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President Bush's Money For Space Cometh

Posted by Hemos on from the delay's-payoff dept.

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."

3 of 619 comments (clear)

  1. Why this instead of stuff like the X prize? by randall_burns · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The X prize was a relatively small amount of money
    compared to what we are talking about here-and the commercial implications appear to be far more substantial-and the organzation of the expenditure is such there was minimal risk. Republicans are supposed to believe in free markets and competition. What are they scared of here?


    I think the US needs a good, innovative commericial space program it it wants to be viable economically. There is lots of money to be made in space-and the US will need lots of money to keep up with its interest payments. That isn't the drive I see behind the latest Bush proposal.

  2. We can't afford NOT to do this. by bigtallmofo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To those people saying that we shouldn't have fully funded NASA so that we could instead lower the national debt, I respond there are a thousand things we should take money away from before NASA.

    Senator McCain clearly labeled many pork-barrel projects in several speeches. Pork Projects

    Failing to fund NASA is failing to fund the future of our civilization and our economy. We exercise such short-term thinking at our own peril.

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
  3. Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have. by mpsmps · · Score: 5, Interesting
    We need to elect some conservatives that will actually..gasp...spend less then they take in.

    Excuse me, a quick check of US deficit history shows that 11 of the last 12 record deficits (1975, 1976, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1991, 1992, 2003, and 2004) occurred under Republican administrations and only 1 under a democrat (1980), so maybe the problem is that we have elected too many "conservatives". It's absolutely astonishing to me how Democrats have become the party of fiscal responsibility.

    I think the reason for this is that conservatives dramatically cut government revenue through heavy tax cuts saying "you can spend the money better than the government" but then the government keeps spending the money anyway.