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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."
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!
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.