Slashdot Mirror
Senators Demand NASA Continue Spending On Ares
FleaPlus writes "Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL and ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) have added an amendment onto an emergency spending bill for military operations in Afghanistan, reiterating that NASA must continue spending its funds on the Constellation program, particularly the medium-lift Ares I rocket. Alabama and Utah have strong ties to Ares/Constellation contractors, and both senators are opposed to the new direction for NASA, with Shelby describing it as a 'death march' for US spaceflight and criticizing the emphasis on commercial rockets."
And this is why the US is such trouble. When politicians are eagerly representing a companies views rather than the country.
Budget be damned! Hold funding for the troops hostage to a steaming helping of pork. I thought Republicans where supposed to support the troops and be against deficit spending.
These actions speak louder than words, and I hope the voters are listening this November.
Yes they are listening, just through republican ears. These are highly tuned and will hear roughly the following: Democrats who vote against this are against funding our troops, republicans who vote for this are voting for our space program!
Really, politics is a lot simpler then people think.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What planet did I wake up on today? Republicans criticizing the commercialization of low-orbit space flights? Demanding the return of a gigantic, overbudget, behind schedule rocket to nowhere? Obama for the privatization of space and Conservatives for the continuation of a government monopoly on space? Has everyone gone space crazy?!
I take pride in NASA but it will be a sad day when the last shuttle lands and we have to rely solely on others for LEO travel.
1960's: "Do you have the right stuff?"
2010's: "How's your Russian?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Spending truckloads of money on a super expensive brand-name rocket that not only do nothing more than the generic ones around but whose purpose of shuttling stuff to the ISS makes it entirely fucking retarded as by the time the rocket gets to orbit the atomized remains of the ISS will be floating in the pacific.
This is the most apparent short sighted bill i've seen in a long fucking while. Someone should add a clause that draws the additional funding required from the pocket of the senators and the companies they are puppets for, perhaps they would be motivated to produce something that's a bit less shitty and budgethogging if they had to pay for it themself.
It's those engineers and support personnel who are about to be out of a job in those states are the ones that need Ares funded. Although I do support the commercialization of space and getting NASA out of the manned LEO rides, I can sympathize with those who are about to be unemployed because of the budget reversal. My memories goes back to the mid 1970s when my father and his friends lost their jobs when Apollo 17 completed it's mission.
Can I blame those GOP Senators for pushing for funding to keep jobs in their state? Nope, sure can't. Do I think it should be funded, nope, sure don't.
Sorry, but it can't be summed up in six words.
It's easy to say that the republicans are in the pockets of some big company.
The Republicans and the Democrats are in the same people's pockets. If some big aerospace factories close, thousands of people lose jobs, and the local representative doesn't get re-elected. The difference between the Republican and the Democrat is that the Republican thinks it's the big company's responsibility to give those people a job, and the Democrat thinks it's the government's responsibility to make sure those workers don't need to worry about whether they have a job or not.
Bottom line, it's always about the voters. Except that most of our citizens of voting age are so cynical about the process, and think it's all about the "money/power/big companies/cronyism" that they stay home and dilute the real power base.
Get off your ass and go vote.
Better yet. Understand what the people you're voting for actually stand for before you go vote. Otherwise you'll be surprised when the guy you voted for to change things starts supporting revoking Miranda rights, and sends more troops to the wars you don't support, and keeps an infamous prison open, and supports off-shore drilling, and signs a massive health care welfare bill into law just like the last guy did, and generally acts like a re-incarnation of George W. Bush, even though the writing was on the wall before the election, and everybody who pointed it out was routinely censored by the internet community.
It's not pork; it's R&D that's every bit as valid as anything else the Federal government spends money on, if not more so.
It keeps thousands of aerospace engineers, scientists, and technicians productively employed.
It restores funding to a project that is well underway and is built on known, working technology (Apollo).
It gives us an American manned launch capability in the near future, versus the complete unknown of relying on the private sector.
It's a tiny investment; Nasa needs about $6 billion a year to keep Constellation going. It's literally a drop in the bucket compared to many other appropriations.
The country needs a manned space program. Say what you will about the Shuttle and other manned spacecraft, they have been an inspiration to generations of young Americans to pursue science and engineering careers. While our private sector engineering jobs have dwindled along with our domestic industrial production, aerospace remains a promising field. Jet aircraft are just about the only big ticket industrial item America still exports, and aerospace technology from Nasa bleeds over to the jet transportation field all the time.
Now consider what else the Feds spend our money on:
$700+ billion economic stimulus - truly, this is almost all pork and includes various "jobs training programs", money for local construction projects, items like that which are traditionally considered bacon. Individually, these projects may have merit, but why should the federal government be funding them with a huge a deficit?
$600+ billion for defense. Surely, 1% of this budget could be redirected to Nasa with no damage to our national security.
$125+ billion per year for new healthcare obligations. That's roughly twenty times the sum Nasa needs, and it won't even cover all the uninsured. It basically is a payoff to medical providers to take care of the indigent or working poor who can't or won't provide for their own healthcare funding.
We could easily cut a trillion or so dollars from our national budget and not even notice the difference. Maybe 25% of Pentagon funding, and a bunch of entitlements, and the economy would actually benefit from the expanded availability of lending capital.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I agree that corporations have way too much influence over government policy. But that's not the problem here.
You're oversimplifying things when you cast it as "the people" versus "corporations". In this particular case, the two are actually aligned. If Ares is canceled, it isn't just corporations in Utah and Alabama who will lose out there, it's all the people who work for these corporations, and everybody in the state who would be affected by the damage to the local economies. Which is just about everybody. Which is why "the people" are actually for Ares. But not all the people — just the ones that live in Utah and Alabama.
To most of us, Ares is pure pork. But not to its supporters. The problem is not "us" versus "them", it's the fact that everybody wants their own bit of pork, and everybody thinks that somebody else is being too greedy. That attitude is screwing us up on every level: health care, physical infrastructure, education, you name it.
So a budget increase, a scope increase and general revitalization of a flagging agency are a death march? Only when some of the suffering is in your district. Obama is promising more NASA for more uses and the Republicans are screaming no.
Ares I is slated to cost $35 BILLION to develop. This is for a basically existing design. Delta and Atlas EELV cost about $5-7G together and produced two families of light-medium-medium-heavy launchers. Ares is a joke and the sooner it dies the better.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
but is it the best use of NASA funds???
1) It's not a good design,
2) there are already other off the shelf American launchers
available that can do LEO for cargo for less money and are less expensive to make man rated including
the Atlas V, Falcon 9, and Delta IV heavy. The Delta and the Atlas are already proven launch vehicles
and the Falcon 9 will likely have proven itself in a month or so. Ares I would not be ready until 2018.
3) Ares sucks money away from other more viable space exploration activities
4) If you want to keep NASA employees productively employed let them work on missions that get us out of
Low earth orbit instead of trying to reinvent apollo(on steroids, on crack, on lsd?)
You have a complete misinterpretation of what 'commercial space' means in this case. The government is still buying the vehicles, launching missions, and deciding where to go -- NASA is in no way being dismantled. What we're doing is just changing how we pay for developing vehicles, and trying to set up a system thats less vulnerable to political disturbances.
Clearly the current way of doing HSF is failing. The only viable option to keep flying on an American vehicle right now is to keep flying the shuttle, and probably kill another 7 astronauts in a few more years. NASA/MSFC has completely failed to develop a new manned vehicle since the shuttle. This is not the fault of the workers and engineers there, but rather constant requirement changes from on high and a focus on doing fancier things rather than keeping it simple.
Doing the same things again and expecting new results is defined as insanity, and hoping that congress will become something other than a short-sighted political body is not a valid exploration plan. If you have a better plan than doing fixed price contracts with multiple vendors I'd like to hear them.