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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...
You've got it backwards. The expensive "exciting new rocket" that the administration likes would be able to take people to Mars ("The Space Launch System, or SLS, will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond.") The robotic space probes (the only ones that mention Mars in the Slashdot summary) do not--they're robotic. (And they'll get there in your lifetime, too).
You're supporting the wrong side.
This will only change when deep-space telescopes find a definite extrasolar planet for human resettlement.
We've found a huge number of candidate planetary star systems, with confirmed planets in the habitable zone, using the Kepler telescope. But now we need JWST to look more closely at them. But JWST was underfunded, so it got delayed and went over budget, which caused it to get delayed some more, in a sort of destructive spiral. And now NASA's caught between a rock and hard place. Congress orders NASA to build SLS and JWST and run the ISS and collaborate with other countries and do technology research and do educational outreach and launch and run geoscience projects and... Congress doesn't provide the funds necessary to do all those things.
It's a "No bucks, no Buck Rogers" situation. And then people have the gall to blame NASA, rather than Congress.
Because, seriously, why the fuck would we want to get to Mars?
Because, seriously, why the fuck would we want to climb Everest?
Mars is the most hospitable planet in the solar system for Earth life, and the best place available to practice and refine the technologies needed for interstellar travel and colonisation.
Pirate Party UK
Because you have to learn to walk before you try and run. What hope would our distant descendants have of surviving on an extrasolar planet lightyears from Earth if we (or more likely our grandchildren/great-grandchildren) don't see what the problems are and try and solve them? One things for sure, if we don't move beyond Earth soon we are going to have serious problems with feeding, and houseing our ever growing population. Problem is, that may not be as "simple" as building ships and packing off a billion or so people to Mars or wherever. Far from it.
Bill Bryson made a point I hadn't come across before I read it in "A brief History of Everything"; our bodies are incredibly fine-tuned to life here on Earth at this particular point in time. As little as a few fractions of a percentage point change in the composition of trace elements in our environment - atmosphere, water, food chain, everything - could easily turn out to be fatal. That's potentially going to be a huge hurdle before even a tentative colony can be established off world. If we can't even grow food locally and have to ship everything from Earth, let alone having to live in a bubble. Short of viable terraforming, I don't see any easy solution to that, but the sooner we get started the sooner we might figure it out.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
We don't. Some people do, but their missions are privately funded.
No, Earth is absurdly more hospitable.
No, even if you wanted to pursue the fantasies of interstellar travel, doing it on Earth is much preferred.
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
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).
The fact that it comes from the CATO organisation. (You know them, the folks that would to find a way to microcharge you for every breath you take) is enough comment in and of itself.
Space travel isn't going to solve that. 3rd world mothers can pop out babies out faster than you can put them in rockets, and shoot them across the galaxy.
Transporting people to other planets is not a cost efficient method of population control, and never will be. That (pretended) problem should be solved on earth, not in space.
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"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
He's right in this case. Without some radical breakthrough, as long as we are pushing spacecraft from A to B, we are not leaving this solar system, no way, no how, never. So we better hope some kind of teleportation will be possible some day.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Cato, Von Mises, Wattsup, Conservapedia.
Link to any of these in a non-humorous post and you immediately lose points in the mind of the reader. Same goes for Greenpeace or any other nutty leftist sources you can find. That shit doesn't fly around here. If the link contains valid information then link to the same info from a reputable source. If it contains a bunch of soapboxing, slant or bullshit with no facts to back it up then save it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
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.
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
There are plenty of radical breakthroughs being theorized and tested all the time. I believe many of them are probably going to be easier to test in space (if you want some measure of safety). I certainly don't wish for fusion bombs to explode near any populace.
It's a crime solar system exploration isn't moon-based at this time and 100% of minerals aren't coming from the asteroid belt instead of polluting third-world countries.
Oh look, the NBA is on strike. Oh Lordy!
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