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."

Comments

No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[American AC in Paris]

...seriously, has anybody looked at the nation's credit card bill lately? We can't afford this. As much as it pains me to say it, we simply can't afford to spend this money. I want a well-funded NASA, but I want a sensible federal budget first.

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?

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be complaining a lot more about the $400 billion we spend destroying a country and then paying our own companies to rebuild it then an extra $1billion for NASA over what it would normally get.

Or the $200 billion in subsidies that oil companies get from the federal government, while renewable energy R&D in the entire US gets ~$280million

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[xott]

Space technology will repay itself in technological advance. Always has.

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[DigitalRaptor]

That's the problem, Bush *claims* to be conservative, but the ONLY place he is conservative is in his spoken values.

His actions and policies are anything but conservative.

I'm a lifelong republican, but I didn't vote for Bush in 2004. I think he's the worst thing to ever happen to the republican party.

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[HeghmoH]

Cutting NASA to get the government's budget out of debt is the equivalent of being unemployed and skimping on resume paper, while eating caviar every night. You're tossing something that does a great deal of good and costs relatively little, while ignoring the gross overspending that put you into debt in the first place.

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[Rei]

Exactly. This budget increase is about 1 billion dollars. That's nothing. Most of the funding to meet the Mars mission goals is having to come out of existing NASA projects - ones working on actual "science" (imagine that!)

Despite wild numbers from people like Zubrin ("Yeah, we'll send multiple manned missions to mars, plus precursor missions, for the cost of developing a single nuclear reactor that we're going to need!"), the real costs of developing (and most critically, *testing*) a massive radiation-resistant space-borne liferaft designed to keep many people alive in isolation for most of a year (something we have trouble doing even on the surface) while flinging it toward a planet that's eaten about half of the spacecraft that have been sent to it throughout history (the Soviets had even worse luck than we did) using To-Be-Determined-But-Undoubtedly-Complex) engines, with a descent/ascent module, base, mini-refinery, etc, is not a simple task.

NASA took over 1% of our nation's entire GDP for a decade to get a small brief manned mission to the moon. The Soviets never got people to the moon and back, despite having an extensive program (it was largely cut back after we succeeded, but they did work on it for as long as we did). The Chinese recently scrapped their planned moon mission because the numbers coming back for the cost of it were just too high (and Chinese space tech is relatively cheap). We're talking about the moon here; the problems concerning a trip to Mars that takes almost a year are an order of magnitude greater.

I'll back the parent, of course. The money we spent on Iraq is enough to get us to Mars and back. And other things we could do with that money concerning space are equally staggering (it's enough for simultaneous development of 10-20 large reusable launch vehicles to replace the shuttle, let alone one!). It's enough to fund any of the proposed "modern wonders of the world" (such as a transatlantic tunnel, a bridge across the Bering Strait, etc). The amount of "pure science" that could be conducted with that money really boggles the mind (materials science: nanotubes, anyone? Space: probes that make JIMO look like toys; etc). And we haven't even gotten started on the "humanitarian" things that could be done with that money (medicine, aid, etc). Or finally modernizing our transportation infrastructure.

Our sense of priorities as a nation are all wrong.

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[mpsmps]

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.

Re:No, really, you -shouldn't- have.

[Rei]

This isn't insightful - that's not how the costs of the war are reported!

The costs of the war are reported in supplemental appropriations bills. These are bills that don't show up in the budgets Bush sends to congress - they're *additional* bills that come after the fact, and grant a certain amount of money *in addition* to what the military normally gets during peacetime (which, BTW, Bush has raised as well, significantly). The normal military budget also doesn't include supplementals like SDI.

Here's a nice page on the subject:

http://costofwar.com/

Why this instead of stuff like the X prize?

[randall_burns]

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.

We can't afford NOT to do this.

[bigtallmofo]

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.

Re:We can't afford NOT to do this.

[WolfWithoutAClause]

I want to agree with you. But the shuttle, and most of the so-called X programs, and the X-33 program in particular (~2 billion to build a *sub*orbital launch vehicle and then not even managing that?????) leads me to think that manned flight at NASA may be irredemeably broken.

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.

If you like that...

[andy55]

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*

Slashdot Response

[Anonymous Coward]

More money for NASA?!?! Wow, that's great. We've been pushing this for years. We need to look towards the future.
Oh... wait..., Bush is backing this? What a terrible idea.

Re:NASA has little time (and money)

[wuice]

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.