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Budget

Sen. Coburn Ready To Take on Mars and Darth Vader

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 16, 2012
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Sen. Coburn: “Washington is set to spend at least $3.6 trillion this year while running a $1.3 trillion deficit. The waste is overflowing and it’s time to take out the trash. This coming Tuesday, October 16, we’ll be releasing our annual Wastebook 2012 edition.”
Download link (Now online)
Keith’s note: This year’s cover includes the Planet Mars and Darth Vader.
Senator Tom Coburn’s Annual Waste Book 2012 – NASA Excerpts
“Imagine pizza so out of this world, you would have to travel to Mars to have a slice. That is the goal of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Advanced Food Technology Project, which has already developed a recipe for pizza and about 100 other foods that could be served some day on Mars. Of course, NASA no longer has a manned spaced fleet and no current mission plans for human space flight to Mars, but some are hopeful a trip to the red planet could possibly be taken in the mid-2030s at the earliest. Even this goal is optimistic, however, due to budget constraints that have reduced the appetite for costly space missions. Yet, NASA spends about $1 million annually “researching and building the Mars menu.”This year, NASA also awarded $947,000 to researchers at Cornell University and the University of Hawaii to study the best food for astronauts to eat on Mars.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

17 responses to “Sen. Coburn Ready To Take on Mars and Darth Vader”

  1. Andrew Gasser says:
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    I wonder if JWST will make it?

    Talk about a porker.

    Respectfully,
    Andrew Gasser
    TEA Party in Space

  2. damien175 says:
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    I notice there is a distinct lack of any military equipment on that cover. I guess the exploration of Mars is government waste, but spending more money on defense than the rest of the planet combined is sound policy. Gotcha. 

  3. Mader Levap says:
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    I bet military spending will be barely mentioned or not at all. He is Republican with everything that this label implies.

  4. Geoffrey Landis says:
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    This is a very expensive, full-color, 199 page report.  Yet it is baffilingly badly produced.  The report has 100 items plus appendices and 199 pages, for example, yet the table of contents only lists 10 of the items, and stops at page 28.
    How much money was spent on this report?  Full-color two-hundred-page glossy reports are not cheap.As damien175 notes, the Department of Defense pretty much gets a free pass here– apparently its budget of 700 billion dollars has almost no waste, since only 1% of the items here are military.That one was a single item– “missile defense agency starts building interceptors before research is complete– at least 1 billion.”– and even this one is MDA.  Apparently all Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard programs are perfect.  And in a report that itemizes “waste” of amounts as low as $365.00 (# 52), this ONE BILLION dollar item is tucked away in the middle and not mentioned in the contents, tucked between a project listed as wasting two-thousand times less, and another one listed as wasting eleven thousand times less.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      Like so many government projects, this report is a good idea, but the execution is worse than awful.  The entire document is full color because of the pictures scattered throughout, and most of the pictures are pointless, not included because they’re necessary but just to make it pretty.

      The last 66 pages (one third!) of this 199-page report list 1,077 footnotes, with references.  Are we to believe that those who prepared this report actually read all of those reference?  How long did that take and what did it cost?  Most, if not all, of these footnotes could have been included in the body of the text instead of making the reader constantly flip back and forth (personally, after the first dozen or so “flips” I quit bothering).  In fact, there are entirely too many words in this report.  It could have been presented much more succinctly and would then have been much more readable and would still have made its point.

      This report is a perfect example of the kind of waste that it attacks.  Some might consider that ironic; I consider it to be foolish and, unfortunately, typical of the octogenarian Senate.

      Steve

    • Mark_Flagler says:
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      I doubt that Coburn’s intended readership would have read much past the cover, Geoff.

  5. cuibono1969 says:
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    What money has the US government given to Martians? Did they spend it all on booze and dope?

  6. bobhudson54 says:
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    OK,Guys/Gals stop with the political ranting for once and look at the problem. The book was ill-conceived and planed to begin with. Someone dropped the ball here and should be confronted about it, regardless of party affiliation. It appears that it was conceived,produced by undereducated people or morons who were dictated the task. There is much waste done within NASA but this isn’t the properly way to show it.

  7. dlaugh says:
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    To be fair to the Senator Coburn’s staff, the book is an interesting read and raises a lot of legitimate questions about many projects that may well be wasting tax payers money.  The Mars project cited is for developing new menu items to be eaten by humans on Mars.  Wastebook reasonable raises the question of whether this is a good use of funding when a) NASA has no published plan to send humans to Mars and b) there are already over 100 items on the menu.  The book includes several other NASA projects including one with which I work.  Perhaps the judgement that they are wasteful is hasty, but raising the question of their value is fair.  Every project should be able to justify itself.

    One glaring issue with Wastebook is that it seems to be focused on there particular 100 entries because they make nice sound bites or headlines.  As others on the thread have already posted, Wastebook neglects to mention a lot of projects that could be considered wasteful.

    • Steve Whitfield says:
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      NASA has no published plan to send humans to Mars

      dlaugh,
      Pretty much anything NASA does scan be represented as waste when it’s selectively and incompletely presented.  In the Mars food case, cart and horse have been conveniently reversed in order to make it appear as waste.  How can NASA, or any other agency/country publish a plan for sending humans to Mars when there are so many unsolved issues and challenges yet to be dealt with.  Consider (just to illustrate my point) what the reaction would be if NASA announced to the world a plan for a manned Mars mission, and later in time started looking at the food issue and discovered a problem that was unsolvable using current or likely near future technology?  Not only would they look bad, but it would have created far more waste than the food program. Granted, the food issues is not likely to be a show stopper, but there are plenty of other issues that might be.  Also consider that cost and schedule for Mars food development/production can’t be pulled out of thin air.  They can only be meaningfully determined after considerable research.  Until budget and schedule for all of the component pieces of a Mars program (or any other program) can be determined, the total combined budget and schedule can not be known.  This is something that, as simple as it is, politicians consistently refused to understand.

      Steve

  8. hikingmike says:
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    Is that really the cover? yech

  9. gofast_92 says:
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    The relative insignificance of these “waste” items is concerning; some of the focus points aren’t even a million dollars. 

    One trillion is a MILLION MILLIONS, this is comparable to a millionaire quibbling over one dollar.  The taxpayers probably paid more for this list to be generated than some of the projects on it.

    I concede that waste is bad, and small items add up.
    But there are so many more significant areas that warrant more focus than the relative pittance on this list.

  10. dogstar29 says:
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    A billion here, a billion there, before you know it you’re talking about real money. In the case of the Marsfood, I would be curious to know why this would be any different from current spacefood. A report on MSNBC says the differences being invesigated are 1) achieving a longer shelflife for prepacked food (5 years vs the current 2 years), 2) Some foods that are not practical in 0-G but can be prepared just before eating in a gravitational field, and 3) some locally grown (‘greenhouse”) foods. It doesn’t sound exactly vital but could be useful on the moon as well as Mars, and in remote sites on Earth as well.

    Scanning the Coburn report, although there is a lot that is disorganized and arbitrary, there are some interesting points, like the first point he makes, the unproductivity of Congress, although Coburn attacks primarily the Democratic Senate when the Republican House is equally to blame.

  11. publiusr says:
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    MaDeR M–we actually agree on this. Coburn is just a latter day Proxmire.