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State of Alabama Fighting NASA's New Plan
FleaPlus writes "Alabama politicians have formed a 'task force' dedicated to fighting NASA's new plans to cancel the costly Constellation/Ares program, which is largely based in Alabama. The chronically mismanaged Constellation project attempted to build new rockets in-house and replicate an Apollo-style lunar program with minimal investment in new technologies. NASA's new boosted budget revives formerly suppressed R&D efforts into critical technologies needed for a sustainable push towards Mars and intermediate waypoint destinations, works with (instead of trying to compete with) existing commercial rockets to transport cargo/crew to orbit, and funds a stream of robotic precursor missions to scout other worlds and demonstrate new technologies. The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook."
Remember the Republican mottos, kids:
- Earmarks are bad, except in my district!
- Government spending can't create jobs, except in my district!
"Troll" ?!? Excuse me!?!?
That's how it works in Washington. We have the same thing here in GA. Saxby Chamblis (R) and the rest our mostly Republican congressional team bashes Obama's spending ALL the time but when it comes to the F-22 project (they're made here in Marietta), he's got his hand out just like any other politician.
Both parties are guilty of it. WTF is it with you people, someone makes an observation that's actually true but says something negative you mod it down?!?
Some of you people are such ignoramuses! Troll indeed!
Unless there's a very different story that I've never heard of:
a) That was Indiana
b) They never considered a law making it anything
c) They certainly didn't consider making it 3, because that's what the Bible says
d) No such law was ever passed.
Basically, they were looking at a law recognizing some local crackpot who offered them free use of his method of squaring the circle (which intrinsically involved pi, of course). As it turned out, pi can be read as having multiple values in his work anyway. (It's not entirely clear what he was saying since what he claims to have done isn't possible to begin with.) They were set straight by a friendly, passing mathematician. (More or less literally true, I'm pleased to say.)
Underwood Dudley has written about the whole, weird story, but the short version is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
That's cute and everything, but before stereotyping the region, read a little about it from Wikipedia:
Huntsville's main economic influence is derived from aerospace and military technology. Redstone Arsenal, Cummings Research Park (CRP), and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center comprise the main hubs for the area's technology-driven economy. CRP is the second largest research park in the United States and the fourth largest in the world, and is over 38 years old. Huntsville is also home for commercial technology companies such as the network access company ADTRAN, computer graphics company Intergraph and design and manufacturer of IT infrastructure Avocent. Telecommunications provider Deltacom, Inc. and copper tube manufacturer and distributor Wolverine Tube are also based in Huntsville. Cinram manufactures and distributes 20th Century Fox DVDs and Blu-ray Discs out of their Huntsville plant. Sanmina-SCI also has a large presence in the area. Forty-two Fortune 500 companies have operations in Huntsville.
In 2005, Forbes Magazine named the Huntsville-Decatur Combined Statistical Area as 6th best place in the nation for doing business, and number one in terms of the number of engineers per total employment. In 2006, Huntsville dropped to 14th; the prevalence of engineers was not considered in the 2006 ranking.
Like most federal government, NASA needs a reboot, it's full of corruption from top to bottom. Years of nepotism and minority set asides when hiring has the federal employees they have a bunch of unqualified crooks that are way more interested in getting paid rather than science. While like all federal agencies, the contractors do all the heavy lifting, but don't get much done, because they hands are tied by the federal drones they work for, and under paid because most of the money the contractors should get is paid to the owners of the 8a firms they work for, or kicked back to members of congress election campaigns.
Tea Parties started with the Ron Paul R[evol]ution's 6million dollar one day fundraiser. It doesn't matter what the republican party claims on FOX news or the democrats claim on MSNBC ... we aren't aligned with anyone against Obama ... we are aligned against big government which is both parties platforms. Just happens that Obama is the latest republicat, big government type, behind the wheel.
Alabama is the home of US Senator Richard Shelby, who is currently single-handedly holding all of President Obama's nominations hostage for pork-barrel earmarks to his home state. Let the retaliation begin!
--Obyron
Small businesses pay a lot of employment taxes, even if they aren't profitable. The business has to match the employee's contribution to Social Security and Medicare, and pay into federal and state unemployment funds. These are not necessarily bad things to be paying for, and I'm not arguing that they shouldn't have to pay for these things. But it's simply not true that businesses only pay tax on profits. If the business employs people, it pays employment taxes regardless of profit.
I'm no Palin fan, but that wasn't her doing. That was Ted Stevens' doing. When the Republicans won control of the Senate, he became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee (they decide which bills get funding). Historically, there's almost a p=1.0 correlation between the State whose Senator is chairman of this committee, and which State gets the most per-capita federal spending.
Small businesses pay a lot of employment taxes, even if they aren't profitable. The business has to match the employee's contribution to Social Security and Medicare, and pay into federal and state unemployment funds.
Yes, but on the other hand, all competing employers have to pay these taxes as well. So the taxes essentially reduce the cash wages that you can afford to pay an employee, but it's not unfair (to the business owner) since it has the effect of reducing the employee's market wage. It can be a problem when you bump into the minimum wage, since these taxes essentially increase the loaded cost of a minimum wage employee.
The real problem --- and I say this as a small business owner with 14 employees --- is healthcare. Healthcare costs do /not/ impact all employers equally, and small businesses are particularly vulnerable to rate increases since we have very little bargaining power. Blue Cross is much less likely to hike IBM's rates when Joe Employee's wife get cancer, but small businesses have to worry about this constantly.
Well... The shuttle doesn't meet the requirements initially set for its development - it's not reusable, but it can be fixed. I remember the way it was proposed: mount it on a rocket, put it in space, let it do whatever has to be done and land like a plane, then it goes back to the Cape mounted on a 747 and gets mounted on a rocket and off it goes. Nobody told it would require half a year of repairs between one flight and the next.
It was also designed to bring cargo back from space, something it did, IIRC, once.
It's a single vehicle that tries to do far too many things and fails to do any of them better than previous technologies. It's cool, but that's about it.
I would not oppose maintaining the shuttle while alternative heavy lift capability is not attained. I am also against scrapping all of its technologies: shuttle C could be a nice complementary technology for when all you need it to haul something heavy into LEO.
And having to rely on shuttle caused a lot of delays and cost overruns of the ISS. Of course it was used to build most of it: it consumed all resources that could otherwise be used to develop other less costly ways to build the ISS and, thus, was the only thing that could be used.
Mind you: on every shuttle flight you send all the mass that will land. If nothing returned, you would have to send up a lot less mass.
Executing what the DIRECT folks proposed would cost a fraction of what Ares would have costed.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com