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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

#241

Post by ModernMech »

musicale wrote: post #232
ModernMech wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who's seen a university budget: - Undergrad education breaks even - Research operates at a loss - Master's and professional programs makes a modest profit because most students pay full tuition. - Interest income off the endowment barely covers operating expenses - The remaining balance comes from donations. YMMV, but at the end of the day, what keeps many universities afloat is providing good exp…

1. Undergraduate education benefits from low-paid lecturers and teaching assistants. 2. NSF's operating model is based on low-paid graduate students and postdocs. 3. Universities (at least until recently?) took a significant cut (for example 50%) off the top of NSF (and other) grants as overhead, but their overhead rate is significantly lower than typical government contractors in industry. 4. If you are a grad stude…

1. Yes, and yet it still only breaks even. The claim was that it's hugely profitable.

2. NSF operating model is based on maximizing the number of supported graduate students, not maximizing support per student. As someone who was a low-paid graduate student, I have sympathy for the perspective they are low-paid. But I also support graduate students now and I understand how expensive it really is.

3. Yes, but at least at my university, the overhead they get from grant funding isn't enough to actually cover research overhead. So research operates at a loss despite the negotiated overhead rate. Research is very expensive.

4. In my experience, graduate students are often involved in writing grant proposals. They also tend to lack the depth of experience necessary to really interpret budgets.

5. Sure, but I didn't really talk about sports programs in relation to academic funding, because sports usually funds itself and proceeds don't go over to pay for academics.

6. Sure, but you say "non-teaching administrators" as if they don't serve the academic mission. For example, in my department we have a non-teaching administrator who helps with advising. In our college, we have an office of tutoring which is very popular with students, and includes many non-teaching administrators. Access to resources like these lead to better student outcomes, but they do cost money.

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

#242

Post by mschuster91 »

pfdietz wrote: post #240
mschuster91 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The need for such large payloads is highly disputable Getting mass to orbit is one thing. The real game is "get masses into orbit and back to Earth", with the "mass" in question being either some sort of explosive, troops, ammunition or tanks. When you don't need to have troops and vehicles distributed across the globe (which is very expensive to maintain) but can just go and ship them off with heavy rockets, the m…

Let me express great skepticism here as to the economics of this. Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.

> Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive.

As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1].

> And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.

Not for SLS... but for SpaceX with Starship. The USSF plans a demo flight for 2026 [2]. And militarily, this capacity is definitely worth it. 100 tons of cargo, delivered to any place in the world that has a suitable landing facility in one hour of flight time. There's absolutely nothing that can come close to this kind of logistic capability, and there is no competitor in sight. It would be an absolute edge over Russia, China or anyone else who thinks they can wage war against the US or whomever the US thinks is worthy enough of its protection.

[1] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Cargo

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

#244

Post by somenameforme »

mschuster91 wrote: post #242
pfdietz wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me express great skepticism here as to the economics of this. Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.

> Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1]. > And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS. Not for SLS... but…

While I agree this will be a major boon for SpaceX because military gonna military, in realistic terms it's far from a game changer. ICBMs are tough to shoot down because of their high speed and small size. Starship, by contrast, is huge and will need to slow down much more when reentering the atmosphere. It would be a sitting duck.

For proxy and "we're not involved in this war, honest" type stuff, that might be acceptable so long as target is nowhere near peer. But in any war against a peer military power including Russia/China, they'd have about as much use as aircraft carriers - which is to say, basically none. This, btw, is the major problem with war logistics in general. It's not the speed, because throughput matters much more than latency anyhow, but vulnerability.

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

#245

Post by elzbardico »

ethbr1 wrote: post #108
elzbardico wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the stroke of a pen, a rogue billionaire could nationalize SpaceX citing some vague concerns about national security. Money is powerful, but never under-estimate the power of having the coercive apparatus of state at someone's hand.

This is drastically under-appreciating the blowback nationalizing SpaceX would generate. Both from the Republican base, to whom government is anathema and private industry the best. And to corporate interests supporting the Republican Party. Want to see where the real power is? Follow the political money.

Corporate interests are not a homogenous, a single block.

From time to time, it is very well known that a group of vultures organizes themselves to capture the State and royally fuck another vulture using the State's power and legitimacy.

Yeah, money have a lot of power, but a lot of money's power is contingent on the existence of the repressive apparatus of State. Don't discount the power of a charismatic populist leader (And I am not talking about Trump) or a political genius.

People thought that the oligarchs in Russia would overthrow Putin as soon as they felt the bite of sanctions on their backs. The only thing that got thrown were the oligarchs who didn't with the program, and didn't dance to the tune Mr. Putin was playing. And when I say thrown, I meant it literally, as in defenestrated from a high rise window.

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

#246

Post by mindslight »

mindslight wrote: post #239
mousethatroared wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you condemn Obama when he droned an American child and laughed that the kid had chosen bad parents? Did you call for his impeachment then or now? How about when he sicced the IRS on conservatives? Did you call for Biden's impeachment when he coordinated with social media companies to violate American 1A rights? Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza? Unless you too add these boiler plates on your…

> Did you condemn Obama when he droned an American child and laughed that the kid had chosen bad parents? Yes, unequivocally. > Did you call for his impeachment then or now? I didn't call for his impeachment because it didn't seem like a political possibility to effect change. I did not vote for him in the first place, and there did not appear to be a differing alternative in the cards. > Did you call for Biden's imp…

I was just skimming my threads for replies, and feel the need to clarify:

>> Did you vociferously condemn what Biden enabled in Gaza?

> Honestly, it seemed like Biden was doing the best he could given the Israel lobby. But I'll admit to not really being invested in that situation any longer.

I responded to your question in the context of being about Biden's policies, in line with the thrust of your other questions.

Regarding what was and is going on in Gaza (regardless which US politicians and policies may be enabling it) ? Yes, I certainly condemn that! It's fucking genocide.

As I said, I'm not super invested in the situation any more, growing older and not seeing any real angle to personally affect it. I had a few weeks after Oct 7 of writing off the situation as FAFO (but still realizing that this was unfair to the Palestinians who did not support that attack), but Israel burnt through that goodwill quick. I'm old enough to have become more conservative such that if Israel had occupied Gaza and implemented martial law with the (stated and apparent) goal of keeping the peace until a civil non-Hamas government could be sustained, I just might have accepted that. But they didn't. What they are actually doing is straight up take-no-responsibility genocide.

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

#247

Post by pfdietz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #242
pfdietz wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me express great skepticism here as to the economics of this. Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.

> Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1]. > And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS. Not for SLS... but…

> As if the US military would take care about costs.

They constantly care about cost, even if it doesn't seem to you that they do.

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

#248

Post by ogjerajogae »

Dig1t wrote: post #216
ogjerajogae wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this user has been making this claim repeatedly for months -- and if you look at the source data they used, the titles are fabricated and non-representative. They are either a GenAI disinformation bot, or they're a human who is so dedicated to their dishonesty as to be impossible to distinguish from such a bot.

I am not a bot, you can search the list of cancelled grants on this site: https://grant-watch.us/nsf-data.html Just take a minute and read some of them, almost every single one is DEI related. It’s pure racism. The titles I pasted into my post I copied directly from the published list of grants, it’s not like I made up those weirdly specific names. You can search for them yourself.

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