Can Rep. John Culberson Save NASA's Space Exploration Program? 156
MarkWhittington writes The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger has published the seventh in his series of articles about the American space program and what ails it. The piece focuses on Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, who has two fascinating aspects. The first is that he is taking over the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA funding. The second is that he has a keen appreciation for the benefits of space exploration for its own sake and not just for his Houston area district.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
Culberson wants to save NASA and the space program from his fellow politicians and return it to its true glory. He favors sending American astronauts back to the moon and a robotic space probe to Jupiter's moon Europa. He would like to enact budget reforms that take funding decisions away from the Office of Management and Budget and gives them solely to Congress. He favors a steady increase in NASA funding to pay for a proper program of space exploration. To say the least, he has his work cut out for him.
I don't care about NASA (Score:2, Insightful)
As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system.
I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
Re:I don't care about NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
If your tax money went to SpaceX, it would convert them into a government-sponsored institution and would be doomed to be plagued by inefficiencies that do not exist in the purely private sector.
um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for gov't inefficiency: it's a myth brought on by a few high profile pork projects (the US Military comes to mind) and underfunded DMVs. Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient. Also, go work in management for a large (private) corporation sometime and tell me again how amazingly efficient they are compared to government.
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Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient.
huh?
perhaps you live on a different world as I, but "efficient" businesses do not lose 1.9B USD every three months. [washingtonpost.com]
unfortunately, history has shown for at least 2500 hundred years that government bureaucracies always devolve into political quagmires, where empire building and ass-kissing trump sound business practices.
Re:um....siiiigghhhhhh (Score:2)
2500 hundred years...
yeah....i know i know....
Re:um.... (Score:5, Informative)
Go to a modern well funded post office some time. They're incredibly efficient.
huh?
perhaps you live on a different world as I, but "efficient" businesses do not lose 1.9B USD every three months. [washingtonpost.com]
unfortunately, history has shown for at least 2500 hundred years that government bureaucracies always devolve into political quagmires, where empire building and ass-kissing trump sound business practices.
If you had actually bothered to read the article you linked to, you would have noticed that Congress is preventing them from taking cost savings measures the USPS wishes to implement. Congress controls the prices they can charge. Congress mandates six day deliveries. Congress prevents them instituting their own health insurance plan (which an organization the size of the USPS can easily do). Congress mandates pre-paying health and pension benefits many decades into the future (the only case of this occurring in the U.S. government, and also all but unknown in the private sector).
And then there all the Constitutionally-derived mandates for keeping unprofitable rural branch offices open, and delivering mail to every household everywhere, every mail-day. Things no private business will do.
When Congress's package of restrictions and controls essentially requires an organization to run a deficit, efficiency alone cannot turn the situation around.
false and false. Fun game, though (Score:3)
I know it it's fun to pretend that stuff. Just like some people enjoy pretending that Obama was born in Kenya. It kind of makes you look silly, though.
When a private corporation, or any state agency in any of the 50 states hires you to work THIS YEAR, while promising you'll get paid retirement from 2035-2055, they pay out that money to a 401k or other retirement fund THIS YEAR. Work done in 2014 gets paid for in 2014, with revenues generated in 2014.
Failing to set that money aside , normally in the car
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No, he's contradicting the claim that losing money is a sign of inefficency, by identifying factors that are not affected by efficiency.
If I gave you five dollars and require you to bring me six dollars worth of stuff, ending one dollar in the hole means perfect efficiency.
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No, he's contradicting the claim that losing money is a sign of inefficency, by identifying factors that are not affected by efficiency.
Such as an external party, US Congress mandating inefficiencies in the Post Office? Sounds like a logical fail then.
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Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet (and their children who may become postal workers), they'd be able to make a profit. That wasn't mentioned in the article you referenced. My guess is that providing the reader of that little tidbit of information would interfere with their "USPS = inefficient govt. agency" narrative.
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Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet
If they're prepaying retirement benefits for employees who are retired now, then that makes them near unique in the US government/public corporation realm already. I'm not going to go that far. The only legitimate purpose of public accounting is the comedy.
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Maybe, just maybe, if the USPS wasn't required to prepay the retirement benefits for employees who haven't even been born yet (and their children who may become postal workers), they'd be able to make a profit.
Not when those payments account for a fraction of their losses.
The same old left-wing talking points get so tiresome after a while.
in case you believe that (Score:3)
Just in case you actually believe that, here's a little information about what was actually going on, with an example.
In 2014, I did some work for the state of Texas and the state promised that they'd pay for that work 30-50 years from now, when I'm retired. Just as all public corporations are legally required too, Texas follows Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) , and therefore recognized that expense in 2014. They got the benefit in 2014, so they needed to pay the cost in 2014. That's why
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The USPS isn't a public corporation, so how public corporations behave and the penalties for not doing so are completely and utterly irrelevant.
Which is actually bog standard for government retirement - pen
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Usually, efficient businesses have control over what they do and how much they can charge. The USPS doesn't. It's still very efficient within its constraints.
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They do when they're forced to pay for pensions for people not even born yet!
Pre-funding pensions and benefits only accounted for about a third of the losses, last I checked. They'd still be losing billions a year, regardless.
And the continual losses kind of reinforce the fact that it should be pre-funding pensions so the money will be there to fund them after it goes out of business.
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>NASA did all the really hard work (the basic design of space rockets). You know, the Basic Science that costs billions and
>doesn't pay off for decades. You see, private companies are too focused on short term profit generation to basic science.
>That's why it's done on the public dime.
I won't disagree with you. But I also believe that NASA should be allowing basic launch stuff to go to companies like SpaceX, which reap the rewards of all of that public domain knowledge - the fruits of publicly fun
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Get with the times - NASA has been buying boosters and launch services from "companies like SpaceX" since the 1950's. Basic Earth orbit access has been "business as usual" since at lea
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Not really. Certainly NASA has been buying boosters for a long time, but from what I understand those have continued to be on a cost-plus basis, or as some would say, sucking from the government teat. Again, from what I understand, SpaceX is new in that it is delivering fixed-cost launches.
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They did some of that (so it is inaccurate to say NASA did all the hard work). They successfully created a suborbital rocket that didn't need to deliver its payload to a soft landing. That was a necessary intermediate step. Getting a man to the moon required quite a bit of additional work, however.
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If your tax money went to SpaceX, it would convert them into a government-sponsored institution and would be doomed to be plagued by inefficiencies that do not exist in the purely private sector.
Only true if taxes are the only source of initial capital outlay and income for SpaceX.
Taxes would be paid to SpaceX as agreed-to remuneration according to a contract offered by the government and won through competition by SpaceX. Seeing as SpaceX is a private concern created with private capital which competes for contracts against other competitors not only on contracts with the US space program but also others, your statement fails on that basis.
Strat
Big bags of water... that's what we are. (Score:4, Interesting)
The human body is a fragile bag of water, not well suited to radiation exposure, temperature extremes,changes in air pressure, high acceleration forces, or long periods of isolation from a sustaining biosphere. Almost anything that can be done in space is better done by robots. The ONLY reason for people to venture into space is to get to the surface of another habitable planet for which we are evolved. And there is only one such place in reach: MARS!
Yes there are good reasons for going to Mars. Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us. We have the technology to colonize Mars now. To make it economical, colonization should be a one-way pioneering trip. Nobody comes back, ever. (I made this suggestion to NASA 17 years ago and was told that NASA does not do suicide missions. Now, many folks at NASA have come around to my point of view. )
Rep. Culberson has not learned the crucial lesson from the demise of the Apollo program... that political motivations for exploring space are not sustainable in the minds of a fickle constituency that wants to be entertained by a list of new "American Firsts in Space". Colonization of Mars requires the serious dedication of the best scientists of Earth to the mission of human survival.
Forget the moon. In terms of the fuel required to reach it on a one-way mission, it is not really much closer than Mars. I has far less to offer as a base for a new sustainable human civilization. (Although I'm sure it would make a nice military base to shoot stuff at Earth). The fact the Rep. Culberson is talking about returning to the moon is the best indication that he is not a serious thinker about why NASA should be involved in human space travel.
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We have the technology to colonize Mars now
No we don't. Not even close.
Greatest among them is to safeguard the species from any catestrophic impacts on Earth they would extinguish us
No matter what happens, Earth is a safer place to be.
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If you think some tech is missing, what is it?
If a large asteroid hits earth, it could destroy all life including bacteria. So Earth is not safer forever. Eventually, a large asteroid will strike. Hopefully, by then our species will have moved on.
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We have the technology to colonize Mars now. To make it economical, colonization should be a one-way pioneering trip. Nobody comes back, ever
How much supplies do you need for the first group of people to stay alive until the second group comes, or until more supplies come ? What's the total mass you need to land softly ? What design of lander can do that ?
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That's "ugly bag of mostly water."
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Almost anything that can be done in space is better done by robots.
Except for thinking...
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And what are people in space thinking about?
If they were closer to Mars, for example (dug into Phobos?), they'd be able to make real time control decisions for the martian roving vehicles, vastly improving their utilization. Speed of light is horrible for efficient operation of such devices. Some progressive Martian mission designs anticipate this scenario.
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Tax money DOES go to SpaceX. 1.6 Billion for 12 flights to the ISS.
Yeah, and? I'm guessing the government pays Fedex and/or UPS to deliver stuff on Earth, too.
Last I looked, most of SpaceX's upcoming business was from private organizations, not governments.
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Oh so suddenly government inefficiencies are OK when they shovel money your way?
Are you saying the government would be more efficient if they set up the National Courier Agency to deliver their parcels, instead of paying a few bucks to Fedex each time? Or that Fedex becomes less efficient if it gets business from the government?
If NASA is going to operate ISS, it should do so at the lowest cost to taxpayers. Which comes from buying the cheapest launch services on the open market, not from building a rocket of their own that flies once or twice a year.
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I sincerely doubt that Space X would create science only missions - like sending probes to Mars or the outer reaches of the Solar System.
No, but they could enable them with their cheap technology. Think of how cheaper the MSL rover could be if if were launched by a Falcon Heavy. All that weight-shedding typical for aerospace can't possibly be cheap. But we won't have any chance to substantially get rid of it until we get cheaper launches. (New Horizons probably could have been much more heavyweight, too, if FH had been available at that time.)
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As a government institution, they are doomed to be plague by inefficiencies that do not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system. I wish my tax money went to SpaceX!
As a government institution, they are also blessed with a focus on exploration and learning that does not exist in the private sector. Elon Musk will take us to Mars and colonize the solar system as long as it is immediately and sustainably profitable.
I wish you could see that your money going to an independent organization - wasteful or not - that is permitted to operate at a fiscal loss in search of raw knowledge has a benefit. Not every discovery has an obvious cash-cow application yet can still prov
Re: I don't care about NASA (Score:3, Informative)
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At this point they are the best way to send cargo to the ISS and in a few year will be the best way to send astronauts in LEO, but if they want to go any further they're going to need a new rocket (stronger than the Falcon 9 heavy).
Uh, you do realize the Falcon Heavy has a payload of 13200 kg [spacex.com] to Mars and will be more powerful than any current operational rocket?
NASA as the actual plan for their SLS while SpaceX only has ideas for now.
They have a great plan, but they don't have the money [waff.com]. The Falcon Heavy is funded and should be operational in the first half of next year while NASA is years away from a date that's probably slipping. And I'm not sure why you're saying SpaceX is the one on the drawing board, the boosters are essentially "headless" Falcon 9s while the SLS is a new design. Sure, when or if the S
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What makes you think your tax money isn't going to SpaceX?
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You should be happy since NASA has paid for about 1/2 of SpaceX expenses so far. In fact NASA doesn't build much. The last A is for administration which is what it mostly does. Private contractors do the vast majority of the work. NASA just sets the goals and monitors the contracts. Some work is kept in house but most of that is so that there are people smart enough to manage the contracts.
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I think you meant to say 'Governments have managed to brainwash people into doing and believing things that are against their self-interest, for the greater glory of the governments.'
After all, it's government that gets to keep every kid in a multi-billion dollar brainwashing industry for most of the first twenty years of their life.
I know someone who can (Score:2)
"Welcome, gentlemen, to Aperture Science. Astronauts, war heroes, Olympians--you're here because we want the best, and you are it. So: Who is ready to make some science?"
Europe probe sounds good (Score:3)
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Re: Europe probe sounds good (Score:2)
Space exploration? (Score:2, Interesting)
Or glory?
What's the real mission here? Space exploration is such a loaded term, what does it mean? Do you need to send test pilots in the upper atmosphere? For what? What can they do that can't be done on the ground? Is getting 400 kilometers closer to Andromeda somehow changing anything?
And glory? That's nationalistic flag-waving nonsense. Let's all grow up and set aside the fantasies here.
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Being bound only to a singe planet is limiting and risky, disease war or asteroid strike, each threaten all of us at once so long as we are only on one planet. Unless this risk is acceptable to you on a long term basis, and you also do not need or consider valuable things like asteroid mining, we want out and so we need the technology, regardless of the short term reason for developing it.
How can we really know where we are making progress towards real earth independent habitats and launch related technolo
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Disease, war, and any asteroid strike in the past billion years (maybe 4.5 billion years) would leave Earth much more habitable than anywhere else in the Solar System. In the giant space goat scenario, colonization only works if the colony is completely self-supporting and able to expand with its own resources. That's not happening off-world for a LONG time now. I'd be surprised if it could be done with a colony smaller than 100K people, mining and growing all its raw materials and manufacturing everyth
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What's the real mission here?
it's a five year mission to bring huge quantities of public pork to all the special interests that "donated" to all the different politicians in the recent election.
wake up and smell the money.
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What's the real mission here?
Given that his congressional district would benefit a lot from money spent on space exploration, I'm guessing his goal is to get money to his district.
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Hint, hint, big goals. Space is big and I mean really, really, really big and to try to explore it is to create a major goal for your society, something to strive for and achieve. Big goals, manned trip to the planets, a permanent moon base with industry and tourism, a major space station. Without goals to drive human imagination we would still be squatting in a cave or up a tree in Africa. What is the current alternate goal, apparently being the winner in mass consumerism and posing about with all your st
Good luck to him (Score:1)
I wish him luck and would love to see his vision put in to action. Unfortunately for him, and American space exploration, most of the members of his own party in Congress do not believe in science.
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Frankly, engineering is what we need right now. Science is great, and should be funded, but space *needs* right now is a great big lump of engineering.
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The hurdles are high, but there's a lot of raw materials and energy out there if we surmount them. Solar energy alone goes from a unreliable power source that's only available for half the day to a steady, ultra-reliable power source of great utility.
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No we don't. We don't anywhere on Earth where a solar panel can collect half the energy a solar panel in space can.
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We don't even have supersonic passenger flight right here on Earth, and that engineering was solved 40 years ago.
Well, duh. That's because governments banned supersonic overflights of their territory, and left few financially-viable routes that could be flown at high speed.
Supersonic airliners aren't an engineering problem, they're a political problem.
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The main issue was Concorde wasn't manufactured by Boeing. But the other issue was the 1970s oil crisis which made a lot of things which used a lot of oil uneconomic. Another casualty was the Wankel engine. Heck even military aircraft no longer use turbojet engines because they consume too much fuel.
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Oh, sorry, is this the Anti-Space Nutter Nutter again? I didn't realize you were also the Anti-Supersonic AIrliner Nutter.
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So are you actually claiming that governments didn't block Concorde by banning supersonic overflights, or what?
Hint: that's REALITY. Who paid for those supersonic aircraft is irrelevant, when you're claiming that we can't go into space because we don't have supersonic airline flights. We don't have supersonic airline flights because governments banned them on many of the most profitable routes.
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Concorde was a government project, and that is relevant, since it's unlikely that it would have been produced by private industry. The ban on supersonic overflights was because the sonic booms would do a lot of damage, considered more than would be gained by such overflights. However, supersonic travel is only worth it on long routes, since it won't save much time on short ones. The transatlantic business was pretty much ideal for that (I don't think it had the range for transpacific, which would be an
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Simple, No! (Score:5, Interesting)
First, a single person is not supposed to be able to do anything within our Senate or Congress. It takes votes, and a majority must agree with anything this person puts forward for legislation.
Second, nothing is getting done in our Government due to massive cronyism and corruption. Until that is fixed, we will continue to see nothing but garbage come out of our Politicians. Start petitions to put people on ballots and vote _them_ into office. People with high moral character, not career politicians. Outside of an outright revolt or military coup, that is the only hope we have to fix things.
Ballot information is here [wi.gov], and more information is here [wikipedia.org].
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One Congresscritter is actually way more powerful in the US System then most. In Canada, for example, most MPs can't be re-elected unless the Prime Minister signs a piece of paper endorsing them. Why? Because he's head of the Conservative Party, more MPs are Conservative, and to appear on the ballot in Canada your party leader has to sign your nomination papers. They aren't completely his creatures (after all, they can always start a new party), but this really tends to cut down on the Parliament-insisting-
He's gonna git in trouble (Score:3, Funny)
His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
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replacing rockets with prayer
This is almost a good idea, but you've got it backwards. If you convince christians that sending their prayers to heaven on rocket casings will make them more interesting to jesus then you'll have all the funding you can use.
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No amount of ignorant atheist propaganda can change history.
That's funny, that's just what I was going to say about the revisionism rampant in religion. You Christians can't even manage to accurately copy your holy book, while other more competent faiths have been doing it for centuries.
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He's doomed as a Republican because he supports that science stuff. If you support science, then you are obviously in cahoots with them liburuls, so you are on the side of evil with evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and the earth not being flat.
His only hope is to turn NASA and space into a faith based program, at least as far as the Republican base is concerned. Some possibilities are going to outer space to find Jesus in heaven, replacing rockets with prayer, proclaiming that God wears a space suit and teaching in school that a flat earth is a reasonable alternative the round earth theory.
Oh please... your poor attempt at mocking Republicans because of sterotypes driven mostly by the liberal media is pathetic. Democrats have their own large mass of uneducated or anti-science people so what is your point? Does it really impact your life if someone wants to view life through the lens of their Christian faith? Why should you insult or mock someone just because you don't agree with them?
Relgion and science can and do coexist together as many of the greatest advances in science were achieved by r
he does NOT support science OR NASA (Score:2)
What a (almost) complete waste (Score:1)
NASA over its entire history has been almost a complete waste. They have done precisely one cool thing in their entire history: landing humans on the moon. Everything else has been stupid.
"Look! We built a telescope!" Yeah that's cool but I don't care, we already had telescopes.
"Look! We built a re-usable spaceship!" But then you didn't go anywhere with it.
"Hey, we have this permanent space station!" Who cares? Is that another world? No.
"We landed robots on some places!" Call me back when they are humans.
"B
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NASA also does a bunch of good stuff with Earth observing satellites.
And JWST is now more than a decade late, and several hundred percent overbudget, sucking up most of the money in the unmanned spaceflight budget.
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The NSF is the appropriate place to fund science that we hope leads to cool inventions. We don't need NASA for that. That is a nice side benefit. It could never make up for the complete failure in its primary mission.
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And the extra money saved could go to such worthy causes as hiring more lawyers or programs that stimulate banker bonuses?
To many people here the only important thing that we do, apart from keeping things going, is to explore and understand more than we did before. None of this really costs that much compared to other things budget-wise (e.g. about a quarter of NASA's yearly budget is what the Walton's who own Walmart get for sitting on their asses ~$4B USD).
Space is the next frontier. Compare this to the t
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My point is that if we shoved off large ships onto the sea staffed by scarecrows instead of humans, that would have been stupid. The King of Spain didn't pay for large ships to sail the sea; he paid for HUMANS on large ships to sail the sea. I desperately support NASA when it puts human beings into outer space -- something that it has either never done (depending on how far out "outer space" is for you) or hasn't done for fifty years.
NASA doesn't "do" human exploration of space, and human exploration of spa
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"Look! We built a telescope!" Yeah that's cool but I don't care, we already had telescopes.
The level of dumbassery in that statement is to high, you'd need a NASA rocket to get to the top of it.
Yes, a couple of old lenses and a cardboard tube is a telescope, as is Hubble, but to claim that they are somehow equivalent is just silly. It's like clutching your trusty Z80 and claiming the last 30 years of development are a complete waste because "we alread had computers".
"Hey, we have this permanent space statio
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I have never even heard anyone suggest that the ISS was a stepping-stone to exploration of outer space, much less is there a plausible argument that such a claim could be true.
The IIS a neat toy where a tiny amount of middling science is done. Yeah, okay, I like middling science, but not so much as to have an entire federal program which spends sixty years PRETENDING that it is trying to advance human exploration of space.
NASA started with the right missing: put a living human being onto another world. Then
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I have never even heard anyone suggest that the ISS was a stepping-stone to exploration of outer space, much less is there a plausible argument that such a claim could be true.
I have: operating some kind of habitat in space is deeply non trivial. The ISS has allowed them to learn a lot about that aspect of it.
What the fuck is NASA now, fucking Instagram?
Yes, because a close up photograph of the rings of Saturn is totally equivalent to an iphone photo of a bunch of bearded hipsters, rendered in sepia print.
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operating some kind of habitat in space is deeply non trivial. The ISS has allowed them to learn a lot about that aspect of it.
Yeah, okay, they learned all about that, and then George W. Bush was elected. And then fourteen MORE years went by. We went to the moon in nine years. How long are we going to spend floating around just above the atmosphere pooping into ever-more-expensive toilets? If ISS were a stepping stone to (say) Mars, then we would have been on Mars in 2002. If that is the justification for t
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Yeah, okay, they learned all about that,
No, they learned a bunch: not everything. There's much more still to learn..
If that is the justification for the ISS
No one claimed it was a stepping stone to mars. It has given vast amounts of research into what it takes to run a long term habitation in space. Given the transit time to mars, that is rather important.
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NASA took "human exploration of space" out of their mission statement about twenty-five years after they abandoned human exploration of space. I think they should have saved everyone the trouble and just stopped trying on the day they closed the Apollo program. We'd have saved a medium amount of money and a metric ton of embarrassment, plus a few astronaut lives.
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I personally can list many amazing NASA accomplishments, but only ONE OF THEM couldn't have been done better by the military or by the NSF.
Let's play your game. Tell me the best thing NASA has done, other than put humans on the moon. Pick one example, your best example. Then, before you click "Submit" re-read your comment and ask yourself "so why the heck do we need NASA to do this instead of some other special-purpose government agency such as the Navy or the NSF?"
If you have such an example, and that exam
Has NASA done all that badly? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder sometimes.
NASA has sent spaceprobes to every planet in the solar system. And turned those places from lights in the sky into worlds.
NASA has discovered volcanism on Io, Enceladus, Triton and probably Venus.
NASA has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets with the Kepler probe.
The various CMB probes have mapped out the very early history of the universe.
All of this in less than fifty years.
You could argue that NASA has mapped more land area than all of the explorers in history, combined. Until we visit other stars no one will beat that record.
Really, has NASA done that badly?
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Really, has NASA done that badly?
Yes. Look at what's missing from your analysis. How much it cost and whether it could have been done more often, faster, better, and cheaper.
Come to think of it, you don't mention manned spaceflight at all. They spend at least a quarter of their budget on that. I'm not going to say that NASA's current manned spaceflight program is worthy of mention in your list - it's not. But that's a quarter of NASA that didn't make the "not do badly" cut.
The key two things missing from usual analyses of NASA are op
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Launching a Saturn V was not cheap. The prior programs also used rockets that already had been developed for military purposes so the costs are probably mostly marginal costs on top of that.
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One of the big drivers for MSL and the skycrane landing system was the ability to put more mass in a precise location on the surface of Mars, which is something you kind of need for sample return.
No, you don't need that level of precision. And you could have always worked on getting that precision with the MERs. Six more vehicles gives you plenty of opportunity to improve landing precision.
And the quest for more capability is a common NASA failure mode. What is the point of obtaining costly capabilities you don't use?
I wish him luck... (Score:2)
But NASA's problem has always been that Congress are full of cheap bastards who'd rather cut taxes $10 Billion then add $10 Billion to NASA's budget. The rest tend to be frivolous bastards who'd much rather fund early childhood education with that $10 Billion then build rockets.
He's going to have some money (at some point the economic growth we've been experiencing will be reflected in a much reduced-deficit, and if Congress was smart they'd use some of that money to fund things like space exploration and i
Re: (Score:3)
Where are these cheap bastards you speak of? Cheap bastards would be paradise, next to the *predatory* bastards in Congress who pose as cheap bastards while steering money to political allies' companies.
How many strings are attached? (Score:3)
I love the idea of steadily increasing NASA's budget, but how many strings are attached? Getting rid of bureaucratic red tape is a good thing, but handing over full control of NASA to congress? Congress is much of the reason why NASA is in such a bad position, forcing them to use a network of politically located/connected facilities and defense contractors that create a VAST amount of waste and pork spending. Congress should only create objectives, provide the funds and appoint the heads of NASA. Leave the fulfillment of those goals up to NASA within their budget. The Next gen launcher is a perfect example of Congresses meddling, requiring that NASA use the old shuttle contractors ballooned costs by tens of billions of dollars, before they canceled it Constellation was ballooning by closer to a hundred billion.
Not-so-hidden agenda (Score:5, Insightful)
And there is the real prize - hidden in plain sight. He wants to usurp the power of the Executive Branch and arrogate it to Congress. But it's for the children!, er, NASA! and so it slides right by most commenters here.
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Plus the money would go to fund failed programs like Constellation and the SLS. I bet it would fly about as much as the X-33 did.
Cullberson is what is wrong with NASA (Score:2)
And this bastard things that he will SAVE NASA????
Re: (Score:2)
He's... eh... he's an elephant? - Peter Griffin