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Is the OMB Trying To End Planetary Exploration?
EccentricAnomaly writes "Lou Friedman (former head of the Planetary Society) has written a provocative article over at Space Policy Review where he accuses the Obama administration of working on plans to gut the robotic Mars program in order to pay for NASA's exciting new rocket. This is after NASA already killed the Europa mission that was to have been the next outer planet mission after Cassini."
Considering the fiscal climate we are in I say the government should forget about going to Mars and just pick the project which would create the most high paying jobs. It seems like the new rocket will create the most and will greatly ease launching more satellites for both private and public use. The only thing on Mars is dirt and sending another probe wont change that.
Like it or not, NASA requires the PR that a rocket provides.
NASA uses a lot of tax money and, with a population whose general impression of resemasearch is that it just giving money to boring nerds in labcoats (ignoring the economy generated by products of past research), they must do regular "America #1, Yihaaaa!" performances in order to keep the population from objecting too much against NASA funding.
Sending robots to a planet that doesn't even have a baseball team is a waste. Launching what looks like a giant bullet shooting large flames from it's back is cool.
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It's not the administration's fault, it's Congress. NASA HQ and the administration didn't even want to build SLS -- they wanted to bolster the commercial launch market instead -- and were forced to do it by the Congressional committee.
If there's someone Lou Friedman should be complaining about, it's Senators Nelson and Shelby and their fixation on providing pork to large aerospace contractors in return for bribes, I mean campaign donations.
I would have hoped that someone in his position would be better informed, frankly.
Pirate Party UK
This is probably going to be marked as flame-bait, but I will say it anyway.
What is the Obama administration supposed to do? They are battling a large deficit, a reduction in tax collection, and a Republican party that won't pass anything. They can only give NASA so much money, as congress has to pass everything, so there is not much NASA or the White House can do.
I'm guessing NASA has to pick between their projects and the new rocket is a bigger priority. Lou is getting the short end of the stick and is pissed, so he's blaming Obama.
Oh well.
It would have been nice if the summary had stated what OMB stands for somewhere (Office of Management and Budget). I was trying to figure out if it was some wacky new term for Obama or his administration.
Look, we're in a debt crisis and cuts must be made, everyone agrees about that. What we don't agree about is what to cut: Some people say "Cut a lot of military spending", others "Cut a lot of social security" and still others "Both of those are more important than planetary exploration". If I were to support significant cuts to social security, it wouldn't be appropriate to ask "Is F69631 trying to end welfare?" as that certainly wouldn't be my motivation. It might be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 consider social security to be less important than our continued presence in [sandy country]" but even that would be questionable as the situation obviously isn't "either-or". It would be appropriate to ask "Does F69631 believe that it's better idea to cut that amount of money from social security than to cut only some of that amount there and cut the rest from [another program]?"...
I'd bet a month's wage that Obama administration has nothing against planetary exploration. It's always easier to create provocative straw-man arguments than it is to actually engage in a civilized discussion in which everyone acknowledges the facts (=the fact that in a democracy we need to make compromises and other people might have different values and opinions than you do). We need some sort of rally to restore sanity or something...
Here's the deal, in my opinion.
Aside from small communities like slashdot and some other nerd forums, there is very little public support for space exploration, and the billions it costs. This is caused by the recent endless string of 'There might be life/water on , so give us more funding', without any results.
This will only change when deep-space telescopes find a definite extrasolar planet for human resettlement.
Because, seriously, why the fuck would we want to get to Mars?!! Would you start training today for a race that might not have to be run in your lifetime?
NASA has a budget of under twenty billion dollars. Since the US budget is a deficit busting 3.8 trillion it takes less than two days to cover NASA. Some will actually say that amount is far too much. Which is odd because we are spending so much we don't have, if we consider that we spend over three billion a day we don't have we deficit spend NASA's budget in a week.
We lose an estimated hundred billion dollars a year is medicare/medicade fraud. When you combine all levels of government we spend over six trillion dollars.
We have over TWO THOUSAND SUBSIDY programs. That is methods of getting money into the hands of people based on arbitrary requirements.
Any attempt to cut one item is usually met with an irrational comparison which puts the person suggesting the cut on the level not much higher than mass murderer. Yet the if we are going to fund science like NASA, and note we need to find all the programs the US funds not just including NASA to get an idea of how much is truly spent, we have to get expenditures under control. NASA isn't the only government player in space, the Air Force does a good amount there as well.
I agree with the person I am replying too, Obama and many Democrats and Republicans have nothing against NASA but one simple fact remains, it garnishes very little votes for them. So the money is better spent on other programs which keep them in office.
The three big forces in American politics are are all self supporting, Big Business, Labor Unions, and Politicians. The rest of us are played all the time and only given two choices because they have effectively shut down third party options.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The space program made sense in the cold war when there was a lot of competition for access to space and each side was afraid of the other. Even now the US has a strategic need to be able to put hardware (both manned and unmanned) into low earth orbit. But I don't think this requirement extends to the moon and beyond. If we want to send humans to Mars and beyond it will not be funded by the US taxpayers. The money will have to come from elsewhere.
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Congress determines the budget, not the Obama administration. NASA can't get anything done unless the project can be porked out to 10 different states.
If China gets their space station started and going, maybe that will trigger Congress to actually back NASA in a meaningful way again. Hoping for Space Race Part 2.
Maybe They know something, or someone, is coming. Maybe They know that we will need a reliable space shuttle to do something (like go pick up beacons on each planet). Maybe They know.
I sleep better at night know that They know.
lucm, indeed.
The thing looks like a souped-up Saturn V. Has the exact quincunx config. of gimballing exhausts under it. They did a nice piece of work with AutoCAD and posted that. Didn't cost very much, as compared to a real rocket. I mean - hey, what this thing does can be done by our very own European ( sorry, Frenchies ) Ariane V. So where's the scoop ??
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Why? Read this for starters: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6168
The way things look, is that there will be funding for the rocket, but no mission to go with it. There is no concerted effort to make a manned mission to anywhere. There is neither a moon, nor a mars nor an asteroid lander in the work. There is no plan for a new space station that require regular launches of 100ton+ payloads. There are no plans to build satellites that mass 100ton+ in LEO or 50ton+ in GTO/GSO.
In other words, we're talking about another white elephant like the Space Shuttle - made for the singular purpose to finance ATK and a slew of other corporations. And of course to "provide jobs" (at a cost of over $1mio per job per year).
What does it mean? I can not understand it. www.371fanyi.com
I have nothing against NASA and the money they spend. I just wish they would consider a new mandate. For years money has been wasted in the quest for Mars. We aren't going to get there in the next few decades...and if we do I can't see we will get much return for the money. Rovers are cheaper and more practical for a Mars mission right now.
The challenge I would like to see NASA take on is a permanent base on the moon ( a good stepping point to Mars) AND how to use that base as a model for future commercial exploitation of the resources up there.
Face it, at the rate we are going the Chinese will probably get to the moon first and I somehow doubt if they can turn it into a commercial operation that it will be a benefit for all mankind.
It must have been 15 years ago I read an article where someone had laid out a nice approach to returning mined minerals from the moon using electo-magnetic launchers to toss payloads back to earth on a free return trajectory. Even back then it seemed a daunting task but well within the technology of the times.
C'mon NASA, I want some moon cheese and I'm even willing to pay for it at my local grocery store!
The operational US Federal science agency I work for has recently hired a number of former NASA program/project managers to "help" us "mature" and "professionalize" our traditionally homegrown project management systems and processes. We were forced to do this by OMB who would not give us money unless we followed an established PM system. I now have a much better understanding of why NASA is in the shape that it is in. The NASA PM process encourages as much back stabbing and finger pointing as possible through the guise of "risk management". It pushes technical expertise away from Government employees and into contractors. It leaves the Govies as the PM experts, who then hire contractors to do the actual PM work. The resulting lack of technical knowledge from the Government employees then allows the contractors to run amok. This, combined with the PM methodology, ends up in the contractors over staffing to support endless meetings that nothing more than arguments over the risk matrix that will be reported to management. There is no leadership and few resources are actually bending metal or writing computer code. It is amazing. I don't know if our agency will survive this new approach given our budget concerns. The sad thing is when my agency fails, people - you may - die. When NASA fails, we learn less and throw money down the can.
"If you leave
Don't leave now
Please don't take my heart away
[etc]
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Sure, NASA gets them votes. It gets them votes by passing around large amounts of money to contractors in key Congressional districts. Like the company in Utah that manufactured the segmented solid-rocket boosters for the Shuttle. Funny, how those same boosters are *required* for the new rocket - over the screaming objections of anyone who knows anything about rocket design.
Planetary exploration missions just cannot serve the same vote-buying purpose.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
China will do
aaaaaaa
NASA is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The Administration seems to be slowly but deliberately crippling every NASA program. There are no clearly defined goals, no guidance from the puppet Charles Bolden (actually Lori Garver is pulling most of his strings) and no money.
The country gets a lot more out of NASA than they do unemployment insurance. At least the scientists and engineers try to build shit, when they are allowed to.
It's time. It is time for NASA to step aside and use their funding to help civilian companies develop and improve their own rockets. It is time for corporations to determine the course of manned space flight, not a political entity with a 4 year half life. It is time for planetary exploration to be guided by what is sustainable and profitable, not by what's popular and will boos approval ratings. It is time for some of us to leave the nest, never to return, rather than fantasize about it on TV.
forget NASA, let's just go to Europa ourselves, who's down with that?!
In case nobody noticed, there is not much political will in Washington to fund much of anything these days. 19 billion/year is not small change and NASA should be able to work on one or two really cool projects - but not everything at once. Would you rather cancel the cool new rocket and leave sending humans to space entirely to Russians? With Shuttle gone, this should leave you with plenty of robotic missions.
Doesn't China have the money to put into a maned space mission? Maybe he should direct his needs towards a country, in the global economy, that is making money instead of one that is trying to thwart an economic implosion. Kicking Obama in the balls while he is trying to keep the country from falling back into the hands of the people that devastated the countries economy is childish at best.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
NASA has basically bet the Mars program on the soon to be launched MSL. If it doesn't work, it will be very hard to keep the teams of researchers intact for the very long gap until the next mission.
I predict that planetary (and lunar) exploration will be internationalized under the ISECG's Global Exploration Roadmap, which is the best thought out plan for space exploration I have seen in a long time.
NASA didn't scrub the Europa mission for budgetary reasons. They did it because the aliens told them to!
It's worse, it looks like they want to shut down Cassini early: http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/10/updates.html
The plan was to have Cassini end its mission by flying between the planet and the rings to do essentially the Juno mission at Saturn. NASA's already paid for Cassini, it's a waste to shut it down early... Juno was $1B, and Cassini could do the same thing at Saturn for pennies on that dollar.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
No, Obama is.
What he is doing is trying to save it from the chopping block. The republicans want it killed.
The villain of this play are the current crop republicans. Remember, they are only about pushing a certain religious agenda. They have been completely co-opt by what had been the lunatic fringe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
NASA uses a lot of tax money
NASA budget: $19 billion
US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.
You're absolutely right about NASA not consuming nearly as much as other parts of the budget. But neither is NASA a mandated constitutional duty as defense is. So it's naturally going to get a lower priority as it's considered discretionary spending.
Now, that said, I completely agree with you on the issue of where the budget problems are (entitlements, entitlements, entitlements), but even being of a more hawkish disposition than not, I'll be the first to tell you that there's plenty to cut in DOD's budget as well ($7 billion for a freakin' destroyer?), but even then, the public probably isn't going to support a higher NASA budget much, especially in times of high unemployment. I think small, cheap probes to other worlds, and perhaps a manned mission to an asteroid, are about as good as we can expect to get. You could cut DOD in half, and you're still not going to get more dollars for NASA. Just the way it is.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I'm sorry but that's just factually untrue. The word "Try" has two implications: A motivation to see something happen and action to make that reality. If there's only motivation but no action, "tries" is misleading because better word would be "wants", "wishes", etc. If there's only action but no motivation, better word would be "causes".
For example: I try to get in shape (I've got motivation and take action). To get in shape I intend to jog. Jogging causes my shoes to wear off. Is it accurate to say "I'm trying to wear off my shoes"? No. That's misleading as it simply isn't how the word is used and it makes no sense at all to use it like that. "I try to do X" implies that I've achieved success when I've reached X. I haven't achieved any success when my shoes have worn off so I'm clearly not trying to do that. I'm not trying to do all [unwanted side effects of things I'm trying to do].
I find it quite ironic that a person who references Orwell in their sig. manages such wordplay to twist words to suit a political agenda.
Our military is TEN TIMES that of China.
Exactly how are you determining that?
People's Liberation Army (inc. ground, air, and naval forces)
Active Duty - 2,285,000
Reserves - 800, 000
2010 Military Budget - $114,000,000,000 (ranked 2nd), 2.2% of GDP
United States Armed Forces
Active Duty - 1,477,896
Reserves - 1,458,500
2010 Military budget - $698,105,000,000 (ranked 1st), 4.7% of GDP
The US Navy has a larger number of combat vessels, but not by much... 286 vs approx 230 for the Chinese Navy (and not including the PLAN's almost 300 small patrol missile boats, and counting neither sides' non-combat auxiliary ships). We do have a large advantage in aircraft, which offsets the heavy Chinese advantage in ground troops and armor. This also doesn't account for the nearly 1.5 million "paramilitary" forces of China... basically, forces that are technically kinds of police units, but receive infantry training and equipment, on the Soviet model, and are used for "internal security" and are under command of the PLA staff.
The US does indeed spend much more in dollar terms than China does, but that's because China has traditionally relied upon the Soviet model: high quantity of weapons and people at low costs. They're beginning to change that, moving to fewer numbers, with more expensive and capable weapons. Since WWII, the US has relied upon a fewer-but-more-advanced model of equipment procurement. New technologies are almost always developed here first, and so they naturally cost more, especially since the goal is always to have more advanced stuff than possible opponents. As a past Joint Chief said, "If it comes down to war, we don't want a fair fight. We want it heavily unfair, on our side".
Now, I think we have a lot of room to cut in DOD, but I certainly agree with that philosophy.
The US budget also includes money for a land war, and a second post-combat occupation force. You can question of the wisdom of either, but clearly it raises the budget numbers above normal peacetime levels, even for a technologicaly-advanced military force.
Bottom line, the US isn't "ten times" anything compared to Chinese forces, and the advantages we do have are slipping away, and will continue to do so as the US cuts it's military budget and China catches up in the technology gap (and increases their budget, which they'e done every year).
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Yah, I thought it was the Ontario Municipal Board, and they definitely don't want space exploration unless there is some possibility of making millions from developers.
The post from @PeterBrett really hits the nail on the head. To his comment, I'll add that from the Reagan Administration onward, there has been money to do either humans in space or planetary exploration well, but not both, and it's just gotten worse with time. The Obama Administration seems to have recognized this, and was intending to focus on science while encouraging private industry to give pulling a rabbit out of their hat their best shot.
[snark]Perhaps we could fix this by relocating JPL to Alabama.[/snark]
Luke, help me take this mask off