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The Creature That Ate Nasa Takes Another Big Bite
ljk4-1
post Feb 16 2006, 07:00 PM
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THE DAY IN SPACE
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In today's space news from SpaceRef:

-- House Science Committee Hearing Charter: NASA's FY 2007 Budget Proposal

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19645

"The proposed FY07 budget is also about $1.1 billion less than the level authorized in the NASA Authorization Act (P.L. 109-155) Congress passed in December. This is because in writing the Act, Congress handled the Shuttle shortfall by adding money to NASA's total spending. Congress also provided more money than NASA had then requested for Science (to handle cost overruns in several programs and an unfunded commitment to the Hubble Space Telescope) and to Aeronautics (to prevent further cuts)."


-- Opening Statement by Rep. Ken Calvert
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19656
-- Opening Statement by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19655

"I am extremely uneasy about this budget, and I am in a quandary at this point about what to do
about it. This budget is bad for space science, worse for earth science, perhaps worse still for
aeronautics. It basically cuts or deemphasizes every forward looking, truly futuristic program of
the agency to fund operational and development programs to enable us to do what we are
already doing or have done before."

-- Opening Statement by Rep. Mark Udall
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19648
-- Opening Statement by Rep. Bart Gordon
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19647

"... the simple fact is that in the two years since the exploration initiative was announced, the Administration has never sent a budget request to Congress equal to what it said NASA would need to carry out the exploration initiative and NASA's other programs. Specifically, the budget plan of two years ago that accompanied the exploration initiative said that NASA would need $17 billion in Fiscal Year 2006. Yet the Administration wound up sending over a request that was more than half a billion dollars lower than that level. Unfortunately that wasn't an aberration."


-- ELMS White Paper: Comment and Endorsement of the NRC "Review of NASA Plans for the International Space Station"
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19646

"We agree with the NRC that NASA is prematurely abandoning the ISS and that these decisions add significant risk to the Exploration Vision. We understand the pressures for Shuttle replacement, but we also understand the need to balance long-term risks of the Exploration Vision with these short-term needs. An even balance of science and technology that is always driven by the long-term value and risk mitigation will enable a successful exploration of the solar system including transitioning science and technology values to Earth – all goals that were at the heart of the President's original vision."


-- Letter from Nobel Laureate Baruch Blumberg and SETI Institute CEO Thomas Pierson Regarding Proposed Astrobiology Cuts
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=19644

"While it is true that the entire NASA science budget is under pressure, this 50% cut to astrobiology is much larger than the 15% across-the-board cuts proposed for FY '07 in the other NASA research programs. Although many of us consider astrobiology to be the primary science of the President's Vision for Space Exploration, this is not reflected in the budget proposal."


-- Planetary Society Presents to Congress a Better Path for NASA
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=19031

"The Bush Administration's proposed 5-year budget for NASA, just submitted to Congress, is an attack on science," states the opening line of The Planetary Society's statement submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Thursday morning, February 16, 2006."


--------------------
"After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance.
I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard,
and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does
not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is
indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have
no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

- Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853

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The Messenger
post Feb 16 2006, 09:24 PM
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QUOTE (David @ Feb 13 2006, 09:57 AM) *
Ahem. Is Griffin implying that the Crew Exploration Vehicle has a military function? That would be news to me. I'm having a hard time interpreting his comments as making any sense whatsoever. What does he see the "strategic" value of the CEV "to this nation" (he does not say "to NASA") being?

If you look around you, you will not find many rocket factories still up and operational. This does become a US strategic issue in the military sense if we can no longer design, support and deliver launch vehicles.

"Free countries do not build weapons of mass destruction." - W. Bush (I wonder if that means no one dares tell him that he holds the button....)
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David
post Feb 16 2006, 09:40 PM
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I think I'm beginning to get a handle on what "strategic" means in the context of the space budget discussion. According to Griffin, it has to do with world politics:

QUOTE
The United States risks both a real and a perceived loss of leadership on the world stage if we are unable to launch our own astronauts into space for an extended period of time when other nations possess their own capabilities to do so


In other words, if other countries -- and I suspect Griffin is thinking specifically of the Chinese, though doubtless the Russians are in the back of his mind as well -- see themselves able to outperform the United States in space, they may come to think of themselves as "just as good" as the U.S. in general, and this will reduce the United States' ability to be Boss o' the World. Hence, "strategic".

I'm no geopolitical analyst, but I think that Griffin's analysis is deeply flawed. First, high performance on manned space missions is not an essential characteristic of geopolitically prominent nations. Unless there's a component of manned space missions we are being routinely uninformed of, they are not a cause of strategic superiority. It is true that high space spending may be a result of a growing economy with healthy surpluses, which itself can be a concomitant of geopolitical prominence. In other words, if you're spending a lot on space, that shows you're rich, which in turns shows that you're powerful.

But it is the economy, not the space program, which is the marker of this prominence; if you are spending a lot of money on space while the rest of your economy is under stress, you have done nothing but subject your economy to more stress. The Soviets certainly managed to maintain the superficial appearance of a technologically accomplished regime into the 1990s; but this was the result of an artificial allocation of resources, and only thinly masked the true weakness of the regime, revealed in the collapse of their empire and economy.

The American economy may not yet be in as perilous a state as the Soviet economy of 1990. But to reveal that you are tossing your productive space science overboard in order to keep afloat a less-than-productive manned space program, is an admission of weakness which more than cancels out any prestige that the manned program itself could bring. If the United States is so strapped for cash that it cannot simultaneously do good space science and rejuvenate its moribund manned space program, then other countries -- China or anyone else -- might well conclude that the U.S. is revealing a significant "strategic" weakness.

In which case, Griffin's "strategy" will have results quite contrary to those he claims for it.
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Jeff7
post Feb 17 2006, 12:47 AM
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QUOTE (The Messenger @ Feb 16 2006, 04:24 PM) *
If you look around you, you will not find many rocket factories still up and operational. This does become a US strategic issue in the military sense if we can no longer design, support and deliver launch vehicles.

"Free countries do not build weapons of mass destruction." - W. Bush (I wonder if that means no one dares tell him that he holds the button....)


Right, they just keep huge stockpiles of a wide variety of devastating weaponry....oh wait, we did restart our nuclear weapons program. Guess we're not a free country anymore - and he'd be the one to know that.
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lyford
post Feb 26 2006, 02:01 AM
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SOFIA made APOD. No mention of it's evisceration in the budget, but it mentions a Feb 6 press release. The Gift of Timing! unsure.gif


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Lyford Rome
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!" Mathematician Richard Courant on viewing an Orion test
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GravityWaves
post Mar 25 2006, 06:32 PM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 7 2006, 03:47 AM) *
I'm still slogging through the 2007 NASA budget -- I haven't read the sections on manned spaceflight at all yet -- but here's what I notice about the space science budget:

(1) The two parts of the science program that really got the hell zapped out of them were the Mars program and non-solar space astronomy. Over $2 billion has been cut out of the Mars program between now and FY 2009 by eliminating not only the Telecom Orbiter but Bush's proposed line of "Mars Testbed" missions to study the environmental and engineering problems associated with manned Mars missions, which are obviously now WAY on the back burner. Mars sample return has also been bumped into the indefinite future -- not surprisingly, since the new mission schedule shows it being delayed from 2016 to 2024.

"Navigator" (the extrasolar planets program) has had $629 million cut out of it during the same period by delaying SIM (the crucial first step in the search for nearby Earthlike planets) at least 3 years into 2015 and delaying Terrestrial Planet Finder indefinitely (sensibly, since its basic design hinges crucially on SIM's findings). SOFIA (the 2.5-meter IR telescope carried on a Boeing 747) is teetering on the brink of cancellation, and the entire "Beyond Einstein" program of major cosmology and high-energy astronomy missions (staring with Constellation-X, LISA, and the Joint Dark Energy Mission) has been cancelled pending major reappraisal. Granted that part of this is to compensate for both the addition of a possible Shuttle Hubble repair mission in Dec. 2007 or later, and the continuing huge cost overruns of the Webb Telescope ($515 million more through FY 2010, with its launch delayed two years into 2013).

(2) There have been surprisingly few cuts in the Earth Sciences and climate-change observation program -- although the Administration's abortive attempt to zap those last year has led to a 1-year launch delay in several climate-change satellites -- and the solar astronomy and magnetosphere program is holding its own quite well. In fact, spending through FY 2010 on ground-based and suborbital Earth-Sun Connection research has been raised by $264 million through FY 2010, possibly due to the influence of Mikulski the Terrible (who sounded quite content with the new NASA budget in her press release today).

(3) Besides the cancellation of any new start for Europa Orbiter, a very big chunk has been cut out of the Discovery program -- and little of this is due to the fact that Dawn is now on hold. I don't know what's going on, although the budget rises again in 2010. (By the way, Kepler's budget has now ballooned to fully $520 million! It would be a dead duck if it hadn't been moved to the Universe Division, which now considers it a mandatory mission.) There has been virtually no change in the New Frontiers budget, although last year's delay of the next AO till 2008 is holding.


Thanks for the low-down, the cuts are shocking. Spaceflight and robotic mission may be lucky to survive this budget but what about the next ones ? GW doesn't have long left so many scientists are already talking about 2008 and the next President and trying to solidify a base at political levels, so the next Democrat or Republican ( condoleeza rice , jeb bush, hillary clinton, whoever... ) will give good support to NASA.
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