Is the OMB Trying To End Planetary Exploration? 236
EccentricAnomaly writes "Lou Friedman (former head of the Planetary Society) has written a provocative article over at Space Policy Review where he accuses the Obama administration of working on plans to gut the robotic Mars program in order to pay for NASA's exciting new rocket. This is after NASA already killed the Europa mission that was to have been the next outer planet mission after Cassini."
Re:Waste of time and money (Score:5, Informative)
OMB = Office of Management and Budget for us non-Americans.
Re:PR (Score:5, Informative)
NASA uses a lot of tax money
NASA budget: $19 billion
US military budget: $685 billion (including $79 billion for R&D alone)
If you do a pie chart of the federal budget, NASA barely even gets a sliver.
That's one of the oddities I've seen among those who generally oppose government spending: They tend to have a wildly distorted view of where most of the federal spending actually goes. The big items that account for almost all of it are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the military, and interest on previously accumulated debt, so if you're really trying to reduce the size of government, you have to do something about those.