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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."
Now, I dun know so much about rockets and flyin' to the moon and all that, but hooey, when you wanna start talkin' bout putting some downhome good ol' boys out of work, well, sir, I just gotta speak my mind. This ain't a threat, son. You take those jobs away from us here and God Almighty help us, we ain't gonna have nothin better to do than march on up to Washington and have us an ol' fashioned conference with each individual congresscritter that 'pposed us. Alabama style.
You catch my drift, fellas?
The Alabamans want to save their pork, plain and simple.
Their efforts should be attacked as being pure pork-barrel politics and characterized as a deliberate attempt to save a bad program purely for the money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Typical, people complain about taxes and wasteful spending, then shit themselves when the government stops spending wastefully ON THEM.
I guess I understand it. People don't really care about whether taxes are high or being spent wisely. They only care about how much of it goes to them. To most, the government is nothing more than a big ciculating fan that sucks money from somewhere and blows it to somewhere else. You jockey for position to stand where the biggest cash dunes collect, and from there use the money to shape the future direction of the wind.
That's all this is. It's got nothing to do with actual space exploration or engineering or research.
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).
So, to recap:
Alabama congresscritters vote to cut taxes and argue that we should reduce government. The citizens call Obama everything from a socialist to a fascist, and argue that they are Taxed Enough Already (that's the TEA in teabagger) and that government is full of waste. Yet when the Democrats want to cut a program that hasn't produced in an effort to save money, the Alabamanites are upset?
Pure hypocracy.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
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.
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!
How many weasel words and how much blatant bias is there in this summary ? We would not even dare to speak of Microsoft like this - and we are on slashdot.
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
States rights seem to be popular on this board. I'm not sure why-- I'm not particularly inclined to trust "those idiots down in Richmond" over "those idiots down in Washington." But perhaps the states could fill a void and start up space exploration programs of their own.
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He believed that if we replace federal workers as much as possible with private contractors, we could shift the size of government at will - increasing or decreasing the labor force in tune with the changing priorities and budgets.
The fallacy is that when you have federal tax dollars flowing into a locale, that locale becomes dependent on the influx. To cut that flow off - whether through salaries or contracts - means killing growth in a district. A district which will look to its congressman as their champion to right that "wrong." In effect, all we've done is add more overhead (contract administration on both sides, procurement processes, and profit for the contractors). Well, that and forced the core engineers and scientists out of NASA, so that when we really need continuity we can't get it.
There are things that can be outsourced efficiently. I outsource cleaning my office, office supplies, and telecommunications. If I chose a different vendor for any of those, it's no big deal. But when you're dealing with a $4T budget, it means that switching vendors or stopping a project has a major impact on whatever area your vendor was set up in. Sadly, we don't really have the money to pay everyone - no matter what your congressman promised two years ago.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This is a lot like how communities fought military base closures. We don't need an air base in the Dakotas to defend ourselves from Canadians. They want it because the base contributes to the local economies. A lot of times, the Pentagon gets hardware forced on them because a contractor in key district makes them, it had nothing to do with whether it was needed or wanted. The bigger projects made with components from many different districts are even harder to kill.
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
What about neophyte startups like ULA, a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed, and of course Boeing proper. Much of the new 'commercial' sector is going to be the same people as before, just acting through fixed-price rather than cost-plus contracts.
Comparing Ares 1X to Falcon 9 is foolish. Falcon 9 is the potentially final vehicle, with a first and second stage. Ares 1X was a 4-segment SRB (as opposed to the required 5-segment), a second stage mass simulator, and a Titan control system. It was intended only as an aerodynamic test, and yet managed to cost as much as all of Space X's development combined. A better analogy would be Ares 1X:Ares 1 as Falcon 1:Falcon 9, in terms of progression of technology. And to answer your question, F9 is coming along quite well. Should see the first test flight in the next few months -- if it doesn't go off, we're fortunate because F9 isn't a single point of failure in this new plan, unlike Ares 1, and there are still other, completely separate vehicles in development that will be able to take up the slack.
Finally, Bolsheviks in the Augustine Commission??? Its socialist to want to privatize something??? Clearly I'm confused in my understanding of these words.
This plan is no less vacuous than the program of record, and has the advantage of having results that can be built off of within an administration -- if CxP were continued, it would just be at risk of being cancelled by the next administration change, and the one after that, and the one after that (no landing till the 2030s). A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. NASA hasn't managed to build a new vehicle using traditional contracting methods since the 1970s, it would be insanity to keep doing it this way.
Oh I see. Just because Obama does it its wrong. Now I get it!
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.
Obviously you have never watched a comedian that isn't white, or watched any tv comedies that have non-whites as their main character.
My ethnic group/race is Homo sapiens.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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.
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.