disturbingly interesting item on NASAwatch
short version - the human spaceflight budget crunch is headed for open conflict with space science and it ain't pretty
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Augustine Panel delivered its report and recommendations to Obama today.
This is important, it will set the menu of options for Obama to choose NASA's future, and a decision needs to be made, and soon.
Almost none of the options are good.
The basic problem is that NASA "Exploration" - the human…
Let's say you wanted to kill NASA. You couldn't just blink it out of existence I Dream Of Jeannie style, but you might be able to strangle it to death in bureaucracy. How might you do it?
For starters, you might completely scrap any attempt to return humans to the moon. You might completely…
Couple of interesting snippets on NASAwatch
SOFIA is back. SIM is slipped, which apparently saves everything. WISE, GLAST, JWST, even HST.
Who knew you could do so much by slipping a $100 million item...
Uh, oh, if you click through to the New Scientist story, we learn SIM is being "refocused".…
Members of the Augustine Commission on Human Space Flight Plans announced.
h/t NASAwatch
and the winners are...
- Norman Augustine (chair), retired chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corp., and former member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under Presidents Bill…
We are so screwed. From my side of the field, looks like there are going to be a lot of NASA refugees knocking on the NSF's doors in the next few years.
As someone who works in science, I support everything that Griffin has done. Some of those "science" proposals are to probe things like inflation and "dark energy" which, to put it lightly, are not likely to pay off. My generation should be allowed to see people walking the Moon on TV.
Years? More like 2 weeks...
The science missions that have been hardest hit by the Exploration program are the planet finders and classical high energy missions - the Joint Dark Energy Probe has a very high probability of being one of the one or two major new science missions approved for the next 15 years, under the current budget. Details matter.
I actually support manned space, and would like to see people walk on the Moon again. And stay.
But if you are going to propose for stuff like that, then you must budget for it. Doing it on the cheap by scavenging other missions is a travesty.
What does this have to do with tourism?
"exploration without science is just tourism"
this seems to be the summary of the battleground issue