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Can Rep. John Culberson Save NASA's Space Exploration Program?
MarkWhittington writes The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger has published the seventh in his series of articles about the American space program and what ails it. The piece focuses on Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who has two fascinating aspects. The first is that he is taking over the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA funding. The second is that he has a keen appreciation for the benefits of space exploration for its own sake and not just for his Houston area district.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system.
I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
Send a probe to Europa, but instead of sending more men to the Moon, do a sample return mission to Mars.
Or glory?
What's the real mission here? Space exploration is such a loaded term, what does it mean? Do you need to send test pilots in the upper atmosphere? For what? What can they do that can't be done on the ground? Is getting 400 kilometers closer to Andromeda somehow changing anything?
And glory? That's nationalistic flag-waving nonsense. Let's all grow up and set aside the fantasies here.
First, a single person is not supposed to be able to do anything within our Senate or Congress. It takes votes, and a majority must agree with anything this person puts forward for legislation.
Second, nothing is getting done in our Government due to massive cronyism and corruption. Until that is fixed, we will continue to see nothing but garbage come out of our Politicians. Start petitions to put people on ballots and vote _them_ into office. People with high moral character, not career politicians. Outside of an outright revolt or military coup, that is the only hope we have to fix things.
Ballot information is here, and more information is here.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science. That's why it's done on the public dime.
As for gov't inefficiency: it's a myth brought on by a few high profile pork projects (the US Military comes to mind) and underfunded DMVs. Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient. Also, go work in management for a large (private) corporation sometime and tell me again how amazingly efficient they are compared to government.
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His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
Why is Snark Required?
I wonder sometimes.
NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.
NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.
NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.
The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.
All of this in less than fifty years.
You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.
Really, has NASA done that badly?
The human body is a fragile bag of water, not well suited to radiation exposure, temperature extremes,changes in air pressure, high acceleration forces, or long periods of isolation from a sustaining biosphere. Almost anything that can be done in space is better done by robots. The ONLY reason for people to venture into space is to get to the surface of another habitable planet for which we are evolved. And there is only one such place in reach: MARS!
Yes there are good reasons for going to Mars. Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us. We have the technology to colonize Mars now. To make it economical, colonization should be a one-way pioneering trip. Nobody comes back, ever. (I made this suggestion to NASA 17 years ago and was told that NASA does not do suicide missions. Now, many folks at NASA have come around to my point of view. )
Rep. Culberson has not learned the crucial lesson from the demise of the Apollo program... that political motivations for exploring space are not sustainable in the minds of a fickle constituency that wants to be entertained by a list of new "American Firsts in Space". Colonization of Mars requires the serious dedication of the best scientists of Earth to the mission of human survival.
Forget the moon. In terms of the fuel required to reach it on a one-way mission, it is not really much closer than Mars. I has far less to offer as a base for a new sustainable human civilization. (Although I'm sure it would make a nice military base to shoot stuff at Earth). The fact the Rep. Culberson is talking about returning to the moon is the best indication that he is not a serious thinker about why NASA should be involved in human space travel.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I love the idea of steadily increasing NASA's budget, but how many strings are attached? Getting rid of bureaucratic red tape is a good thing, but handing over full control of NASA to congress? Congress is much of the reason why NASA is in such a bad position, forcing them to use a network of politically located/connected facilities and defense contractors that create a VAST amount of waste and pork spending. Congress should only create objectives, provide the funds and appoint the heads of NASA. Leave the fulfillment of those goals up to NASA within their budget. The Next gen launcher is a perfect example of Congresses meddling, requiring that NASA use the old shuttle contractors ballooned costs by tens of billions of dollars, before they canceled it Constellation was ballooning by closer to a hundred billion.
Where are these cheap bastards you speak of? Cheap bastards would be paradise, next to the *predatory* bastards in Congress who pose as cheap bastards while steering money to political allies' companies.
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And there is the real prize - hidden in plain sight. He wants to usurp the power of the Executive Branch and arrogate it to Congress. But it's for the children!, er, NASA! and so it slides right by most commenters here.
We don't even have supersonic passenger flight right here on Earth, and that engineering was solved 40 years ago.
Well, duh. That's because governments banned supersonic overflights of their territory, and left few financially-viable routes that could be flown at high speed.
Supersonic airliners aren't an engineering problem, they're a political problem.
I know it it's fun to pretend that stuff. Just like some people enjoy pretending that Obama was born in Kenya. It kind of makes you look silly, though.
When a private corporation, or any state agency in any of the 50 states hires you to work THIS YEAR, while promising you'll get paid retirement from 2035-2055, they pay out that money to a 401k or other retirement fund THIS YEAR. Work done in 2014 gets paid for in 2014, with revenues generated in 2014.
Failing to set that money aside , normally in the care of a disinterested third party, is fraud and can send you to prison. That's a significant chunk of the white collar guys in prison- they didn't actually set aside funds in the appropriate accounts for various things, they only pretended to.
The matching principle is a fundamental principle of accounting that you learn in the first few weeks of Accounting 101. You have to match expenses (employee pay) with the revenues they generate (postage collected) . You don't get to collect the benefit now and just say "we'll pay the expenses in 30 or 40 years, long after the current board is gone". You have to recognize the expense in the same period as the revenue it generates. Again, disregarding Generally Accepted Accounting Principles is how suits end up in _prison_.
The US Postal Service is actually very unusual in that they had workers working in 2010, but promised to pay for that work in 2030-2050, using revenue they HOPED to generate in 2030-2050. The problem here is obvious - USPS might not be generating any significant revenue in 2040, so how are they going to pay all of those retired workers they promised to pay? With no money set aside, they won't get paid. That's fraud, and that's why private company officers who try that crap can end up in prison.
So you're basically advocating that USPS should commit felony fraud upon it's workers, by promising to pay them a handsome retirement but making no arrangements to see that they are actually paid.
Oh, sorry, is this the Anti-Space Nutter Nutter again? I didn't realize you were also the Anti-Supersonic AIrliner Nutter.
Just in case you actually believe that, here's a little information about what was actually going on, with an example.
In 2014, I did some work for the state of Texas and the state promised that they'd pay for that work 30-50 years from now, when I'm retired. Just as all public corporations are legally required too, Texas follows Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) , and therefore recognized that expense in 2014. They got the benefit in 2014, so they needed to pay the cost in 2014. That's why Texas has set aside $130 billion dollars, managed by disinterested third parties, to cover the future retirement costs it has already incurred by having us work for them. See http://www.trs.state.tx.us/inf... for details. The key point is that the state already got the benefit of my work, so they already paid it's cost, the retirement they promised I'll get later.
That's called the "matching principle " and is a basic part of GAAP. When corporations fail to follow GAAP, the executives can go to prison. You might wonder why. That's because they've acquired my services by promising that I'll get paid later; if they make no preparations to ensure that I'll actually get paid later that's fraud. Fraud in the billions is felony fraud and sends suits to prison.
What USPS was doing was having people work now, and promising to pay them 30-50 years later, but making no provision to make it possible to actually pay them. They were having employees work in 2000 and HOPING that in 2040 they'd have revenue to pay the promised retirement pay and benefits. Of course USPS might not be making any significant revenue in 2040, so there might not be any way to pay retirement in 2040 for workers who worked in 2000. The workers would be shit of luck, screwed out of the retirement they were promised. That's often considered felony fraud, but it's how the USPS was operating.
Congress figured that felony fraud on the postal workers'was a bad idea, and ordered USPS to do two things. First, they had to start setting aside _some_ money to pay the retirement benefits they had already promised to people who had already done the work. Second, they had to WRITE DOWN A PLAN for the fund to become sound within ~50 years.
They didn't have to follow generally accepted accounting principles yet, but they had to have a plan on how they'd get their shit together within the next 50 years. That's where the "not even born yet" silliness comes from - the idea that USPS has to at least come up with a written plan as to how they won't still be committing the same fraud on their employees 50 years from now, if the USPS still exists in 50 years.
Establishing a colony on the moon makes a great test bed for sending people on to Mars and if anything goes wrong they are three days away from Earth. If anything goes wrong on a Mars trip you are a minimum six months away. You can't even have a video chat in an emergency due to the time lag. And there is science that can be done on the moon. Chris Hadfield thinks that the moon should be our next step into the cosmos instead of Mars and I'm not going to argue with him.