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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."
FTA: 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.
I believe this happened for a few reasons:
1. War
2. Sympathy
3. Elections
War: The spending on the war has caused so many problems in the US that it's hard to fathom any budget increases for any program, other than a military one. Take into account the huge chunk of cash moved into Iraq and you have yourself some questions. Is it prudent to be offering extra money to spend on space when so much money is going to killing resistance fighters, terrorists and occasional Iraqi civilians? Not to mention the costs of rebuilding the country that was bombed into the stone age, for whatever reason.
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.
Elections: By cutting the funding to NASA, this will show people that it's an election year and it's important to vote. I'm not sure which party will benefit from these cuts more, yet it's important for everyone that more people go and vote. People everywhere love NASA for their space exploration because most human beings want to pretend they can be members of a space faring race, like on Star Trek. NASA's human rights injuries, be damned.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It saddens me to see our proud government to decrease the investment in R&D, especially an institution like NASA which has produced some great technologies. This tech has now found its way into every-day use.
But instead we increase our military spending and restricts our citizen's rights and freedoms, for no sensible reason.
Yes, Osama has won, and our leaders are too dumb to realize it.
...is why we'll never make it to the moon or mars with the gov't: we're not prepared to pay the price.
I hold out hope for private enterprise, but that's still decades away.
I am a fervent liberal, but Republicans claim to be about smaller gov, and less taxes. Well, the tax cuts enacted earlier warranted great cuts in programs. I don't like seeing the space and science budgets cut, being a fervent liberal, but hey, they need to do things right, and it's about time. I have an 8 month old daughter and she will be paying for the sins of this administration for a long time after I am (possibly) retired. What they need are massive cuts around the board to protect her. They want to do big tax cuts, it needs to come out someplace. I am of the opinion, however, that the federal government should be nothing more than international relations and international science (these would include space exploration and military), and that would greatly reduce our national taxes. All other things should vary from state to state, and that would enable each state to model its own economy and laws that could overwrite the federal ones. Smoke up!
"As any economist will tell you, and as all you Linux people know, a monopoly of any kind is bad, and NASA has one on SPACE."
Hi, coward. This is the rest of the world; we took slight umbridge at the implication that NASA is the only space agency, and we'd like to invite you to check out Ariane, Long March and Huygens.
And it's 'monoculture'.
"but in order to do that it must obey the same laws as business and NASA will never do that."
You mean like charging people for satellite launch, repair and retrieval? Yeah, they'd never do that.
OTOH, I really like your thinking. California's never had power supplies this good, Litigation is at an all-time low and the media isn't trying to position itself as a government protected subscription outfit. no siree. None of that happening.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
IIRC, 2001 was released in 1968. Think: that film was made in a time when nobody had ever been to the moon, but they were just about to do so. At Christmas '68 Apollo 8 orbited the Moon for the first time. That's the backdrop to 2001.
Now it's 2004. We've been to the Moon, we gave it up because we wanted to spend the money on killing Vietnamese people, and nobody seems to care anymore.
There's a word for this. Decadent.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
And of course, the vote went along party lines. The 6 Republicans, led by Young, voted for the cuts; the three Democrats, led by Obey, voted against. At least they gave more veterans benefits than the pittiance that Bush requested....
Still, there's no way that this will remain in its current form. I can't imagine even the Republican-dominated house supporting this.
Windmills do not work that way!
Read the article carefully... The subcommittee recommended a budget for NASA of $15.1B, which is $229M below last year's budget of $15.329B. That means the subcommittee cut last year's budget by 1.49 percent. They did, however, cut NASA's requested budget, including a requested increase over last year, by 7 percent.
The Big News Page
It's sad to see legions of /.ers using semiconductor-based memory, microprocessors, and advanced networking technology to diss the achievements of the Apollo program.
We got more out of NASA than Tang and some rocks, boys.
(Personal note: my earliest memory that I can date accurately is being five years old, watching Neil and Buzz hop around the LEM on that late Sunday evening.)
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
You didn't mention the one that needs to be slashed the most: the military.
$500 billion. Roll that one around in your head for a bit.
This particular case (veterans' benefits) is different, since that's a real benefit to people. But I have gotten *no utility whatsoever* out of most of our military spending. Neither has the rest of the world, and--to the extent that they have--it'd be possible to provide more benefit for cheaper using some other method.
I'm not saying that the US should eliminate its military--shit happens, and it's good to have a fighter jet or three in the neighborhood when shit starts to happen. But our current military capability grossly exceeds our need for defense--we'd be secure from invasion with half the budget we have now.
What to do with that $1*10^11+ wad? Pay down the debt. Give it back to taxpayers. Go to Mars. Fund Aids research. Regain the lead from CERN in particle physics. Build public-access wlan hotspots. Fix roads. I don't care.
But spend it on something that benefits someone.
(Oh, and the argument "cutting the military budget would put all those defense R&D contractors out of work": there are plenty of jobs for EE/CPE/MAE types that need doing that aren't military.)
"Go watch "2001 a space odyssey" (released in 1970) to see where it was widely thought we should have been by 2001."
Arthur C Clarke isn't that wide. Even Gerard O'Neill conceded that some of his designs wouldn't be done by 2001, BUT, when Kennedy announced that they were going to the moon, it was a boom time for space. The limits were removed, only to slam back in as space was put on a backburner because the grey dust of the moon's surface failed to keep feeding the novelty. Hence the various stunts they pulled.
Politically, it was a time when the US thought they couldn't be beaten. Vietnam was a bit of a shock.
"THE #1 defining moment of human civilization."
As much as I am a fan of space in general, I think contraception was probably bigger, as it meant that we could control our own population; medical science in general has reduced our lability to environmental pressures and increased lifespan. Walking on the moon may well have been the defining moment for a generation, though.
"No, it will be the first steps off our home planet.
Except people are already forgetting it, and the vast majority follow a book of myths and legends called the 'Bible' that was cobbled together roughly two thousand years ago.
Do you even want to speculate on the fine people that think it was all staged in California?
"I can only hope in the next few years China makes a dash for Mars"
They're committed to a moon base, but what the other side of the bamboo curtain says and does are two completely different things. Mars has no interest for them at the moment because they're realists. That's one of the nicer aspects of communist nations...none of that PR stuff to sway the public. (Yes, this is a downside, I was tongue in cheek there.)
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
I would rather have all that money spent to social development within the US. The poverty level, especially in children living in it, is alarming. In fact it compares to Third World country levels.
But then again the Mod-Nazis might find this irrelevant/offensive/antiamerican (freedom hating propaganda) and mod it down in a futile attempt to exorcise the problem (out of their conscience?).
Go ahead teach master teach...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
I personally would take a third option: hard science at current levels, scrap the big showy things like "mars trips", and focus work on cost reduction.
Primarily, cheaper payload to orbit options, cheaper stationkeeping and orbit changing methods, better in-space construction technology (to allow the use of smaller rockets), more materials research (so that payloads and rockets themselves become lighter and sturdier), etc.
Nothing will help the space industry as much as getting costs down far enough to allow for a true space tourism industry to develop, which would in itself help drive down costs further. There's no *technical* reason why it should be impossible to get rocket costs down to, say, 1000$/kg to orbit. It is the current practical limitations that keep even the cheapest rocket costs over 6,000$/kg.
As somewhat of a side topic, does anyone here have any familiarity with propane fuel cells? I've been toying in my mind with the prospect of replacing a traditional rocket turbopump with a completely isolated AC hysteresis motor-driven turbopump (no shaft need enter the fuel or oxidizer lines, and you don't need an extra turbine and rocket engine); with a specific energy of 400W/kg of fuel cell and a specific power of 2000Wh/kg of propane/oxygen assumed, and 50% efficiency in the AC conversion/motor efficiency/turbine, the numbers came out pretty favorable compared to a traditional turbopump approach, so I was wondering how close my estimated fuel cell numbers come to reality.
Windmills do not work that way!
Can you just imagine if we didn't spend half of the world's total military spending? If we spent merely, say, 1/4 of the world's total military spending, and allocated the savings to NASA, it'd 15x NASA's budget. Now, I wouldn't suggest cutting our military budget *in half*, and wouldn't suggest reallocating *all* savings to NASA, but still, our military spending is just huge. And that ignores our debt, of which most of it was accrued to pay for wars. While certainly some of them were worth it (such as WWII), others (such as Vietnam) certainly weren't.
Windmills do not work that way!
Nasa made a _lot_ of promises that weren't really delivered by the shuttle. The X-prize entries have gotten a lot further for the amount of money expended than has Nasa. Now you can argue-well Nasa already built the shuttle. Still, is a politically correct bureacracy like Nasa _really_ the way a society ought to reach for the stars? I'm not sure that greedy corporations doing it for money is quite the right way either. This stuff really doesn't inherently need to be expensive. Thirty years ago, it looked like something was going to happen. What went wrong? Was it simple bad luck or a fundamental societal organizational problem? By now organizations like the National Geographic Society really _ought_ to have a space program. If the nascent Mormon church could organize colonization of Utah 150 years ago, why isn't anyone similarly motivated today? The folks running the USA today seem very, very different than those running the USA 100 years ago.
My guess here: if the USA were to go away, somebody else would pick up the ball-maybe the Russians or Chinese. Hell, I can even believe that if the US government were fundamentally restructured(ala Yugoslavia), it might have a better shot at space than this bunch of looser attorneys/media folks that will spend $1.2 trillion protecting an antique energy source in the Middle East-and not consider having a few hundred billion in prize incentives for a new energy sources to stop that bleeding.
I cannot say that a NASA budget cut is a big surprise. It's only a matter of time before the full effects of our misadventure in Iraq comes home to roost. But there may be a silver lining in here for NASA.
At the core, the scientists and engineers at NASA are very smart and clever people. They've done some incredible work on budgets that seem little more than spit and lint compared to the outlays the military typically gets. I think that they'll do great work no matter what the budget is because in the end they have great passion for their work.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Bush is "hemhorraging money" to folks like Halliburton, which is merely a bizarre sort of multinational nightmare to do with the military industrial complex, not the military itself. The military proper, well, that he's positively decimating -- engaging our soldiers in reckless policy ventures and cutting their bennies at the same moment, and so on.
Even the things the guy says he's about, he's not really about. (As you so adroitly observed of the Mars announcement.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
And which party controls Congress? Oops. There goes your arguement. Bush: Watch me, I got this vision thing, "Go to Mars!!!" Oh, on the other hand, let me cut your funding.