NASA's Big Telescope Avoids Death-by-Budget-Cut 123
coondoggie writes "NASA's most ambitious and highly over-budget space projects, the James Webb Space Telescope has apparently been spared the budgetary axe. The US Senate Committee on Appropriations has approved about $530 million of NASA's $17.9 billion budget to 'enable a 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.'"
If only (Score:5, Funny)
If only they renamed it to the "enduring freedom" telescope it would be much easier to get budget approval.
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hehe
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You're thinking small. Call it the Star-Spangled Freedom Eagle Dominator Patriot Telescope, and then duct-tape a handgun to the side of it. It goes under the defense budget, and BOOM, infinite funding.
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Oh, and I think this goes without saying, but if it isn't obvious, it would have a bitchin' America-tastic paint job, like this. [flickr.com]
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This is quite funny, actually. Even the spam here is a troll - if you click the link it takes you to a Slashdot 404 - with the spammy URL pasted to the end of it!
So actually going there is a conscious decision rather than a trap... and the language is just so stupid it's funny. Troll, not spam. And I like it.
- Rachel
If I May (Score:2)
If I may be permitted, I'd just like to say
FUCKING AWESOME!!!!
Very good news indeed. Thank goodness Congress has gone completely mental and there are still a few people with vision and curiosity.
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Because it's "completely mental" to cancel something that is 1700% over budget and 11 years late.
When it was proposed, it was going to cost $.5 billion and launch in 2007. Now it is going to cost $8.7 billion and launch in 2018.
How is that sort of program management "fucking awesome"?
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I would say its a win for the management, they haven't produced anything and got even more money to do it ... for everyone else though?
Re:If I May (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree with you in terms of budgets going over, delays and the like - the James Webb telescope is a disaster, I do also agree with MightyMartian in the sense that it is good to see the damned thing actually going to go up.
Program Management on the JW is terrible.
James Webb telescope itself is a good thing.
James Webb telescope on budget and on time would have been a better thing.
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The bleeding edge (Score:3, Informative)
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Yeah. It's not like it's even a war or anything useful.
It's fucking awesome in the way that the invention of the telescope was. Or in the way that getting eye surgery and being able to see better than you have for the past 20 years is. Or in the way that being able to discover something new is.
But yeah, it's no war. It's no bailout of huge companies. It's not as cool as any of these things: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/09/examples-of-government-waste [heritage.org] But still... it's pretty cool.
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hey lets dump another billion cause we spent 10x that much in something else!
I never understand that argument, yes NASA is cheaper than war, that doesn't make it a bargain though
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Hell the Libyan War is cheaper than NASA.
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"Hell the Libyan War is cheaper than NASA."
Well, yeah. The US isn't providing the ground troops. The rebels aren't the world's best trained, but they're mostly winning. The Brits and the Qataris are providing special forces to train them.
A lot of other NATO countries are doing air sorties for it.
Yeah, war can be a lot cheaper if you get someone else to pay for a good part of it. Though we did fire an awful lot of cruise missiles in the early part of it.
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Yeah, and we might even be able to visit Libya as tourists someday before we're able to visit Iraq / Afghanistan... Hopefully cheap wars are the wars of the future!
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Hey, are we fighting wars for peace, or are we fighting wars to DESTROY ALL HUMANS!?
I say, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
But I'm an optimist like that :-P
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The Mission Accomplished referred to the mission to dispose Saddam Hussein, which in case you didn't notice, was accomplished...
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"Veterans' program overpayments cost $800 million annually."
Yet the James Webb space telescope is 1700% over budget and 11 years late, and that is right now, with the James Webb's program history, it'll likely be 3400% overbudget and 22 years late before it's completed.
That's worse cost inflation than the F-35 program, which is notorious in aerospace circles as a ballooning budget running late.
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Did you catch the whole thing about that the second cost overrun was caused by congress not funding it enough, and congress was warned it would happen if they didn't fund it enough.
Re:If I May (Score:4, Insightful)
That list is crap. May of the tems are misleading, or simple not true.
Others arn't waste at all.
Looka t this one:
The Congressional Budget Office published a "Budget Options" book identifying $140 billion in potential spending cuts.
How is potential spending cuts 'waste'? it's not. Its a report indcating areas that shuold be looked at for spending cuts. Not 'here are cuts yyou can make'.
or this one:
The Advanced Technology Program spends $150 million annually subsidizing private businesses, and 40% of this goes to Fortune 500 companies.
Yeha, they pay companies that ahve the tools to do so to work on experimental stuff they woudn't otherwise looka t. .. and it's 150 million. That's money well spent, not waste.
"The Department of Agriculture spends $12 billion to $30 billion annually on farm subsidies, the vast majority of which go to agribusinesses and farmers averaging $135,000 in annual income."
AND? annual income? so the fuck what. How much is profit? Farm subsidies maint a stable food cost. Personally, I like ahve a stable and reliable food source. Lok at the countries that don't ahve that. Food Riots every few years, and starvation. Fuck that noise.
The whole list is twisted, and the few that seem to be actual legit complaint are a small, tiny, insignificant amount of money. Not that they should be stopped, but it's hardly an example of waste. If that list is the best someone can do, that are government is pretty damn good.
Re:If I May (Score:4, Insightful)
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Farm subsidies maint a stable food cost.
Well, some of them do. Some of them funnel money into the pockets of rich New Yorkers who don't farm. [exiledonline.com]
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If you're a farmer, either your farm is a corporation of some kind that is paying you over $135,000/yr, or you file a schedule F on your federal return where the farm's income and expenses are tallied up and the total goes to your 1040 as income. In other words,
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AND? annual income? so the fuck what. How much is profit? Farm subsidies maint a stable food cost. Personally, I like ahve a stable and reliable food source. Lok at the countries that don't ahve that. Food Riots every few years, and starvation. Fuck that noise.
So what do subsidies have to do with a stable food supply? There's no correlation here.
Re:If I May (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't understand how subsidies provides a stable food supply you really should shut your fucking cakehole about anything involving government spending.
Fortunately, I do understand how subsidies affect the food supply. They kill farmers in the Third World who can't compete with subsidies First World food. They allow the creation of oligopolies by those who hold the right to the subsidy (not just anyone can grow peanuts, sugar, or honey and collect the subsidy!). They encourage monoculture crops. They eliminated cane sugar from sodas and many sweets. There's interesting speculation that agricultural subsidies are a good portion of the cause of obesity in the US.
But the dumbest part of all? Subsidies don't actually address a need. We don't need stability in food crops because the market is already very stable. People aren't going to stop buying food, so farmers aren't going to stop growing food.
I swear to god... Slashtards become more and more dense by the day. WTF people??!?!!?
Look who's talking. You provided a very retarded argument about federal spending by going through a list and discounting every single item. Then when someone disagrees with an especially weak argument of yours, you blow up in some sort of kindergarten-style temper tantrum. If "Slashtards" are really causing you so much heartburn, then go away.
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They kill farmers in the Third World who can't compete with subsidies First World food.
The thing that kills them are the perverted free trade agreements that prevent them fro taxing imports so they have to treat massively subsidised foreign foods on the same level as their own.
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There's interesting speculation that agricultural subsidies are a good portion of the cause of obesity in the US.
There's interesting speculation that unicorn farts cause cancer.
But the dumbest part of all? Subsidies don't actually address a need. We don't need stability in food crops because the market is already very stable. People aren't going to stop buying food, so farmers aren't going to stop growing food.
Look, I'm not a fan of subsidies, but you clearly don't even understand the argument. If the price of imported food is cheaper than the price of local food, a country will import more and grow less. If the price difference is great enough, they'll import almost all their food. Depending on where the imports come from, that creates all sorts of issues. If half of your food comes from, say, China, what happens if the Chinese get pissed at you
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If the price of imported food is cheaper than the price of local food, a country will import more and grow less
And? The US grows a ridiculous excess of food (far more than double what the US needs) and it's a wealthy country. And subsidies don't protect against bad growing seasons.
It's the same reason the US is slowly trying to get away from middle-eastern eastern oil. It's not a good idea to put your country at the mercy of outside suppliers, especially ones with whom you have ... "issues". If you're suddenly getting only 50% of the oil you normally get, that would be really, really bad ... but nowhere near as bad as if you suddenly have only half as much food.
There's two ways food is not like oil. First, it's not as important. There's a vast amount of overproduction of food in the world today, most of it due to subsidies. In the US's case, it could endure much more than a halving of its food production and not be significantly effected. Second, food is a nearly purely renewable resource which a
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Your response has absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. Did you even read my comment?
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Look, I'm not a fan of subsidies, but you clearly don't even understand the argument. If the price of imported food is cheaper than the price of local food, a country will import more and grow less. If the price difference is great enough, they'll import almost all their food. Depending on where the imports come from, that creates all sorts of issues. If half of your food comes from, say, China, what happens if the Chinese get pissed at you? What happens if they have internal conflicts that interrupt trade? What happens if they have a really shitty growing season?
Most of the countries with massive agricultural subsidies already are the cheap food exporters. In the US in particular, there's a lot of unsubsidized food being produced competitively.
And no single country, especially one with as high population density as China, can dominate agriculture to the point of having pricing power.
I could see this argument working for a country with a high population density and no reliable nearby allies. But that's not the situation with the US which both ha
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Most of the countries with massive agricultural subsidies already are the cheap food exporters. In the US in particular, there's a lot of unsubsidized food being produced competitively.
That's the first time I've heard a claim like that. I'm not sure I believe it, though it seems semi-plausible. Anyway, as I said earlier, I'm not necessarily in favor of food subsidies - it just seemed like you completely misunderstood the argument being made in favor of them, so I tried to explain it. I think it depends - sometimes food subsidies can be a good idea, sometimes they're bad idea, but it's important to understand the issues before coming to any kind of conclusion.
I could see this argument working for a country with a high population density and no reliable nearby allies. But that's not the situation with the US which both has immense local agriculture, a reliable food producing ally, Canada right on its border, and a massive trade network with the rest of the world.
I'd tend to agree. There
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So we should continue to have an underlying hidden food tax? Why should farmers be special with handouts. If they can't do it profitable, get out of the business. We already import food from around the world that can do it cheaper. Altho farmers COULD do it profitable if they weren't competing against corporatism.
I come from a farm area and the farmers here have enough legit complaints about government and don't get the handouts. Subsidies really do go to the big farmers with lobbyist friends. What I hear
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Yes, managing something that has never been done, among multiple agency in different countries with growing technology needs and feature lists changes from congress and approval is easy.
And the wikipedia article you probably got those numbers from is wrong. Initially it was 1 billion.
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Sorry, original budget estimate was $500 million.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n39_v13/ai_19964936/ [findarticles.com]
"If the mirror and heat-shield concepts can be perfected, NGST promises a quantum leap in knowledge. Yet its cost, estimated at $500 million, is roughly as much as a single shuttle mission. "It's a real bargain," says Mather, especially if it fulfills its promise to deliver dazzling new views of the early universe."
Re:If I May (Score:4, Interesting)
The original cost estimate was $5.1 billion, and included the first five elements only. The 2013 launch date was never settled upon, and the optimistic estimate associated with the $5.1 billion figure was 2014. When the cost went up to $6.5 billion and the launch date got pushed to 2015, that was really NASA's fault. I don't want you to come away with the impression that NASA is blameless in this; there really was budget mismanagement. This happened last year.
How did it happen? As my source tells it,
During 2010 the project held its next major review: the Critical Design Review. By this time the 2014 launch date had started to appear not credible. Therefore, Senator B. Mikulski, chair of the appropriation subcommittee responsible for NASA, called for an independent review of the project in the Summer 2010. The Independent Comprehensive Review Panel found that the project had not been properly managed, primarily due to the lack of near term reserves which for a project of this complexity are needed to make sure that things stay on track when issues are discovered.
In other words, the mismanagement was primarily not keeping enough cash-on-hand to deal with unexpected issues when they came up. This resulted in a new figure of $6.5 billion and a new launch date of 2015.
BUT!
This is important. The Independent Comprehensive Review Panel, when it came up with the $6.5 billion / 2015 figure, said that it was contingent. Upon what?
The ICRP conclusion was that the earliest JWST could be launched was late 2015 for a total cost of $6.5B of which $250M extra had to be provided in each of 2011 and 2012. They stated clearly that this was the earliest and cheapest way to launch JWST and any delay would result in a more expensive mission.
The 1B figure seems to be a gross underbid, according to other sources which
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Because it's "completely mental" to cancel something that is 1700% over budget and 11 years late.
...paid for by people who don't want to, have no choice in the matter, and have families to feed.
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"...paid for by people who don't want to, have no choice in the matter, and have families to feed."
You mean like the war in Afghanistan?
Well, that's only 9 years and some months old, but still.
(I'm hardly a peacenick, but it's gone on longer and cost more than was expected by most people.)
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Exactly!! The war in Afghanistan has gone on waaaaay longer and cost waaaay more than initially expected. And those costs are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE larger than NASAs whole budget!!
Bitching about the cost of NASA is a political game. Congress complains about how much NASA costs, but try to cut their precious defense spending and they all start crying about how we shouldn't do it.
I've decided one thing regarding the next election and it's that I will refuse to vote for anyone who is against cutting defense s
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"I've decided one thing regarding the next election and it's that I will refuse to vote for anyone who is against cutting defense spending."
Good thing that I'm not running, then. ;)
Like most of us here, I might be competitive running for dog catcher, but not much more than that.
I certainly agree though that NASA gets used as a political bargaining chip way or gets downsized in favor of things that have more political "zip" too often. It's been done for decades, going back at least to Nixon, and pretty much
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What part of "I'm hardly a peacenick", did you miss there?
I think pulling down too fast is unwise. And we're likely doing it too fast, at least with what the current plans "say". I think those will get pushed back the way a lot of things that are said get modified in light of ground truth.
Or, is it just easier to argue against something I didn't say rather than something I did say?
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Its fucking awsome. I don't care what it costs you. IMO you should stop bitching about the high cost of the program and get with the research. None of this is 'real' money anyway.
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That's about average for a government project actually. ;)
Just like our war (oh wait "conflict") in Libya was going to be a matter of "days not weeks".
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Whoever put out the $0.5billion figure was lying through their teeth, with full knowledge of what was going on. That's known as getting your foot in. I still think it's going to be a wonderful instrument and wish them success with the mission.
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By that logic, they should have canceled the Iraq war long ago.
The White House (Ari Fleischer) originally said it was going to take 6 weeks, and cost $20 billion.
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That is unless you're worrying about Webb and its partner money sponge SLS soaking up funds from other programs.
Personally, my interests are in seeing CCDEV/COTS, tech development, and planetary science advance. Sadly, unless things (I'll give management the benefit of the doubt and just leave it at luck) improves drastically I can't help but worry as costs keep going up and launch keeps getting delayed.
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More like fucking bullshit. If they'd seen fit to allocate that 500 million to Nasa in 2010, we could have had the James Webb in 2016 for a total of $6.5 billion.
The 11 billion extra you're seeing here is so Nasa can dig themselves out of the hole that Congress pushed them in to - if you don't pay vital employees they leave and take millions of dollars woth of practical experience with them, and if you don't fund important parts manufacturers they close down and you have to pay billions to get them started
good news but ..... (Score:4)
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It might be more accurate to just say they are going to throw away another $530 million before they get around to killing it.
Well... looks like for the US Senate, the death by a thousand cuts is funnier.
Unfortunately not clear where it comes from (Score:2, Troll)
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While the money has been allocated the total NASA budget has not been increased, in fact it has gone down. That means that the money for it is coming from somewhere.
Taxpayers.
Enough said.
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It is proper science. Do you not know just how many immediately useful technological advancements we have gotten from these "pipe dreams"?
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Good. Axe the colonize mars pipe dream and put that money on proper science. This telescope is capable of directly imaging alien planets
What?!? Give up on the idea of anyone actually doing something for humanity to get off this rock and diversify, in favour of just being able to look at stuff that'd take a generational ship to get to.
Brillant [sic]. :-P
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Paula? Paula Bean?
In seven years (Score:1)
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Mismanaged, but Essential (Score:1, Informative)
For starters, IANAA (I am not an astronomer) but I AM dating one, who is currently applying for prize fellowships/looking for post-doc positions. She explained that cancellation of JWST would effectively nullify the careers of many recent and soon to graduate astronomers, and put a ~50 year hold on the progression of astronomy.
Going into a bit of detail on this point, she explained that Hubble's Ultra Deep Field exposures revealed extremely well formed galaxies, meaning that even the faintest objects were
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For starters, IANAA (I am not an astronomer) but I AM dating one ...
I envy you. :-)
She explained that cancellation of JWST would effectively nullify the careers of many recent and soon to graduate astronomers, and put a ~50 year hold on the progression of astronomy.
WADR, they said the same about killing the SSC, that it would set particle physics back $yada decades. LHC appears to have made that argument moot.
I'm glad JWST (or Hubble successor) is so far supported, and it would be a shame to throw away all that's been invested in it so far.
I'd also like to see the _process_ of doing stuff like this fixed, so $shit like this can't happen. With Congresskritters sticking their noses into the process at the least provocation, this sort of stuff is always
Re:Mismanaged, but Essential (Score:4, Insightful)
WADR, they said the same about killing the SSC, that it would set particle physics back $yada decades. LHC appears to have made that argument moot.
20 years later!
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WADR, they said the same about killing the SSC, that it would set particle physics back $yada decades. LHC appears to have made that argument moot.
20 years later!
And with 1/3 the collision energy. The LHC is not a complete replacement for the original SSC - it is simply the best in the world today.
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And with many nullified careers.
Where do you think all those Ph.D particle physicists went? A few lucky ones went into astrophysics, only to see a litany of missions get cancelled (SIM, LISA, TPF-I and TPF-C, and many others), and the rest went off to be quants on Wall Street, with the results obvious to all.
Now (maybe) we'll get JWST, and so the students who will work on that won't have their careers nullified, but every other science project at NASA, and those students, scientists, and engineers, is goin
Crisis in Economy and Waste of Means (Score:2)
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So US should shut down NASA? Then the decline of US would be guaranteed.
R&D programs, like NASA, should *never* be cut, not matter what happens to the "economy". R&D is what drives our standard of living in the first place. Cutting it is like a business cutting workforce to increase profits. Sure, it works in short term but you have a smaller business. Same for cutting R&D, sure, you spend less and get more now, but later you will pay for not investing in new tech... Same analogy applies to nucl
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When the economy is severely hit and many of the citizens of the nation are in search of their livelihood, I think, Nasa's experiments are cutting the budget that is more required for the citizens of the nation.
You should be complaining about the US military's budget, not NASA's.
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Funny, the graph you link only shows Social Security to be larger than the DoD budget.
some other numbers that might enlighten you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures [wikipedia.org]
http://www.visualeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/ve-gov-spending-r2.swf [visualeconomics.com]
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Keep in mind they did just have a huge management overhaul. That doesn't guarantee that they fixed the problems, but it certainly means they are aware of and are trying to fix the management issues.
More Good Money After Bad! (Score:2, Interesting)
Folks, I work at Goddard. I don't work on JWST, but I have many colleagues who do. JWST is a "defective by design" project that probably will never fly, or, if it does, will simply create a large piece of space junk out at L2--where we don't have the ability to send a servicing mission.
It's been over budget since day zero, and the program management has chronically misestimated funding and development time requirements. For example, there is a subsystem called the microshutters that supposed to be used
Re:More Good Money After Bad! (Score:5, Informative)
Reading NASA's website, it sounds like the microshutters have already been developed and shipped
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/microshutters.html [nasa.gov]
and
http://spiedigitallibrary.org/proceedings/resource/2/psisdg/7594/1/75940N_1?isAuthorized=no [spiedigitallibrary.org]
"The assemblies have passed a series of critical reviews, which include programmable 2-D addressing, life tests, optical contrast tests, and environmental tests, required by the design specifications of JWST."
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Do you really think that if it gets killed that any of that money will come to your program?
Not likely. The money will just be removed from NASA.
I wish you luck in your pipe dream, but I think that's all it is.
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Actually, his program might get better funding. The House version that kills JWST restores the funding to be used on other missions.
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Do you really think that if it gets killed that any of that money will come to your program?
He probably does and he's probably right. NASA's budget has been pretty steady over the past thirty years. Similarly, the budgets for the various departments is moderately stable. There are winners and losers each year, but nobody goes hungry.
If Congress eliminated the funds for the James Webb Space Telescope, they'd probably say "What else is there for space science projects?" and fund some mix of those.
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I heard that in physics when the SSC got cut. The same old saw. NSF and DOE budgets are pretty stable and so a lot of the large amounts that would have been used would be used for other physics.
Even my first advisor thought that. He was ecstatic when the SSC was killed.
Didn't seem to turn out that way. Maybe it would this time, but I'd not bet on it.
I think more likely, the effect would be that a major NASA program was killed, and it would be used as a precedent for tearfully killing other programs that "we
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I heard that in physics when the SSC got cut. The same old saw. NSF and DOE budgets are pretty stable and so a lot of the large amounts that would have been used would be used for other physics.
NSF funding doubled from 1990 to 2001 according to Wikipedia, going from $2 billion per year to $4 billion. So I continue to disagree with your assertion.
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From AAAS: "After declines in the NSF budget in the mid-1990's resulting from
pressure to balance the federal budget, support for NSF surged in the late
1990's. The growing support for NSF was demonstrated when Congress
passed and the President signed the NSF Authorization Act of 2002 (P.L.
107-368) that authorized a doubling of funding for NSF from its FY
2002 level of $4.8 billion to $9.8 billion in FY 2007. Despite high hopes,
a dramatically changed federal fiscal environment-characterized by
increasing budget
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Also, it's worth noting that 2007 is not that long after 1993. Sure it's perhaps a quarter to a third of a physicist's career. My view is thatt the SSC would still be consuming a considerable portion of those funds, even in 2007.
I saw too many groups lose funding in the mid 90s to begin to swallow what you're selling for a minute.
No offense, but the US was going through a phase of relative fiscal responsibility. Those programs you cite (assuming they existed in the first plac
Re:More Good Money After Bad! (Score:4, Insightful)
I work on the science side and have collaborators and friends who are up on all of this. According to them, essentially all of the technical aspects of the mission that were originally viewed as "possibly not feasable" have been solved.
And as mojo-raisin pointed out, the telescope very recently passed CDR (Critical Design Review) meaning all of the major technical issues have been solved and what remains is essentially putting it all together. That's still not a walk in the park, but it means we should have more confidence this will actually work. As far as the microshutters go, my understanding is that it's all pretty much working up to spec now (although, as you say, over-budget).
And keep in mind that in fact, for astrophysics, zeroing JWST means that money probably disappears from astrophysics. Some of it is reassigned elsewhere in NASA, but it essentially means we (the US) are completely abandoning our lead in astrophysics, because we made the decision a while back to push our space-based lead to the detriment of ground-based astronomy. We're still good in ground-based, but not the dominant player we once were. Perhaps some of that money will make its way to other science, but abandoning JWST abandons billions of dollars of engineering and science that was done planning for and building JWST. If you ask people on the science side, at this point they're mostly willing to take the risk.
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"abandoning our lead" to whom? India? Japan? France? LOL!
Listen, I'm not for cutting JWST. I'm not. If it's got problems, we should stick it out and solve it. If we misestimated budget and cost, then we need to FUCKING FIX the contracting and bidding system that keeps on doing this at an exponentially worse rate year after year, in a way that is strangling our nation's economy, and literally, actually, killing people.
But, we're not abandoning our lead to anybody. Not by a long shot. Maybe in manned
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Where's the money coming from? (Score:1)
The Senate didn't specify where the money will actual come from. Maybe they can recover the 535 million buck from the Solyndra loan.
saved by a little help from the NSA (Score:1)
i guess NASA forgot to mention that the NSA gets to use it 50% of the time to "look at women err-women's uhh bikinis f-for manufacturing defects. yes, manufacturing defects". not exactly what what i meant when i said we need more government oversight but I'm cool with it if i get some copies of the recordings.
You may also remember (Score:2)
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That Hubble also went WAY over budget, not to mention the incurred cost of sending a shuttle up not once but twice to fix and upgrade it.
Five times actually...
SM-1 in December 1993
SM-2 in February 1997
SM-3A in December 1999
SM-3B in March 2002
and the most recent and final mission,
SM-4 in May 2009
http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/team_hubble/servicing_missions.php [hubblesite.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servicing_missions_and_new_instruments [wikipedia.org]
Congress interferes with NASA more than page boys (Score:2)
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Despite Feynman turning a carefully constructed whitewash into an exposure of that flawed process NASA is still suffering from it fifteen years later.
The Rogers Commission Report was 1986 -- so it's 25 years. :/
Sorry about that cheif (Score:2)
I wonder if NASA will ever get to be NASA first instead of a pork distribution network first.
"Death-by-Budget-Cut" since 1987, at least (Score:2)
"Death-by-Budget-Cut" since 1987, at least:
http://www.google.com/search?q= [google.com]"Death-by-Budget-Cut"&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=iceweasel-a#q="Death-by-Budget-Cut"&hl=en&source=lnt&tbs=tl:1&sa=X
Well, at least the phrase itself.
Tragic unavoidable progress (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Over budget government funded projects work in favor of the republican candidates. I'm glad their desire for potential bad press for Obama worked in our favor.
Re: (Score:2)
Who the hell do you think builds space telescope and space shuttles?
Wealthy corporations.
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. is the principal optical subcontractor for the JWST program, led by prime contractor Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, with industrial partner Lockheed-Martin for other sensors.
Re: (Score:2)
Who the hell do you think builds space telescope and space shuttles?
Wealthy corporations.
Funny, I thought it was my dad and a bunch of other guys just like him.. Will let him know I am onto his game now..