Slashdot Mirror
Lawmakers Voice Support For NASA Moon Program
Matt_dk writes "Members of a key Congressional committee on Tuesday voiced support for NASA's Constellation program, designed to get astronauts back to the moon. The comments came a week after an expert panel said NASA's plans were not possible, given its current budget. The occasion was an appearance by Norman Augustine, head of a committee formed to consider the future of human space exploration. The Augustine committee sent a summary report to the White House last week saying NASA needs at least an extra $3 billion a year to implement the Constellation moon program. The report also included several alternatives to that program. At a feisty session on Tuesday, Congress was having none of those alternatives, starting just minutes into the two-hour hearing."
"Voicing support" doesn't mean jack squat. Put your money where your mouth is or sit down. For WAY too many years now, Congress and various presidential administrations have "voiced supprt for NASA and made grand promises about building moon bases, going to Mars, etc. But they've turned around and quietly kept the same anemic budget that's been in place since Nixon axed their budget after Apollo. And, for all the grand promises, all NASA has actually delivered were a few probes, a low orbit space station, and a "reusable" spacecraft that can only go into low orbit and has to be rebuilt after each mission. Politicians have coasted on bullshit promises for decades now, and NASA has been all too willing to go along with it.
This committee report is the first time that someone has so publicly pointed out what should have been obvious for a long time now--that NASA isn't going ANYWHERE on the current budget. So either give them the budget they need or own up to the fact that the era of manned space exploration is over. Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
and utterly failed to provide funding for it. Its no wonder that NASA does not have enough money to complete the project. If this results in a funding increase for NASA, it will be a start. Even if it is only a tiny baby step.
$636B. More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
The national debt is almost $12 trillion (for reasons legitimate or not, depending on your views). As cool as the thought is, the moon can wait. The best thing the gub'ment can do at this moment is to not interfere with private space endeavors.
This is my signature.
soid st egr.hyTa rsiugm usnin
Any questions?
As a result I think that good public policy would tell us that there needs to be a compelling reason to scrap what we've invested our time and money in over the past several years.
Compelling? Like an expert panel saying 'this won't work'? What's the point of assembling experts to make recommendations if we're not going to listen to them. I can't say I didn't expect it, but I think it's just pathetic that there apparently wasn't any serious discussion of the alternatives. There may be benefits to going back to the moon, but most of what I've read lately leans toward "I want to relive the glory days when space was new."
If this finally gets somebody to throw NASA some more funding, then I suppose that's something, but the cost of manned missions is staggering. There's so much interesting and useful science that could be done without having to spend (waste?) resources on consumables and redundant systems for supporting life.
I actually had high hopes that someone would listen to the recommendations... Reminds me of a poker player that doesn't know how to fold a hand. Sure, we have a chance to get something out of it, but I don't see that the pot odds are not worth it for manned missions right now.
(Sorry for the poker stuff... no car analogy came to mind)
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iWWPT8cAUpUCsmOZoABze-6XhwTAD9ALBNU00
We're in the deepest recession since 1930, and have run up $1.38 Trillion in debt, people- and that's not all from the two wars we're fighting.
The administration is forecasting a $9 Trillion budget deficit within ten years, a figure the Congressional Budget Office agrees with.
"Only $3BN more" you say? That's a +15% increase of NASA's budget. "Oh, only 15%", you say. Well, guess what happens after 1000 federal agencies and projects have come to you asking for "only 15% more"? I can't even find a figure for the number of items in the federal budget, but I'm guessing it falls around 10,000 or more.
Yes, military spending is an order of magnitude larger. That is not an excuse to increase spending for another agency; it is a reason to reduce military spending. That is something that is not easily done, given how dependent our country has become on military spending to employ people, and congresscritters are very allergic to "defense" cuts in their district.
We need to be trimming from the federal budget, not adding to it any more, except for the most critical needs. Space exploration, while fascinating and a great boost for nationalism, is not a critical need.
Please help metamoderate.
And who was developing the Internet until the 1990's? The government. Specifically, DARPA and NSF. And a bunch of universities, probably funded by government grants.