Obama's Impending NASA Decisions 405
eldavojohn writes "From delaying Project Constellation to an additional $2 billion in funding, Space.com looks at some immediate decisions the President Elect will have to make once he takes office in January. The biggest one will be the shuttle plan: do we retire the shuttle fleet or keep it on for more missions? If it is retired, we would have to rely on another country to bring our astronauts into space between 2010 and 2015 as a new fleet is built. Will Obama hold true on his $2 billion pledge to NASA?"
Re:Just NASA? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think US national debt is anywhere near $10^22 just yet.
Will he give NASA the $2 billion? Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
I think Obama will give NASA the $2 billion. It's a stimulus to the economy, something it badly needs. Now, I know that 90% of slashdot is libertarian, but Keynesian economics says that you do deficit spending in a recession. You both decrease taxes and increase spending, since the gov't can act as a employer of last resort (when everyone else is firing). There's no question that there's great waste when 10% of the population is unemployed (if that high unemploymentcomes to pass). You'll have millions of people not doing anything for the economy, just sitting at home and draining the government's social spending with nothing to show for it. The only way to quickly reduce that number is by government spending. No other way. He may even reverse Bush's decision to go to the Moon and instead go to Mars first. If he wants Florida in the bag in 2012, he probably will also extend the Shuttle for a couple years.
(Of course, the national debt will eventually overwhelm the tax base unless the flip-side of Keynesian economics is also followed: increase taxes and decrease spending during boom cycles.)
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Because our diplomatic relations with Russia have generally been getting worse. Many of their officials are hard-liners from the cold war era.
Re:Continuing to use the shuttle? (Score:3, Informative)
The expected Apollo loss rate was 1 in 25, or 4%. The Soyuz loss rate has been 2 out of 100, or 2%.
Having said that, the Russians are very sensible in running basically the same spacecraft for decades. Once you get the bugs out, spacecraft (like any engineering) is a lot more reliable, and the Soyuz has had 90 successful missions in a row. (I am counting success here as the crew survived - obviously, not all of these missions did everything they were supposed to do.)
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:5, Informative)
This year's NASA budget [wikipedia.org] was $17.318 billion. Meanwhile, the military got $515.4 Billion. [wikipedia.org]
One year's military budget would fund NASA for three decades. I think your priorities are as badly misplaced as our government's.
Meanwhile, we could do a lot of other things to balance the budget - like ending corporate welfare.
Re:Just NASA? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:5, Informative)
As for private enterprise? No chance. No private enterprise has ever launched a person into orbit. SpaceShip One was a major achievement for them, but didn't even reach Alan Shepard levels of spaceflight; a Gagarin is far beyond them.
Is there a reason you're mentioning SpaceShip One (which was never designed for orbital capability) while ignoring Falcon (which was)? Granted, Falcon didn't carry any people, but a claim that this capability "is far beyond them" is ridiculously false. Dragon [spacex.com] should be ready to go by the time the shuttle retires.
If you mean could the government write a cheque to a private firm to build them a spacecraft, yes, they could.
And they already did. You seem to be treating an ongoing program, started years ago, as if it's a hypothetical...
Shuttle Launch tonight! (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:5, Informative)
Total NASA budget, FY 2009 - $17.6 billion
US federal budget, FY 2009 - $3.1 trillion
NASA budget as a percentage of federal budget - 0.568%
Even if you completely scrapped NASA, you're not going to make any useful difference.
Re:First (Score:5, Informative)
As a fiscal conservative, I'd prefer less aggregate government spending because it is an inefficient way to accomplish the ends it is put to. However, given the spending spree the government is on, I find NASA far less objectionable than writing checks to citizens, bailouts, or WPAish "dig a ditch. now fill it in." economic "stimulus" plans. At least spend our money on something that might one day help us.
Re:The bigger question... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, our being flat broke has very little to do with the space program, except that every dollar spent by the government is a dollar it either needs to tax us for, or borrow from someone (to later tax us for with interest).
Here's a chart I threw together a while back when having an argument with a friend of mine about NASA's budget and our general federal budget woes.
http://foofus.com/amuse/public/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg [foofus.com]
Note how, if the NASA budget remained the same every year from now on, it would take approximately 47 years to spend as much as we threw away on the bank bailout this year. Also note how the "Interest on Debt" line is about 40 times NASA's budget.
I understand that we need to cut spending and balance our budget - hell, I DEMAND it of anyone I vote for - but NASA is an awfully popular whipping boy for "government spending" compared to the very small portion of our budget that is actually spent on basic science research, engineering, computing, space exploration, and protecting our planet from potential destruction by rogue asteroids.
(disclaimer: Yes, I DO work for NASA - but I'd feel this way even if I didn't!).
Re:Shuttle Launch tonight! (Score:3, Informative)
Shuttle launches are truly incredible to watch and hear in person. There are parks a few miles from Cape Canaveral where you can pull over and get a good view once the shuttle gets up in the sky a bit.
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:0, Informative)
Meanwhile one is explicity authorized by the Constitution, and the other isn't.
Re:I love the space program but ... (Score:5, Informative)
I actually agree with you. NASA has a lot of value to the country that people really do not see! There's lots of factors why, and NASA shares a little bit of the blame in that PR could be done a lot better - but overall it's been a constant problem that people don't see the end product of all their government-sponsored research dollars.
There's some good sites online though, that have lists of NASA Spinoff technology:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html [thespaceplace.com]
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/nasalife/index.html [nasa.gov]
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26661 [spaceref.com]
I know I'm starting to sound like a shill at this point, but when you really believe in something, that's a risk you end up taking. :)
Re:Obama's Decision? (Score:1, Informative)
Is any of this really up to Obama? Isn't it Congress that decides where money is spent?
Shhhh, you'll spoil it! Next thing you'll be saying is that Obama can't wave a magic want and "change the world," ...
I've been seeing this line from the Republicans a lot lately but, from my perspective, it's a bit of a straw man.
I was choked up when Obama won - not because I think Obama will be a good president but because I was so relieved that we won't have another four years of failed Republican policies.
What I'm saying here is that the Republicans still don't get it. They see teary-eyed Obama supporters and think "rock-star Obama" rather than "boy, we (Republicans) sure have managed to make ourselves unpopular". That is, Republicans still don't get the depth of the opposition to their policies.
Let's take just one example: torturing innocent people to death. It is established fact that members of the US military, working on military time, using military facilities, carrying out instructions from their superiors to the best of their ability and understanding, have beaten a number of innocent people to death over the past eight years.
Technically speaking, Bush didn't torture anyone to death himself nor did he give an explicit order to anyone else to torture innocent people to death (as far as we know). What Bush did do, with overwhelming Republican support, was to painstakingly create a system lacking the basic features necessary to prevent innocent people from being tortured to death by governments. These features are hardly a secret. They have been known by civilized countries for hundreds of years and they are even spelled out explicitly in the Bill of Rights in the US constitution.
So, people like me have been saying for some time that we really don't like the US government torturing innocent people to death. But, the Republicans brushed us off: they even told us that we were anti-American traitors and that, if we didn't like it, we could leave.
When Obama got elected, I wasn't thinking magic wand. I was just feeling overwhelmingly relieved that after eight excruciating years we might finally have a president that didn't think it was OK to torture innocent people to death.
And that, is what the Republicans still just don't seem to get.
Re:First (Score:5, Informative)
On the surface it sounds like a BS argument, but if you do a little analysis on it theres probably quite a bit of truth to it.
It's much more than a bit of truth: it already happened! NASA tried to pull that stunt after the Apollo program. There was a big gap between Apollo 17 and the first Space Shuttle flights and NASA fired a lot of engineers and workers with valuable skill sets. They tried to hire them back more than 5 years later.
Guess what most of then answered? No, thanks.
Re:Continuing to use the shuttle? (Score:3, Informative)
There hasn't been a Soyuz-related fatality since 1971, and the vehicle has undergone 3 major design revisions since then.
I would argue that it's unfair to include the early Soyuz launches (or Apollo 1 for that matter), considering that the problems which caused the failures were entirely eliminated, and the vehicle proved to be extremely robust afterward.
The same can be said (to a lesser extent) for the Challenger, but not Columbia, as the tiles remain extremely vulnerable.
There have been 2 Soyuz launch failures since 1971, both in which the entire crew survived thanks to the launch-abort system. (One blew up on the pad, and the other had a stage-separation failure that caused the craft to invert before the LES activated)
In its current design, the Soyuz is probably the inherently safest and most reliable spacecraft in existence.