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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."
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
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...
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
OMB = Office of Management and Budget for us non-Americans.
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.
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.
They could learn to go to war less and have a smaller military maybe?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
You think this is about jobs?
Please ponder the following:
* Realistically,m how many jobs can NASA create?
* How much does it cost to create each of those jobs? (NASA doesn't do cheap stuff)
* What's the intersection between "people who are qualified to work for NASA" and "people who are having trouble finding work"?
No sig today...
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.
You do realize that one of the reasons why more countries don't attack the USA is because our "larger" military and our perchance to whip it out if provoked. Smaller military means that every anti-American country waiting to attack us (i.e. ideologically, militarily, economically, etc.) would have a better chance at winning should they decided to do so.
There are some cultures out there for which live and let live does not exist; and look at the USA's culture as an anathema to be crushed.
Regards,
MBC1977,
We don't need any breakthroughs; we already have good plans to get to Mars with existing technology. Have you heard of Mars Direct? It's a plan for routine manned flights to Mars accomplished with existing chemical rockets (actually the Shuttle launch stack), artificial gravity induced by spinning the spacecraft linked with a tether to an empty rocket stage around the common centre of mass, and using chemically propelled cars (why would we use electric if we can have something better?). If we had wanted to, we would have sent people to Mars by now. All the things you mention are completely unnecessary.
+1 informative
thanks
Our military is TEN TIMES that of China. We could reduce military spending by a factor of 5 and still have twice the force China does.
There are some cultures out there for which live and let live does not exist
America being foremost among them.
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Sycodon thinks verifiable facts are invalidated if presented by a comedy site and assumes I watch the Daily Show (I'm not even sure which talk show that is - Conan O'Brian's or that really funny guy with the grayish hair? - can't remember his name now).
This is the state of Internet discussion.
Abandon all hope.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Conversion efficiency is low (an engineer can only eat so much pizza) and there's some leakage (most of the toys an an engineer is tempted by are made overseas).
Nope, it's mostly a PR circus for the masses - just like those F22 fighters, etc.
Word... a good engineer could maybe make a product cost 10% less to manufacture. On the other hand, a good PR/marketing flack could simply get people to pay 2x more for the goods. Which is a better investment for a company? :-P
A good lawyer could.... well, I'd come up with something, but it would be pointless since you'd have to be able to find a good laywer first >;-D
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