NASA v Airbus

NASA is apparently planning to cut a thinktank that deals with formulating the theoretical bases for far-off ideas, like navigating a spacecraft on magnetic fields or solar winds. This is a $4m lab doing long-term research, so it's an insignificant amount of money in terms of the NASA budget, and has no immediate tangible effect (unlike slashing funding for geological satellites). As far as I can tell, space exploration has had three areas of benefit to the American people. First, along with the Olympics the Space Race served as a safer outlet for Cold War nationalist competitiveness, beating the Russians on the moon so we didn't have to beat them here, to borrow a phrase. The second benefit was that meeting the grand challenges meant accomplishing a lot of intermediate challenges, for instance looking for signs of life on Mars required a sensitive, rugged device for detecting water vapor that, once someone actually built one, turned out to be useful in measuring water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, critical to predicting the weather. While this engineering benefit is more practical, and theoretically any challenge will do, it seems to be that it takes something so difficult and novel that the intermediate steps are all greenfield sort of challenges... nobody had ever built a lunar lander before the Apollo program, where if you ask Minnesota to try to fix the Crosstown traffic jam on 35W, you've already got a highway so the most innovative solution considered is to just add a couple lanes. The the third benefit is that nobody knows what will come from general scientific research, or what lies beyond the frontiers once we open them. When the speed of light was first measured precisely, and Sputnik was launched, nobody could claim to be envisioning networks of GPS satellites.

So anyways, some of NASA's current predicament and budget cuts are down to politics, and some of it to focusing on Mars, which should be that kind of grand challenge that requires broad innovation, but there's another cause I think is amusing given the current climate in aerospace manufacturing. NASA built all these space shuttles to serve space stations and carry heavy satellites to orbit, and then spent the next thirty years trying to find somebody with a space station or a heavy satellite. We never built a shuttle-ready space station, and electronics tend to get smaller in a hurry, so it turns out satellites and rockets got small enough that a lot of sites could launch them cheaper. Once we had the thing, everything we did had to be planned around it though, hence the exploration of space turned into carrying up a load of windex and paper towels to the Hubble telescope, and hanging out at Mir once the Wall came down. A lot of money and manpower went into keeping the shuttles flying, and a lot more is earmarked for replacing them, since we haven't been steadily innovating and improving our spacecraft like you'd expect over the course of 30 years (unless you count Armageddon in which case Billy Bob's on the job). This is the opposite of the biggest benefit of space exploration: finding new innovations and solutions, not figuring out how to reuse old the same old technology.

So that was kind of silly, but then the Europeans got in on the game and built its earthbound equivalent: the Airbus A380. The money spent on it has crippled the ability of Airbus to build and launch what their customers are actually asking for (a wide-body with lower operating costs), like NASA has to sink their resources into the shuttle. The A380 doesn't have any airports to land at any more than the space shuttles had a giant space station to dock at, and just like the commercial payloads never materialized, the freight version of the A380 now has zero takers, now that FedEx, UPS, ILFC, and Emirates have all canceled their orders, and nobody knows why Emirates is stocking up so heavily on the passenger version. The last time somebody launched a jumbo jet, the only thing that kept Boeing from going out of business was that the 747 had an unparalleled range for its day, even if you couldn't fill it, and they seemed to learn their lesson since the longest range planes on the market in the next few years will be much smaller 777's and 787's. On the topic of bankruptcy, it has been commented that despite doing a wealth of productive work, if NASA were a private company that didn't have Uncle Sam forgiving their strange wanderings, they'd have gone out of business a long time ago... it remains to be seen if Airbus can right itself without a little help from a funny uncle in Brussels.