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NASA Think Tank to be Shut Down
Matthew Sparkes writes "NASA will likely shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funds research into futuristic ideas in spaceflight and aeronautics. The move highlights the budget problems the agency is facing as it struggles to retire the space shuttles and develop a replacement. The institute receives $4 million per year from NASA, whose annual budget is $17 billion. Most of that is used to fund research into innovative technologies; recent grants include the conceptual development of spacecraft that could surf the solar system on magnetic fields, motion-sensitive spacesuits that could generate power and tiny, spherical robots that could explore Mars."
If there is only 1% waste in the NASA budget, they are wasting 170 million per year, and that would be considered a low level waste-fraud-mistake amount.
If it is 0.1% loss that is $17m/yr. So what is with shutting down a program that may yield opportunities for far greater savings and benefits over time?
I suspect more efficiency program work would do better for NASA.
...of recent technologies they've come up with that have made it into practical use?
I see the value of research for research's sake, but you've got to come up with things that have a practical use once in a while, even if by accident, otherwise that value goes away...
I'm not saying this lab hasn't come up with such things, but if they have, what are they and why aren't some of them listed in the story summary?
I think that it'd be safe to say that the think tank lost it's foam.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
NASA used to be a organisation which looked to the future and developed new and astonishing technologies and dared to dream large. There is little left of all this nowadays...
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Can some helpful person explain how the NASA budget is drawn up? The wikipedia article covers the facts and outcomes, and not the political angles.
I guess I'm asking:
* where the money is going instead? To different NASA projects or to other state projects outside [stable economy]
* is there less money overall? [shrinking economy]
* is the budget determined by the President or the Senate?
* how frequently are these budgets determined? - how soon could all this budget shrinking really be turned around?
* is there consensus on the role of NASA, or is there variation between Democrats and Republicans?
* if there had been less spent on Defense [say Iraq war], would that have been allocatable to NASA? Sometimes budgets are drawn from several pools... e.g. Road Tax in Australia is only spent on roads.
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This makes about as much sense as shooting a perfectly good horse while you're riding through the middle of the desert.
NASA has been charged with getting back to the Moon and on to Mars and frankly needs all the innovative ideas and thinking they can find. So what do they do? Shut down the people who dream up advanced concepts! It's sad enough that they are going to try and go back to the Moon using souped-up Apollo-era technology, which I predict is a prescription for disaster, but they are not even giving themselves a fair chance of coming up with a better alternative.
My pride in and belief in NASA wanes more with each passing year.
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for government airheads when they visit. they are truly eating the seed corn now.
this idiotic decision is beyond pathetic.
if NASA is going to shut down research for political suckup stunts like mars, they might as well shut down, and let the chinese colonize space.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I am by no means knowledgeable about such matters, but of course I'm going to speculate anyway.
4 million sounds like a very small amount in the grander scheme of things. Choices have to be made. I understand this. But isn't the entire point of NASA to do research? The very core reason it exists?
Maybe I only hear about the success stories that come out of think tanks. Maybe most of them squander away money in futile pursuits. As a previous poster mentioned, I would like to hear what they have accomplished in the past.
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NASA budgeting has little to do with politics or even practical realities. NASA continues to try and thrive on the glory days of its leap to the Moon, even though the first landing was almost 41 years ago now. Whenever things are going bad, the President (choose any one you like) will announce plans for NASA to do something to make America proud and continue our long tradition of space exploration. However, not even Presidential boosterism can keep Congress from continually whittling away NASA's budget, to the point where it becomes a competition for money between the manned program (see as costly, inefficient, and dangerous) and the unmanned programs (see as cheap, flexible, and low-risk). Inevitably, the bulk of the budget goes to the manned program and some promising probes and instruments are shelved for lack of funds.
Now, I am a firm believer in the need for both the manned and unmanned programs. The fact is NASA is underfunded, and those funds could certainly come from somewhere else (DoD for example), but the bottom line with the American people always is, what's in it for me? Now, there a legion of examples of technology spun off from NASA applications, but those are not the kind of things that the everyday citizen is impressed with. And unless you are a Star Trek fan, the idea of exploration for exploration's sake is a dim memory, best left with Lewis & Clark. The sad fact is, unless NASA can come up with something stunning, that captures the imagination of Americans again, as the Moon landings did, this is just another stage in the deterioration of a proud agency that once carried this nation's pride to a new frontier.
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So what do they do? Shut down the people who dream up advanced concepts!
Not exactly. They feed $500M to SpaceX and Kistler to develop real-working rockets that can deliver to ISS. And yes, the money is contingent on success. Invoking private industry to develop the next generation of vehicles is the way to go.
It's sad enough that they are going to try and go back to the Moon using souped-up Apollo-era technology, which I predict is a prescription for disaster
As an aerospace engineer, I'm glad they are reverting to the apollo 'stack' concept. It is safer than the shuttle, in theory, and let's face it - the shuttle never reached its full potential as a 'space truck': dropping off and retrieving satellites. It only really efficiently used the payload bay during the construction (and continued construction) of ISS. All those missions where they just brought along a few pallets of experiments - think of all the wasted mass that was accelerated to orbit. The new system will compartmentalize equiptment from people, allowing for better scaling and efficiency. And better failure modes, using existing hardware with a proven track record (and failure modes that have been documented and corrected).
Unless of course it's a "Conservative Think Tank." One could argue whether or not today that term is an oxymoron.
I always felt I was a moderate. As I get older and learn more, I'm beginning to believe I'm a Goldwater Conservative. Today that makes me a Liberal.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
In short, NASA is faced with a slightly declining budget (not in actual dollars, but in dollars when accounting for inflation) at least partially because of tightening budgets in the U.S. due to rising costs across government and Bush's tax cuts. Recently, the Republicans were both big on tax cuts and big on spending (which IMO was a key to their political success), but the public is finally starting to catch on and demand some sort of responsibility. (I'm not gonna say Democrats would have been particularly better for NASA... only that they were not in power and fairly irrelevant in recent years.) More importantly for NASA, however, is that the agency has been tasked with very expensive priorities to go to the Moon/Mars within its current budget, which means other programs are experiencing cuts.
... say $4 million ... program that nobody in their right mind would cut... showing to Congress just how tight their budget is. (Not that this is necessarily a bluff or that this program is actually important... they could be spending $4 million on monkeys and typewriters for all I know.)
Iraq spending is obviously a major constraint as well, since it's a bit pricey, although that hasn't really been handled within the normal budget process.
The budget process is long, ugly and usually late, but begins with a proposal by the President, which is then mixed and mashed up by the Congress to meet its fancy. Both the House and Senate then consider the budget and negotiate a final budget, which is sent to the President, who can either sign it or veto it. Inevitably, they miss the deadline and pass a resolution to continue operating the government at previous years' budget levels for a few months before actually passing a bill. Essentially this means all the agencies spend most of the year fretting about how much money they have and not figuring out how best to spend it.
The agencies will also, of course, lobby the government for larger budgets and even threaten to do something crazy like cut an important but very small
The above concept appears in local government budgets as the "cut the fire department budget."
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Don't you watch South Park?! it'll be MASA... The Mexican Aeronautics and Space Administration and the good part is they'll do it for pennies on the dollar. 17 Billion pesos there is about 5 bucks!
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I suspect NASA is actually playing brinksmanship games here. Cut external programs that cause maximum pain to the loudest voices in the scientific community and somehow this convinces Congress to restore funding allowances. Loudly threaten that we won't have any manned space flight capability for 5 years while the Chinese, Indians, and Europeans ramp up their programs.
No member of Congress is going to begrudge $4 million. It's a drop in the bucket. The average Senator and congressman earmarks more than that for their many pet local projects.
This is a pale shadow of what NASA used to represent: the scientific might of the world's most advanced country, boldly striding into space while the world watched in awe.
Today NASA just exists to keep its patchy old 1970s era shuttles flying, pouring billions into dead end maintenance efforts while the truly innovative efforts are moving to the private sector if not completely to other countries.
Frankly I think the U.S. has lost its will to explore space. Now everything needs to be justified by short term gain. The can-do, beat-the-Soviets mentality that drove us into orbit in the '50s and 60s seems to have been replaced by crass (and ignorant) focus on the bottom line. Of course, those early efforts resulted in massive technological advances, but today everything has to be directly and obviously profitable to even the stupidest politician before it gets any funding.
Let's vote out the war and vote in a $1 trillion increase in science budgets. That's my pet solution to the whole NASA problem.
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<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls
1) Clever Sig 2) ????? 3) Profit!
I think think the science of non-manned missions is too compelling to give up for manned missions if push comes to shove. We almost have the technology to detect Earth-like planets around other stars with fancy space-scopes, perhaps even life-signs in such atmospheres. To me that is far more important than Neil dancing on Mars. Humans on Mars is about self-agrandizing ourselves. Finding other Earth's makes us ponder our future and think deeper.
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I hate to say it, but NASA has been reduced to a large burecratic organization, they are not run for science any more. I spoke with a guy that had been part of the shuttle program, many years ago. It was EXTREMELY interesting listening to him. His thoughts on the shuttle program, the last shuttle disaster (his opinion is that it was easily avoidable, but wasn't because of cost-cutting measures). He also made it sound more like a government agency that was out for money, and not out for research anymore.