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."
PR (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, NASA requires the PR that a rocket provides.
NASA uses a lot of tax money and, with a population whose general impression of resemasearch is that it just giving money to boring nerds in labcoats (ignoring the economy generated by products of past research), they must do regular "America #1, Yihaaaa!" performances in order to keep the population from objecting too much against NASA funding.
Sending robots to a planet that doesn't even have a baseball team is a waste. Launching what looks like a giant bullet shooting large flames from it's back is cool.
Blaming the wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the administration's fault, it's Congress. NASA HQ and the administration didn't even want to build SLS -- they wanted to bolster the commercial launch market instead -- and were forced to do it by the Congressional committee.
If there's someone Lou Friedman should be complaining about, it's Senators Nelson and Shelby and their fixation on providing pork to large aerospace contractors in return for bribes, I mean campaign donations.
I would have hoped that someone in his position would be better informed, frankly.
Re:PR (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA uses a lot of tax money and, with a population whose general impression of resemasearch is that it just giving money to boring nerds in labcoats (ignoring the economy generated by products of past research), they must do regular "America #1, Yihaaaa!" performances in order to keep the population from objecting too much against NASA funding.
Well, what do you expect [in-other-news.com]?
Also, it's pretty clear that Obama's core voters don't see space exploration as a priority or even a necessity.
Sure, Obama told the public that he will start a program for Mars and some gullible voters actually believed it. Of course anybody paying attention and having a memory realized back then that Obama's Mars-landing was even more unrealistic than Bush's Moon-landing.
Think of all the subsidized housing and foodstamps that can be bought with just one rocketlaunch. Americans want subsidized housing and foodstamps and that is exacly what they will get in the future.
Also, NASA lags behind [dailykos.com] in what really counts, so of course they deserve rigid cuts that hurt. Otherwise they will not learn their lesson.
NASA budget is two days expenditure by the US (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA has a budget of under twenty billion dollars. Since the US budget is a deficit busting 3.8 trillion it takes less than two days to cover NASA. Some will actually say that amount is far too much. Which is odd because we are spending so much we don't have, if we consider that we spend over three billion a day we don't have we deficit spend NASA's budget in a week.
We lose an estimated hundred billion dollars a year is medicare/medicade fraud. When you combine all levels of government we spend over six trillion dollars.
We have over TWO THOUSAND SUBSIDY programs. That is methods of getting money into the hands of people based on arbitrary requirements.
Any attempt to cut one item is usually met with an irrational comparison which puts the person suggesting the cut on the level not much higher than mass murderer. Yet the if we are going to fund science like NASA, and note we need to find all the programs the US funds not just including NASA to get an idea of how much is truly spent, we have to get expenditures under control. NASA isn't the only government player in space, the Air Force does a good amount there as well.
I agree with the person I am replying too, Obama and many Democrats and Republicans have nothing against NASA but one simple fact remains, it garnishes very little votes for them. So the money is better spent on other programs which keep them in office.
The three big forces in American politics are are all self supporting, Big Business, Labor Unions, and Politicians. The rest of us are played all the time and only given two choices because they have effectively shut down third party options.
Pork Pork Pork (Score:2, Insightful)
Congress determines the budget, not the Obama administration. NASA can't get anything done unless the project can be porked out to 10 different states.
If China gets their space station started and going, maybe that will trigger Congress to actually back NASA in a meaningful way again. Hoping for Space Race Part 2.
Re:Money, money, money (Score:5, Insightful)
They could learn to go to war less and have a smaller military maybe?
Re:Waste of time and money (Score:4, Insightful)
You think this is about jobs?
Please ponder the following:
* Realistically,m how many jobs can NASA create?
* How much does it cost to create each of those jobs? (NASA doesn't do cheap stuff)
* What's the intersection between "people who are qualified to work for NASA" and "people who are having trouble finding work"?
Re:Waste of time and money (Score:2, Insightful)
Conversion efficiency is low (an engineer can only eat so much pizza) and there's some leakage (most of the toys an an engineer is tempted by are made overseas).
Nope, it's mostly a PR circus for the masses - just like those F22 fighters, etc.
Re:NASA budget is two days expenditure by the US (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself: it's almost entirely pharma, especially since the US government refuses to actually negotiate drug prices. Which in a market system is batshit crazy since it amounts to a massive handout to pharmaceutical companies.
Re:Money, money, money (Score:4, Insightful)
Our military is TEN TIMES that of China. We could reduce military spending by a factor of 5 and still have twice the force China does.
There are some cultures out there for which live and let live does not exist
America being foremost among them.