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Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination
marcel-jan.nl writes "There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money. The Voyagers alone need $4.2 million a year for daily operation and data analysis. Scientist say this cut is "an extremely foolish thing to do": the Voyagers are approaching the edge of the Solar System and Ulysses is observing the Sun coming to the end of a 22-year magnetic cycle."
I think there are very few intelligent people who would argue with collecting data from Voyager 1 and 2 as long as they are still in operation. After all, these craft have (boldly?) gone where no manmade object has ever gone before. Out into deep space. Considering that it took 30 years for the darn things to get out there, do we really want to blow this opportunity over a mesely few million bucks? I mean, 30 years is some people's entire professional career!
That being said, I think this is an area where scientists tend to underestimate the value of manned space travel. You'll notice that as long as manned space travel exists, it generates excitement in the general population. And as it advances, young people dream of one day visiting the stars themselves. Remove manned space travel, and the funding to ALL space ventures will be cut. Joe Smith really has no idea of the significance of the Voyager program. To him it's just a piece of junk that the Klingons will blast out of space in a few centuries. But give him dreams of visiting the moon, Mars, or other interesting places, and he'll happily support funding for all forms of space travel.
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Okay, so NASA spends $15 billion of our money each year, and the Pentagon spends another $20 billion on satellites and rockets. It costs a billion to launch a shuttle, and there used to be four launches a year, before they started losing things so often. They even canceled development of the X-33, and sold it for scrap metal, after spending 912 million dollars on it.
But we can't afford to spend a measly $4 million to maintain three projects that are still returning useful, interesting data, and haven't disappeared behind Mars or killed anyone?
I guess they have PHBs at NASA too! Maybe it's just about PR...making things look good to the average guy on the street, who thinks going to Mars is way cooler.
(I have to admit, the headline "Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination" made me wonder the Aliens had finally taked over ISS...)
Will the money saved enable NASA to save the Hubble Space Telescope?
If not, then what is NASA planning to study after everything shuts down? I mean the shuttles arent flying, Hubble's about to be scrapped...
Hey here's an idea, let's fake another landing on another solar system body!
We could use the money we save on scrapping these to help develop Iraq's space program! But seriously there are tons of other programs that the government should cut that are pretty absurd before they even think of scrapping a space program that is truly beneficial?
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
4 million for one year? IMHO that is cheap.
How about setting up a foundation that operates them?
I am sure there are enough people who would donate the required amount of money.
give us more money or else we will be forced to close / stop / retire this important / necessary / historic person / place / program
Essentially it's the same old story, give us more money for salaries and positions or else.
I'll bet this never happens.
(... and no, I didn't RTFA)
While I'm not railing against the war, and I believe we should be spending whatever money is necessary to protect the troops, I find it interesting that it's science that gets shoved aside...
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The money needed to pay for that additional season of enterprise would pay to keep these running for quite a while.
.. it's so expensive?
$4.2 million dollars to analyse incoming data? You could employ 80 PhD astrophysicists for a year for that much. Surely there's not so much information coming back as to require that much computer time?
I'm not trolling, I'd just love to know.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There's no one as short sighted as a bureaucrat. I should know: I am one, and I work with them every day. We regularly do foolish things, to achieve short term, counter-productive goals.
See what I've been reading.
I'd suspect funding the Voyager probes would be a better (and maybe more ironic, given ST:TMP) use of their money than more episodes of that television show.
Imagine that: buying science instead of fiction.
I think it's sort of indicative of our priorities that we spend $160 billion+ on a fanastic romp in the middle east and barely feel the need to justify the expense and yet we have trouble coughing up $4 mill a year when it comes to funding a scientific expedition which has the potential for giving us greater insight into our place in the universe. its times like these that i wish i had the option of controlling what my taxes funded.
I can't imagine a worse idea in the space program than terminating these missions to save a half-drop in the bucket of the overall budget.
I've read a fair amount of discussion of how they're approaching the heliopause (the point at which the solar winds begin to be overpowered by interstellar winds) and, as JPL will say, "The thickness of the heliosheath is uncertain and could be tens of AU thick taking several years to traverse."
Considering it'd take billions more dollars and waiting decades to get that piece of data from somewhere else, I'd call it a bargain. I'm sure I don't know the impact of that information, but if something as fundamental as how far our sun's influence really extends is unknown, it seems like it'd be at least somewhat important.
to keep these prohrams funded? As a taxpayer (reluctantly so), I am not willing to pay more money out. Having fought some budget battles, for some one to win, others must lose. Who is willing to give up a pet project?
Better yet, why not have those who want to continue the program contribute directly to it? Kinda like OSS?
If a spacecraft is about to leave the solar system, then surely we should at least leave it running for a couple of years in order to get some more data on the Pioneer anomaly - it would be a shame to pass up on the chance to study one of the few unexplained anomalies in elementary physics...
Here's something else to consider - we've spent over $100 billion dollars now to invade and occupy Iraq - but NASA's budget is only $15 billion per year? Isn't space exploration a little more important than beating up on a third world country (flamebait)?
No, no he is not. No funding redirected into the moon/mars missions came from this program. Nor did the moon/mars directive cost us Hubble. And NASA was largely spared budget cuts in the latest proposed budget... no one has "summarily cut" NASAs budget regardless of moon/mars. Now excuse me while I am modded into oblivion for posting something that even looks faintly like a defense of Bush Inc.
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
No, the problem is that he got very little enthusiasm out of the public when he presented the concept. As a result, he assembled a "team" to take care of it and went on to more pressing matters. If you want someone to blame, talk to:
1. Congress, who not only fails to fund NASA, but regularly cuts their bugdet while forcing them to outsource to ever-more-expensive contractors.
2. NASA's internal beauracracy that shifts managers around and kills programs without actually improving anything.
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The 1st being the result of a republican-controlled congress.
Nonsense. Both Republicans and Democrats have been responsible for the various issues that NASA faces. In fact, the reason why we have the ISS instead of Space Station Freedom is because Clinton (and his Democrat controlled congress of the time) cut funding.
The issue is that congress critters are looking out for number 1, and that means shunting money wherever it will get them re-elected. Giving money to NASA doesn't get a representative re-elected unless NASA outsources to a large corporation in their constituancy. If we want space travel, we need an independent Space Agency, and we need the general public to make space travel a re-election issue.
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I was surprised that my previous rant about Dan Goldin was flagged as flame-bait... but I want to revisit it.
Goldin in his reign was instrumental in killing NASA. As opposed to lobbying the government and stirring public interest, he became an implement by which NASA became irrelevant as he oversaw slash-and-burn budgetting.
NASA did not recover. I believe all recent failures in the space program are due to Goldin's initiatives.
And this is relevant to the Voyager topic because his policies continue. Its not an argument about funding cuts from the fed - because the fed greases the palm of the lobbiest selling the sexiest product (and lobster dinner.)
NASA today is nothing more than a federal children's edutainment organization. And the nation and the planet will suffer as a result of this. How many technological innovations came out of the space race? These presented REAL value to the corporate crowd. So anyone who thinks that research constitutes tax dollars ill spent - please remove all computers, cd players, cell phones, vcrs, and other subsequent beneficiary gadgets from your homes.
Shutting down the projects is also vile. Open the project up. Give it away to someone who will support it in industry. Or give it up to another space agency (or country that still thinks space exploration is a point of national pride.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Why go so faaaaaaar away?
70% of the earth' surface are oceans.
It's easier to send men to the moon and back, and have them do some space walk than to dive 4000m deep and do the same.
Sub surface research is not "sexy" enough and you don't have this cool simulation videos what 42 million dollars spent might look like if nobody get confused by inches and centimeters...
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
What NASA really needs is a better pitch man. Which of the following sounds better:
"Voyager is a 30 year old probe that has lasted well beyond it's intended purpose."
OR
"Voyager is the first wave of NASA's proactive plan at deep space detection, which ranks among the organization's most cost-effective projects to date." (The "second wave" would be Voyager 2.)
Let's face it, a room full of eggheads just don't know how to pitch a great product. If NASA would start selling it as a security feature, and not just some probe that sends back random data, this wouldn't be much of an issue.
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
EXACTLY!!!
Remeber, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Cheap talk about a Mars mission that will never happen is cover to cut practical science today.
This is exactly the same as the cheap talk about a "hydrogen economy" which has been used to prevent progress on fuel economy today.
Would someone like to explain why NASA gets to shut down an ESA project?
The US decided not to go ahead with their half of the Solar Polar Project at a fairly advanced stage, now they want to shut down the other half?
Why does everyone insist on making every boneheaded decision by a government department the fault of george bush himself?
Because if The President wanted more science, there would be more science. Remember the space race? The President wanted to flex a bit for Russia and put science on a "fast-track" - and_we_touched_the_moon - rather quickly at that.(if you belive that sort of thing). And that was what, almost half a century ago?
Really, if The President wants science and technology for science, that is where (more) resources will be allocated; if The Commander in Chief wants more war and technology for war, there will be (more) war and technology for war.
It is not that The President has to have his nose in every pie, but that the pies he is sniffing get the appropriate funding.
[lame_pot _shot]We all know what kind of pies the current U.S. President likes to sniff, and it is not sweet sweet science pie.[/lame_pot_shot]
|plastic....or gasoline?|
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed. NASA's webservers (OK, JPL's) have consistently collapsed under the load of people checking the initial data returns from the unmanned probes. The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes. I think you underestimate the people's willingness to pay for good science, as well as their ability to understand what makes good science.
There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system. There will also be those who denounce spending a penny on "frivolous" ventures like space probes as long as Just One Child Goes Hungry here on Earth. I'm a fan of spending money wisely. We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
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Hell, the Enterprise fans supposedly raised over three million bucks... for a TV show.
That money's needed for faith based initiatives, abstinence-only education and 'my-granpappy-ain't-no-monkey' stickers for textbooks. Question; can they save money by shutting down the analysis portion and just collecting raw data until more generous hands are on the budgetary purse strings?
Half of our budget goes to Medicare and Social Security. How much of that money do you think is wasted due to government bureacracy?
Now, how much of the budget goes to the (albeit stupid) programs you mentioned?
Yet no spending cuts* can make it through Congress, because both sides are weighed down by lobbyists who will paint any cuts* in the most drastic light possible to sway public opinion. Everyone wants to cut spending, but not on THEIR projects, which means nothing gets cut.
* Note: 'cuts' are a misnomer. No spending is ever actually cut by Congress. When they use this word, what they really mean is they are just SLOWING the GROWTH in spending on a particular program. Most programs have built in "raises" each year in spending. That way, Congress can say, "Instead of giving your program 2% more money this year, we're only giving it 1% more -- we're cutting spending!"
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
If they terminate funding and someone doesn't find a way to sneak commands to the spacecraft on the sly, contact will be lost, the Voyagers will go into their command reset "safe modes" and we may never regain contact with them.
This is shameful. They don't cost much to run but they give us valuable data on the Sun's influence and how it influences the interstellar medium. The data helps refine models on solar wind dynamics, wind influence and strength over distance, particle interactions with the interstellar medium and ultimate tell us where our neighborhood ends and interstellar space begins.
To the layman, yes, go for it. But these spacecraft are the only two vehicles this far out. It would take a decade or more to get a new spacecraft out there and if they cut funding to these, what makes you think they'll spend the billions of dollars and time needed to design a new spacecraft to explore the same region. Probably not in my lifetime.
I'm a big fan of the VIM. I stand in awe of the foresight and talent of the engineers who built the spacecraft and the fact they remain operational after decades in space. The communications needs aren't that much and it is incredible that these faint whispers can be heard from so far away.
Someone can't just pick up this mission from NASA. They would need a network similar to the DSN to communicate with the spacecraft and the technology is so old that it is improbable that someone else could learn how to communicate and interact with the spacecraft in time. Likely the only hardware and software on earth that can understand the Voyagers exists at NASA and if shutdown or disposed of, this knowledge would be lost forever.
If someone were to pay my living expenses, I would happily work to help keep the VIM running. There is grandeur in hearing the whispers of ourselves from so far away and we should listen until they can't talk to us anymore.
Cut some other program to help fund it. I can think of several.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
You people make no sense. The last president to do ANYTHING about improving the space program was Reagan. He spent money trying to undo the boneheaded space choices made by every president and congress after Kennedy. Once Reagan was gone, the status quo was again reasserted. I don't see ANY evidence that ANY valid choice in president would improve the space program.
If you want science done at NASA, it needs to be a re-election issue for congress critters. The president has some say, but at the end of the day it's congress who holds the keys to the purse. Making them see the light would be far more effective than complaining about the effectivness of the president's attempts to encourage the space program.
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How about we do this the old fashioned way and just ask people directly for money. If someone can raise 3 million in private funds to save a tv show about exploring space, Enterprise, then somebody could certainly come up with the same amount to keep someone receiving and recording signals from voyager. NASA should turn over the keys to whomever raises the cash to keep running the program.
I'm sure I don't understand the cost or complexity of running a spacecraft. However, I'm certain that a volunteer organization could raise more than $4M per year to keep these spacecraft running. Additionally, I imagine that they could at least off-set some of the cost by relying on volunteer, possibly quite distributed, labor. Naturally, some of the labor cannot be distributed, and perhaps for some of the labor you don't want to rely on volunteers. However, money is money, and if NASA can do it for ~$4M, then I doubt that it would cost more than that for an independent organization to do the same. There are probably quite a few retired NASA employees who would be willing to donate their expertise. Probably several of these employees were involved in getting Voyager off the ground in the first place.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This data is worthless if we want to know what is ahead, because we can not extrapolate this data even 1 AU further.
On the other hand, the Voyagers will soon (estimated a few years) be in a posistion to gather information about the Heliopause. It would take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to get another probe out there to gather such data. In comparison, $15 million and a few years is too low a price to pass up. We should wait until the really get into interstellar space, if cancel the tracking before the probes go dead at all.
It lets him claim to be interested in spaceflight while he kills off Voyager, the Shuttle, and Hubble. Bastard.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call. Did the president call up O'Keefe and tell him to stop flying the shuttle? Nope, that was O'Keefe's call. The president actually asked what he could do to get manned flight back on track.
Now Voyager is facing cancellation from a desk jockey inside NASA and you think the president had something to do with this, how? The program is facing cancellation because some beaurocrats are worried about losing their jobs. The shuttle incident made things look very bad for NASA, and the inquery board's findings of "too much management" made them look worse. Managers inside NASA are trying to look like the "fiscally responsble" ones so that it's not their head on the chopping block.
Stop trying to make everything into a Democrat vs. Republican argument. It has no bearing on reality and only makes people here look stupid.
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Once again we have another example of real science being killed off so NASA can continue it's slavish and visionless mission from before we even landed on the Moon.
So we watch while they desperately try to scape up every amount, no matter how tiny, from worthy missions such as this in order to feed the Space Station and Shuttle programs.
When the post-Apollo era was first being studied NASA came back with a 1-2-3 punch, a space station to study deep-space and long-duration missions, a space shuttle to support cheap, timely and safe crew exchange, both in order to get ready for a mission to Mars. Nixon balked (rightfully) and told them to pick one. They picked the Shuttle, justifying it by saying the cheap access to space would let them go back to the station in the late-70s/early-80s. That turned out well.
What's sad about all of this is that the missions only support each other, neither, on it's own, would have ever made it to bent metal. They built the shuttle to make the station cheap, but when the shuttle turned out to be the most expensive launch system in history, they STILL kept to the original plan -- and now we have the most expensive launch system supplying the most expensive space station. And since the budgets go down (inflation adjusted) every year, NASA has to turn off every other project and feed every dollar into these useless projects.
Someone needs to stop the madness. No one will. What's the sound of freedom? "Oink!"
I can't believe NASA has been pissing away our tax dollars on some unmanned satellites out in the boondocks of the soloar system. By killing the support for this program we will save enough money to launch one more shuttle flight (where the REAL science is done) in just 302 YEARS!
($4.2 million / 1.3 billion average shuttle flight cost.)
As I mentioned in a post yesterday, I love Microsoft because they "...will make the decision based on what is best for customers."
Let me add that I love NASA because they always base their budget priorities on how to get the most scientific knowledge for every dollar spent.
Oh, and they're immune to politics and mere PR crap.
Insert witty sig here.
If they can scrounge up millions to try to keep Enterprise on the air, I'm sure funding ACTUAL REAL SCIENCE should be a more worthwhile cause.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
That's nothing. Divide it by the US population.
Just my two cents. (literally)
NASA should consider open sourcing those projects. Learn from SETI@home. There are probably enough enthusiasts with the brains to keep those missions up with only minimal funding required by NASA for the very basics.
I'm not saying the two are mutually exclusive. I just find it interesting that people are willing to take to the streets for a television show and will invent a foundation to fund it, but wait for someone else to tell them where to send money for real science.
I'm just wondering if anyone will create a Voyager United fund, or if they'll just fold their arms and wait passively for others to solve the problem.
This news makes me very, very sad and I can feel your pain...
I was not born yet when the Pioneers/Voyagers were launched, but when I started to learn more and more about the world around me as a kid.. I became fascinated with space at a very young age.
I just cannot tell you how much both projects and their teams have inspired me throughout the years... and how much I wish I had been born earlier and been part of the whole those mission teams!
Those probes are IMHO still on the frontier of our knowledge and technological capabilities as humans.
Even though they're 'just' made with technologies from the 1960's and 1970's... I have an enormous amount of respect for the way those probes have been built, their ability and stability.. and their precision!.
IMHO, these missions are one of the 'wonders of the (tech.) world' and a beacon for what we should be doing as a race: explore the Universe!
(indeed, instead of all those pathetic wars on this planet)
Thank you and your collegues for everything!!
Heck... Seti@Home is able to convince thousands of people to donate their CPU cycles for pretty useless stuff (IMHO)... If what they need is data analysis, distribute the effort and make a Voyager@Home or something like that. Other than the cost of the software development, the data analysis part is almost free.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Geeze, I can't believe I just read through this entire thread and haven't seen a single mention of what people (at least those who are US citizens) can actually do about this. Go here:
http://www.congress.org/
Type in your zip code. Look at the list of your elected officials. Call them or send them a paper letter (even better if you include a donation in it). I did it, and you can too. Believe it or not, congresspeople actually listen to their constituents.
That said, I hope in the future more and more science-related projects get handled by private groups, like the Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 launch of the first solar sail spacecraft next month. That way, instead of whining to congresscritters about using other people's money for projects we care about, we can just give the money ourselves. I'm sure the actual Voyager space program would be able to raise at least as much money as the Enterprise television show.
There are many good reasons to go to Mars. Bush, however, is not interested in them. He doesn't really want to go to Mars, he wants to destroy NASA. "What, you can't get us to Mars? Say goodbye to your budget..."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is that not a solution: There are lots of amateurs who love to analyze this data.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Let me get this right, it costs NASA $4.2 million a year to receive and analyze a few kilobytes of data from these probes a day? It sounds like they have a team of engineers working on this project for god's sake. Maybe they could, you know, just scale back their mission and put the engineers somewhere else? I mean, do they even really need one engineer devoted to this full time? It's no wonder NASA has budget problems.
I understand your point. Thing is, we're still at the baby-steps stage of space exploration. Before we drop tens or hundreds of billions of dollars developing the technology to send men to Mars for (optimistically) a few weeks to explore a tiny area around their landing site, I think we should spend a few ones of billions of lots of probes that we can drop all over the heavenly bodies to spend months finding the more promising candidates.
The scientific instrumentation and experiments are pre-determined here on Earth. Sure, men can fix things that just stay broken on a machine probe, but it's not like men take up a machine shop to fabricate a spectral mumbleizer in transit because they realize that mumbleizing would be good to do.
Also, I take objection to your opening sentences. I am a huge fan of exploring the universe we find ourselves in. I'm not so blindered as to think the only way we can do that is by sending people, though. We understand Mars better than we do the moon even though we've had a dozen guys stand on the latter. Going to other worlds isn't like loading up a sailing ship and traveling to the other side of the same planet you evolved for. We owe it to those who will go to know as much as possible about the places they'll visit. We're simply not to the point where it's time to talk seriously about sending people to faraway worlds.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
When you look at the relative costs of BushCo's other priorities, the amount of money involved here is incredibly trivial. I admit that the RoI from this specific kind research is unknown, but it's exactly the kind of research that can only be funded by a government--someone has to have a long-term perspective. There might be an enormous breakthrough here, but no private organization could speculate on that and spend even a few million dollars per year. However, if you take a really long term perspective--the way government is supposed to--then whatever you learn, even if it is small, will eventually accumulate to a large value.
Religious fanatics aren't interested, of course. They already know *EVERYTHING*. Meanwhile, BushCo is glad to exploit their deliberate and intentional ignorance for political advantage and personal profit. Sad.
Note: Insightful has to start from the truth. I don't care how nicely you write and how well you package your lies. They is no such thing as an "insightful falsehood".
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
With the exception of a few sacred cows, every office and program becomes expendable. If there aren't enough of the right people bitching and moaning to defend program X, then it's not important enough to fund. Sure, it's a pain in the ass to have to rejustify one's work each year or so, but it's not an unreasonable way to allocate resources within a huge organization such as the US Federal Government.
Unfortunately, humans don't organize well beyond a certain size, hence the collapse of the Soviet state, and NASA considering wiping a program when it's just about to start paying off in valuable science again.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Now, it seems as if most of scifi tv/movies had it wrong - that in fact, English speaking Americans will not be flying starships. They will be flown by Chinese and Indians...
Not that I have a problem with this in one sense - being a humanist...but it does kind of suck living in an age where a country once known for being a world leader, is making itself, with all haste, a second-rate power...
rant: We had a 30+ year head start on the world in space, and we blew it! We fucking blew it! Too many shallow and near-sighted politicians, and too many apathetic Americans famous for quotes such as, "why should we study the jumps of grasshoppers?"
dahlek (will you squirm when you are pecked
I think that's it's pretty clear to many Slashdotters that NASA is bureaucratizing itself to death. I'm equally sure many administrators at NASA think that this viewpoint is laughably layman ... and since they are perfectly willing to come into work every day, with a desk, phone and computer, while NOTHING AT ALL is launched or flying again that day, then we can see their biases.
... just to save a sum of money that could be easily covered by the everyday excesses of the bureaucratic class. In effect, the body is thinking about eating a couple of fingers while lard hangs off its belly, just so the brain can continue to believe in its own supremacy.
Like any cancerous bureaucracy, NASA is proposing the cuts for 2 reasons:
1. Scare Tactic. Instead of administrators cutting the number of administrators, administrators instead cut at the actual functioning of the organization: missions, projects, tasks and workers. This produces the desired fear effect and their budgets may be sustained thereby. (My city has been doing this kind of thing for years, and it bringing out the method a lot lately due to the collapse of the economy.)
2. Smart Morons. Modern business methods have infected much of American culture. Hence, we get a NASA administrator thinking that a 30-yr-old program that is still ongoing is something that should be shut down early
I've been predicting that America will cash out much of the accomplishment of its culture since it no longer wants to take risks or take lesser profits for general prosperity. As how my prediction affects NASA, the agency will continue to let equipment de-orbit, will continue to cancel programs, and will continue to advance the unintentional program to make itself completely irrelevant. The Shuttles are dead (even if they return to fly, they won't last long). Nothing will replace the Shuttles anyway. Mir is gone. Hubble is going to go. The Webb Telescope will never be launched.
And the collapse of supersonic commerical transport only continues to demonstrate from all this that Western civilization is giving up the ghost. Accomplishment is being abandoned. Nothing is replacing all this, either. The future in space is almost undoubtedly Chinese.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Sadly, it seems frighteningly true of the Bush administration.
The world seems to be moving toward a conflict between two extremist groups - one "Muslim" and one "Christian" and neither bearing much relation to the teachings of either faith.