NASA May Drop Ares I-Y Test Flight

Matt_dk writes "Just one week after the first test launch of the Ares I-X rocket, NASA says it may decide to cancel a follow-up launch called Ares 1-Y, which wasn't scheduled until 2014. Reportedly, program managers recommended dropping the flight because, currently, there isn't funding to get an upper stage engine ready in time. Depending on whether the Obama administration decides to continue the Ares I program, this decision may be moot. Earlier this week Sen. Bill Nelson said Obama may make a decision on NASA's future path, based on the report by the Augustine Commission, by the end of November."

Comments

Internal Interest

[Microlith]

I wonder if NASA is going to be able to keep up internal interest on these projects with the way their budget keeps getting cleaved. Hell, I wonder how they managed to keep people onboard, what with a 5 year delay between test flights.

Blew Your Wad Too Early

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad we spend a trillion dollars invading the wrong country based on obvious lies and fabrications. I think we would have been better off spending that money on cool space toys or at least getting Afghanistan right the first time.

We will be paying for the George W Bush's disastrous presidency for a very long time.

Re:For example...

[Wonko the Sane]

We're going to get the worst of both worlds: no manned space exploration program and a white elephant "green" energy infrastructure that won't be good for much except making the investors who started the Chicago Climate Exchange richer.

Re:Space program != science

[BJ_Covert_Action]

I'm am going to play the false dichotomy debuff card on your fallacy and add an alternative perspective to the game. From the way you presented your comment it sounded as if you were saying that we have the choice to either invest in useful cheaper science here on the ground, or invest in expensive fluff science up in space. I would assert that we can, and should do both. The federal government annual budget is not a simple pie that is divided into a few equally sized proportions. It is made up of thousands of expenditures on everything from federal employee wages to excessively expensive arms contracts to student grants for college assistance. If we cut spending on some of our more absurd money sinks that are not as valuable to science as say, alternative energy and space exploration, we could easily afford to fund useful science like alternative energy and space exploration simultaneously.

If you take an hour out of your day (really, you have plenty of time left in your life, you can survive 1 hour) to do some poking around over at USASpending.gov you will see figures pop up like the fact that the top five federal contractors this year were:

1 LOCKHEED MARTIN CORPORATION ... $29.748500571 Billion
2 THE BOEING COMPANY ... $18.231538802 Billion
3 GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION ... $12.318737574 Billion
4 NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION ... $11.900713440 Billion
5 RAYTHEON COMPANY ... $11.156782353 Billion

Now you may already know this, but if not, another hour of research won't kill you, but each of those companies is very diversified in the types of products the provide to their customers. They work on everything from appliances, to housing, to spacecraft. However, a little more research and a little intuition will show you that these companies are, above all else, arms developers. And the majority of their contracts coming from the federal government are those dedicated to developing the new, powerful, absurdly capable weapons that would have been useful in the Cold War, which ended ~20 years ago. If you add up the total monetary value of the contracts provided to these five companies for FY 2009, you see that, together, $88.356272740 Billion (with a B) was awarded to companies that are essentially developing technology to fight a war that fizzled out 20 years ago. Now of course, neither economics or politics are as simple as I am making this out to be, but it does illustrate a point. While these companies probably are also getting plenty of money for advancing science and engineering in general, the mass majority of the spending by the federal government is spent ramping up what is already the most powerful and capable military in the world right now.

Suppose, for a second, that the war-machine lobby groups could be quelled long enough that the exorbitant level of funds being diverted to arms development and obscure wars on ideas (terrorism, drugs, etc.) could, instead, be cut significantly and diverted instead to, as you put it, meaningful science pursuits. We could, quite easily, save money on a federal level AND fund space exploration (manned and unmanned) AND fund alternative energy AND fund stem cell research AND fund computer infrastructure development etc. Instead, however, we have allowed our federal government to be infiltrated and overtaken by corrupt, greedy, selfish corporate interests. Thus, rather than funding valuable, civil science and tech, we have a government whose spending levels are out of control. A good amount of that spending goes towards funding wars that are sketchy at best, and a dormant lion of a military that needs nothing more than a twitchy trigger finger on its leash to free an unholy uproar of annihilation and chaos.

In short, our current priorities are the only thing that keep our country from properly funding the sciences that both you, and I, find valuable simultaneously