How comes NASA is so much more successful than ESA?

h.. hello mister president

i.. i'm your biggest fan

i swear

>as an european
false flagging again, Chaim?

I'm convinced. Welcome President Trump! So sorry you had to visit the Veeky Forums.

You're right. But then we have many of the richest people and biggest corporations in the world in the states. I wonder if these massive fortunes aren't skewing things a bit.

I know not all is well over there. They keep coming out with more bad news about Deutsche Bank on a weekly basis. The collapse of Deutsche would make Lehman look like a financial crisis for ants.

NASA still has cred from the moon landing. Also they show up in all near-future science fiction movies because of hollywood.

any sort of "joint" program turns into disasters
NASA has coasted on shit it did in the 70's while doing almost nothing since

You look at probes, if something goes wrong because you have the italians doing shit or the spainiards, then the whole thing fails

Also Eurosocialists will inflate costs above even Americans, while having a lower budget.

>You look at probes, if something goes wrong because you have the italians doing shit or the spainiards, then the whole thing fails

It's funny because NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because Lockheed used Imperial and NASA uses Metric.

trump will fix this

ESA's budget is like 5 billion €, the spaceport is in South America and the the offices are scattered all over western europe.

Brain drain post-ww2.

They did their most significant work in the 60's.

You think that matters? The first orbital flight by anyone was in 1957, NASA put men on the moon in 1969 and put up a space station, did a Mars landing with pictures and surface samples, and launched probes that would visit every planet but Pluto all in the first two decades of orbital spaceflight.

Even if they didn't have huge technological advances and access to much of the scientific results produced by NASA and the Soviet space program, if the ESA had put out an effort of comparable scale and competence, they'd have done comparable things by 1999 (20 years after their first orbital launch in 1979). But here we are in 2017, and the ESA hasn't put a man in space, hasn't successfully landed a Mars probe, has done little that would sound out of place in the first half of the 1960s (except for riding along on NASA, Soviet, or post-Soviet Russian vehicles and missions).

ESA's recent track record is way more impressive.

NASA had only that Cold War nonsense running.

>It's funny because NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because NASA uses Metric.
They put men on the moon using Standard units. Then they started doing stupid shit like metrication.

I'm worried for SpaceX. Falcon 9 was built with Standard units, but for ITS they're going Metric.

kek
>'nasa'
>sounds cool
>'ehsah'
>sound like a faggot

>NASA has coasted on shit it did in the 70's while doing almost nothing since

>what is hubble
>what is space shuttle
>what is ISS
>what is webb
>what is going to pluto

Money.
The amount of money available to NASA, especially in its first years, was enormous, relative to ESA.
That translates into people and materials.

Nobody on this anime forum going to point out how many times they've heard "esa" used to mean "food (for an animal)"?

Esa is basically dogfood.

>"food (for an animal)"?
You seem to be missing "fodder."

"Fodder" isn't such a common word that you can count on people knowing it, and it doesn't mean "food (for an animal)" it means "feed provided to livestock" with a strong implication of purpose-harvested plant matter.

Cut hay is fodder. Growing grass a cow eats is not fodder. Dog food is not fodder. Table scraps given to pigs or chickens are not fodder. A mouse devoured by an owl is not fodder. All of these things are "esa".

>"Fodder" isn't such a common word that you can count on people knowing it,
>All of these things are "esa".
>Fodder
>esa
>count on people knowing it
Seriously?
dictionary.com/browse/esa?s=t

Come on, Einstein, "esa" is a Japanese word. Hence the "anime forum" comment. And when you explain a word from a foreign language, you should use common words people understand well, rather than searching through obscure ones trying to find the closest equivalent.

NASA has a better kickstarter video.

Europeens are brainlets

hmm. I actually haven't heard 'esa' in my chinese cartoons, but I also haven't watched any in which an animal was being fed

ESA is only in it for the science. NASA is in it for the glory.
>implying the its will be built
Also, source on the imperial units claim?

Yet Europe can't put anything on Mars in one piece even with a consistent set of units.

NASA piggybacks off the larger American military-industrial complex.

>NASA has coasted on shit it did in the 70's while doing almost nothing since

Wrong, see the ISS. It may not be the masterpiece it was in 2000 but it's legitimately a new thing they did. Right now it only seems as if NASA is shit because they're between programs.

>ESA is only in it for the science. NASA is in it for the glory.

This is completely wrong, and demonstrates that you don't know anything about either NASA or the ESA.

>How comes NASA is so much more successful than ESA?

The agencies are completely different scales and only recently has ESA's budget risen to ~1/3 that of NASA. When you integrate the difference in funds over decades it's not hard to see why one has done more.

But today's ESA is still very successful. ESA's science program has now risen in quality to the point where it is comparable only to NASA. Mammoth successes like Herschel, Planck, XMM and now GAIA have set the tone that ESA can think big and produce results. With ESA focusing most of it's effort on medium sized missions this nicely compliments NASA current over-emphasis on slow large missions in astrophysics. Unfortunately the way NASA astrophysics seems to be going (with WFIRST nearly doubling in cost right after JWST) ESA will be critical. Euclid will be amazing and so will Athena and eventually LISA.

ESA definitely has some problems to work out but unfortunately so does NASA, and JAXA, and IKI RAN...

>ESA definitely has some problems to work out but unfortunately so does NASA, and JAXA, and IKI RAN...

ESA's problems are unfixable. Whenever they want to get something done, it becomes an exercise of cronyism and earmarking. Each member wants the maximum share of work and contracts regardless of how unfeasible it may be.

Vega launch vehicle is a disaster for example, because Italy got to lead the project.

I've never head much about jaxa. Are they good (considering it's japan alone)?

What about the chinese?

>LISA

Been canceled.

>Are they good (considering it's japan alone)?

Launch vehicles are too expensive. They used American cryogenic engines for most of their program. New medium-class LV will be out by 2020. H3. Japan is too far north be a good country to do space launches.

>What about the chinese?

Rapidly advancing, but they are banned from cooperation from any US companies due to IPR and security concerns. This makes them an untenable nation for international launch contracts, as most satellites use US components. Their CNSA structure is modeled after the Soviet-style. So heavily subsidized and little competition to make competitive launch vehicles. Nothing to compete with SpaceX or Blue Origin. Their SLS-class LV won't be ready until post 2030.

>what is hubble
>what is space shuttle
both started in the 70's

>what is ISS
A disastrous makework enterprise meant solely to justify the space shuttles existance

>what is webb
shit that doesn't exist yet, and them spending decades producing a telescope is insanity

ISS was no different from earlier space stations...

Funding. Decades of experience. Better scientists / researchers and engineers.

>Japan is too far north be a good country to do space launches.

????
Ryuku islands are further south than the Cape...
But shipping stuff that far from your industrial/population base is not even worth the effort to save like what, 400 mph starting speed?

Will musk actually bring humans to Mars by 2024?

>Each member wants the maximum share of work and contracts regardless of how unfeasible it may be.
ESA practices economic return which means countries can expect roughly what they put in, not what-ever they want. It will drive up cost but at the same time it means countries don't get nothing to show for it when they put money into non-core programs.

>Vega launch vehicle is a disaster for example, because Italy got to lead the project.
I don't think you understand how ESA works. Italy got to lead the project because they put the money in, it wouldn't have happened otherwise. Launchers is not a core program.

ESA's problems aren't unfixable and this isn't even on the radar in my opinion. Many large programs, NASA included, are forced to spread there money for political reasons.

JAXA is ambitious but their biggest problem is reliability. Astro-H a major x-ray observatory failed, one of the instruments on-board had already flown twice and failed twice. Akatsuki missed Venus. Hayabusa barely made it back from asteroid Itokawa as a sample return but it's collection mechanism failed, it got specks of dust. They're still planning big but they really need to fix their quality control.

No, only on the NASA side. ESA is still going with it and launched LISA Pathfinder to demonstrate the tech, it was a wild success. LISA may be even more ambitious in light of this and NASA are signalling they want to rejoin.

they're* money

more money. Not having to deal with politics of a bunch of different countries

NASA's just a bigger Mir, and it's way oversized for what they're doing with it.

It's not that size for any good reason, but because they wanted an excuse to fly a lot of shuttle flights, since there wasn't much else to use that piece of shit for, but everyone working on it wanted to keep getting paid.

>NASA's just a bigger Mir
(I meant ISS is just a bigger Mir)

their* money

And Mir was a bigger SkyLab, ...

No, Mir and Skylab were different sorts of achievements.

Skylab was a single-launch space station, using the power of Saturn V. It was a single relatively spacious room, allowing play like this:
youtube.com/watch?v=S_p7LiyOUx0

Mir was a modular space station, using the economy of Proton. It could be expanded without limit by adding rooms, but each room was relatively cramped:
youtube.com/watch?v=vBONpY3TxN8

Notably, Mir was the end of a series of developments. It came after 6 Salyut space stations, each single-launch stations. Some were essentially manned surveillance satellites (a practical idea for the USSR, which lagged in electronics technology and aviation), while others were for research purposes.

Including failures, the Salyut program used 9 Proton launches at a rate of about one per year, plus the separate crew launches (and supply launches, for Salyut 6 and 7, which used the Progress resupply vehicle still in use for ISS). Mir used six affordable Proton launches for its assembly over ten years, plus crew and supply launches. Even including the crew and supply launches, this all probably cost about as much as two or three shuttle flights.

ISS is just another Mir expanded to triple the size. It was worthwhile to build a Mir successor, since Mir was both loaded with obsolete technology and worn out to the point of being unsafe, but ISS is oversized and unnecessarily used the expensive shuttle for a mind-boggling 36 flights ($50 billion right there, even without the payloads). Plus it is now approaching the status that Mir was in: obsolete and worn out.

ISS shows the limitations of this approach plainly. While you can make an arbitarily large volume from modules, you can't ever have even one spacious room. Nor can you add artificial gravity. Plus as you make it larger, it grows more fragile and less tolerant of any shaking or jolts from doing anything interesting in any part of it.

ISS is Mir taken to madness.

Interesting post, thanks.

>Standard units
There is nothing "standard" about the 'Murikan
system of units, LeeRoy.

The most obvious is the difference in funding. NASA gets almost four times as much money as ESA. The second thing is, since ESA is a multilateral organization, it has to satisfy its constituents, which leads to many inefficiencies when e.g. a spacecraft involves two dozen manufacturers because every funding nation wants a share of the manufacturing jobs according to their share of the funding. Another thing is that, since often people work at the edge of science and technology and many thing are dual purpose, information sharing isn't as open as it would be in a purely national organization for reasons of security.

Nazi superscience gave us a jumpstart

Get fucked, weeb shitter.

Fodder is far more common than esa.

They have more money to sink into a blackhole.

That's the US name. Inside the US, they distinguish between Standard and Metric units. Outside of the US, it's referred to as the "US customary system".

Metric isn't a good system, let alone a better system. The Standard system derives from the English system (later diverged into the Imperial system), which was the first sufficiently sophisticated standard to allow long-range industrial cooperation and the Industrial Revolution. It was thoughtfully evolved from natural and convenient units until they were in exact ratio to one another.

The Metric system was a continental invention driven by jealousy of England. They could have adopted the English system, but they wanted something incompatible, to exclude England from trade or impose on them the cost of converting to the new system. It was thrown together in a rush based on simple-minded reasoning, creating a vast proliferation of arbitrary, inconvenient, overlapping, similar-sounding units.

I repeat: the motivation for the Metric system was incompatibility with an established, superior system. The point of it was to create these problems.

This is why the English said "fuck that" to Metric until after their Empire fell, and why the world's most advanced industrial economy still isn't based on Metric.

So this is the thing where you say something really stupid, then because you don't want to face that, you carry on with it hoping people will believe you were trolling.

It's an anonymous board, chum. There's no point.

If metric is so bad how come you don't see anyone converting to imperial?
thought so

Metric system (1700's) predates the Imperial system (1800's) which replaced the Winchester measures (1500's)

We use metric for everything apart from miles and speed and that's only because changing the entire road system signs is to impracticable although it is being planned to happen at some point...eventually. Everywhere else is metric. You have some old codgers still measuring inches at home but any official purpose or young person uses metric. All of our STEM industry uses metric. Our screws, bolts, girders and bricks are metric. Our building regulations are metric. Our money changed from imperial money to metric money with the abandoning of the half pence, shilling etc.

I only know the imperial systems because I work with legacy systems. Which we are slowly replacing ... to metric.

Stop fighting the change, it's happened. If I go pull up an an engineering table of values it'll be metric. Stop spreading misinformation. How is metric a worst system? It's standardise and easy to scale.

the new road signs they have to give duel units to slowly replace them instead of one huge payment its now a slow proccess

Converting is expensive, you stupid monkey, and the original spirit of Metric, to sabotage the leader, is still alive.

>Metric system (1700's) predates the Imperial system (1800's) which replaced the Winchester measures (1500's)
US customary isn't Imperial, this was never about Imperial. Imperial and US customary come from the same root of standard weights and measures that were well established before Metric. Metric is, of course, also based on the ideas behind the English system, but it was done in a way to be deliberately incompatible to hurt the English position in industry and trade.

>We use metric for everything apart from miles and speed
Who is "we"? You're someone who has never been to the US pretending to be American, aren't you?

The US customary system will survive. England failed, lost its place in the world, and is currently being overrun with Islam, Metric, and other bad ideas.

>Who is "we"? You're someone who has never been to the US pretending to be American, aren't you?
He was obviously speaking about the UK, you inbred cretin. There is a world beyond your no-name town and your sister/wife.

>The US customary system will survive.
Only because most of the units are defined in terms of metric quantities and have been for over a century. It's just a shitty metric re-skin.

>Converting is expensive, you stupid monkey, and the original spirit of Metric, to sabotage the leader, is still alive.

What?

>He was obviously speaking about the UK
Then he was changing the subject.

>the units are defined in terms of metric quantities
It's older than metric, you chimp. They specified conversion factors that didn't change the size of the units.

If you're not going to read the thread, don't jump in.

Did the Nasa land on a fucking comet ?

youtube.com/watch?v=vcYo-qQ5HbA&index=11&list=PLbyvawxScNbui_Ncl9uQ_fXLOjS4sNSd8

>Then he was changing the subject.
No he wasn't.
>This is why the English said "fuck that" to Metric until after their Empire fell

>It's older than metric, you chimp.
Completely irrelevant. It is defined in terms of metric units, it's just a facade. There's a reason science is done in SI, because there's no point in pretending, it will only waste time.

We really need a system of logarithmicly scaled units.

A size 2 bold would be 13% larger than a size 1 or some shit like that. Both us customary and metric don't scale ideally. At what point do you go from 1mm increase from size to size to 2 or 5, I had to find a 7mm allan wrench a while back, no one carried it was a bitch to find, most sets went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 but apparently this was not an agreed upon standard because size 7 also existed and I fucking needed it to change my breaks. You would want a uniform increase in strength or size from one size to the next. We really need to get this shit sorted out before we go to the stars, the space shuttle carried both a metric and standard set of tools, costing $8,000 per lb to orbit and increasing mission complexity.

>We really need a system of logarithmicly scaled units.
Which is what SI prefixes are for. Having lots of base units for the same quantity is a waste of time.

WTF
1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1000000

Add in SI prefix's then metric scales ideally.

Log scales only work in certain places like apparent magnitude or pH

Why does it take decades for anyone to build cool telescopes? Why can't we get our OLT?

See change ratio. Metric is shit. 4, 4.5, 5, 5.5, 6, 8.

And then some ass hat throws in a 7 to fuck everyone up.

I want a constant change ratio scale similar to db, but for tools and shit. Each increasing number would be more gradual than what is the case in db.

With OWL then E-ELT a lot of time was spend trying to get the money together, it's still not all there. Planning takes time to, you can't afford to get things wrong the first time anymore. OWL may never have worked but E-ELT will be very cool indeed.

You really have no idea what your talking about do you.
Also that's why the nice simple metric mm is given on the right hand side.

Also that shit isn't used outside of eastern europe and russia..

Why can't we have nice things? What Jew is hogging all the money?

>Sound like jar jar Binks

Fuck, can't hear it any other way now

>can't afford telescopes
>can afford millions of rapefugees

More like nobody wants to spend the small amount of money to home them so massive jungles are forming in the first few places they can get to and then many more problems are forming long term.

Like insulation. Sure you can have a house without insulation but you'll spend more long term in extra heating bills. If Europe had properly spaced them out so you get a few per town. The effect would have been negligible and would have helped the current population crisis with not enough young workers.

Instead they let them group together, form massive hive shantey towns and became a breeding ground for all sorts of political issues instead of just dealing with the problem at first.

>Why are they using their budget for science and actual advancements in the field when they could just do wasteful prestige projects so I feel less insecure about my small penis

So why do you keep going?

The soviets landed on venus multiple times, put the first space station up, put the first man up, put the first to orbit up, made the first eva, made the first two person eva, put the first women up, built part of the ISS, put the first probes on the moon, would have had a soil sample from the moon back just before apollo 11 returned (but it crashed sadly) and now NASA relies on them to put it's astronauts on the ISS with technology they developed in the 50's.

Actually only the engineering side of NASA (or rather the outsourced components) used american standard.
The calculations, number crunching even the Apollo guidance computer used metric. (although it displayed in custom units)

The science experiments both on the moon and ground where metric apart from when metric didn't have units.

The entire recovery and communication operation used metric and the custom units used by the navy at the time.

shut the fuck up you FUCKING FASCIST RACIST RAPIST
I BET YOU FUCKING VOTED FOR TRUMP TOO FUCKING DIE DIE DIE!!!!

Russians were true bad asses, especially when you factor in the GDP to achievement ratios. But this is not a Russia vs US thread, its a thread mocking how pitiful Europe is. The EU has a gdp 10x that of Russia and they cant even land a stationary platform on mars.

Oh look another idiot who doesn't know anything.
The ESA get's less than a third of NASA's budget.

The ESA is not a European Union organisation but is a space organisation set up by a number of European countries so it shares the same geological/political name of the area.

The Schiaparelli EDM lander that you refer to is part of a joint program called ExoMars by the ESA and Roscosmos (the russian space agency)

The EDM was designed to land as a bonus. It's was to demonstrate the ability to get to mar, enter, descend and then landing. Hence the name.

Remember Roskosmos have failures to such as Fobos-Grunt (which I helped track when a signal was received) and Mars 96. Most spacecraft that try to get to Mars die. It's very hard to do.

And the last thing to remember is we don't focus on Mars. We have had operations ranging from Huygens to Integral.

Then you have the fact that the ESA isn't the only "space" agency in Europe. You have different operations ranging from the ESO to the ISA. All these would come under the same title for NASA but for Europe it doesn't.

SpaceX is demonstrating that a proper rocket program doesn't need to cost tons, and you could have incrementally worked towards a fully reusable rocket on a budget of like 1 billion a year

>If Europe had properly spaced them out so you get a few per town.
kill yourself traitor
How many rapefugees live in your house ? Fucking piece of shit
Slit your throat or I'll do it for you

Remember how Republicans made a big stink a few years ago when Obama suggested making shit like diversity quotas and Muslim outreach a part of NASA's mission goal and the suggestions all got shot down?

Well the ESA actually does devote a sizable chunk of its time, money, and effort to shit like that.

>identifies himself as an european
>not his country of origin's nationality
kys

There is a refugee centre down the street from my work. It houses 100-300 people. They are some of the nicest people I have met all fleeing horrors.

But no you American inbred fuck tell me about what your altright fantasy circlejerk has told you.

My country killed millions before and the only reason it did that was people like you.

Why would we spend money doing that though? SpaceX is only good at what it does. We have rockets that are good at what they do (from putting probes on a comet to probes on Titan or satellites in orbit.)

The spaceX rocket currently is only looking at travelling to the ISS. Granted it may eventually go beyond that but that's a long way off. When we need to do that we use the Soyuz and perhaps one day SpaceX.

Why throw money at something we don't need when we can throw money at other stuff. No need to invent the wheel twice.

False. Afirmitive Action isn't legal in most of Europe.

>the ESA
ESA is an acronym not an initialism.

Technically ESO doesn't fall under NASA. NASA isn't invested in much ground based astronomy which causes tension because NSF believe it should fall under NASA, not them. The US ground based program is a mess, particularly so in the optical. ESO is a shining example of what can be done with a bit of organisation.

Because when SpaceX is doing 100+ launches a year by 2020 you'll be going out of business