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Why NASA's Budget "Victory" Is Anything But
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes 'Earlier this week, attempts to cut NASA's budget were defeated, and it looks like the largest space agency in the world will actually be getting nearly a 2% budget increase overall. While common news outlets are touting this as a great budget victory, the reality is that this is shaping up to be just another year of pathetic funding levels, putting our greatest dreams of exploring and understanding the Universe on hold. A sobering read for anyone who hasn't realized what we could be doing.'
Maybe we shouldn't put our greatest dreams in the hands of government.
I'd suggest that we start with the more modest step of expelling all the people from government who were elected on a platform of breaking the government which they then proceeded to make into a self-fulfilling prophecy so that they can crow that it's broken... If it's still fucked 8 years on, we can try more drastic approaches.
another year of welfare-warfare waste, the USG pissing away our future whether Obamunist or Bush leaguers.
2% isn't a victory, it's an "oh my f*cking god, we survived being killed off by the skin of our teeth".
It isn't a budget increase at all.
The Media is supposed to publish stories about NASA's plans for humans reaching Mars in 10 years. On even-numbered days of the month The Media is supposed to publish stories about NASA being underfunded and cutting programs to send small robots to it. Jeez, Slashdot, get with the program.
A scrap of funding for such a vital tool for human survival. Is it that our technology could never allow us to escape the confines of Earth, or is it that the government would rather lock horns with rivals on a pebble in a sea of pebbles? KUNG KUNG KUNG...
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"... putting our greatest dreams of exploring and understanding the Universe on hold."
You talkin' to me white boy?
It may surprise some that not everyone has high falutin' dreams about space exploration. Some people would be happy with a safe place to sleep, relief from disease, or a hot meal. Until those dreams are fulfilled for every human, space can wait.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Seriously think about it. How can we pay for the NSA to spy on everyone, our Military to bomb anyone, our CIA to fund terrorist groups in the Middle East (and everywhere else for that matter), pay for Welfare instead of actually doing something to fix the economy, continue to let the top .01% live tax free lives of luxury (and allow them to offshore most of their money), provide strike force military equipment to local police and sheriff departments so that they can enforce "Free Speech Zones", pay for expansions in DHS and TSA so that they can frisk little children and search colostomy bags for explosives, have the Federal Reserve give hundreds of billions of dollars to whatever country they feel like propping up today, and give your tax money to countries like the Ukraine so that they can revolt and join NATO if we are spending money on bettering mankind?
I really and truly wish that something in my list was a joke, but sadly it's actually a very short list of how the US is being mismanaged by corrupted people holding offices.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Maybe they're saving their funds to give to SpaceX instead who seem to doing things more efficiently than NASA in terms of getting us off this rock.
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You mean I packed my bags for Mars for nothing? I put up all my favorite artist's renderings of fantasy space stations too!
Oh no!!!
http://www.floridatoday.com/st...
Representative Richard Shelby, aka the politician who brings home the pork to Alabama's space industry and one of the biggest proponents of SLS, is trying to add more paperwork to the Commercial Crew program.
Because clearly, the best way to save taxpayer money is more studies and paperwork. Next up: studies and paperwork to determine if the amount of studies and paperwork is a detriment to government effectiveness.
Americans on average are not ready to fund a big space shot. People are still recovering from the financial meltdown and recession.
Maybe if and when China starts to show us up, THEN the collective will shall come.
Table-ized A.I.
It dont need tax dollars.
The game is rigged. You are another sucker assuming there won't be another stock crash to redistribute your "earnings" to those who don't share your dream.
Why listen to the messages of the stars when you can listen to the messages of your fellow beings on Earth?
What programs will you cut? What taxes will you raise? What about the massive debt and deficit? Will you cut the military to the point that bad actors like Putin can behave as they wish? Cede the western Pacific to China? Excessively confiscatory tax policies have proven counter productive in many attempts. So, that leaves cutting other programs to move more funds into NASA. What programs might those be? Do the proponents of those programs (and they do have proponents, all of them) wield more money and clout then you and your fellow NASA supporters?
Until you can answer basic questions like these, you are just pissing in the wind. Bitch and moan all you want, cry that science is ill served. It will make no difference until a sufficiently influential constituency is assembled that can overwhelm your opposition.
Tyson has lectured, screamed, went before congress and actively lobby's that if we increased NASA's budget by a penny on the dollar just 1% would get man to mars.
And he's against private manned space missions, course he says low earth orbit/satellites/iss could be private but only a government can take on the budget and risk of manned exploration of space
Neil deGrasse Tyson On NASA & Federal Budget (MUâ¦: http://youtu.be/jcdDb-cbadw
Neil deGrasse Tyson at UB: What NASA Means to Ameâ¦: http://youtu.be/RQhNZENMG1o
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Apollo missions and NASA funding: http://youtu.be/LWqNYiCAbsY
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: "Elon Musk's SpaceX Won't Get Us To Mars: http://youtu.be/gW74vsCNQtc
The main thing is, military spending is extremely high, so you can kill the baddies before they kill you... cause the baddies are scary and need killing and big guns help keep baddies at bay.
It was broken by 'Waste anything but time' - and it hasn't recovered.
Space launch has - from about the 60s till comparatively recently (last decade) cost $10K/lb or so to orbit.
'SLS - NASAs most recent rocket design - will cost around this.
This is not due to physics.
All governmental space efforts are unfortunately in general not actual space programs, they are welfare programs.
At current prices of launch on commercial vendors, the cost of developing SLS to its first couple of flights would
launch 4000 tons to low earth orbit.
With plausible near-term launchers (SpaceX falcon heavy), even neglecting the reusability options - this same budget would launch 11000 tons.
The same mass as a WWII aircraft carrier.
If people want us to go to mars, why won't they voluntarily contribute money to do it? Maybe they don't want it, or don't want it at the current cost?
Had you been paying attention to your own first cite, you would have learned that the scenario he was proposing was that 1% of the TOTAL federal budget would go to NASA, rather than a 1% increase to the amount currently allocated.
With a fraction of that money a lot of deaths could be prevented by improving road safety, tackling malnutration or other causes of preventable deaths. Seems more important to me than than human spaceflight in the shape of the iSS or Mars missions.
Qatar is investing enough money to host the football world cup - a tournament that lasts one month - to fund NASA for ten years.
http://keepingscore.blogs.time...>/
What a world.
You don't need to know anything complicated about the situation to realize this is bad. ALL you need to know, is that INFLATION in the US stays around 3% year over year.
So, a 2% budget increase, is really a 1% cut.
Keep this in mind at work, when you're getting your annual performance reviews. If you aren't getting at least 3% each and every year, you're getting your pay CUT.
Companies with a policy that pay increases can't be more than 3% (or less), absolutely infuriate me. Those smart enough to intelligently object, usually get the problem worked-around. However, it's still a company policy that says, in no uncertain terms, that every employee who has performed superbly, must get penalized, year over year, as a punishment for remaining employed by that company. They're encouraging you to jump ship and get a higher salary elsewhere. Then, you could possibly come back, getting signed-on at a much higher starting salary than they were willing to give you while you stayed with the company.
Institutional knowledge is valuable, and companies go out of their way to destroy it. </rant>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Dont count your cookies just yet. Senator Shelby has inserted a poison pill amendment into the spending bill to put onerous accounting requirements on spacex missions for NASA, in order to make them less competitive with the SLS, a lot of which is being developed in Alabama, Senator Shelbys state.
Tyson is an unabashed statist just like the people in Congress who have destroyed the exploration industry.
He's quite possibly the dumbest smart guy I've ever seen.
Tyson's latest Cosmos episode was a pack of outright lies and misleading statements.
He tried to explain climate is easy to predict vs weather with a dog. He failed to mention that EVERY climate prediction by the IPCC has been 100% wrong, so it appears climate is not so easy to predict.
He claimed the only green house gas is CO2, while methane is 100x more powerful a green house gas, but its harder to tax methane so most "scientists" with a political slant always skip that part.
He claimed the temperature is going up every year, but failed to mention it hasn't gone up for 17.5 years now despite the spike in CO2, thus disproving CO2 as runway green house gas that can't be stopped.
I turned off after half of it because it was obvious I wouldn't learn anything, I've already read all the fake talking points and was hoping to see some actual new facts that I could look up.
In other words he chose the political talking points while ignoring actual facts. He is not a scientist anymore, he chose to become a political shill. He turned Cosmos into a political tool instead of a science show.
When you've been getting your ass kicked for years, "not losing" can count as a major victory.
I wish
Most of NASA's budget is wasted on pork such as the ISS, the Rocket to Nowhere (SLS) and the Orion capsule; all manned porky missions. The money would be so much more useful for the following types of missions: Terrestrial Planet Finder Europa Clipper Mars Sample Return Unfortunately NASA's top management is all ex-pilots and astronauts and that is all they are interested in,
But if we can't afford to do it now, then that's that.
This is timely. I spent the better part of last night in a zoning and planning board meeting. I'm the IT director for a couple of small private schools for Kids with Dyslexia. One of our schools is currently located in the basement of a really old church. It works for us now, but our lease is running out and we need more space to grow.
We found a generous landlord willing to lease us space (way below market rates) in a brand new building - it's beautiful. It is part of a small financial complex, and the space is perfect for our needs. This landlord sees this as a temporary growth space, and he is offering to renovate a larger abandoned school for us over the next two years as our permanent home. He has a philanthropic foundation that would fund the renovation.
But there is one problem. The current (temporary) building has commercial/retail/office/daycare zoning. It does not currently have school zoning as an approved use.
We tried to argue the fact that currently "daycare" is an approved use, and teaching little kids how to read isn't a significantly different use. They didn't want to hear it. The sticking point? Parking. The landlord needs to completely redo a traffic/parking study to show how taking a few parking spaces from an enormous parking lot and dedicating them as "pickup and drop-off" spaces will impact the remainder of the parking lot.
Keep in mind, the entire parking lot and complex is privately owned by the landlord - there is no public parking anywhere in this complex. Presumably any parking problems would be the business of the tenants and the landlord.
That's what we thought, be we were wrong. The town denied our application and that means there will be no summer program this year.
So tell me - Government preventing a bunch of kids getting summer reading enrichment over a handful (3) of parking spaces is a good thing?
Sorry - people that extoll the virtues of Government have not had complex enough dealings with government to know any better.
Not a huge Tyson fan, but saying methane was not mentioned is a lie. It was mentioned at least once when talking of the permafrost melting and the organic matter decomposing. He also didn't say climate was easy to predict, you just pulled that out of your ass. The dog thing worked great to help my kids understand the difference between climate and weather, just as it was intended to.
Unmanned missions to Mars makes sense, manned, not so much
The asteroid capture mission is a stunt that management at NASA has dreamed up to justify their manned pork missions. The is almost no scientific value in this mission/stunt, just jobs and bucks for manned mission contractors
Yes, but, apart from timekeeping, radio, clean air, water, electricity, education and roads and public order, what has the Government ever done for us?
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The summary is ridiculous. There is no way NASA could be 'underfunded'. It will do what it can with the funding it has. There is an infinite amount of other things it COULD do, if only it had the money. By this logic only an infinite budget would be sufficient. In other words, one can't just generally be underfunded. One can be underfunded in regards to a specific goal. For example, we might say that NASA is underfunded if we want to send a man to Mars (digression: an absurd waste of time and resources IMO). I suppose implied by the summary is the addition "(underfunded) for what I would like to see it doing"
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If space exploration will remain nationial effort via the government. The politicians in US Congress need be petitioned and remined by people who give darn about supporting exploration. Their the ones okays the bills to be payed and out muched.. Scientist say what is doable what they know how to do. Corpirations build the things (big and small), thats why NASA's commerical space program has potenial, since its a hybrid of both commerical and government backing.
We live in complicated worlds, exploration was started by politics and military inititives. Space race is part of the Russian race with the United States. Will of the people came later, but problem is it was always in backburner, secondary. It was always the government and militaries of the world showboating their technologies and result of weapons development that got us where we went.
I'd don't know if we can sustain what were doing unless there a driving force that charging everone on this planet to want space be part of our lives. Nature of Business is seeking opporunity to profit, I'm glad SpaceX and other like wise companies see more a future doing business. Its getting around politics and inflantion of building things we know what to do is going be keep us from getting anywhere. seriously. How can you have a multi-year space program when you have people in charge coming and going with completely different agenda, not necessary ones who stick to what going on?
Bullshit. The government has done more in my lifetime in the way of killing my dreams than any other single entity.
First world problem. I came to this country from the second poorest country in the world, and my wife is from Japan which has the 3rd largest nominal GDP. The opportunities we have had here to pursue our dreams are great. For me specifically.
It is true that the gap between the haves and have-nots has widen in the last 30 years, but c'mon. It is not doom and gloom. With all the difficulties that exist in this country, people can still get a better chance at pursuing their dreams than in most other countries. I scratch my head when people spout first world problems like you are doing right now.
is not trump change. Perhaps NASA should try to pick better priorities? Or better yet, NASA should get out of the launch and manned business completely? Design research probes in conjunction with university researchers and pay private industry to launch.
"What programs will you cut? What taxes will you raise?"
None? At least from the numbers that SpaceX is publishing, backed up by actual launches & contracts we could have designed a heavy lifter and paid for at least 40 Falcon Heavy launches with JUST the money burnt on the Constellation Program (11 Billion). Do you have any idea what we could have done with the capability to put 4,640 TONS of equipment into LEO. If we cut SLS right now and transferred funding into launch programs with reasonable prices we could probably put almost 10,000 tons of equipment into orbit to within 15 years. That is the the equivalent of a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser, probably more than enough to build a large base on the moon, +100 crewed orbital space station, or put a couple dozen scientists and associated living quarters/equipment on Mars.
I believe that China will be the world's best hope for getting off this rock, the US is doomed. Too many useless deadbeats with their hands out, and not enough people with vision to hope and dream. We should have been off this rock 20+ years ago, even the most pessimistic people wouldn't have believed that 40+ years after landing on the moon, we would be at the same place we were back in 1950...
6:30 a.m. You are awakened by your clock radio. In theory, the power companies keep your clock running in synchrony with the national time standards by supplying a precise 60 Hz signal, but with the corporate capture of regulatory bodies there is no longer any real way of enforcing this, and frequency lock is slipping increasingly every year. Furthermore the TSA's insistence that the National Institute of Science and Technology convert entirely to Windows systems, thanks to Microsoft lobbyists, means NIST timekeeping systems themselves are increasingly failure-prone. But on any given day, your clock is probably right, if not quite the same as everyone else's.
The radio is full of static, because the Federal Communications Commission no longer tracks down and eliminates sources of interference due to budget constraints, and anyway the radio stations are all moving to XM where they can gain subscription fees in addition to the ad revenue that once completely supported them.
6:35 a.m. Like 17 million other Americans, you have asthma. But as you get out of bed you notice that its a "smog day" and thanks to the dismantling of air pollution regulation enforcement you're going to be having a rough day. During one of the brief interludes of radio clarity you hear Rush Limbaugh complaining about the "anti-American environmental movement" that is crippling competitiveness.
6:38 a.m. You go into the kitchen for breakfast. You pour some water into your coffeemaker. You simply take for granted that this water is safe to drink. But of course America's water is increasingly toxic, not just due to the removal of EPA authority and relaxation of limits on lead and other developmental toxins, but also because infrastructures are crumbling due to reductions in government spending imposed by highly paid elected Tea Party ideologues.
6:39 a.m. You flip the switch on the coffee maker. There is no short in the outlet or in the electrical line and there is no resulting fire in your house. Why? Because there's no power. It's summer, and your power company is unable to meet demand for power when all the air conditioning system are on, because they've been paying off the public utility commissions that are supposed to make sure they keep expanding and maintaining their infrastructure and putting the maintenance dollars into the pockets of right-wing corporate bigwigs.
Your greatest dreams are in the hands of the government everyday, but because we've gone out of our way to elect people who believe that government cannot and does not work, we've sabotaged two centuries of development in the name of paying the rich extra dividends.
And those are just from the first 10 minutes after you wake up.
I don't think Musk is going to launch his own manned expedition to Mars, but I think a NASA one would wind up heavily depending on Space-X. Remember that getting something to low Earth orbit is the really hard part, and that's a large chunk of the way to anywhere, measuring by energy required.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So first the story is that we are making a great leap forward by killing NASA and turning it all over to private enterprise. Now it's a crying shame that NASA's budget is only growing as much as what is already built into the budget plus two percent. Really, the current crop of idiots running things in this country couldn't keep their story straight on ANY SUBJECT if their lives depended on it.
Murphy was an optimist