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

A shame and ironic

[Hmmm2000]

In a bad economy, pure science and space exploration seem to be first on the budget chopping block. However the information learned and technology developed while performing these activities quite often lead to innovations that fuel the economy for years to come.

Re: A shame and ironic

[MightyMartian]

NASA has produced a helluva lot of useful technology. The drive to miniaturize onboard guidance systems and other computers in the Apollo program pretty much lead to the blossoming of integrated circuits and microprocessors in the 1970s. The value that that has produced over the last forty years for just about every industry in the industrialized world would be hard to calculate. So even though Apollo was an insanely expensive program, the spinoffs were enormous.

I'm not saying NASA doesn't need to live within its means, and I'm not saying that there aren't areas where efficiencies can be gained, but guys like you who just mindlessly go "money shouldn't be wasted on space research" are tragically ignorant of just how important the Unites States' space exploration programs have been to the technological innovations of the last few decades.

Is sending humans a novalty at this point?

[ViennaSt]

With robotics coming such a long way since the 60s, it is more efficient and cheaper to just send robots to do all the exploring and data/sample collection in space. Until the average American thinks the cost of human presence in space is a priority for the tax payer dollar, space flight will have to be unmanned in the meantime. We are just going to have to wait for China or another rising global leader to send humans to Mars until the US population is willing to put in the extra effort and dollar to compete in a second space race and reinflate their ego as the "pioneers of space".

Re:Why is this a surprise?

[spacemandave]

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).

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.