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NASA Attempts To Cut Back Constellation
FleaPlus writes "In a surprise move in the battle between NASA and certain members of Congress over NASA's future direction, NASA has told its contractors to cut back nearly $1 billion on this year's Ares/Constellation program, stating that the cutback is necessary to remain in compliance with federal spending laws requiring contractors to withhold contract termination costs. While complying with budgeting laws (and in line with NASA's desire to cancel Constellation), this move is also potentially in violation of a 2010 appropriations amendment by Sen. Shelby (R-AL) and Sen. Bennett (R-UT) which prohibits NASA from terminating any Constellation contracts. If NASA's move goes through, the biggest liability is $500M for ATK, the contractor who is/was responsible for the first stage of the Ares I medium-lift rocket."
Orion left holding pants up with no belt
It pisses me off to no end that we can afford to spend trillions of dollars killing each other, but we can't afford a few billion dollars exploring the universe around us.
What the fuck, people.
Living With a Nerd
Hang on, weren't they going to cancel constellation in the new budjet?
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
You can't force an organization to stop spending money while at the same time forcing it to not stop spending money.
From reading the background on this, it seems that the whole "force Constellation to continue" was essentially a pork measure for the states where the contractors are. (Notice that the bill is credited to two Republicans.) This isn't about space exploration; if NASA felt the project was scientifically worthwhile, they wouldn't be trying to cancel it. Space exploration is what NASA does.
This has been over a month coming. The irony is that at least for Orion they are using some jobs stimulus money that was given to keep working. At least through June. So what was important enough for stimulus money one day goes on the chopping block the next. Makes sense. My understanding is there is some verbage attached to an Afghanistan funding bill (something guaranteed to pass) that addresses the termination fee coverage issue.
I do not care whether it's Ares V, which doesn't really quite exist yet, the even more vaporware "new heavy lifter" that president Obama spoke of, or some weird hybrid that the nerds down in propulsion dynamics wrote up on the back of a napkin 2 or 3 years ago and havn't told you about yet...
But will you PLEASE get our monkey asses to Mars before I die?
I'd love to see the beginings of a manned Mars base (even, dare I dream, a colony?!), but at this point I'll take Neil Armstrong's grandson standing there holding a flag with 50 (or even 52) stars on it.
Pick a heavy lifter that can get the job done, put some intelligent technial people in charge of it, give them the money and resources to get it done, and LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next decade. Also, if it's absolutely necessary to get the job done again, I'm ok with you telling them that the russians (or maybe the chinese, the're more likely to believe that nowadays) are going to take over the world (scratch that, the galaxy) if they don't succeed.
That is all.
Too bad this is happening because I've always been a fan of private industry gaining more experience in the space exploration industry. It seems, not only was NASA inefficient and bureaucratic when it came to building space vehicles, they're impotent when charged with the simple task of doling out cash to competent private companies who are better equipped to handle the job. Yet another example of how large government is broken. I've worked in both the private and public sector and know from experience the problem lies with accountability. There is a serious disconnect between reality (i.e. what works vs. doesn't) and politics. Policies in private industry are based on getting the job done quickly, efficiently and competitively whereas there is no such incentive in the government sector.
The decades of Nazi's Ageing in Southern Anonymity seems to be over.
You would think they would have passed on the 'how to keep your projects funded' secrets as well as engineering, medical and other useful data.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Well of course Hussein Obama would cut NASA. How's he going to pay for all this socialist crap that he has planned? Next to cut will be the military and on and on until we are forced to wear chairman Mao suits like good little communists!
This I agree with. I think NASA should be used as a governing body to be in charge of overall space operations (for now), but the private industry should be funded enough to do the research and build the vehicles. NASA shouldn't be gutted (on the contrary, I think its budget should still be increased), but its role needs to be looked at.
Not sure why you were modded down. Companies like Orbital (formally Fairchild) already build most of NASA's hardware anyway. Might as well make it official, know what I mean?
Living With a Nerd
Screw you guys! I'm gonna build my own space launcher, with blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the blackjack!
Manned space flight was a government program that has been determined to be
too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding
levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and few people
believe that throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into space will solve
them. Grown-up people chosen to make hard and realistic decisions about our
public funds and resources have decided this. NASA and its Tom Swift-space buffs
can't accept it. I'm sorry, guys, but it's time to get real.
Sure, politicians will continue announce great new projects like manned Mars
missions. But then they will quietly de-fund them to nearly nothing a few years
later. They don't have any choice. Money that would have been spent on these
projects has already been spent; and it's gone.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because
they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that
their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for
space exploration. There is no trillion dollars for anything left anywhere in
the USA.
Money is not a physical good. Money is basically created out of nothing. If
this conjured money doesn't in turn create real wealth, it disappears back to
nothing by means of inflation. Space exploration does not create wealth by
itself. It is only a combination of heavily-subsidized unfocused research and
technological stunts done for national prestige. NASA engineers never
understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand
economics.
There won't be hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space in the coming
years because there was already a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan
war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on
maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too
big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $650,000 mortgages to
$10/hr janitors. And then there were all the trillions of dollars spent on federal
government budget deficits.
All these trillion-dollar misadventures didn't create any real wealth. And
therefore, the money disappeared. America was rich in the past, now it's not.
There were great sums of money in the past available for funding giant government
projects, but there aren't going to be any more of these giant projects in the future.
The trillions of dollars that space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on
the glorious future in space and its endless possibilities for the betterment of
humanity don't exist anymore.
Space-cadets love to talk about the need to venture beyond the moon in order
to save humanity from a soon-to-be dying Earth. But this is not science
talking, it's a personality disorder. These guys assume that because their
scientific prowess has created tools and techniques that can destroy the Earth,
then it will inevitable happen. And that they have a right, and even a destiny,
to make it happen. They confuse rockets with penises and hydrogen bombs with
testicles. These guys are not clear-eyed, sober engineers; they are death-worshiping
fascists. They are left-over 'Dr. Strangelove' techno-psychopaths from mid-20th
century. They're pissed because 'little-minded people' wouldn't let them burn
the Earth and rule the ashes. These men are transparently insane, and you shouldn't
pay serious attention to them. Fortunately, their time has gone and they don't
have the political power that they did fifty years ago.
We live in a different age now. This is the era of limits. Understand this
and we will all prosper in new and unexpected ways. We all need to learn to
differentiate fact from fantasy and leave the fantasies to the Hollywood. Space
Exploration is a 20th-century quasi-religion that has begun to manifest itself
as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Don't let that happen to you.
with the successful launch of the falcon 9 recently, its a nail in the coffin of these really quite bad launch vehicles.
yeah and I thought Pluto was a planet. Times they are a changin'
Would have bought us two more SpaceX's and four more new rockets, based on what SpaceX has spent in their 8 years or so of existance.
NASA's Constellation program is a massive budget boondoggle.
Stick a fork in it....
Necron69
This is a great example of how NASA is trying to cut a wasteful program but is having its hands tied by Republican senators with solely their own selfish interests in mind and not caring about the usefulness of the end output. I can't remember the exact number but something like over 90% of the NASA budget is mandated of where it is spent by congress and the NASA administrator has no control over it. NASA has no choice but to be inefficient when saddled with restrictions like that.
NASA would be far more effective if it wasn't mandated by law to keep current contracts in place. Constellation was mandated by Bush, is completely unrealistic and unsustainable, and they are trying to terminate it which is what any fiscally responsible organization, public or private would do. However senators are passing stupid laws to prevent them from taking the right path. ,
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
" I think NASA should be used as a governing body to be in charge of overall space operations (for now), but the private industry should be funded enough to do the research and build the vehicles."
I think NASA should be abolished. It was a creature of it's time... the US-Soviet space race, and it served its purpose as a cradle of US space exploration. It's time we left the cradle and let the children grow up and move out on their own. Abolish NASA, and farm out its responsibilities to existing agencies. Traditional aerospace research... the "Right Stuff" kind of flight testing, etc... should be given to DARPA. A new, smaller agency should be created that does nothing but manage space exploration and astronomy-based sciences. They'd do things like manage observatories, coordinate space research with universities, and manage space and planetary probes. Call it the US Space Institute or something similar if you like. Last, as much launch activity as possible should be turned over to the private sector. Perhaps the Commerce Department should have a bureau that manages these activities. Create more "Spaceports" like Mojave. There are plenty of retired Air Force bases and Army Air Corps fields in the southwest that could be converted to this kind of use.
Regardless, NASA in its current form has outlived its usefulness, and its duties are too varied and scattershot. Break it up and merge it into smaller units with distinctive missions.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The filibuster DDoS attack against the constitutional function of the senate brings you much of todays PORK spending. These senators have corps in their state that want our tax money. Deals must be made for EACH senator's pet project when they decide they are in the best position to abuse procedures. (filibuster is not written into the system and some voting thresholds are which clearly imply a majority rule is the expected norm.)
State government needs to get back some of their power to pick senators. We changed it due to corruption; but it has become corrupt either way while state representation has fallen down to the point where the federal government has become too powerful. Power corrupts and must be distributed even in some cases where it is not ideal. Just as the right to due process applies to everybody without exception (drawing lines only leads to abuse so this must be severely limited.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You are correct except for your knee-jerk desire to place blame on a single party. BOTH parties pull as much pork money into their states as possible, and in this case as many of the NASA contracts are in states that tend to vote republican, it happens to be republican senators pushing this particular issue... but do some reading on the subject and you'll find that there are plenty of democrats in the same situation with NASA contracts in their states as well.
Polictics is politics. No matter what team you're on, you play the same game. Political parties matter about as much as uniform colors. You root for the burgandy and gold team, I root for the yellow and black team.
FTS:
While complying with budgeting laws (and in line with NASA's desire to cancel Constellation), this move is also potentially in violation of a 2010 appropriations amendment by Sen. Shelby (R-AL) and Sen. Bennett (R-UT) which prohibits NASA from terminating any Constellation contracts.
The mind boggles. I've never seen politicians in other countries actively sabotaging current policy like this.
Although I agree with your assessment that the filibuster is bottleneck completely controlled by the corporate/wealthy, I don't think going back to states appointing Senators will help. I have a simpler idea: we have a problem with the filibuster, the solution is to address/eliminate the problem. Kill or weaken the filibuster and (gasp!) we'll have a more democratic government!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"NASAs desire to cancel Constellation"? Is this the Obama-led NASA, as I was under the impression that NASA wanted to continue with the programme?
My web domain.
Problem is that an alien occupation would probably be incredibly devastating for us, somewhere along the lines of the Spanish conquest of South America, I think.
I can't remember the exact number but something like over 90% of the NASA budget is mandated of where it is spent by congress and the NASA administrator has no control over it. NASA has no choice but to be inefficient when saddled with restrictions like that.
I'm shocked. Shocked! You say that spending within a government agency is driven by... AGHAST... politics?
If you want to take some of the politics out, then with their scientists, R&D and launch facilities the NASA centers would be very competitive as FFRDCs. Look at NASA's JPL which is overseen by Caltech and see how successful they have been with the robotic missions: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05306/#Topic5
Why aren't all the NASA centers run like that? Focus on the missions.
Yes but only the Republicans are the hypocrites you fucking moron. The Democrats platform on this behavior. See how one is acting against the will (hypothetically) of their constituents, and the other is doing exactly what they were elected to do. Are you really that fucking dumb? Can you not see how this shit matters? You and all the people like you are the reason shit never gets any better.
Why aren't all the NASA centers run like that?
Because as I said, the vast majority of the money is mandated to go to specific projects instead of where it makes sense.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
After Challenger, Congress (in the form of the appropriations committees) mandated a new Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM). NASA indicated that the Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor (RSRM) and the changes suggested by the Rodgers commission were more than adequate.
Still, ASRM was funded. Why? Congress said so.
For years, we as taxpayers footed the bill to build a new plant in Iuka Mississippi, and to develop a new monolithic beast that even NASA thought was infeasable.
Why? Because Congress said so.
Then, after spending billions a new congress came in and said "If NASA says they don't need it, why are we funding it?"
And thus, the ASRM died.
The moral of the story: If Congress Says so, you have to do it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"