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U.S. Satellite Programs in Jeopardy of Collapse
smooth wombat writes "A committee of the National Academy of Sciences, headed by Richard Anthens, has warned that 'the vitality of Earth science and application programs has been placed at substantial risk by a rapidly shrinking budget.' The list of Earth-observing satellite programs affected is a long one and includes satellite programs which observe nearly every aspect of Earth's climate. A delay in launching a replacement satellite or the disabling of a current satellite without a replacement could mean that data necessary to monitor or predict an upcoming event would be severely restricted. For its part NASA says that tight budgets force it to cut funding for all but the most vital programs. 'We simply cannot afford all of the missions that our scientific constituencies would like us to sponsor,' NASA administrator Michael Griffin told members of Congress when he testified before the House Science Committee February 16."
$400 billion for the Iraq war. All of it pissed away and probably actually hurt our efforts on the war on terror. By comparison, NASA's budget is only $16 billion per year.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
The first thing I thought when I read the title was that, yet again, people were cancelling missions because they had no "obvious benefit" or some such nonsense, completely missing the point that science for science's sake has often lead to many of the greatest breakthroughs in science history.
However, I realised that they're not just cancelling missions that are trying to learn more generally, they're cancelling missions that have immediate and obvious benefits: weather monitoring to try and help avoid natural disasters, studying global warming and suchlike.
What ARE the Americans playing at? This seems to me to be a very foolish course of action, these problems will not go away if we're blind to them...
Not only the $400B, we have to keep paying into the future - soldier's benefits aren't cheap plus the soldiers wounded are a long-term (rightfully so) expense as well and veteran's benefits make up a significant portion of the yearly budget and is not part of the military budget itself.
All of that, so we could show the world how awesome our toys are. Oh, and spreading democracy throughout the world.
The funding will come, unfortunately it is all how you classify it.
A scientific satellite to help observe global warming? NOT in this administration! They don't even want to acknowledge that global warming is happening, let alone help observe it.
If this upsets you, I suggest you vote for a President that actually cares about Science.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
That will not be a problem because Bush keeps cutting Veteran's benefits, to the tune of over $14 Billion since he took office.
Support our troops indeed.
You say you want a revolution....
Hmmmm... Let me see... There's this...
... We (he) was in it for his Oil buddies. Now that he is a LAME DUCK president he can virtually spout off about whatever...
"the desire to explore and understand is part of our character," President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and use the mission as a steppingstone for future manned trips to Mars and beyond.
AND
President Bush's Jan. 14 speech painted broad brushstrokes of his plan to put humans back on the Moon and send them to Mars.
Oh but that was back in 2004, right, trying to get more "techies" to vote for him...
And NOW, as most of us have always know is TRUE color...
Disgruntled members of a congressional oversight committee objected Wednesday to a White House budget plan that threatens to cripple NASA's unmanned space programs and Earth and aeronautics research, President Bush's plan instead emphasizes sending American explorers back to the moon by 2018.
Budget cuts for 2002
Elsewhere there is talk of a 1% increase in NASA's budget for 2k7 but this is NOTHING compared to the slash to the budget that Bush dealt NASA when he first took office because he "needed" that money for the military we would later use to attach the middle east...
Hmmmm... Nice Logic! Instead of looking FORWARD back then... and looking into alternative fuels, the future, and Space
But that's ok, it's obvious at this point that most Americans have a short attention span and don't really delve deeply. At least the "red" ones.
What ARE the Americans playing at? This seems to me to be a very foolish course of action, these problems will not go away if we're blind to them...
Well, the reasoning is pretty clear, if you accept one premise: anything the private sector might the government ought not do. By this way of reasoning, government weather monitoring, morally speaking, tantamount to theft of potential profits from private parties.
I'd posit, I hope in an impartial way, that acceptance of this precept is the greatest difference between the conservative and liberal theories of governance.
An alternative precept is this: the government should do any activity where, on the whole, the public benefits more from government participation than government non-participation. This is a liberal viewpoint. To represent the conservative viewpoint fairly, conservatives don't say this is false, but it is true only in a tautological sense. They believe that in any case where the private sector participates to some degree in an activity, public sector participation a priori impledes the progress of the public good. This means it is never the case that government activity in spheres the private sector is interested in does the public good, people of a conservative bent can hold both premises consistently.
Of course, these are caricatures of liberal and conservative thinking. Most thoughtful people don't reason exclusively from first principles to specific situations, but make allowances for exceptional circumstances.
In any case, while one might violently disagree with government policies of the left or right, the stupidity if it exists doesn't necessarily lie in the process of reasoning, but the first principles from which that reasoning proceeds.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
These NASA cuts are just the tip of what coming up.
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Americans have spent way too much money;
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&s
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Has anyone raised the point that the current NASA director may actually have some very smart advisors? Six months ago NASA was doing the worst possible thing (economically) but the best for short-term job-security: kowtowing to Congress and saying "Oh yes great leaders we will do more with less." Now, someone had the bright idea, and the balls, to stick it to Congress, and announce cancellation after cancellation -- which doesn't mean the programs will actually *be* cancelled. This could all be a massive game of chicken, in which NASA releases press release after press release hitting constituency after constituency until 51% of congress has people set to be directly harmed by the cuts (lost jobs, lost revenue from satellite services, etc), and actually hands over the cash to save the programs. The director will piss off his bosses and may lose his job, but he'll save his organization.
Least successful war? I nominate three others...
Vietnam, which we LOST. Many more allied casualties than this war, war aims not achieved, one million Vietnamese dead.
Korea, which was a DRAW. Also many more casualies than this war, war aims not achieved, barely held on to S. Korea, lots of Koreans dead.
The War of 1812, which we LOST. Washington DC sacked and burned to the ground. More American casualties than this war, and signifiant homeground damage due to British invasion. Oh yeah, and it made Andrew Jackson the indian-killing moron a war hero.
I might also mention the American Civil War, but at least a few good things came out of that one. Also some bad things, like one out of three American males dead. But hey, who's counting?
If you calculate the cost of these wars in constant dollars, some of them, particularly Korea if you include reconstruction (which I assume people are including in the Iraq cost), approaches the current cost of the Iraq War. It is likely that before the end, the Iraq War and reconstruction will end up costing more than Korea, but not by much.
Now, I think that the Iraq War is an expensive and miserable failure, same as the next guy, but hyperbole really weakens the case, don't you think?
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
From Wikipedia: "Although the water supply has reached prewar levels in some provinces, ageing and poorly maintained equipment combined with looting and vandalism leaves the drinking water system substandard."
From the GAO: "However, electrical service in the country as a whole has not shown a marked improvement over the immediate postwar levels of May 2003 and has worsened in some governorates." Not only is electrical service worse than during Saddam's rule, it's even worse than after much of their electrical capacity was destroyed DURING the war.
From Wikipedia (same link as before): "Untreated waste is polluting the Euphrates River, and many treatment plants require repair. More than 45 pipelines have exploded"
Right. And they're built to inferior standards, and you can't go to them in any case without risking death. I don't need to provide a link, you can see the story every day on CNN.
From Iraqi Body Count: estimates range from 28 - 32K deaths just from coalition military activity since the start of the war. Other estimates, some of which include deaths from lawlessness and terrorist activity, are much higher, ranging up to a quarter of a million.
Way to distort the facts. Maybe you should try getting your news from somewhere other than the Weekly Standard.
Sean