NASA Receives $19.3 Billion in Final 2016 Spending Bill

[Fugus]

I like how people just assume NASA isn't going to blow this cash like they've done in the past.

Considering that for every dollar put into NASA, it has generated between 8 and 14 dollars in return, I wouldn't call that wasting or blowing the cash as NASA actually generates more income than it consumes.

[Detritivores]

The kid in me thinks this is great, but for any program there should be adequate benefit/compensation. What'll this give the US in material/political terms aside from the scientific/exploration aspect?

Spend the next 24 hours watching every Neil deGrasse Tyson clip you can find on youtube.

[Kalisandra]

I'm not proposing cutting their funding. I'm proposing lashing them if they try their usual MO and build everything from scratch on a per project basis rather than developing generalized technologies and patterns that can benefit from economy of scale.

It's risky for NASA to do that, because it's much harder to explain to the politicians that control their budget why something is useful when it's a background technology. It's much easier to sell something when you can say "...and this will get us to Mars by 2025, and the legs of that lander there, Mr Congressman, are made in your district".

Also, a partly finished probe program, or the like, can be re-purposed. A partly finished backbone project, with none of the supporting projects anywhere near finished, risks being nothing useful at all.

So, NASA, and organisations like it, have to play safe. If they could get guaranteed funding locked in for five or ten years at a time, building an entire technological framework for a long-term series of interlinked projects would be sensible.

[Independent voter]

They are saying on reddit that Congress put CISA in the budget bill and the only way NASA gets the money is if CISA passes. I don't know how much of this is true, reddit being reddit.

[TrumpIsPresident]

I like how people just assume NASA isn't going to blow this cash like they've done in the past.

And what makes you think that's not exactly whats going to happen?

Because it was "time for a change".

Pfff ...government has no accountability and no sense.

Its not their money and so they just don't give a fuck.

If you want to amuse yourself with the ways in which government manages to waste hundreds of billions of dollars each year just google "government waste".

There is no shortage of documented examples.

Liberals are always going on about free this and free that.

The fact is that if government was forced to reduce its waste then we could afford a lot of that "free stuff".

But no, we don't get to criticize government for pissing away our money.

However we sure as hell get to be criticized ourselves for not giving more.

Fucking government.

[Deleted]

This is good. We need to put more money into nasa.

I don't know.
Private space programs will take over anyway, right?

[gamingmuscle]

Ha, yea, I can see Obama addressing SpaceX:

"if you have a rocket program, you didn't build that, somebody else made that happen"


Well there is truth in the sentiment that we all build on the efforts of those who came before us.

There is also truth in the reality that NASA isn't now what it was then, nor is the government now what is was then.

Waste, lack of accountability, extremists agendas, and extremest agendas have become the new norm such to the point that no government agency can escape them.

NASA isn't immune to this therefore it will fall to the wayside as private industries come in and do the job better, faster and cheaper.

It's not that. It's the risk. A private company isn't going to gamble on a trip to mars. Cause if they fail, its over. There is no learn and try again for them. But putting stuff into orbit, we've been doing it for decades. The private sector could totally step in and do that.

[Pterodactylus]

And what makes you think that's not exactly whats going to happen?

Because it was "time for a change".

Pfff ...government has no accountability and no sense.

Its not their money and so they just don't give a fuck.

If you want to amuse yourself with the ways in which government manages to waste hundreds of billions of dollars each year just google "government waste".

There is no shortage of documented examples.

Liberals are always going on about free this and free that.

The fact is that if government was forced to reduce its waste then we could afford a lot of that "free stuff".

But no, we don't get to criticize government for pissing away our money.

However we sure as hell get to be criticized ourselves for not giving more.

Fucking government.

What a bunch of rambling nonsense. I mean, do you have some intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of NASA? Have you studied how each dollar has been spent over the last 50 years? Would you please quantify NASA's ineffciancy for me?

Also, do you seriously believe that there is not waste in the private sector?

Nice dig at liberals.

And we get it, you hate Government. But you know what else you hate (based on your posting history)? Facts.

[May90]

And we get it, you hate Government. But you know what else you hate (based on your posting history)? Facts.

Everyone hates facts when they undermine their position.

[tehealadin]

Good. NASA is one of the worlds great institutions, its progress helps humanity progress. It isn't just physicists needed to put stuff in space. Computer scientists, biologists, chemists, psychologists and all in between, contribute to these missions, each in return benefiting, giving us new technology and a better understand not only of our world, but of ourselves. I'd be throwing every penny I could at them.

http://www.design-laorosa.com/2012/1...-take-for.html

[ItachiZaku]

Whatever they need to get Ben and Bruce on that asteroid, just pay it.

[Sam the Wiser]

Hover board now!

[Skroe]

Man this thread... I love you guys but seriously, differentiate between the NASA you wish we had and the NASA we actually have.

What is the NASA we actually have? This one.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/...-it-must-land/

In the FY2016 budget, the Europa mission, which was funded for the first time in 2015, got a big boost. Little detail though: NASA doesn't really want to go to Europa.

What you say? This is from Charlie Bolden, Administrator (head) of NASA.

NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, has accepted the Europa mission only grudgingly. When NASA didn’t ask for Europa funding in its 2013 or 2014 budgets, Culberson gave it a total of more than $120 million. Finally, in its fiscal year 2015 budget request, NASA acquiesced and created a Europa program. The president’s budget called for $15 million to begin preliminary studies. Culberson appropriated $100 million. For fiscal year 2016, NASA requested $30 million. It got nearly six times that.

Now that NASA has accepted an orbital mission to Europa, the biggest point of contention has been a lander. During a November interview with Ars, Bolden explained why he didn’t want to tackle such an ambitious mission.

“My scientific community, the people who do mission planning, say we need to go and do a little research with the first mission to Europa to determine whether that’s a place we want to send a lander,” Bolden said. “That’s the point of our big disagreement with Congressman Culberson right now. He wants a multibillion dollar Europa mission that has a lander on the first flight and everything. Our belief is that that is imprudent from a scientific perspective.”

Why? This is why.

“Until now Europa has had no advocate,” he said. “NASA headquarters was prepared to let the Europa mission die. But I have always believed there is life on other worlds, and I have wanted to have a hand in helping to discover life on other worlds.”

Let that sink in. NASA headquarters was prepared to let the Europa mission die. Europa.

That's because NASA is an agency beholden and prisoner to field centers (like JPL) that work to protect their budgets and about science and destination cliques.

What Bolden REALLY means is that the Mars clique at NASA, lead by JPL didn't want to land on Europa. They didn't want to even orbit it. As with so many things done by NASA lately, it is yet another porject that had to be ordered to them by Congress, because the institutions that make up NASA don't want to do them.

What do I mean by that? Consider Mars. Mars is harder to get to than the moon, but it's easier to get to and do planetary science than pretty much anywhere else. Missions to the moons of Jupiter would be several times as much (as Europa Clipper is) than a comparable mission to Mars. Venus is too hot to put a rover on. Mars occupies a destination and budgetary sweet spot. You can have missions there in the hundreds of millions, rather than the billions. What does this translate to? A constant drumbeat of missions, ongoing cashflow... keeping of the Mars rover/lander/orbiter/robot factory open, with a new mission every 2.5 years.

That is to say, the Mars faction at NASA has a good thing going.

It says everything about NASA's Mars exploration that the ESA ExoMars rover is including that 2 meter drill that every NASA mars lander and rover oddly refuses to include (INSIGHT has a "probe", not a drill), despite a decade of saying how ice and possibly life is a few meters below the surface. The Mars 2020 rover, constructed from spare parts, is being launched for no reason other than to just bridge JPL between Mars projects. And the second other destinations start being looked at - like Europa - JPL campaigns against them.

Oh yes, this is not the first time a Europa mission has been proposed. JPL has tried to kill non-martian planetary exploration programs for over a decade, and they mostly succeed. Pluto New Horizons? Keep in mind it's the successor mission to a canceled Pluto-Kupier Express mission that JPL lobbied to kill to protect Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) funds. Because they played no role in either mission.

All of NASA does this by the way, not just the JPL. Consider the James Webb Space Telescope. When you budget a telescope for $2.5 billion, and it ends up costing $8.9 billion what happens to the rest of your space observatory budget? It gets eaten up. Because of the JWST, there is a massive gap through ~2022 of new space observatories, because the JWST team successfully worked, for years, to build the too-big-to-fail mission, that just crushed other promising science missions in its wake.


The Mars clique lobbied against Europa hard, for years, because unlike Mars, there aren't many scientists careers and entire laboratires being supported by Europa science. Mars has turned out to be certainly geologically interesting, but from a biosignature standpoint, the results are slim. In fact, the Curiosity rover been explicitly criticzed for it's lack of scientific return (compared to its predecessors, the Mars Exploration Rovers). One reason JPL isn't fighting Europa anymore is because they're getting the contact to build it.

In the end it's all about money.

And now comes the order to land on it. And it's driven NASA's cliques into a frenzy.


Folks... NASA is a wonderful agency whose achievements represent the absolute best the human race is capable of. But the lack of desire for accountability given their record, displayed in this thread, is appalling. NASA is no more or less subject to the same pressures that any other government agency, corporation or group of people larger than 5 is subject to. It is certainly ABOUT space exploration, but on a day to day basis it's subject to the exact same budgetary and organizational pressures. As a scientist, let me tell you first hand, ego plays a HUGE role in science and always has. And NASA's history, the one that is in higher resolution than just a list of their achievements, is one where promising projects were killed because of turf battles.

Just look at Project Prometheus. The Bush Administration started a nuclear reactor / ion electric propulsion technology demonstrator over a decade ago for a mission called JIMO... the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Because of it's reactor - which would have been the test bed for what is needed for mars propulsion - it would have been able to change orbit in the Jupiter system, something probes can't do due to limited fuel reserves.




It was big. It would have taken two launches to build. It would have been 180 feet long and 45 feet wide.

Jimo was supposed to launch in May 2015. Except in our universe, it was killed in 2005.

Killed by the Mars clique.


Let's support NASA. But let's not forget all the Project Prometheuses, the Terrestrial Planet Finders, the Laser Inferometer Space Atenna (LISA), the Titan mission TiME mission, that were killed because they don't fit the core agency narrative which is:

-Mars probes every 2.5 years or so.
-Keep the International Space Station flying as long as humanly possible
-Launch the James Webb Space telescope


Everything else is a distant second.


So it's wonderful we're going to Europa... but let's remember... like the SLS (Space Launch System), like Orion, like New Horizons, like the forthcoming WFIRST mission this is yet another case where Congress told NASA, over Bush/Obama administration objections the way it was going to be, and NASA grudgingly followed along.

If you're going to throw billions of dollars at a thing, demand accountability. Don't just say "I like what they do, I wish they had more". All you'd do is get more exotic Mars probes... you wouldn't necessarily go to more destinations.