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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?
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.
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.
Except NASA's budget goes right back into the pockets of the American people, plus we get space missions.
"The economic benefits of NASA's programs are greater than generally realized. The main beneficiaries (the American public) may not even realize the source of their good fortune. . ." - paper in Nature, 1992
In 2002, the aerospace industry accounted for $95 billion of economic activity in the United States, including $23.5 billion in employee earnings dispersed among some 576,000 employees (source: Federal Aviation Administration, March 2004).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Economic_impact_of_NASA_funding
NASA's budget is insignificant compared to the entitlement programs and DOD spending. Cutting NASA's budget doesn't upset the old people, the welfare recipients, and the retired military veterans. Cutting NASA's budget does little for actually balancing the budget. It's just the least important to that good o' red blooded american voter that is so important this time of year.
The problem with the budget has always been that politicians do not look at what will be good for the nation's future when making decisions. Instead they look at what is good for their individual political future and saying "I cut welfare, defense spending, and social security" won't win them any votes. They particularly love the elderly vote since they outnumber the rest of us and they don't let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy story.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
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.
1.3 Billion? That's 5 F-35 Lightning II's the DoD will have to cut out of it's budget! (Yes I know the A version costs "only" 197 million, but just wait...)
In any case, sequestration will hit the DoD (and Veterans Affairs) as well. If you weren't paying attention, last year Congress refused to raise the misleading named "debt ceiling" -- which is not a ceiling on actual *debt*, but rather securitizing *debt* already incurred. In other words, they wouldn't allow the treasury to issue notes or bonds to pay for expenses already budgeted, authorized and incurred. In order to avoid sovereign default, the administration worked out a deal where it would iron out the budget differences with Congress after the election. To give that commmitment teeth they arranged for automatic budget cuts, split evenly between DoD and the rest of the federal budget, if they failed to achieve 1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
Since this voluntary deficit reduction will almost certainly have to be achieved without tax increases or defense spending cuts, NASA's prospects don't look any brighter if we avoid sequestration. Without a huge and probably unrealistic economic boom we're going to be cutting stuff that the public cares about a lot more than NASA. Sure, NASA's costing the average taxpayer less than 20 cents a day, but we'll be scrounging under the sofa cushions for pennies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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