NASA To Face $1.3 Billion Cut Next Year Under Sequestration 242
littlesparkvt writes "A budget forecast that was released on Friday shows that the defense department isn't the only department getting hammered: NASA is as well, if the automatic budget cuts happen. According to Nature magazine, NASA will lose '$417 million from its science budget, $346 for space operations, $309 for exploration, $246 for cross agency support, among other cuts.'"
Re:Budget cuts should not be imposed (Score:3, Insightful)
News coverage question of the day (Score:5, Insightful)
When the republicans temporarily shut down the government while budget battles raged on, we had 24/7 wall to wall coverage of this. [wikipedia.org] Contrast this with today where absolute NO TV and virtually no newspaper coverage exists for this event. Why?
Nasa is the spearhead (Score:5, Insightful)
Nasa is the spearhead of innovation, if it wasn't for them, we'd not have a lot of the materials today that we make our innovations even more innovative with. Nasa isn't just all about space exploration, but what we can do with materials in near zero gravity, search for alternative energy sources that can literally save our lives, nanotechnology and beyond.
To see such an innovative organization being stripped down like that, rips my heart apart.
Another nail in the coffin of science in America. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure there are a depressingly-large number of Americans who would be overjoyed at the prospect of NASA being monetarily crippled, if not defunded altogether. Not only is it a haven for climate scientists (NASA has Earth-looking satellites, and has monitored the Antactic ozone hole for years), but it's packed to the gills with astrophysicists who maintain that the universe is billions of years old instead of a mere six thousand.
Forrest and Trees (Score:5, Insightful)
All this focus on the released details of the bad things that will happen to each agency is a waste of energy. The administration put this document together because Congress insisted on it, and if it had been dropped in my lap I would have done as litle as necessary to put this useless exercise in budgetary masturbation together. This is all focusing on the "trees" of "OMG, my favorite NASA program will be axed" when it should be on the forrest of "DAMN, Congress is about to put a shotgun to the head of the US economy and pull the trigger." We should be furious about the short-sighted, infantile, "he's touching me" inability to work together of what passes for leadership in Congress, particularly on the REPUBLICAN (there, I said it) side of the aisle. NASA losing $1.3B is a candle against the general confligration this disaster will cause to the US.
Re:Damn Democrats!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither party really tries to spend more or less than the other.
What people fail to realize is there's very little difference between the two parties. Those issues everyone campaigns on? They're to polarize people to give them a sense of duty to vote for one party or the other. If you'll notice very little actually gets accomplished on polarizing issues, those issues exist to keep you from voting third party.
What is the real difference in the parties? It's like a sports franchise. Each party is playing for different companies.
Obviously the Republicans are playing for defense contractors and some other civil engineering types.
The Democrats are obviously playing for unions, health insurance, and pharmaceutical companies. (non-health insurance companies fall anywhere in the spectrum)
So in the NFL what happens when two teams go to the Superbowl? One team wins and the other loses. Does that mean the losing team doesn't make any money? NO! The losing team makes a huge profit, the winning team gets the glory and makes an even bigger profit.
Tax money is like a river to these people. There's a fork in the river with a dam going to each fork. Winning an election is winning the right to open up the gates to your fork a little wider so your team gets more of the profit, like winning the Super Bowl. The other team still gets some.
As tax payers we've lost focus. We've put all of our focus into deciding who to trust with the gate controls further down the line. Fact is the river is supposed to come off of a lake, the lake is nearly empty because all the waters been diverted to the river. Sure some asshole keeps setting the trees on fire in the mountains to melt snow into water (inflation) but that's destroying the land we live in. We need to close the dam where the river starts and turn our taxes into a stream, not the friggin Mississippi. As long as you're voting for the NFL we all lose.
Re:much as I like NASA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Except NASA's budget goes right back into the pockets of the American people, plus we get space missions.
"The economic benefits of NASA's programs are greater than generally realized. The main beneficiaries (the American public) may not even realize the source of their good fortune. . ." - paper in Nature, 1992
In 2002, the aerospace industry accounted for $95 billion of economic activity in the United States, including $23.5 billion in employee earnings dispersed among some 576,000 employees (source: Federal Aviation Administration, March 2004).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Economic_impact_of_NASA_funding [wikipedia.org]
Re:News coverage question of the day (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Fox News Corp. and AOL Time Warner doesn't want to show the republicans as the reason nothing gets done during the election season. This way if the republicans sweep all the elections, they can brag about how they were the ones to finally get something passed.
Re:much as I like NASA... (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA's budget is insignificant compared to the entitlement programs and DOD spending. Cutting NASA's budget doesn't upset the old people, the welfare recipients, and the retired military veterans. Cutting NASA's budget does little for actually balancing the budget. It's just the least important to that good o' red blooded american voter that is so important this time of year.
The problem with the budget has always been that politicians do not look at what will be good for the nation's future when making decisions. Instead they look at what is good for their individual political future and saying "I cut welfare, defense spending, and social security" won't win them any votes. They particularly love the elderly vote since they outnumber the rest of us and they don't let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy story.
Nasa is chump change, need to hit the sacred cows. (Score:5, Insightful)
The real waste in the Budget is in things like Medicare. US spends 15% of GDP on health, while most OECD countries spend about 7-8% on evil "socialised medicine" yet have everyone is covered and in many cases they have higher life expectancies. 7% of us GDP is about $1 Trillion per year, I realise that isn't the federal budget but it is money that people could use for other things if they weren't wasting it.
Higher education 3% of GDP vs OECD average 1.5%. College attendees are getting screwed to the tune of $200 billion per year.
Around $1000 per person spent on tax filing per year due to ridiculously complex tax system - another 2-300 $billion per year.
And I am not even going to bother talking about the Pentagon.
Point is that there are ways of saving all that needs to be saved without impacting negatively on peoples standard of living, but the US needs to be willing to adopt the best practices of the rest of the west, regardless of philosophical objections about free-markets etc.
Re:It won't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "working" hard when you make more in a year than a middle class person makes in their entire lifetime. Human performance doesn't scale up that far, we're talking multiple orders of magnitude. On the way down from middle class you can of course slack as much as you want, but on the way up -- you know, a day only has 24 hours, no matter how bright you are, you can only do so much before you start, effectively, exploiting others.
Re:Budget cuts should not be imposed (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. The cost of GPS and "other such technical marvels" could easily be absorbed into the federal budget.
Sure, but you'd have to create an agency to handle development of the "technical marvels". It would need a lot of fancy buildings with high tech gear inside them, a good acronym...and...we're back to NASA.
Re:DoD (Score:5, Insightful)
1.3 Billion? That's 5 F-35 Lightning II's the DoD will have to cut out of it's budget! (Yes I know the A version costs "only" 197 million, but just wait...)
In any case, sequestration will hit the DoD (and Veterans Affairs) as well. If you weren't paying attention, last year Congress refused to raise the misleading named "debt ceiling" -- which is not a ceiling on actual *debt*, but rather securitizing *debt* already incurred. In other words, they wouldn't allow the treasury to issue notes or bonds to pay for expenses already budgeted, authorized and incurred. In order to avoid sovereign default, the administration worked out a deal where it would iron out the budget differences with Congress after the election. To give that commmitment teeth they arranged for automatic budget cuts, split evenly between DoD and the rest of the federal budget, if they failed to achieve 1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.
Since this voluntary deficit reduction will almost certainly have to be achieved without tax increases or defense spending cuts, NASA's prospects don't look any brighter if we avoid sequestration. Without a huge and probably unrealistic economic boom we're going to be cutting stuff that the public cares about a lot more than NASA. Sure, NASA's costing the average taxpayer less than 20 cents a day, but we'll be scrounging under the sofa cushions for pennies.
Re:It won't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "working" hard when you make more in a year than a middle class person makes in their entire lifetime. Human performance doesn't scale up that far, we're talking multiple orders of magnitude.
Who do you think employs those middle class people?
Mainly other middle class people (Score:4, Insightful)