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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."
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
It's all about pork-barrel income and this is why NASA has failed to do anything on the manned spaceflight for decades... At least UK doesn't have that much money sunk in manned spaceflight, yet. The existing-but-soon-on-its-way Government have decided to have an astronaut and has cut many science projects already.
Taxes bring in money from that state ... its the job of congressman to earmark it back to the state they represent. Anything not earmarked is handed over to the executive branch to spend however they want without any sunlight/oversite. The war against earmarks is a smoke screen to provide the executive branch more money to throw around doing who knows what. As far as I am concerned ... every damn cent should be earmarked. At least then we know where its going.
I fail to see how the fact that NASA will get the funding anyway makes this not hypocritical. The project in question has had a lot of money spent on it and hasn't really worked very well in the past few years. I think the comment about the tea parties from the parent came from them being mostly Republicans, which you're correct in saying that it doesn't necessarily make them agree with the Tea Party protesters. However, this does mean that five out of seven of their congressmen are from a party which ran mostly on the promise of reduced spending and belt-tightening in the last couple election cycles. This does raise some questions as to why it is they can do this and not have their fellow party members claim that they're socialists or spend-thrifts.
This also comes at the same time that one of Alabama's senators is holding up all confirmations of administration officials in order to block spending cuts in the state. Which seems to color these actions, perhaps incorrectly, as being intended to save their pork.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving?
A couple of those, big business and health care costs are directly linked to tax law. Big businesses can play the tax game better. Complicated tax law increases the barrier to entry for small businesses. And not paying taxes on employer health care just drives up the cost. Hmmm, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason foreign competition is "unfair" is because they don't have to cough money for Social Security, health care benefits and other things that plump up the cost of labor without adding much of anything. Taxes play a big role in that process.
I have a graduate degree in rocket engineering and have been testing rockets longer than most of you have been alive.
Constellation is way over budget, way behind schedule, with a bunch of sniveling managers trying to hide both facts. That's classic mismanagement, in any goddamn field. These guys should be put out to pasture and whipped for attempting the endeavor in the first place with inadequate resources. Rocket science may not be hard anymore but IT IS EXPENSIVE, always will be. These fuckers knew better, they were pretty clearly just showing up for a paycheck.
I'm assuming you're speaking in a 'macro' sense, since the space program has always been a government run enterprise relying heavily on private contractors. More like a legacy of Lyndon Johnson than anyone else.
Of course, your macro argument on Reagan doesn't fly either, as Reagan wasn't very successful at convincing congress to privatize or eliminate much of anything. He was a little busy winning the Cold War, I guess.
The fault really lies with Congress (specifically the House) who create the spending bills. A congress run by Democrats for 40 of the 50 past years. Not that the GOP was all the impressive during their brief time in charge. I hope they learned a lesson since it's clear the Democrats haven't.
More debt in one year than in the entire history of the country and we're debating about who gets the pork from NASA - make no mistake, this isn't about eliminating pork, just shifting who it goes to. Alabama isn't what you would call an Obama friendly state..
Unfortunately, in this case, we need to cut pork not to cut taxes, but rather to get our debt load under control
I agree that we need to get our debt under control, but this is a long term problem. We need to solve it AFTER we get the economy in shape. Cutting spending now is foolhardy. That doesn't mean EVERY program is a worthy one of course. If we're talking about going to the moon again, it's a stupid program that doesn't benefit much of anyone.
The real problem here is Americans have short memories. After this whole economic mess is over in a few years will there really be enough political will to actually solve our long term debt problem?
Every American household is now responsible for almost a million dollars in government debt and as-yet-unfunded government programs.
I don't know where you're getting your numbers from, but according to the publicly available numbers for the national debt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
and the households:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
The number is actually more like 100,000 per household. That's still bad, but nowhere near the million dollars which you quote.
AccountKiller
As I listen to your wisdom, I am now beginning to understand why China is now able to spend about $145 billion dollars per year on high speed trains
When you treat most of your population as "slaves of the state" (the average Chinese still needs government permission to move from the countryside to the city, for example) then it frees up a lot of money for whatever else you might want to spend it on, but that doesn't make it right. There are hundreds of millions of working class Chinese who never ride these trains and never will, but their cheap labor greases the wheels of the Chinese economy and the Chinese state has an interest in keeping them in their places. They call it "social stability" (a nice term for do what the state demands or disappear).
while America struggles to complete its first such link between two Florida cities a little over a hundred miles apart by 2014
The small number of high speed rail links in the United States is not due to lack of knowledge or inability to build such links if we wanted to, but rather the fact that high speed rail is largely not competitive with regional airports which provide cheap flights between major and most medium sized cities (the sort that a high speed train would connect). The North American continent is bigger and more spread out than Japan or Europe where high speed rail makes more sense. There may be a few marginally cost effective routes in some regions, but planes are still cheaper and NIMBYs (who will file lawsuits to restrict train speed thereby eviscerating any advantage the train might have had over an airline ticket) will make the trains uncompetitive.
I agree, its time to stop spending money on pork in Alabama so that it can be funneled to foreign defense contractors, who grease the palms of Alabama senators.
I would like to less overall government spending, not equal spending but on different things. What makes you think that I want any savings from killing to the constellation program to go right back to the defense contractors? I would prefer that it be returned to the American taxpayers or used to pay down the exploding national debt instead.