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President Bush's Money For Space Cometh
citanon writes " The Washington Post reports that
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has delivered, via the omnibus spending bill passed
Nov. 20, the President's full budgetary request of $16.2 billion dollars for NASA as a part of his
Vision for Space Exploration. Despite earlier reports that NASA's
budget will be cut, DeLay, whose congressional district now includes the Johnson Space
Center, was able to deliver the full budgetary request without any debate. NASA now has "enough money to forge ahead on a plan that would reshape U.S. space policy for decades to come."
Despite this early victory, questions regarding the full cost of the program remain unresolved. It is also unclear whether the NASA
bureaucracy will be able to rise to the challenges posed in the initiative and which current projects will suffer as a consequence."
To continue beating a dead horse, how exactly are we going to go about paying our debts? Are we just assuming we're going to have another decade like the nineties any day now? Are we just assuming that the rest of the world will happily keep throwing money at us for as long as we want them to? Hell, does anybody even care that we're flinging ourselves into insolvency? Does anybody even bother trying to comprehend what the consequences will be when China decides to quit investing in us? Does it strike anybody that China might, y'know, have ulterior motives?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
the President's full budgetary request of $16.2 billion dollars for NASA as a part of his Vision for Space Exploration.
And if you like this idea, just think that the cost of the iraq war could have paid for 15 of these. *sigh*
G-Force music visualization
It's ok, the Republicans have always stood for smaller government, balanced budgets and less spending...right?
Sorry, I must've been dreaming.
Seriously, just wait until interest rates go up and they try to borrow more $ to pay off the current massive debt.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The biggest problem I see is that %80 percent or more of the money will go to pay Career CYA type desk jockeys, NASA camp followers, and other parasites that have infested the space program since the end of the Apollo landings. There really needs to be a major house cleaning at NASA and the major NASA contractors before any money can be wisely spent. The recently mentioned NASA X prize would be a good start but the the parasites' paid representitives in Congress are probably going to nix that.
Governments must invest money in risky projects, R&D, which may or may not be profitable in the long term. On the other hand, commercial space program wants to be profitable in short term.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
So was the interstate highway system before it became a crux of today's economy.
So was air travel before it became a crux of today's economy.
So was the internet before it became a crux of today's economy.
So lets just *try* and look a little farther into the future than *your* vision, k?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
IMHO, solving the energy problem is much more important than space exploration now. The energy consumption at the moment is rather dire and having a Manhattan Project or Apollo Mission directed at solving it is much more important. Many new innovations or revolutions in technology means we'll need more energy in the future. Thus, not only it solves the current money spend on oil, it helps
1. reducing money paid to terrorist supporting countries such as Saudi Arabia.
2. paving the way for future inventions
3. preserving mother nature and reducing pollution.
4. saving money to be used on more basic things like food and homes, improving people's lives immediately.
Sure, it is less glamourous than space exploration, but it could be something that has a much more practical impact in the US dominance (economically, politically, militarily -- those tanks and jets consume lots of energy -- etc.) on Earth. I still can't believe that with the number of brainiacs the US attracted over the years, there is no concerted effort to solve this problem.
If the human race survives the 5 billion years it's going to take for the sun to burn out, I have a feeling that finding a new home will be the least of our species' worries by then.
I think the objection is not that the money is being spent, but that it's being spent in a careless manner. Because this manned mars program is so expensive, other programs, scientific programs, will have to be cut. NASA has a long history of doing both extremely useful things, and pointless things. The Space Shuttle and the ISS come to mind as complete wastes of money, whereas Hubble, the current mars rovers, and countless other unmanned missions have been great successes. Which would you rather have?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Sometimes you get a culture evolving at an organisation that precludes them from getting anything done. The Shuttle was, and is a big mistake- they originally sold it on the grounds that it would be able to launch every week (even when they knew it wouldn't- and the record shows that they didn't even bother building the facilities needed to do that, the NASA leadership knew it wouldn't be able to launch once a week, it was just the only way they could sell the program).
A lot of the problems in the manned program is lack of good leadership- Von Braun was very well respected within NASA, whilst he was in the loop everything more or less worked. Once he left the big trouble started.
If Bush can actually stand up to the plate for the plan, that might work. However, Bush isn't exactly my or pretty much anyones idea of a space leader, and his term in office won't see the program completed... Political instability is probably going to kill any chance of success anyway.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Take a look at this graph (taken from figures on the White House website)
US Debt
US Debt as a percentage of GDP was falling when the US first went to the moon. So the USA really isn't in the same situation as it was then. Add to that a very weak dollar which might encourage less lending, and things aren't looking that great. Debt isn't just bad in the short term, it's expensive to maintain and difficult to get rid of.
The US is doing this at a time when other countries like the UK are cutting back their debt as much as possible to limit interest payments. Here's a similar graph for the UK
UK Debt
Now I'm no economist, and this obviously isn't the only economic indicator which is important, but it looks kind of scary given the expensive war that the neo-cons have taken on all alone, and the others they still appear to be planning (Iran springs to mind). Perhaps this is the dawn of a new era of faith-based budgets.
What I find interesting is that there are suddenly a lot of comments saying how this is silly, and a waste of money. If the comments were primarily focusing on the destructive or impractical requirements that come along with the funding, I could understand, but a surprising number seem to be complaining about the funding itself.
That's interesting to me, because if memory serves, slashdotters on average tend to bemoan the lack of funding for space-related ventures, rather than the amount of money that is being wasted on them. I don't like Bush much, and he's certainly screwed up the budget in a lot of areas, but it confuses me when people criticize him for increasing funding to NASA, or the NSF, or NIH, when similar increases would probably be praised in a candidate that people liked a little bit more -- and I'm quite certain that if Bush actually cut funding for NASA, slashdot would be in an uproar over it.
Criticize him for an unjust war, or for counterproductive goals in space research, but the funding itself is a good thing as far as I'm concerned...
I am the man with no sig!
Part of the "Wolfowitz doctrine" is to pre-emptively strike other countries in the name of defense. This has already come to pass. Another part is to militarize space, breaking existing treaties.
It will be easier to sell the militarization of space if it can be explained as "defense". Once the U.S. establishes a base on the moon, then it obviously has to be defended. And, of course, defense means space-based first-strike weapons.
I doubt that Bush cares about Mars at all. But, getting funding for Mars exploration is easier than getting funding for establishing a military moon base. The $16B of exploration funding will be followed by $300B of "space defense funding".
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
My wife has subbed, I know full-time teachers. Good education requires good support in the home. If the kids come to school preconditioned with a bad attitude, there's only so much even an excellent teacher can do to change that.
Personally, I believe a large part of this is that we have adopted Day Care as "the standard model" for the family in this country, and there's a larger-than-ever number of single-parent households. I won't say that single-parents can't do a good job raising kids. Nor will I say that you can't raise good kids where both parents work. And finally, I won't say that a full-time stay-at-home Mom (or Dad) is a guarantee of raising good kids.
But IMHO, it's a matter of statistics. Being a parent is HARDER if there's just one of you. Imbuing kids with proper values is HARDER if you have surrendered control of your child to the low-cost day care provider for the work day. (Actually, that "low-cost" may be part of the problem.) Not that these things can't be done, but they're HARDER.
As long as you have more capable people taking on these extra challenges, things work. But once it becomes the general model for society, things start breaking down. Schools are the canaries for this class of problem.
BTW, I won't disagree that "more money != better public education," but I disagree with the corollary that many like to make, that better public education doesn't need more money. More money might be part of the solution, but only part. IMHO the more important part is better parenting.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.