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House Representatives Working On NASA Reform Bill
MarkWhittington writes with good and bad news about NASA's future budgets. From the article: "Rep. John Culberson, along with Rep. Frank Wolf, are developing a bill that will attempt to rationalize NASA's budget process and provide some long term continuity in its administration. First, a NASA administrator would be named to a ten year term. The intent is to provide some continuity in the way the space agency is run and to remove it, as much as possible, from the vagaries of politics. Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle. This is of particular importance to the space agency because the majority of its high level projects take several years to run their course. If funding were fixed for a number of years, the theory goes, money could be spent more efficiently. NASA planners would know how much they have to spend four or so years going forward and would not have to worry about being cut off at the knees by Congressional appropriators year after year."
But is it more than political grandstanding in an election year? There might be a few problems: NASA could get stuck with a bad administrator, multi-year budgets might be a bit unconstitutional, etc.
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If we can go 3 years with no Federal budget whatsoever and count it as "constitutional", I'm pretty sure we can finagle a multi-year budget or two.
..that NASA could get stuck wirg low levels of appropriations for years at a time. Sigh.
Silence is a state of mime.
If funding were fixed for a number of years, the theory goes, money could be spent more efficiently.
I can't figure out if this would encourage or discourage the "Gotta spend every penny this year or we'll lose the money permanently for all future years" behavior.
If a multi-year budget means you get $30M for a project, in total, spread across the entire project, then you don't have the headache of spending exactly 3 mil each year for a decade so it discourages wasteful spending at the end of the year. On the other hand if multi-year budget means that $3M is set in stone for all eternity then it encourages wasteful spending.
Since wasteful spending = votes I'm going to guess it is designed to increase waste.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Is a drop in the bucket.
The top 5 defense contractors all have larger revenues than NASA's entire budget. The US Army spent more on air conditioning tents and trailers in Iraq than NASA's entire annual budget.
Want to fix NASA's budget? Actually give them one.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Stop the wars and spend 1% of what is spent on wars on NASA instead.
You can't handle the truth.
NASA has proposed reorganizing themselves as the "United Earth Directorate" and absorbing all legacy governments.
Good luck in 2012 America.
*ALL* those bastards care about is politics.
I wouldn't count on much of anything more substantive than renaming post offices to get through Congress for the foreseeable future.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
...with a business model...
...with goods and services...
...and other sorts of incomes...
...like Patent Royalties on all the great discoveries they've made.
I sleep on 'space age' NASA foam every night!
Then they can spend what they make and get the government out of the space business, except again, to aquire goods and services which NASA could provide.
What happens if there is a higher than nominal inflation period in the interim time between the new longer budget cycle decision points? Could that be factored into the equation?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
We don''t even HAVE a budget now.
Once the Democrats took power, they did away with that for the ENTIRE government.
Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle.
It seems they have already been on that kind of funding for about 4 years now, seeing as Congress has failed in their Constitutional duty to pass a budget for 4 years...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Lots of it happening on both sides this summer. It'll dry up in a few months and most will go back to the golf games and fact-finding trips to the Caribbean.
Is this going to have a rider mandating Faith Based Space Exploration?
If the administrator position were for a nominal 7-10 year term and had the authority to hire his successor at any time, it would make more sense.
The very best way to fix NASA is to privatize the budget amn management function entirely off-budget from the government and fund the government portion with a "block grant" to the NGO.
The entire problem with NASA is being married to Federal government rules and procedures.
JJ
The FBI actually needs this more than anyone else. It's a little known fact that the FBI is the only federal agency that has no charter-defined enforcement authority; all enforcement authority comes from the Attorney General. That means that they live and die in their latitude to investigate federal crimes by politics.
What we need is the FBI to receive a well defined grant of authority from Congress and to make them an independent agency unaccountable to the President. There is precedent for this; the US Marshals Service, until a few decades ago, didn't report to the President. It reported to the federal judiciary.
-First, a NASA administrator would be named to a ten year term. The intent is to provide some continuity in the way the space agency is run and to remove it, as
much as possible, from the vagaries of politics.
GOOD.
-Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle. This is of particular importance to the space agency because the majority of its high level projects take several years to run their course. If funding were fixed for a number of years, the theory goes, money could be spent more efficiently. NASA planners would know how much they have to spend four or so years going forward and would not have to worry about being cut off at the knees by Congressional appropriators year after year."
EXTREMELY GOOD.
-But is it more than political grandstanding in an election year?
POSSIBLE. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't happen
-NASA could get stuck with a bad administrator
As a part of the executive branch, the president himself has oversight. Also, very unlikely; you dont get picked to run nasa if you're a bad manager
-multi-year budgets might be a bit unconstitutional
On what grounds?
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
So, make a clause in the multi-year contract that if the Administrator sucks and isn't doing his job, fire his ass and take the next guy in line.
Why should these positions be any different than any other employment?
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Congresses idea of 'Reform' - cut spending on anything not related to the military, and give the money to the rich people as a tax cut.
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The CIA has had the same problem, actually--I have heard complaints from their people that the single biggest problem they had was the single-year budget process, and that multi-year budgeting would make their planning much, much, much easier.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
If NASA changed their focus from exploring the Cosmos to searching for God, they would have no trouble getting multi-year funding.
Stop the wars and spend 1% of what is spent on wars on NASA instead.
you wouldn't spend even 1% of that on nasa, you would give it all back as tax breaks to the wealthiest in the country. don't sugar coat your agenda.
Beyond the fact that the sponsoring congressmen are Republicans? Oh.... I'm sorry, I guess we weren't supposed to know that.
Putting them on multi-year funding is how you turn NASA into the Department of Commerce, it is NOT how you go to Mars. The fact that NASA has to justify their spending each year, and stand before Congress to defend their programmatic problems or sucesses IS A GOOD THING. The only problem with their budget is the fact that their numbers are fairly small and THE DIRECTION THEY ARE GIVEN FROM THE EXECUTIVE CHANGES TOO OFTEN. $18 billion per year is plenty to put humans on mars, but NASA has become bloated and civil-servanty. It's time to trim the fat, return to the roots of rocket-engineering, and pool the money into a single project.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
roman_mir's sock puppet is taking part in this discussion. he openly admits to puppetry to push his agenda.
Move all of Nasa's office and administrative staff to cheaper office locations. States such as Mississippi and Montana offer much lower salaries as well as cost of living. Incidentally they are also both "red" states. In fact it appears that all of the 10 lowest paid states are all red.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
This incompetent Congress can't do anything beneficial. Does anybody think that a Congress where a huge faction are only 1 step away from flat earthers SHOULD reform anything at NASA? As reasonable as some of these ideas sound they can't get past this Congress without idiocy.
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Although I'm hopeful about the concept, I'm suspicious until the full text of the bill is released. Considering the proponents of the bill, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a thinly-veiled way to protect particular pork projects, worded in such a way that it could only be used to keep projects like SLS from being cancelled while being of limited applicability to other NASA projects. After all, after the Falcon Heavy starts launching, locking SLS into a multi-year procurement contract is probably going to be the only way to keep money funneling towards SLS contractors.
Also, from what I've been able to read online so far, NASA (along with the DOD and Coast Guard) already have some multi-year procurement capability, bit can't use it where there's significant technical risk. With NASA technical risk usually means cost-plus contracts, and cost-plus contracts combined with multi-year procurement is potentially very bad, depending on how the bill is worded.
It is the Aeronautics and Space Administration.
You have it completely backwards.
The budget has always been a searingly-hot political issue. It has been one of the country's major political problems for half a century, and especially since the early/mid 1980s. It's just happens to be a hot political issue where the Republicans and Democrats aren't distinguished from one another. (Just because something is bipartison, doesn't mean it's not political.)
And that is still the case; the Rs and Ds basically agree that the government should use its powers to funnel the country's resources away from the citizenry to the corporations who fund the campaigns. Budget deficits will usually be a part of that overall program.
The reason for the "hoo-haw" of the last couple years, is that Republicans are desperate for a personality "wedge issue" because people have little political reason to vote one way or another between those two parties. Without political distinction, voters tend to vote for the better personality, and Obama totally creams any Republican when it comes to that. Obama is probably the coolest president since Teddy Roosevelt.
So the Rs wear the small-budget costume (as long as it never comes to actual politics). It's non- political; it's marketing. People just like to call marketing "politics" because acknowledging the triteness would hurt their pride too much. "My party is for a responsible budget!"
Perhaps with an extended budget NASA will no longer feel political pressure to peddle their snake oil CAGW hysteria. It's pretty sad that in a short 40+ years NASA went from moon landings to backing University research papers that speculate that we will all be destroyed by aliens because of CAGW!
This article is silly. Before a project is even started Systems Engineers map out time and personnel resources, along with dependencies, for any modern aerospace project. This includes contingencies and failures in technology readiness levels. If timescales could be truncated without significant detriment to success or loss of life, then they would be. Let’s not pretend every wishful armchair engineer knows more about the challenges of space missions than the people who actually do it.
How many maiden flights of any of the aircraft you mentioned were straight into the battlefield at the most critical moments in battle – NONE.
If space missions go wrong, people can die or you have loss of payload, if military projects go wrong, oh wait
Comparing challenges like autonomously navigating in hypersonic regimes through relatively unknown atmospheric conditions on distant planets, and landing with unprecedented accuracy – to consumer technologies? This is a joke right?
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We haven't had a Federal budget in 1200 days, so why should there be a worry about multi-year budgets being unconstitutional? We're 4 years into unconstitutionality already...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes