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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.
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".
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.
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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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.
So we should put everything on hold because people refuse to breed responsibly? Guess what, there aren't enough resources for everyone to have 7 kids, so why should I care that someone decided to be evolutionary greedy and try to spawn more than they can support? Really, why?
Monstar L
I always cringe at comments like this.
Space exploration can be an end to itself, but it has also proven to be a massive driver for improvements in life in general.
The spinoffs alone are huge, let alone the jobs created, the money moving around the economy.
https://www.sac.edu/AcademicProgs/ScienceMathHealth/Planetarium/Pages/Benefits-of-the-NASA-Space-Program.aspx
$18 Billion is what, $70 a year per person in the US? (rough guess there).
If you want money to help you live a better life, have a look at the defense budget. For the Joint Strike Fighter in the development phase, $14 billion was spent on 35-40 prototypes over 3 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#Procurement_costs
How much does a nuclear missile cost? The NSA?
There's no "safe place to sleep" on a planet unprotected from large asteroids, any more than there's a safe place to sleep in the caldera of an active volcano. There's merely hoping the statistically inevitable won't happen in your lifetime. Space can't wait.
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.
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.
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.
The same mass as a WWII aircraft carrier.
That's wasteful. All we need to launch is a WWII Japanese battleship.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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.
Right, because satellite communications, GPS, Teflon, water purification systems... none of these have improved our lives at all.
So.. it has come to this
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.
They'll just print it, silly. Taxing and balancing a budget is just so 20th century.
While I can sympathize with that viewpoint, if we waited to work on new things until we solved all our current problems, we would still be stuck in the middle ages.
The answer is to work on both at the same time. And you can't just funnel all the spare money into poverty relief...throwing more money at it doesn't help after a certain point. How about we halve the military budget, divert 3/4 of that to your programs, and 1/4 to space and energy stuff. Everybody'd be swimming in money.
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You want a driver for the 20th century? WWII.
Umm...nearly half the 20th century was past by the time WWII ended.
Space welfare. Just redistribute the wealth without the shenanigans and we could have the leisure society that was speculated about.
Wow. Give a man a fish...
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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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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.
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.
Fortunately for you, the project I'm working on ( http://www.seed-factory.org/ ) can solve material scarcity *and* enable us to occupy the Solar System. Self-expanding automation can grow from a small starter kit to producing what people need (building materials, agricultural equipment, utility hardware). It does so by directing part of the output to making more equipment for itself. The same starter kit idea lets you mine an asteroid, or set up on the Moon or Mars, without having to bring everything from Earth. In both cases, the leverage is huge.
Communication satellites and GPS I'll give you. Teflon and water purification systems don't count. If we needed them, we would have invented them separately. Maybe we would have invented them sooner, or better, or invented more important things instead, without the space program.
We effectively took a lot of high-grade engineering and scientific talent and had them concentrate on putting things into space. In the process, they invented some stuff here and there. If they weren't trying to build rockets, they'd have been doing something else that might have been better for all of us.
As far as jobs go - this is the broken window fallacy. Doing something that's not worthwhile just to create jobs does not in general make the economy better, and certainly not in the long run.
If you're going to argue for the benefits of space exploration, you're going to have to argue on the basis of what we've gotten from space. That's what's relevant. Not what people concentrating on space invented by accident. Not as a jobs program. You're going to have to argue on the basis of what we've gotten out of spaceflight, what we've learned, that sort of thing.
(And for the guy who thought WWII improved things...not in the long run. We took a bunch of extremely capable scientists, and put them in charge of implementing advanced technology on the basis of what science we had. Naturally, we got a lot of advanced technology fast. What we didn't get is those years in research that would have produced new science. Technology is based on science, and in the long run will advance with science. Delay the progress of science, delay future advances in technology.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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