US Manned Space Flight Taking a Budget Hit

An anonymous reader points out that Congress has quietly begun dismantling NASA's manned space flight program. "Other recommendations contained in the bill include a $77million reduction in NASA's proposed space operations budget, which includes the space shuttle and international space station; a $6 million reduction in science; and a $332 million shift in funds from the Cross Agency Support account to a new budget line-item included in the subcommittee's mark. Dubbed Construction and Environmental Compliance, the new account would be funded at $441 million. Congressional aides said the new line item and accompanying funds are aimed at consolidating NASA's various construction efforts into a single pot of money."

Comments

Re: A shame and ironic

[al0ha]

Actually this not completely true. While it seems some space exploration may be on the chopping block, scientific research is a part of the Obama stimulus package and the top notch research/educational institute for which I work is a beneficiary for this year and in 2010.

Re:Stupid move

[Chris Burke]

Obama needs to grow a backbone and stand up to the Republicans he is trying to appease by continuing overseas military operations. Instead of diplomatically engaging with the Muslims, keeping a heavy military presence in their countries in order to "stop terrorism" is only pissing away funds that could be better used elsewhere.

Obama is engaging heavily with Muslim leaders, even making overtures to Iran to prevent the next mid-east debacle (which would make Iraq look like Candy Land). So it's not a matter of "instead". As far as the military presence, he's pulling out of Iraq -- not as fast as I'd like by any means, but about as fast as is responsible I must admit. Afghanistan, now that's the conflict that actually made sense, and with an actual enemy and lines and territory won and lost, our military has a prayer in hell of winning. It will still be expensive at a time we don't need it, absolutely, but at the same time we can't let Afghanistan fall to the Taliban again. Hopefully with us focused solely on that, and Pakistan starting to get serious about their Taleban problem now that it's hurting them, we can resolve it soon. Okay, I don't have that much hope, but it will help.

The full budget requested by NASA was 4 billion dollars (As per TFA, Congress reduced it to $3.2 billion). Guess what? We piss away this much amount in Iraq every two weeks!

I hear ya. Really, this pissing around with millions here and there, targeting "earmarks" and such that nobody is going to be able to get rid of anyway, is just a distraction that can ultimately just backfire. You might think the ten million here, half billion there would add up and it does... to a pretty small fraction of the budget. There are bigger issues there. Robbing NASA of $800 million that can be used for doing their special kind of advanced R&D that can benefit us going forward... silly.

So getting back to one of the things that does matter, I wonder how much cheese we will save when at long last we're not more than a token presence in Iraq. I know we're ramping up in Afghanistan, so that offsets any gains. I am willing to bet it'll be enough that scraping that $800 mil off NASA's budget won't seem like it was much use.

Re:So why not?

[blind biker]

First of all, as an academic (his name escapes me now) once said:

A trained geologist can do more research in an hour than a robot in a whole year

and as I understand, his opinion stemmed from the huge delay in sending commands and receiving feedback from the rovers on Mars - and he actually contributes to the Mars Science Laboratory, so he's not "just being negative".

And then, a manned mission to mars would galvanize the energy of the nation that would take on such an endevour. Direct monetary benefit: none. Indirect: incalculable.

Seven hours in Iraq

[Weaselmancer]

Other recommendations contained in the bill include a $77million reduction in NASA's proposed space operations budget

When I read this I decided to see what that is relative to the Iraq war.

I'm using this chart as a reference. It says we've been at it for about 7 years, and it's cost about $670 billion in total.

So, 7 years is about 2500 days. Divide that through and you get about $268,000,000 per day. That works out to 11.16 million per hour.

77 million / 11.16 = 6.89 hours.

7 hours.

Re: A shame and ironic

[SETIGuy]

Branson's efforts have managed to produce a vehicle of about the same capability as the early Mercury missions. In one respect, it's impressive, in another, well... the US government has significantly greater resources both financially and technically than any private interest.

You're kidding, right? The Spaceship One spacecraft is nowhere near the capability of a Mercury capsule. Even if you could get it into orbit, there is no way Spaceship One could make a survivable reentry. The Mercury capsule was intended from the start to be an orbital spacecraft. Spaceship One is a suborbital dead end. Even Spaceship Two is targeting a 120km apogee and about 1 km/s velocity at MECO. The feathered reentry won't do the job if you're going much faster than that.

The first manned Mercury hit 2.3 km/s at MECO, 186 km apogee and 500 km downrange. Apogee mass of it and Spaceship One are about the same, so there's only a factor of 5.3 in the amount of energy Mercury dissipated on reentry. Toss Spaceship One into the air at 2.3 km/s and you'll be picking up charcoal where it comes down.

Spaceship One is a toy for rich people, and is only a spacecraft because someone decided that the arbitrary edge of space is 100 km. The real, non-arbitrary edge of space is 7.8 km/s. When Scaled Composites gets there, then they can say they have spaceship. Since there isn't a way there from Spaceship One, it'll be a bit of a wait.