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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.
Sorry
But most likely not any changes that will actually help NASA.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Until they detect signs of oil on Mars, this trend will unfortunately continue.
...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.
In other news, Congress is now sponsoring the "Y-Prize", which awards 1M to the first private spaceship that safely lands on Mars surface.
They're also outsourcing NASA jobs to India, I guess.
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.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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.
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.
My rights don't need management.
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 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!
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.
I live in Huntsville, AL--Rocket City USA.
There's nothing sadder than engineers who've been chomping at the bit for years wanting to do some *real* space work hearing about Bush's Mars plan, maybe even getting to work on preliminaries, and knowing that it's all a political game and nothing will ever actually get off the ground.
"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.
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.
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.
NASA's human rights injuries, be damned.
There is pleanty to critisize about the government, so lying to support a tenuous point is hardly necessary. The link you supplied discusses abuses foisted on the American public by the Pentagon and a few other government agencies. NASA is mentioned once, in passing, with no direct references or credibile, verifiable sources to support their inclusion. The phrase you chose to reference the link directly implies otherwise.
Yes, Congress has to deal with paying for the outrageousness of the Bush administration's poor decisions regarding Iraq, and personally I think that is the real driving issue, along with the medicare fiasco. The rest is complete supposition. While I don't doubt some find it interesting, there's no need to create contention by being dishonest when we already have more than enough to go around.
You misspelled "billion". IIRC, the total cost for the rovers was around $800 million.
A realistic (i.e. not done by the incredibly bloated NASA bureaucracy) plan to put people on Mars would cost something like $20-40 billion. So for 20 to 50 times as much, you can put actual people there, and probably get at least 100 times as much done, if not more. That's a better return for your dollars. The only trouble is that it's a much higher initial investment, and NASA is completely incapable of thinking about putting people on Mars for less than a trillion dollars.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I'll readily admit, I had to google for the meaning behind your post. Here's some info for those more lazy.
The spiel mentioned above is the message that the Yucca Mountain design is intended to convey to future civilizations. Namely to those that show up 10K+ years from now. (Yucca being the designated site for the United States' Radioactive waste. It will be quite hazardous for an amazingly long amount of time.) The text is not really supposed to be an inscription per say, but simply the overall concept behind the structure of the entire complex.
The original research was done by Sandia national labs. A significant portion of the document can be found here.
Madcap googling resulted in an easy to read summary here. May god have mercy on the poor soul that gets slashdotted.
BTW Tackhead, kudos on the obscure (?) reference. Forced me to learn. =)
--LordPixie