Subcommittee Stops Human Mars Mission Spending

An anonymous reader writes "Last week's House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science FY08 budget markup would prevent work on programs devoted to human missions to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue "development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." The Mars Society is already leading an effort to get the language removed."

Simple Solution

[Stanistani]

Relabel it all as "Human Ganymede Landing Research."

Didn't anyone learn from Wrong Way Corrigan [wikipedia.org]?

Priorities

[mushupork]

We need tax money to make craters, not explore them.

Re:It's pretty simple, really...

[TheMeuge]

You can either go off starting random wars of aggression, or you can conduct planetary exploration. The American taxpayer, quite rightly, doesn't want to pay for both. Many don't want to pay for either, frankly.

And many of the latter have the intelligence of a tree stump, and the foresight of a drunk gerbil up Richard Gere's asshole. Doesn't mean we should listen to them.

DSC-304s

[HTH NE1]

They just don't want the general public finding out about our existing DSC-304 [wikipedia.org] shipyard on Mars.

Re:If you don't want to d/l a PDF for TFA #1

[SnowZero]

The PDF also boasts, actually boasts, that Congress is adding over 1.7 Billion dollars in extra funding that the White House did not request, which must be used for "drug enforcement".

Nah, that's just $1.7B of pork.