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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.
...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.
"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.