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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."
That is exactly how they would like it portrayed. The real truth is we are lucky to have any budget for NASA currently. Considering the reckless, if not criminal, debt being piled up in just the first year I will be surprised if NASA doesn't get bigger cuts going forward. How long can the funny money last? The real threat to scientific investment by the US government is all the new entitlements and "stimulus of the moment" bills coming down the pike. Eventually reality will bite us hard, we cannot print our way into having it all, someone pays the bill.
NASA's budget has always been pitiful. It will continue to be so because it isn't the science of the rich and powerful climate groups who have the money to buy influence to get even more money. I expect NASA money to be directed into more "Climate" areas as a way of funneling money to payoff people who voted right or supported the right people.
Each year we seem to get new reasons to blame NASA's budget shortfall but in the end it really all boils down to NASA is being kept around because they have to keep it. If it were not for other nations reaching for space currently or the military needing to keep progress going I would have had no doubt that NASA would be reduced to unmanned flights.
Until NASA becomes a real public interest it won't get money. NASA generates very few votes. It would probably take a meteor or Extraterrestrial's to get people interested enough to where they get the funding many of us here like.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wow, an astounding amount of ignorance is on display in this post. Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs, or NEOs if you prefer) may indeed be easier to visit than the Moon, and they are quite a bit easier to visit than Mars. Mainly this is due to the lack of appreciable gravity, so that the escape velocity from the surface adds only a negligible delta V to the total delta V budget required (for both landing and taking off again). You're not going to find yourself on a 100+ year orbit on an NEA. If you did find yourself on a 100+ year orbit and on on your way out of the inner solar system, then, by definition, you would have landed on a Halley-type comet (or perhaps even a long-period comet if you were *really* on your way out). Take as a typical NEA 433 Eros. The NEAR spacecraft successfully landed on it, despite the fact that the spacecraft was designed to be an orbiter (which, I think, succinctly illustrates how easy it is to land on an asteroid). Its perihelion distance (closest approach to the Sun) is 1.13 AU (1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance) and has a period of a bit less than 2 years. Once nice thing about asteroids is that they basically represent remnants of the original solar nebula from which planets were formed, and most of them never differentiated (melted and formed iron cores and rocky mantles). That means that they are relatively rich in many raw materials compared to the surfaces of planet-sized bodies. A carbonaceous asteroid contains valuable metals (often as little blobs of pure metal), water (up to 30% by weight in many cases), and organics (kerogen). Some other asteroids are nothing but metal, and would require very minimal processing to make them useful (unlike many ores found on Earth). Going to asteroids makes a lot of sense. The main difficulty with an asteroid vs. a lunar mission is that the mission length to an asteroid would be longer than one to the Moon (although depending on the asteroid, it could be much shorter than a Mars trip).
"In a bad economy, pure science and space exploration seem to be first on the budget chopping block."
Dump the manned program and devote the remaining resources to advancing robotic systems. We can afford to wait centuries to send meat tourists, while learning how to economically exploit space by remote control.
Human explorers were fine when they were cheap and expendable. The loss of a ship and crew was nothing near as damaging to exploration as the loss of a Shuttle is today. Now humans are expensive and robots are cheap, so leave the tourists at home.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's what the urban legend says. But it's utter bullshit. The Apollo computers and guidance system were based on those of the Polaris A-1/A-2. The USAF and the USN miniaturized the computers and guidance systems, all NASA did was issue spiffy press releases.
You find the same thing almost universally when you run down the list of technologies 'developed' by NASA. They were first developed by someone else, and then like a technological Sylar NASA sucks them up.
The tragically ignorant are people like yourself who endlessly regurgitate NASA press releases. As far as results for dollars expended, the NASA PR department is probably the most efficient in the US government.
No, we know for sure that spending money on direct research will have some benefits. You're saying that focusing on a goal that has no direct benefits will probably have greater knock on benefits than direct research would have done. I think that puts the burden of proof onto you.
If you're claiming that research for research's sake is better for technology, then the burden of proof lies with you. Neccessity is the mother of invention. Money is not. Dumping money into a cloud named "research" is going to get you nowhere, no matter how much money you dump into it. Asking the world to conjure solutions to problems it doesn't even know exist will net you waste. In the 60's (and stretching even much later), everyone was sure that computers were going to get bigger and louder. The limitations of space travel completely reversed the direction of circuit research for this small group of engineers, and that revolutionized the evolution of computers. Were that money directed elsewhere, personal computers could still be a pipedream today.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
As a someone put it, "Research is the transformation of money into knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge into money".