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NASA To Face $1.3 Billion Cut Next Year Under Sequestration
littlesparkvt writes "A budget forecast that was released on Friday shows that the defense department isn't the only department getting hammered: NASA is as well, if the automatic budget cuts happen. According to Nature magazine, NASA will lose '$417 million from its science budget, $346 for space operations, $309 for exploration, $246 for cross agency support, among other cuts.'"
It is because of NASA we are enjoying the fruits of GPS and other such technical marvels. I don't think there should the any more budget cuts.
Those damn Democrats and their spending cuts! Why don't they spend more, like good Republicans?
Can we please just cut $1.3B extra from Defense and leave NASA alone? Seriously, $1.3 is only like half a B2 bomber - DoD can absorb that cost.
NASA is where all the money should go.
When the republicans temporarily shut down the government while budget battles raged on, we had 24/7 wall to wall coverage of this. Contrast this with today where absolute NO TV and virtually no newspaper coverage exists for this event. Why?
Nasa is the spearhead of innovation, if it wasn't for them, we'd not have a lot of the materials today that we make our innovations even more innovative with. Nasa isn't just all about space exploration, but what we can do with materials in near zero gravity, search for alternative energy sources that can literally save our lives, nanotechnology and beyond.
To see such an innovative organization being stripped down like that, rips my heart apart.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Much as I like NASA, if that's what it takes to get the deficit under control, then that's what needs to happen. Given that the DOD takes the brunt of the cuts, it seems fair. And a billion dollar in cuts for NASA amounts to pocket change when distributed about all the billionaires that are currently financing private space ventures. We'll probably do better altogether by getting the economy going again and having them work on getting to space than to keep financing bloated DOD and other programs an relying on handouts for NASA to get us into space.
I'm sure there are a depressingly-large number of Americans who would be overjoyed at the prospect of NASA being monetarily crippled, if not defunded altogether. Not only is it a haven for climate scientists (NASA has Earth-looking satellites, and has monitored the Antactic ozone hole for years), but it's packed to the gills with astrophysicists who maintain that the universe is billions of years old instead of a mere six thousand.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
All this focus on the released details of the bad things that will happen to each agency is a waste of energy. The administration put this document together because Congress insisted on it, and if it had been dropped in my lap I would have done as litle as necessary to put this useless exercise in budgetary masturbation together. This is all focusing on the "trees" of "OMG, my favorite NASA program will be axed" when it should be on the forrest of "DAMN, Congress is about to put a shotgun to the head of the US economy and pull the trigger." We should be furious about the short-sighted, infantile, "he's touching me" inability to work together of what passes for leadership in Congress, particularly on the REPUBLICAN (there, I said it) side of the aisle. NASA losing $1.3B is a candle against the general confligration this disaster will cause to the US.
The real waste in the Budget is in things like Medicare. US spends 15% of GDP on health, while most OECD countries spend about 7-8% on evil "socialised medicine" yet have everyone is covered and in many cases they have higher life expectancies. 7% of us GDP is about $1 Trillion per year, I realise that isn't the federal budget but it is money that people could use for other things if they weren't wasting it.
Higher education 3% of GDP vs OECD average 1.5%. College attendees are getting screwed to the tune of $200 billion per year.
Around $1000 per person spent on tax filing per year due to ridiculously complex tax system - another 2-300 $billion per year.
And I am not even going to bother talking about the Pentagon.
Point is that there are ways of saving all that needs to be saved without impacting negatively on peoples standard of living, but the US needs to be willing to adopt the best practices of the rest of the west, regardless of philosophical objections about free-markets etc.
These sequestration cuts will not happen. After the upcoming election, minds will be concentrated, horses will be traded at a furious rate, and this can will be kicked down the road. The details of the can-kicking and horse-trading will depend on the nature of the election results, but the can will be kicked down the road. Of that you can be sure.
There is no such thing as "working" hard when you make more in a year than a middle class person makes in their entire lifetime. Human performance doesn't scale up that far, we're talking multiple orders of magnitude. On the way down from middle class you can of course slack as much as you want, but on the way up -- you know, a day only has 24 hours, no matter how bright you are, you can only do so much before you start, effectively, exploiting others.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
lol u mad
If you want to make a point and engage in actual debate, then using a mocking tone like that won't convince or intrigue anyone. It just serves to circle-jerk up people who agree with you and enrages people against your opinion, the latter of which is considered trolling.
I'll bite by saying this: more money is already spent on feeding the hungry (food-stamps) and some amount goes to NSF, some of which goes to climate research, I'm sure. Not as much as nasa, but then again, it's priorities, I guess.
Paying down the debt, true. Then again, more revenues would help too.
Yeah, not sure why the Democrats went with that plan. It's exactly what the Tea Party wanted, an enforced budget cut that made the government figure how how to operate on less money. Perhaps the Democrats thought that the Tea Partiers were insincere career politicians like they were and would not want to play chicken.
The problem with thinking you can play chicken with someone is that, on a rare occasion, the other guy is actually there to see what a car accident feels like.
I've never been one for the hack and slash approach to budget cuts, but I do have to admit that it might be the only way to do it with special interests having a constant steel cage match to get more and more money for themselves. Look on the bright side, do you really think the Democrats would ever get even close to the amount of defense budget cuts they could under this?
But don't worry, maybe some rich person will take pity on your attempts at brown-nosing, and give you a job as a footstool or something.
Exactly! What's been missing in the dialog is the fact that the federal budget has ballooned in all departments. You can hear the little piggies being called to the troughs in DC while leadership at all levels, congress, the administration and even down to local municipalities has been missing. It's has been easier to say 'spend and borrow' than 'let's make the hard choices that's right for our country.' This is what happened last year when the debt ceiling was being reached and the republicans said they wouldn't support it without budget cuts. So what happened? they compromised for a joint task force with them all being deadlocked and both parties agreed that Sequestration wouldn't happen until after the 2012 elections. Guess what, nobody did anything. The joint task force couldn't come to a consensus and now we have the 'Fiscal Cliff' everybody is talking about. Do we honestly think that our dysfunctional government can come to an agreement of how to reduce the budget? Well for the past four years they haven't been able to so my suggestion to everybody is save your money now and get ready for another recession because there is a complete lack of adult supervision in Washington and it's time we all recognized that. Being a leader means that sometimes you have to make a decision that isn't popular but one that you know is right. There isn't anybody in Washington DC that can do that. Sure they can make speeches and talk about things like women's rights and "The private sector never built anything" but it gets us nowhere fast. I suggest that if you have the ability to vote in November, do so, don't ignore it and then vote against all incumbents. That means if the person has the office now, vote for somebody else on the ballot in all races, even down to your local elections.
That will send a message and it will also give somebody out there, anybody, a chance to do better than the bunch of clods we have now.
Getting back on target, if we start to get a handle on all those non-essential things, like 16000 new IRS agents, it would close the budget gap for NASA but let's all face facts, the Obama NASA wants the Private Sector to do the heavy lifting, while NASA continues to explore. This would represent more opportunity for Space-X et. al. Even Burt Rutan would like to see that.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I'm not generally one to defend NASA but they've had a pretty huge role in earth observation satellites, Landsat for example. They've had a huge impact on environmental issues, deforestation, climate change, resource usage, monitoring the destruction of our our ozone layer by CFC's and helping to stop it, this list goes on for a while.
Their manned space program has moslty been a huge wast of time and money but their earth observation programs have been DOING EXACTLY THE THINGS YOU SEEM TO BE WHINING FOR.
It pretty delusional to think you should basically stop doing anything ground breaking until you've solved every problem on Earth. YOU WILL NEVER SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM ON EARTH. If you manage to insure everyone is well fed and, and no one dies of diseases, chances are you will just cause a population spike that will push a bunch of people in to starvation or further deplete the earth's resources trying to feed them all.
Its still a little over the horizon but it wont be that much longer until we start deplete the Earth's easily accessible mineral resources at which point pretty much the first thing you are going to be wishing for is a robust space program so you can start mining near earth asteroids for them.
@de_machina
Yes, because there is simply no way a producer and a consumer would ever manage to connect without some rich ass facilitating it?
Do you really believe that?
It's the world we live in. Reality is what's left when we stop believing in it. Most of the products we buy didn't come from anywhere near us. Somehow in the absence of rich people we'll develop some sort of ESP that allows us to find the products we need and make the products that other people need.
Remove the upper class in one well targeted plague and the middle class would do just fine.
There'd be a new "upper class" inside of five years populated by newly wealthy "facilitators".