as possible and have huge amounts of bureaucracy to spread the blame for any possible failure
There's a reason why SpaceX started landing rockets with a fraction of the money that NASA spent on building ridiculous boondoggles.
>> Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a ton of inefficiency from poor communication
Ummm.. I thought remote work was no less efficient?
Remote work is fine in some circumstances. One of the circumstances where it is definitely not fine is in designing, manufacturing, and testing high-precision aerospace hardware. You aren't gonna put a 5-axis CNC mill in your garage.
You are comparing company that makes trucks with a company that makes precision scientific instrumers, and you are declaring that truck companu is more efficient per kilo of produce. this is stupid.
Nasa develops nuclear reactors, landed on titan and has reached pluto. Spacex vehicle has never left the Earth-moon system.
SpaceX is not Tesla. It's disingenuous to call SpaceX a "company that makes trucks". Just like NASA, they also make precision scientific instruments. They're the first privately funded mission to the ISS and run a massive satellite constellation.
They may not have the same accomplishments as NASA, but they're far from a "company that makes trucks".
You think their satellite fleet has absolutely no precise equipment for knowing and maintaining its position? Or for communicating with terminals and each other?
Like, come on. I get shitting on Musk is the cool new thing, but this is genuinely the case where SpaceX is doing cool things in space, and at an extremely fast pace. Get over yourself if you can’t see through your Musk hate and only see them as “a company that builds trucks”.
The analogy is apt in at least defining a separation between the overall complexity of what SpaceX produces compared to NASA, to say something of how the two different models of R&D work, but maybe off in degrees as you discussed.
"NASA makes precision scientific instruments and SpaceX makes precision scientific instruments that have higher tolerances with a higher focus on throughput, and there are rapidly diminishing returns in how much funding can be used to close the gap" is probably the right take if not as fun.
One of the things that I think I noticed from the press conference, is that funding is going to be the bare minimum to meet some goal for a design they select.
This seems like a gross mistake.
If we are going to avert a climate catastrophe we will need TW of power to "unburn" the carbon we put into the environment (ocean and atmosphere). Instead of barely hitting this target, we should over deliver since we are running out of wall-clock time.
Every project that meets a bar for feasibility, organizational/operational capabilities (if they dont have it, either fix it, or transfer design to capable team) should be given funding (50-100M). We should be dropping BILLIONS on this, if we can drop 50B+ on semiconductors we can do the same for fusion.
Dump trillions of dollars into fusion energy today and it will still be decades before the first fusion power plant is connected to the grid. You'd be better off funding the construction of fission power plants. Those are very expensive and take years to build, but they're still a hell of a lot cheaper and faster than funding fusion to the degree you're suggesting.
Each dollar diverted to chase nuke wills-o'-th'-wisp brings climate catastrophe nearer.
Money is fungible. Dropping $billions on this means not dropping those $billions on something that works already, works fantastically well, and would work even better with more money. We already know how to prevent (more) climate catastrophe. We just need to do more of it.
Fission means, in practice, paying enough for coal generation, over the decade, to have built enough solar to displace the nuke; and paying many times that, on top, to build the nuke.
So, no. Each dollar diverted from building out solar to mining coal or fooling with nukes brings existential catastrophe nearer.
Simulations and estimations about processes in the physical world always leave room for surprises when one is doing things that haven't been done before.
I think a major bottleneck for fusion research from the lay public (including myself) is lack of interest.
Fission reactors work really well and have been around for 50+ years. If we are going to go nuclear instead of renewable, we need to address the elephant in the room.
The elephant in the room is: why not just fission?
And somehow harnessing the power of the literal sun will have a better safety rate? It's all speculation at this point because fusion doesn't exist yet... but it does seem like a huge undertaking to get superior safety over fission.
It’s not speculation because so much is known about the physics and elements involved. With fusion you want lighter particles which tend to be less radioactive, rather than heavy uranium etc particles for fission.
”Regulatory bodies have vast experience in the realm of safety and security for fission. We are working with them to ensure that all applicable knowledge is transferred to fusion."
Let me put the question another way: suppose we get fusion that's equally as safe as fission like IAEA is saying here. Why would we switch to it if we were unwilling to switch to fission?
You’re making false equivalences, and ignoring all of the fundamental differences between the technologies. The materials involved are different, the chain reactions are different, the kinds of radiation and half lives are different, the way you build the cores are different (and are still being worked on for fusion).
The entire reason why people are working on fusion IS the fact that it’s much much safer due to all of the key differences. That doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons from fission to transfer, just as lessons from ICE cars have gone to EVs.
This is like saying thread count is always the bottle neck in computation. More money allows more parallelism as you can pay for more people and more equipment for more research. As in computing, there are diminishing marginal returns and surely a version of Amdahl's Law for human endeavors.
> thread count is always the bottle neck in computation
The softer the bed linen, the more rested the computer scientists will be and the more likely they are to come up with novel solutions that lead to faster computing.
I would have to agree. The "in general" though is carrying an enormous amount of weight in that statement.
I think what other commentors may be getting at is that in many cases the simple analogy of asking how 9 women can have a baby in 1 month is instructive here. You could throw trillions at that problem, a need to have a baby in 1 month. Sometimes there are hard limits that money has a hard time addressing.
A case could be made that with enough money put towards advanced technology, like gene therapy to force a fetus to maturity in 1 month vs 9, it could be done with horrendous side effects.
So to your point money does solve all problems, but I think diminishing returns is putting it very lightly.
I believe the Manhattan project (where we basically built an entire new city, and entire new manufacturing process from scratch: mining operations, refineries, enrichment, milling, etc.) cost less in constant dollars than the stealth fighter.
The talent + purpose (which drew the talent) was what defined Manhattan. The money came easy when all of the greatest minds in the country were pointing a giant flashing light in one obvious direction.
This is big news but fusion will largely be a product of the people it attracts. The people can do the job attracting money and other talent if it's justified.
I've seen the Canadian gov try to throw money at trying to build a local tech scene and it all went to hucksters, old school finance suits with megacorp resumes, and administrators. While all the tech talent just kept going to SF where the capital was going into high risk ventures... not expensive buildings, events, 'entrepreneur/small business programs', and propping up old school D-round investors. Money is easily wasted even when the pursuit sounds noble and valuable on the surface.
