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Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

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Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#181

Post by filoeleven »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #153
somenameforme wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except SLS/Orion should be cancelled. The SLS is pejoratively called the Senate Launch System, because it has no real place in the market yet is continuing to consume tens of billions of dollars. It was mostly obsoleted by Falcon Heavy years ago (SLS has been a black hole of funding since 2011), and its costs are completely ridiculous. You're looking at billions of dollars per launch if it ever is confidently flight…

Just to add to this, somehow the current plan for getting to the moon involves over 15 launches (or 25, the number does seem to vary). With Starship actually having a larger payload than the Saturn V at least to LEO, how 15 launches could possibly be required, and such a plan been approved to spend billions of dollars on, I just don't know. So as much as I like the idea of NASA, something needs to be done there.

Destin from Smarter Every Day put up a video of a talk he gave at NASA about this program, focusing on all the problems that nobody's talking about. It's a great watch and a good example of how to say the hard things to the people who need to hear them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#182

Post by ceejayoz »

IAmBroom wrote: post #134
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #115

If they are going to try and backtrack, why pass it in first place?

Because: Congress has turnover; the POTUS has turnover; things change; Trump is a mercurial idiotic dictator-wannabe.

The bill was signed twelve days ago. What turnover?

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#183

Post by ceejayoz »

msgodel wrote: post #132

The aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June. This has to happen or everything gets cut. We're pretty much at the end of the road. The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not. As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.

> The aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June.

My household runs a very nice budget surplus if I don't pay the mortgage, student loans, credit card bills, electricity, gas, insurance, etc. too. Huge balance in the account!

It's a few months later that the chickens come home to roost.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#184

Post by adrian_b »

graycat wrote: post #149
naasking wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about. Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.

Moreover, in WWII we had Turing's code breaking, England's radar, the US proximity fuse, and "the bomb, the ATOMIC bomb". Then Garwin and Tukey talked, and we got the FFT (fast Fourier transform), talked about the test ban treaty and detecting underground tests. GPS is nice, but the first version, with the relativity considerations, was done at the JHUAPL for the US Navy missile firing submarines. Then, as I recall,…

Also the semiconductor industry, and ultimately the Silicon Valley, had their origin in WWII, in the great effort for developing technologies for making germanium and silicon crystals with extremely low levels of impurities and defects, which were needed for diode detectors in radars.

The vacuum diode detectors used in radios before WWII did not work at the high frequencies required in radars. Most of the work for semiconductor technologies had been done at Bell Labs, which after the war used this for developing other semiconductor devices.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#185

Post by ceejayoz »

msgodel wrote: post #152
softwaredoug wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The viable alternative is pretty obvious. Don’t renew the tax cuts and cut entitlements and defense. That’s what you have to do to get a balanced budget. You don’t get a balanced budget trimming random measly costs that might look nice but are infinitesimal parts of the budget. But we tend to cut taxes, not substantive spending. Which is going to saddle my kids with a mess.

What do you think the tariffs are? We've just about maxed out domestic tax. Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.

> We've just about maxed out domestic tax.

We really haven't. The effective tax rate on the wealthiest Americans has dropped from nearly 60% to about 20% since the 1960s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...

> Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.

The Laffer curve is a wildly simplistic concept that's widely disputed, and every practical test of it (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment) has demonstrated that it fails. It's the right's equivalent of "let's try Communism again!"

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#186

Post by somenameforme »

sandworm101 wrote: post #130
IAmBroom wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or who themselves would later become representatives. That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.

Or they were from well-connected political families. The path for wealthy sons of academy ... elite military job ... politics, is well worn. Someone like John Maccain could easily be identified as a future political leader. He would have been a prime nasa candidate if not injured.

Go look at the resumes of astronauts, particularly before modern DEI stuff. For instance here [1] is Buzz Aldrin. A-student in school, varsity football center for a state championship team. Graduated third in his class at West Point with a degree of mechanical engineering while also competing in track and field. Enlisted in the Air Force as a combat fighter pilot where he saw plentiful [successful] combat including dog fighting. Enrolled at MIT and earned a doctorate in astronautics.

His thesis was "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous, the dedication of which read: "In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!"

He then began work as an engineer on Project Gemini. He then applied to become an astronaut and was rejected because he had not passed test pilot qualifications. He sought a waiver, and was rejected. Fortuitously for him, the next round of astronauts NASA sought required being a test pilot or having at least 1000 hours of flying time in a jet. He had more than 2,200 hours in jets alone. And at that point, he applied again, and was accepted.

---

McCain [2] - prep school (where he at least wrestled), graduated from the US Naval Academy ranked 894 of 899 students. Completed flight school where he was regarded as careless and reckless, having crashed his craft multiple times. He then requested a combat assignment. The first carrier he was on caught fire killing hundreds shortly after he arrived. He moved to another carrier and was shot down and captured a couple of months later. Not exactly "The Right Stuff."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_edu...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_edu...

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#187

Post by adastra22 »

IAmBroom wrote: post #133
adastra22 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

IMO, because robots can replace humans in dangerous and highly undesirable jobs, while increasing overall productivity.

Astronaut is NOT an undesirable job. Bringing people beyond the earth is kinda the whole point in fact.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#188

Post by adastra22 »

ginko wrote: post #86
adastra22 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is enough payload.

[flagged]

Source: I worked at NASA when these decisions were made. The Artemis architecture was artificially engineered to require SLS mass margins and exclude FH. This is not an accident. Alternative architectures would work just fine with FH. Orion, for example, was designed as two pieces that couple be launched separately and joined in orbit.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#189

Post by bo1024 »

supertrope wrote: post #139
ceejayoz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. Any district with a college or university is likely getting some.

What I mean is universities tend to be in cities with a few satellite branches in rural towns. Spread the “production” across as many Congressional Districts as possible to optimize for votes. When the system incentivizes pandering to rural areas that is the only winning move.

Not sure about that but the NSF does have a requirement to spread awards out across states, places with less elite universities get a boost.

Re: Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts

#190

Post by naysunjr »

RALaBarge wrote: post #162
notfish wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ex coworkers at spacex are pretty damn motivated to get to mars, many of them despite all the Musking happening. I wouldn’t bet against them.

I wouldnt bet against them either, but the material science aspect of it all just isnt there and wont be for a while. How many tons would we need to get into Earth orbit alone, let alone transfer to mars? I never hear anyone speak of the radiation outside of our atmosphere very often when it comes to 'moonshot' ideas like this, and how we would be incapable of preventing it or surviving it once we arrive, in our curr…

It will never happen. Zero evidence any organic as complex as a human can move planets. It’s not an emergent event that’s common enough for us to have observed so far it’s too unlikely.

Some dried goo in a meteor or some poetic notion of consciousness being the innate physical interaction of electromagnetism and matter such that consciousness is everywhere and imagining the potential is as good as humans will ever get.

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