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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
OMB = Office of Management and Budget for us non-Americans.
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."