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The Upside of the NASA Budget
teeks99 writes "There are a lot of articles circulating about the new changes to the NASA budget, but this one goes into some of the details. From what I'm seeing, it looks great — cutting off the big, expensive, over-budget stuff and allowing a whole bunch of important and revolutionary programs to get going: commercial space transportation; keeping the ISS going (now that we've finally got it up and running); working on orbital propellant storage (so someday we can go off to the far flung places); automated rendezvous and docking (allowing multiple, smaller launches, which then form into one large spacecraft in orbit). Quoting: 'NASA is out of the business of putting people into low-earth orbit, and doesn't see getting back in to it. The Agency now sees its role as doing interesting things with people once they get there, hence its emphasis on in-orbit construction, heavy lift capabilities, and resource harvesting hardware. Given budgetary constraints and the real issues with the Constellation program, none of that is necessarily unreasonable.'"
Please stop the FUD. Approximately nothing of what you have said is true, cdrguru.
The FAA's office of Space Transportation (AST) has a mandate written in its authorizing law to both regulate and promote commercial space activities. They take both parts of that quite seriously.
Please do not spread FUD.
I am not aware of any commercial space activity which was denied an AST license or permit. There have been a few "Can't fly from this airport" snafu's from the aviation side, who are alternately happy and sad about rockets, but the AST crew are doing the "promote" thing quite seriously.
Is it always a completely smooth relationship? No. Is any of the startup companies spending most of their time (more than 10-20%) on paperwork? No. People are getting licenses and permits, they're flying.
From a reasonable standpoint, someone does need to be an external review to make sure we don't kill someone on the ground. If the industry neglected that, we'd eventually *really* get shut down when we did something neglegent. The reviews and regulation are appropriate to avoid dropping rockets on some poor family some day, which would be a tragedy both for the victims and for the industry.
EPA has no authority, the FAA has a standing environmental finding that there's no significant impact from the reusable rocket industry.
Am I personally flying rockets? No. Have I had to talk to AST about some proposed activities? Some. Do I know the people flying stuff now (Xcor, Armadillo, Masten, Unreasonable)? Yes, in most cases for decade-plus and personally. When we all get together, most of the griping is about operational lessons, and learning new things about rocket design, and high-fives for new successes. Only a small fraction of it is regulatory. It's there, but we know how to deal with it.
You simply can't make the arguement that's NASA's fault we havn't been back to the moon since the early 70s and have never been to Mars. NASA had plans for a third round of Apollo missions and had mission plans to bel anding us on Mars by 1985. 1985! Thats 25 years ago!
Why didn't they do it? Not for any lack of know-how, willingness, or determination. It was for lack of funds. Congress cut the hell out of NASA's budget. Perhaps it was NASA's fault for expecting that Apollo era funding would continue, but you can't say they didn't WANT to do all the things you're saying they didn't accomplish.
You really have no sense of where government money goes, do you? TANF (federally-funded welfare) is $16.5B. By contrast, the latest Pentagon budget request is $768.2B.
Welfare is a really tiny portion of our total expenses.
I'll BUILD someone to replace you. Some kind of gamma-powered monster, with a heart as black as coal!