Mars Rovers Facing Budget Cuts [Updated] 327
BUL2294 notes a CNN article reporting that the Mars Rovers program at NASA is facing budget cuts of $4 million for this year and $8 million for fiscal 2009. This will mean job cuts; and in all likelihood Spirit will be put in "hibernation mode," to be reactivated when or if future funding becomes available."
Update: 03/29 20:02 GMT by KD : NASA has rescinded the memo to the JPL threatening budget cuts, and is now saying that no rovers will be shut down.
Update: 03/29 20:02 GMT by KD : NASA has rescinded the memo to the JPL threatening budget cuts, and is now saying that no rovers will be shut down.
Re:Sad day (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sad day (Score:2, Interesting)
The same President who launched the war in Iraq also is the first President to enact a workable plan for putting people on Mars. By contrast, if Obama gets in, its likely that NASA will face some pretty deep cuts. For some reason, Republicans don't have as big of a problem blowing lots of money on space stuff, whereas Democrats always have to get past this "we could use the money to feed the poor" mental stumbling block. If it wasn't for the war, Bush would have been alright.
Not as bad as it sounds (Score:2, Interesting)
Canada also hates its Space Program (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of you may have seen that giant freakin' cool space robot called Dextre that just went up to the ISS. The Canadian company responsible (MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates or MDA) for that coolness is being sold off to a U.S. company.
The important thing to realize about MDA is that it was started over four decades ago and has been carefully nurtured by public funding with the express intention of forwarding Canada's space technology sector. MDA is the backbone of Canada's space program. (as small as it may be) In addition to selling off Canada's space program, this sale also includes RADARSAT-2, which was built with Canadian tax money and is currently used by the government to monitor the arctic. The sale of this satellite to a U.S. company will mean that the Canadian government will be ceding control [foxbusiness.com] of the satellite which it paid for to the U.S., a country which disputes Canadian sovereignty in some of the areas RADARSAT-2 monitors. RADARSAT-2 was effectively *given* to MDA to simplify operations, but now it's being sold to the U.S. and the money is going to MDA's shareholders rather than the Canadian government that paid for it!
The only thing standing in the way is a Rubber Stamp from the Industry minister Jim Prentice. Seeing as he's never failed to rubber stamp a sale before, the picture looks grim.
So, the U.S. is not alone in being mismanaged from the very top.
What are the costs involved in running the program (Score:5, Interesting)
The rovers, it's true, cost a lot of money to design, build, test, and deliver to Mars. But that is money already spent. Now that they are there, what are the major expenses of running the program? I realize that you do need staff and equipment to maintain communication with the rovers, and to send them programming, and that implies needing facilities in which to house the staff and equipment. But NASA already owns the facilities and equipment, I believe?
How many staff does it take to run the program? I wouldn't think it would be a huge number of people? 20 or 30 (that might be way off, I'm just pulling numbers out of the air, admittedly, but I can't understand why it would take a lot of people to run the program)? I realize that the scientists and engineers working on a program like this would be higher paid than the general public. Assuming an average salary of 100k per year, plus benefits at, say, 20k per year, 30 people would run you 3.6M per year.
Also, quick question - sometimes in large organizations like NASA, you can get some tricks going like paying one person to work on something that benefits two programs, but who is officially working on the other program. Could the Mars Rover program be kept alive with assistance from other programs inside NASA that need to maintain 'shared infrastructure'?
Re:In Space Nobody Can Hear A Brain Fart (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Simple solutions for NASA (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side note the war in Iraq is doing wonders for the robotics industry - defence is putting a lot of funding into AI and robotics which will speed up progress by possibly a decade.
Much of the money is borrowed from the PRC (Score:3, Interesting)
This means the PRC has the US over a barrel: if we try to stand up to them over, say, Tibet or Taiwan, they'll stop buying our bonds, or even dump them.
Re:Simple solutions for NASA (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm all for low prices, but if fruit growers would stop getting away with paying under minimum wage to illegal and even legal workers, maybe we would have more incentive to invent decent fruit picking machines? Maybe they could be assembled in Mexico? And our locals would maintain them? Win-win?
Although, we already import fruit [freshplaza.com] out of season.
Re:Sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
The real CPI has not been reported since 1986. Here's some of the tricks used [financialsense.com].
Gasoline has more than tripled in price in the last decade (1.04 to 3.27) . Housing? Doubled or tripled. Food? Don't even ask. Sure, you can substitute for some items, but for the stuff you actually NEED, like a roof over your head, food in your stomach, and transportation to and from work?
Also, the calculators of the CPI have already done the "substitution", to such an extent that they use USED cars instead of new cars, and "owner's equivalent rent" instead of the actual cost of the roof over your head. Its a lie.
Re:Simple solutions for NASA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Simple solutions for NASA (Score:5, Interesting)
Back on topic though, this country really needs to get the sense of wonder back and realize that a lot of what we have today we owe to the space programs.
Re:Simple solutions for NASA (Score:3, Interesting)
This "illegal immigrants do jobs that americans won't take" rhetoric is fallacious. Americans won't take the jobs because they don't pay a living (or legal) wage. If you made them full-time, roughly minimum wage jobs then I'm sure Americans will flock to them. I really don't understand the origin of this rhetorical trick, since Americans can, and HAVE done these exact same jobs in the last 30 years, the only difference was that they were fair jobs because it was before the politicos and fat-cats used our disadvantaged neighbors down south to break unions and lower wages, WITHOUT passing any of the savings from screwing the blue-collar worker down.
The economic argument for keeping illegals is bunk. The only valid argument I can find is the humanitarian one.