Interesting points from Prof. Brian Cox:<p><pre><code> * NASA costs less than 0.13% of GDP
and provides 9x return on investment
* The entire Shuttle Program cost approximately
the same as the UK bank bailout
* The Iraq conflict so far has cost significantly
more than a manned mission to Mars
</code></pre>
Source:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88955884390195202" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88955884390195202</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88956654539902976" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88956654539902976</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88957802281840640" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/profbriancox/status/88957802281840640</a>
Yes, when you pour money down the money hole, you do tend to get a few things in return. My real question, which we'll see answered hopefully over the next few years, isn't "Were the capabilities we got with the shuttle <i>cool</i>?" but "Was the shuttle a cost-effective way to obtain those capabilities?"<p>And it's really hard to look at the Shuttle program and say <i>yes</i>.<p>In general, we really need to get over whining about what we could have if only we could spend money we don't have.
The Shuttle fails in its primary objective, that of being a "reusable" vehicle. I attended a presentation by a NASA employee that explained the Shuttle process from landing to launch, and I was amazed at how much of the craft is replaced. I think we would have been far better off extending the Apollo program to new missions, similar to the Soyuz (which is still flying although much improved from the moon landing era).
The Shuttle is inspiring, and compared to nothing it looks excellent. But on the whole it is not a good system. It has unique capabilities that it uses extremely rarely or not at all (such as the cross-range flight ability) but which impose tremendous compromises on the system's cost, reliability, and safety.<p>All of this added up to the system falling far, far short of its design goals in payload cost and flight rate, by nearly 2 orders of magnitude. By any sound measure the Shuttle is a failed experiment that was left to run, and bleed NASA budgets dry, for far too long. On the whole each Shuttle mission cost $1.6 billion dollars.<p>The alternative to not building the Shuttle was continuing with what we had before, which even at a reduced budget compared to the Shuttle would have resulted in larger space stations, moon bases, and perhaps manned Mars missions. The alternative now to not continuing the Shuttle is relying on commercial launch providers as the base of manned spaceflight, which looks to be both cheaper and more capable than the Shuttle.
NASA has been screwed since someone made the decision that we needed to land on the Moon by the end of the 60's. We didn't build the infrastructure to go and stay in space. Being first should never have been a goal. Being there to stay should have been.
We lose a lot. We gain incentive to go out into space privately and commercialize spaceflight.<p>Is living in a Futurama-esque commercialization of space worth it?<p>I believe so, yes. Bring on the frontier!