Smithsonian Using Kickstart Campaign To Save Armstrong's Moon Suit

qpgmr writes: The Smithsonian is appealing for assistance to raise enough money to preserve Neil Armstrong's moon suit. The "Reboot the Suit: Bring Back Neil Armstrong's Spacesuit" campaign launched Monday on Kickstarter, marking 46 years since Armstrong's moonwalk in 1969. Smithsonian reports: "....on the anniversary of that 'small step for a man,' the Smithsonian Institution announced a plan of action that is, in its own way, a giant leap for funding the job with what the Institution’s first federal Kickstarter campaign. With a goal of raising $500,000 in 30 days—by offering incentives such as exclusive updates to 3D printed facsimiles of the space suit gloves—museum officials hope to be able to unveil a restored spacesuit by the time of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing four years from now, in 2019."

Comments

$805M budget

[hawguy]

The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.

Re: $805M budget

[Karmashock]

I'm responding to this because it wasn't a troll question... I also felt answering it would get people to think about an issue for more than the .5 seconds they normally do which invariably leads to no actual thinking ever happening in the first place:

To be fair, he's saying that the DoD "Over Spends" so much on paperclips that you could raid the DoD budget indiscriminately and pay for the suit restoration.

here you might say "well, why do you say over spend"... because otherwise you're saying that the government is spending X on paperclips and doesn't need to because apparently they either buy too many or they aren't using them for anything.

Here is what you use paper clips for... to hold bits of paper together. So if you're using them... then what are you going to do when you don't have them?

  Staples? Folding the sheets just so? Maybe putting them in a folder?

And that causes your staple budget to go up... and that ignores that there are feature differences between staples and paperclips. Paper clips don't damage the paper when you use them which means you can separate out individual sheets or add sheets. Or folding... doesn't work as well as paper clips which means close efficiency from whatever that does. Or folders means you're now spending more on folders which are more expensive than paper clips per unit and are basically a superior version of the same thing at a higher cost.

I know I sound autistic going through this but details matter. The context of the statement was that there was so much fat in the military budget they could just bill it to the DoD. Now I'm sure the DoD does waste at LEAST half a million a year on all sorts of stupid shit. But every branch of government does that as well.

Obama and his wife took two separate government secret service protected planes to go to Los Angeles on the same day. Now, if they had shared the same plane that would have saved money. But they didn't. They chose to take two planes because "reasons". And I'm not beating up on Obama for that. you see it in every government department. They do stuff like that all the time.

The US Federal government got in trouble recently for running the sprinklers too long in California. They have a very bad drought there and for that reason they're being asked to not run the sprinkers for more than 6 minutes a week. Instead they're running them for about 6 hours a week.

Typical stuff. The city hall of San Francisco dumps about half a million gallons of drinking water down the drain every day to run water boiler heating system for the building. Again... in a drought. Never mind that they could recirculate the same water every day for at least a year at a time without any problems.

Its typical.

So if you want to raid a budget... I'd like people to stop picking on the military as if they're the only ones that do retarded shit on a regular basis. They ALL do it. Raid the general fund if you're going to take money out.

This would properly be filed under the "discretionary non military" fund. ANd that make up about 420 billion dollars of our annual budget every year. So add it to that.

Re:$805M budget

[nbauman]

Here is the best model I can find for what you'd get in the US.

The VA hospital system. This is a medical system set up for US soldiers in the US. It is entirely operated by the US federal government and it is widely regarded to be some mixture of corrupt and incompetent. There have been quite a few scandals with it recently.

Mostly stuff about putting people on wait lists forever. A lot of soldiers die waiting for treatment in the system.

When I hear "lets socialize the US healthcare system"... I think of the VA hospitals.

I've studied the VA system, and they're getting a bad rap.

First, you have to judge them by their main purpose: When a soldier comes back from Iraq with a brain injury, their job is to keep him alive and get him functioning as well as possible. They do the best job in the world. There is no place in the world that can treat head wounds as well as the U.S. military. Nobody. Same with the guys who have a foot blown off by a land mine.

If some 60-year-old vet comes in with trouble urinating because of an enlarged prostate, they're going to take care of him, yes. But he may have to wait for somebody with a more urgent problem. Like a coronary bypass or stroke.

Second, Congress wanted to cut taxes. But they wanted first-class service from government agencies. They wanted everything but they didn't want to pay for it. So they ordered the VA to cut their waiting times. But they didn't give them the money to hire more doctors to do it. So what do managers do when you tell them they have to do the impossible or they'll be fired? As any MBA will tell you, they cheat. They fudged their appointment records, just as any private business manager in the same situation would do. (Hello Enron?)

Third, the VA system does some of the best medical research in the world. When they do a treatment hundreds of thousands of times a year, they do a study to find out which treatment works better, which hospital gets better results, and which doctors get better results. (No, they don't fire the doctors with worse results, they retrain them.) They do that for heart disease, stroke, cancer, eye disease, amputations, everything. I went to a lot of medical conferences, and they're always talking about "the VA study" in their field, which is usually the best study available.

For example, I just read a study about how the VA was trying to figure out how to give pain-killing drugs to vets in severe pain. If you don't give them enough drugs, they're in pain. If you give them too much, and if you give them opioids, they can die from an overdose. The VA doctors figured out how to optimize it.

So yes, if I had a heart attack outside a VA medical center, I'd feel comfortable that I was getting the best care in the world. I'd trust them to make a tough diagnosis, and to treat a serious, life-threatening disease. If you were crippled, I'd trust them to get you walking again, if anybody could do it.

Don't whine to me because you can't get an appointment this month. Tell Congress to give them enough money to hire more doctors.

keep the stains

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want the stains removed. They're part of history. They're badges earned by actually making the trip. Preserve it: sure. Clean it: no way.