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Congress Cuts NASA's Budget On Apollo Anniversary
colonist writes "A House appropriations subcommittee voted to cut NASA's budget request by 7 percent on the 35th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon. The panel also cut environment and science programs, but increased funding for veterans' affairs. NASA would get $15.1 billion next year, $229 million below this year and $1.1 billion below the President's request. Most of the cuts are on new initiatives. The subcommittee is the first step of a long budget process and major changes to the bill are expected."
Sorry
Face it, during an election cycle, lawmakers would rather be percieved as budget-minded tax cutters than bold visionaries. If any major funding for NASA is to come, it will have to be shortly after the election, when a president is in a better position to advocate major change.
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Well when taxes are lower, spending has to be cut somewhere. Many programs want more money, many people want more programs, many people (and corporations) want less taxes (there was a story in today's Chicago Trib about some new super-corporate-freeforall-taxloophole bill today, kinda disheartening, our government is 0wn3d).
Like the MS Word issue, where people with unrealistic demands drive software bloat, the unrealistic demands of people drive deficit spending.
And we elect the nice members of Congress to balance these needs. Better them than me.
Sympathy: Dogbert says that if you want to get more funding, you should have your funding publicly slashed and burned for about a year. The sympathy you get will cause your funding increases to double in the next year, and the year after that. Part of the problem with getting new funding is that the old funding can be perceived as too fat if it hasn't been cut recently. Having funding cut will help obfuscate your motives for even more padding in the years to come.
Are you actually implying that supporters wanted the funding cut, so as to increase it in the future?
Government funding doesn't work like that. On the contrary, if you don't use up all your funding, the likelihood of it going up is nil.
If NASA can meet the new budget, Congress says, "See? That's all you need. That's what you get next year."
If NASA underruns, Congress says, "See? You've made improvements. You don't even need THAT much!"
The reality of the situation is that you need to use all your funding / even run over a little bit to justify "getting more" in the next round of appropriations.
I doubt the US would have put men on the moon, if they were not scared to death that the russians would get there first. I saw an interview with Buzz Aldrin last night, where he pretty well said as much, saying that this was an element of the cold war that they had won. How sad. And once this was accomplished, the budget was cut, despite the fact they had the Saturn V's in mass production at the time, and could have finished the planned missions for a relatively small cost. The NRE was over, and next Apollo rocket and crew was primed and ready to go. Go watch "2001 a space odyssey" (released in 1970) to see where it was widely thought we should have been by 2001.
Setting foot on another world was THE #1 defining moment of human civilization. 10,000 years from now, when we are hopefully spread across the galaxy, what historial event will stand out? A revolution in country X, a war in country Y? The raize and fall of empire Z? No, it will be the first steps off our home planet.
I can only hope in the next few years China makes a dash for Mars, and the west feels a need to upstage them. We should have been there by now.
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Let's face it, the American people (on average, not your typical US Slashdot reader - I hope) just do NOT get the fact that you have to HAVE money to SPEND money. Apparently being suckled on credit cards has removed that concept from peoples' minds.
With Bush's multiple rounds of slashing taxes, that means we have LESS to spend. We've got record budget deficits and we have to cut spending correspondingly. Period.
So if you like deep tax cuts, quit whining about budget cuts. This is what the results are - the government HAS to spend less or we're simply pissing in our own well.
Whine all you want about "But they could just cut (Program-I-Don't-Care-About) instead!" The problem is that every other program has their own segment of the population screaming about the exact same thing.
Maybe some nation that understands the concept of debit/credit ledgers can get to Mars instead, and send us a postcard.
Sad.
I think that Congress has the impression that more research should be done by the private sector. I tend to lean toward Libertarian values, but I can see how funding NASA helps us all.
After all, NASA doesn't need to turn a profit on its research. When the private sector pumps billions of dollars into something it's expecting to get billions in return. So why search for things that (seemingly) won't turn a profit right away.
NASA has benefitted this country so much its sad to see Congress shoving it aside. I guess they're hoping to offshore NASA.
Funny; I'd rather scrap the Man on Mars mission and spend the money on science (as opposed to engineering.)
Not that a man (or woman) on Mars wouldn't be unbearably cool, and certainly capable of doing some great science (a human could walk from crater to crater in hours, not months), but the cost is astronomical (pardon the pun). We put two rovers on Mars for less than a hundred million; people on Mars would cost tens of billions.
Of course if they were talking about sending _me_ to Mars I'd feel differently; I'd love to go. But I don't get real vicarious thrills watching somebody else go, so I'd rather spend the money more carefully.
Forty years ago, we looked to the stars and put flags on the moon.
Now we spend all our time worrying about countries that tend to put the moon and stars on their flags.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
The reality of the situation is that you need to use all your funding / even run over a little bit to justify "getting more" in the next round of appropriations.
And that is why there will never be a balanced budget until govenment departments are rewarded for saving money. It was actually proposed somewhere that promising to give just a bit of the saved money as a bonus to employees in a federal department that went under budget could help quickly eliminate deficits.