5% of its overall budget, with 20% of the planetary missions budget, going bye-bye. Musk, Obama, and Bolden have all said that they want to retire on Mars. How the fuck do they expect to be able to do that if NASA's budget keeps getting chopped?
Money well spent if the US is going to be involved in the Middle East (which seems likely under any US government), that money now could save a lot of money later. These funding cuts suck though.
Here's what a NASA employee posted about the cuts on another forum: (bolding mine) So, the soonest we could look at sending any important missions (like looking for life on Europa or gathering enough data to put humans on Mars) is 2020. Factor in at least five years for R&D and construction, the first opportunity to send anything up is 2025 if the launch window is at optimum, otherwise its a year plus wait, followed by another 6 months to a year (or longer) before anything can get there, and 2030 is a better bet. If we're talking about sending humans to Mars, you can now put the earliest Americans can do that at 2040 at best. Not only will all of the Apollo crews be dead of old age by then, but so will many of the first shuttle crews.
The Obama Administration finally found something it could cut. Of course, it turns out to be one of the few government agencies Americans had any real pride in. This will all but clinch it: we will not see Americans land on the moon again or on Mars in our lifetime.
I'm still optimistic. All it takes is a president getting elected who has a real passion for space exploration.
The only way to fix NASA is to shut it down entirely and simply use the money to buy complete science missions from private companies. You don't need a monster agency like NASA for this and all the good people can find new work in private space companies. The only thing NASA is really good at is wasting enormous amounts of money and getting nothing in return. Take, for example, the Constallation program. Ten billion dollars spent on a pork barrel project, then the logical cancellation. Next, the Space Launch System. Just continuing with pork barrel where NASA left off with Constellation. That thing isn't going to launch in any reasonable amount of time. Instead, this project is sucking up NASA's budget. SpaceX has announced that they can deliver a heavy lift vehicle before SLS is ready, for only 2.5 bn dollars (which is a lot of money, but a hell of a lot less than what is proposed for SLS), at a fixed price. Not only that, they guarantee that potential cost-overruns will be covered by SpaceX. So why doesn't NASA go that route instead? Because NASA is basically a distributor of tax money to some constituents of some politicians. Common sense isn't a relevant factor. So maybe cutting the space budget is not so bad after all, if that means that at some point there's no alternative than going for low-cost private access to space.
Though sad, this is not news. America never really supported space exploration. It was interesting only as a way of "beating the communists." It captured the imagination of the science-fiction crowd, but that was all. The military types were interested in space only to the extent that it meant developing new ways of making things go blooie, and that does not include the moon or Mars. And the average person comes up with single-digit-IQ slogans like "Why throw all that money away in outer space when we've got homeless people right here who need our help?" The only thing that's really changing is that, as the Cold War dims into past memories, the fundamental disinterest of the American people for space exploration becomes more and more explicit. But a return to the moon, or a mission to Mars, never was a real possibility. It was just a pipe-dream, and it was not shared by enough people for it ever to become reality. So, yeah, get used to it: There will be no manned missions outside of Earth orbit in our lifetime. Or, at the very least, no such missions by Americans. (The Chinese just might do it, and even that is extremely unlikely, IMO.)
So does this mean NASA was successful in helping muslims feel better about themselves and is no longer needed?
Holy fucking hell. Can this administration be any more short-sighted? The only thing really worth spending money on is the advancement of human knowledge and frontiers. Hell, the USA wouldn't even exist if a bunch of Europeans didn't look outward and wonder what was there. (Yes, yes, they were looking for trade routes... but they still had the gumption and fortitude to venture into the unknown.) America's space program has never been a waste of money, despite all the moaning from social misfits who think the dollars would be better spent on welfare and food stamps. The best thing I have ever heard about why we need to explore space comes not from a politician or scientist but a television screenwriter: Suck it, Obama!
Medicare? DoD? No, let's slash NASA to the bone. But don't let it go private. Don't even let them accept private funds. Just neuter them and leave 'em twisting in the fuckin' wind.
While I agree that the near term future of Space Flight rests on Government Grants to Private Industry. However, I do feel the need to comment on this: Or what? How does a company who's biggest source of income is the US government going to guarantee to the same government that they will cover any cost overruns? With what money? Maybe one day they will have the reserves to make such a guarantee worth the paper it is written on, but for now we need to be very careful with any huge influxes of cash. Better the incremental, step based process we've been using the last couple of years, just ramped up.
Maybe if NASA could find some Muslims who felt really bad about themselves we could mount a mission to go help them feel better about themselves.
