Cost/Benefit

[Gail & Roberta]

Ever since Moomaw's tirade against the $4 billion ISS "boondoggle," I've been wrestling with a rebuttal. Now don't get me wrong--I have nothing but the greatest respect for Bruce. And he's right about at least one thing here: the cost of the ISS is probably 'way higher than it could have been. But that's bureaucracy, isn't it? (Spoken from the point of view of being a trained bureaucrat myself--30 years with the St. of Calif.) Part of bureaucratic "inefficiency and waste of the taxpayer's hard earned dollars" is caused by the selfsame taxpayers themselves in demanding endless checks and balances. The political process also says that competing demands must be rigorously compared using hard numbers, and the least cost alternative selected--"least cost" sometimes meaning "no cost at all, i.e., don't do it." I have served in conservative administrations whose driving philosophy is "If it isn't required by law, we won't do it." I have seen deliberate attempts to make the record look good by such simple things as delaying budgeted projects so the money earmarked for that approved project will stay in the savings/investment pool earning interest. In a budget the size of California's, every day of interest is a significant amount. For example, I worked for DMV. For nearly the whole twelve years I was there, energetic attempts were made to get the income into the bank as early in the day as possible. By the time I retired, that was up to about 97% of the moneys received were deposited before noon of the day they were received. I don't know the exact amount of income earned each day, but the effort was worth it. I also served in liberal administrations, like the one that implemented Medi-Cal, and many of the other "welfare" liberalizations. I served, for example, for over 8 years with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, almost from its inception. For those of you who weren't around at the time, this was the law that gave farmworkers collective bargaining rights. Like the ancient Chinese curse (paraphrased) "...we lived in interesting times." So you see I do know a little about whereof I speak. I've seen it both ways, and can't say which is "best." Both philosophies have positive and negative aspects, and maybe Jerry Brown was right when he said that governing was like paddling a canoe: "You paddle a little to the left, and a little to the right, and you pretty much go down the middle." So the ISS spent money. And so it soaked up more than pure efficiency in design, construction, testing, et al., than it could have if administered better. Could a private corporation done better? Could a group of "Whiz Kids" like the Robert McNamara bunch at Ford did after WWII? They got Ford up and running with their bean counting, but the same thing didn't quite work as well in running the Vietnam adventure. Maybe there's a big difference between private industry and government after all. Well, duh! Satisfying stockholders is one thing--keep the profit up and they're happy. Satisfying taxpayers is quite another, partly because there is no agreement on what "profit" is. The ISS will never return a recognizable profit. The billions spent on it will never be offset by more billions in return. But another aspect occurs to me, and it's probably not new at all, just takes me a while to recognize the obvious. What about all the jobs that have been provided to put the ISS up there and keep it there? And I don't mean just the NASA jobs or the jobs directly contributing to the design, construction, etc., etc. etc. I mean the jobs in what might be called the "secondary" market. These are the folks who are making a living growing the food, pumping the gas, fixing the plumbing, etc., for all the thousands who are directly involved. Some of you arithmeticians out there might run some numbers and I think we might be astonished at how many of us are supported in one way or another by the ISS alone, not to mention the other space programs in the works. Even the government workers ("feeding at the public trough"...I hated that one!) who process the checks and balances demanded by the taxpayers are buying clothes, cars, refrigerators, food, vacation trips, etc., as a result of what is spent on the "boondoggle." It is true, and I have no argument with this, that robots will probably be able to tell us anything we want to know about the possibility of water on the poles of the moon, or on Mars, but people will have to build, launch, and service them. So you see, I don't see the ISS as a big hole in the sky into which money is poured. I see it as an effort that much be made if we are ever going to be a spacefaring race. I see it as one of the first faltering, limping, stumbling, staggering steps we must take on the way "out there." I believe we will learn from our experience, and it may well be that we will find other, better, ways to finance the projects. I believe what we need to do is keep the political pot burbling away by continuing to let our representatives know that there are a significant number of voters who want the journey to continue, and to keep the pressure on NASA to get their house in order and keep it that way. A new space plane (the X40) is being tested, check out Space.com for some interesting content on the whole subject. If I have exhausted the patience of the participants in this list, I apologize, and I hope no one bails out because (a) this doesn't apply directly to Europa, or (b) it's too long, or (c) both. I think it does directly affect our willingness and ability to reach and explore Europa, for we won't even send robots there unless the political side is firmly addressed. Watch the skies! Gail Leatherwood