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Shuttle Politics
TheLoneCabbage writes "Texas Rep. Joe Barton has been quoted today in an AP article saying that he is in favor of grounding the remaining fleet of shuttles. 'If we have to stop manned spaceflight for five or 10 years, then so be it.' The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in every 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable. According to OpenSecrets.org this may have more to do with Joe's friends than how much attention he paid to his math teachers." There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.
might as well have a Senator Lockheed-Martin.
Disclaimer: I work for Lockheed.
I don't understand your point... surely Lockheed has proposals and products that compete with the shuttle, but they also have thier fingers in the shuttle as well. they handle the external tanks, where I work we do the data processing computers, they do the thermal protection, they support shuttle missions, provide other shuttle support services, and do other shuttle related work.
So yeah, they'll probably gain when NASA moves to the next-gen space exploration system. But they're by no means missing out on the shuttle action as it stands now. The thing about Lockheed is that they are very diverse... they handle IT for government sites (pentagon, bases, etc), they do package distribution for the US & UK post office, we do traditional rockets, they do air traffic control, airplanes, avionics, missiles, support services of all sorts - the list goes on an on. Go to the main Lockheed homepage and look at the list of products & capabilities. So you can't pull one proposal or project that Lockheed has, and say that they want the shuttle to die because of that.
The politics here are a hell of a lot more complicated than $14,000 in campaign contributions. I don't understand them all, to be sure... but neither do you.
_sig_ is away
Let me say, as someone who actually attended the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing, that this cynical Barton- and government- bashing is ridiculous. What the Yahoo article failed to point out was that Barton unequivocally affirmed his support for manned space flight and ambitious space exploration, and has in fact supported every NASA budget request (read: every ill-designed, failed NASA initiative) over the last ten years.
His remarks were made thoughtfully and deliberately, not banging a shoe on the table. And as to remarks by MagusAptus that "Just goes to show that we elect the brightest and the best to congress. It would just seem reasonable that if we had to have these committees on everything, then the members of those committees should have at least *some* knowledge or background in the area," Congessman Barton has actually been on the S&A Subcommittee since the early '80s; he served when the Challenger crashed. And he also earned a B.A. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
Think so? Let's compare and contrast that amount (the sum total) against 1 (one) B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.
B2 Info
Hrmmm.. how many bombers do we have at 1.16b a piece? How many do we really need? Keep in mind that this doesn't even remotely account for the support infrastructure like the NASA budget did.
Thus we arrive at the moral dilemna. Let's see, we can fund science and space exploration, learning about our planet and ourselves in the process... or we can produce machines whose only viable purpose is to destroy human life and their surroundings. How much is just -one- of those snappy laser-guided missiles that we seem to be so fond of shooting at other humans?
Cruise Missle
$600,000 a pop to kill a handful of humans? I suppose I should be honored to be senselessly slaughtered by such expensive weaponry! Except I'm too [expletive] dead to appreciate it.
How about this? Let's go for the -BIG- picture for DoD:
DoD Budget
It's a problem of priority. There are some of us that feel that advancing human knowledge is worth more than producing more machines of warfare. What a senseless waste. Perhaps Darwin was on to something.