Slashdot Mirror
Congress Decides To Delay US-Launched Astronauts, Keep Using Russian Services
New submitter surfdaddy writes: In order to protect the entrenched big aerospace companies, the Congress has increased NASA's budget for FY2016 but has cut funding for "commercial crew." Commercial crew is the funding used by SpaceX for the planned initial manned launches in the first half of 2017. With this cut, the launch of U.S. astronauts from U.S. soil using U.S. rockets will be delayed two years, and we will continue to send millions of dollars to Russia for launch services. "Senate appropriators suggested that NASA’s plans announced earlier this year to procure Soyuz seats for missions in 2018 indicated that the agency was not confident at even this early stage that the two companies with commercial crew contracts, Boeing and SpaceX, could remain on schedule to begin flights in 2017. ...
Lets create a good relation with our friendy Russian neighbors. They are so welcome and inviting and will never do harm.
Oh wait.. War, Oil, Communism.. I might reconsider..
Systemd!!! long live!!! been a while
You can tell congress is run by a bunch of corporate minded Republican douchebags, when their answer to budget problems is just to offshore the work.
He'll have to keep getting fellated by Slashdice over his electric cars and his Hyperloop, there won't be any astronauts in the near future.
Sad Sad... Pathetic really,truly...
40 years after the faked(sarcasm) moon landings and they can't even pretend to send humans into orbit.
IMO lets put 1 years military budget into real space exploration, 1 way trips to mars (several at that budget) etc... be more useful than bombing tents.
Sort of reminds me of what happened to Preston Tucker, just not quite to that extent yet.
No bias here from the slavish /. Elon Musk fanbois. Perhaps 'commercial crew' should live up to the hype and invest in their own private platform. NASA needs to prioritize SLS. Besides, we should cancel commercial crew. We have Delta IV orion and will soon have SLS Orion.
Being able to do military launches means SpaceX neatly outmaneuvered this attempt to cut them off at the knees.
I guess that means the the overall budget will be smaller than last year?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
are more anti Obama than they are pro usa
Our roads and bridges are crumbling. Giving obese, lazy white trash and immigrants free healthcare for their lifestyle-induced ills is more important than exploring space, the final frontier (or giving up libtard guilt and heaven forbid rewarding the producers of society properly). Obama is an attention whore celebrity too pussy to really come down hard on ISIS like they deserve. No one will be accountable to fix that problem until it's wold war 3. Silicon valley is in another egomaniac bubble. This country is shit and it's just sad. Goodbye America, I think I may leave if you for the Canadian wilderness if this lousy God forsaken American society can pull itself out of this wallowing libtard delusional hell hole it's dug itself into. We are being eclipsed by China in a number of ways slowly but surely. This fucking country has gone to shit and I'm ashamed to say I was born here.
Is it cheaper to launch by Russia? Will we tax the US economy, weaken ourselves, to hoard our activities here, to hoard the illusion of physical dollars staying in the economy?
People are so simplistic in their views. "Shop locally! Locally-produced will strengthen your local economy!" Not if your local economy expends twice as many resources as it would to import; then it only makes you twice as poor.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Outrage!
Scandal!
fat-cat politicians and their greedy elite
the car insurance news you won't believe is true!
best hair color 2015 announced!
how this company is disrupting shaving!
sure feels like friday around here.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station unexpectedly started" yep, that would do it.
http://www.space.com/29632-soy...
This is the same congress that has specifically said that DoD payloads can't be launched using the RD-180 after a certain date to PREVENT us from spending more money buying RD-180 engines from Russia... but in order to get to the ISS we are willing to pay the Russians for a ride.
Ugh!!!
I can't believe I'm the first to point out:
In Soviet Russia, cosmonauts launch YOU!
If they succeed and are not put in the line-up for manned deliveries then just of the shear hell of it, SpaceX should send their own man up with a stack of Pizzas, for delivery to the ISS, COD!
Your leadership just wants to make things a bit more fair, you know spread the wealth. They have such a long history of coddling SpaceX, won't someone think of the Russians!
Delta IV never lost an engine in flight. F9 has. I don't see how they launch men using that Soviet styled 9-clustered thrust package. One thing is for sure. F9 is a very dangerous rocket. Hey Musk! Why don't to follow Jeff Bezos lead, and develop a real engine on your dime.
I thought we we're gonna solve this shit with a space elevator, what's the current progress on such?
I was expecting this to happen at some point. Most people think of NASA as a space program, but to Congress it's just a fund to be used for political horse trading. I need a few more votes to pass the budget? Then this representative gets farm subsidies, that representative gets funding for a new highway, and the other rep gets a piece of a NASA program.
What that means is they want Constellation, even though it's going to be waaaaaaaay more expensive than comparable SpaceX offerings. What Congress doesn't want is for people to start wondering "Hey, if SpaceX can give us what we need for a fraction of the price, why do we need Constellation?"
Competitors already are in big trouble trying to compete with SpaceX. Now they force SpceX are forced to cut prices even further.
Politicians expect Elon Musk to complain loudly, run at a loss or go bankrupt, giving competitors a better chance.
Many Slashdot readers know how a man like Elon Musk will actually respond: If he complains, he will be doing it while designing an even cheaper solution, and then offer a price well below the cut budgets, and still make a healthy profit. _Then_ his competitors will be in deep shit.
Democrats are just complaining because Congress decided to defund a public project where the money went to a private company owned by a number of their big supporters. But it's not like they totally defunded anything, they just moved some money to another account because said private company wasn't going to be able to deliver the service the money is supposed to obtain. Space X will be short $344 million from what they expected because Congress had to make sure they still had transportation to the ISS to keep a US presence there, or do you propose we risk just giving the Russians the whole thing?
It's like you where building a house, but one of your contractors wasn't able to complete his work within the schedule you need. Well, now your house will not be ready for another 2 months, so you will need to pay rent for your current apartment for that time, you are going to have to get that money from someplace. So you cut back your budget for your new home and sacrifice someplace.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
"Senate appropriators suggested that NASA’s plans announced earlier this year to procure Soyuz seats for missions in 2018 indicated that the agency was not confident at even this early stage that the two companies with commercial crew contracts, Boeing and SpaceX, could remain on schedule to begin flights in 2017."
Clearly the correct approach is to put all your eggs in one basket at any given time.
If you delay American crew launches until 2019, then NASA is going to procure Soyuz seats for 2019 and maybe 2020.
Aren't the russians under sanctions, in a horrible dictatorship and all that nasty s**t flung by the US media?
And these same russians still allow us to use their launch vehicles?
At least SpaceX can boost there numbers about how many times cheaper they are than SLS.
Congress cuts funding for a program that (at least on the SpaceX side) is well advanced in producing a man-rated booster and capsule to replace the Russian rides to the ISS and yet they INCREASE funding for a program that has yet to even produce a full-size prototype, doesn't have a proper mission yet, just some thought bubbles AND is costing far more than it would cost if you just said "this is what we want the rocket to do, who can build it for us"
I think there are 2 things going on here.
First is that there is an election comming up and the votes of a bunch of ATK workers in Utah who have been promised jobs in the SLS program to replace the jobs they had in the shuttle program are somehow important enough to matter (which is a reflection on just how broken the US political system is). Hence the increase in funding for SLS to get it to the "actually building stuff" phase much faster. (and to assure the workers in question that their jobs are safe)
And second is that SpaceX has the lead in producing a crew rated capsule right now (their crew capsule and rocket are a modified version of the capsule and rocket they are launching to the ISS already whereas Boeing has to develop a capsule from scratch) so the cut in funding and the delay is a chance to give Boeing time to catch up (since Boeing is too politically and economically important to allow SpaceX to win this race on its own)
It's all about the pork, and protecting those Shuttle-era jobs. (Never mind that NASA is a relatively small budget item and there's no good reason they couldn't add to SLS while keeping Commercial Crew funded.)
Remember those Shuttle main engines that they removed (replaced with mock-ups) before sending them off to museums? Yeah, well the test stands are still at Stennis, and the 2010 legislation ordering SLS required NASA to use existing Shuttle technology where possible, so SLS will launch with SSMEs removed from Shuttle orbiters before they were sent to museums. Those SSMEs are being test-fired once again at Stennis. That's right, the actual same Shuttle engines that they had to refurbish after every flight.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Given the money remaining in the budget for Commercial Crew, NASA should reduce the number of entrants from 2 to 1 and fully fund SpaceX. Tell Boeing that their CST-100 is no longer needed, thanks for playing, and get lost.
I actually think the two-year delay is to buy time until ULA's Vulcan can fly; since CST-100 was slated for Atlas V and all purchased RD-180 engines are slated for the military block buy.
This INCREASES commercial crew over the previous year by 200 Million dollars.
The President's supporters are calling this a "cut" because he is yet again playing the anti-deep-space shell game he has played his entire time in office and the congress is not going along with him. Just because Obama proposes spending more on Commercial Crew than congress does, that does NOT make the congressional action a "cut" as it increases funding year-over-year.
President Obama is on a warpath against deep space exploration. He initially cancelled the Constellation Program to return to the moon and go on to mars. He has shifted funds that would have funded probes to other planets into "climate change" instead - nearly choking-off planetary science. Every year he sends his lap-dog administrator up to Congress to testify that he has too much money for SLS and Orion .... and then he sends the guy back to testify that these programs are slipping and will launch later and later. Simultaneously, he keeps trying to shift cash from SLS and Orion into Commercial Crew which is producing far less-capable-than-shuttle LEO access vehicles. Sure, Obama has a vague asteroid mission (no schedule, nor budget) penned-in for some distant future date, but that's using the SLS and Orion which he keeps trying to strangle. If Obama truly wants to spend that much on Commercial Crew, all he needs to to is ask for it WITHOUT cutting it from the SLS and Orion which Congress wants. Obama does not do this because he actually does not want the extra money, he just wants to use Commercial Crew as an excuse to shift funds away from the deep space systems the Congress wants.
In the future, can we please have HONEST headlines that only call actual cuts "cuts"? This scam where somebody proposes an INCREASE but it is smaller than somebody else's INCREASE so it gets dishonestly called a "cut" is how the hyper-partisans play their dishonest political manipulation games.
John Kerry met Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin in Sotchi a few weeks ago, and since that time US and Russia seems to be able to talk together again.
What happened? Obviously the US administration realized the Ukraine government was just impossible to control, but that kind of consideration did not prevented them from supporting weird regimes in the past.
was a supplier (started a few companies) to the automotive industry back in the 50's and lost $10,000 on Tucker. He died before I was born, but my grandmother always called him a scam artist and crook. I don't know any more details than that, but always wished she'd told me more, but I was too young to know about these things, but I knew about Tucker from the rare rant decades before the movie (I've never seen it, but my father told me it was mostly a lie).
Shouldn't we be happy Congress is being more restrained? Everytime there is a cut the same people who whine about taxes being too high whine about the cuts.
Fact is SpaceX is not ready. That's it. They completed less than half their scheduled launches last year and have only done a few of the 14 scheduled for this year.
If you were in Congress and had to make a decision about 2018 or 2019 - what would you do? There is no data to show that SpaceX or Boeing will be ready - I guess you could give them more money and push the problem down the road (then get questioned for "why did you give them so much money when you knew they couldn't meet the timelines")? This is the right and prudent decision. Boeing and SpaceX have consumed a lot of taxpayer dollars so far to develop something which will be sold at a high margin. Congress did the right thing here, I am sure it was a tough decision.
President Obama could easily ask for proper funding for commercial crew and there are plenty in congress including Republicans who would fund it - it's a tiny sliver of a rounding error in the budget. The Republicans are NOT hard-wired against CC - remember: THEY were the ones who drove the whole Commercial Cargo agenda which produced the current SpaceX supply runs to the ISS. It was former Bush's last NASA administrator who oversaw the creation of Commercial Cargo and said it could eventually be extended to become Commercial Crew.
Obama does not just propose to add the money to fully-fund Commercial Crew because he does not really care about it - it's a corporate thing and he's more of a big government guy. He keeps playing a passive-aggressive political game with the congress in which he keeps lying about the project priorities THEY have for Orion and SLS and gettiing back out of low Earth orbit, and he keeps trying to strip funds from those projects to use the cash for Commercial Crew to/from LEO.
He has done the same thing with "flagship" exploration missions. He keeps shifting money to study global warming, and as a result the James Webb telescope is sucking-up nearly all the remaining cash from robotic probes to other planets. We are not building any more Cassini-style planetary probes under Obama - we are having to go cheap with recycled parts for a couple of mars landers and another mars rover. The public has not yet noticed the effects of this because so many pre-Obama probes are still operating. Messenger (the pre-Obama Mercury probe) was only recently ended. New Horizons (the pre-Obama Pluto probe) is only now reaching its planet. Even Cassini continues to work.In a few years when these are all finished and there are no new Obama-era probes reaching their planets the public might finally notice the huge slump in new data.
Again: No cut to Commercial Crew has happened. the congress has simply resisted Obama's effort to shift MORE money into Commercial Crew from a program he knows full-well is a priority for them. Turning the tables, this is about equivalent to congress trying to shift money from Obamacare to fund trips to Disneyland for terminally-ill kids - both sides might agree it's a good cause, but it would clearly be about more because everybody knows Obamacare is a priority item for Obama. Same thing here: SLS and Orion are a priority for congress and the constant effort to rob funds from it has seriously irked some critical people in congress who will not give-in.
President Obama could easily ask for proper funding for commercial crew
That's exactly what happened, and look how it ended up.
Ezekiel 23:20
BTW, what does the JWST have to do with Obama? JWST went horribly wrong years before Obama got into office. Are you saying Obama is a time traveller? And what does JWST have to do with "studying global warming" anyway?
Ezekiel 23:20
At least this House vote gives us some clarity about what the GOP *really* think of Russia: "No problem". I'm inclined to agree. Mr Putin isn't perfect, but he's a long way better than most world leaders and it can be argued he is defending his own country's interests effectively and isn't really a threat to the US. Pretty much what Putin himself has been saying. We should remember to discount GOP fear mongering and bluster on the subject of Russia. They don't really mean it.
Only boring people are ever bored.