Ohio Has to Help Pay for Maryland's Space Program
Congress might cut tens of millions of dollars from NASA Glenn budget, Cleveland.com
“The money taken from Glenn would help pay for a different priority of some Senate members: a Maryland-based robotic mission to refuel and service long-orbiting satellites that otherwise might have to be shut off. Hundreds of satellites orbit the earth to provide observation and weather tracking but were not designed for servicing. If they could operate longer, they could save future replacement and launch costs, NASA says. The proposed $150 million taken from other NASA programs would focus first on keeping the Landsat 7 satellite, launched in 1999 to provide imaging of the earth for a variety of government and commercial purposes, going. Otherwise, the Landsat 7 could reach the end of its useful life in 2019. The robotic program to prolong the life of satellites has been dubbed “Restore-L Pathfinder,” and is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.”
Until NASA Glenn gets better senior management, is consistent in showing its value to NASA’s mission, and utilizes the resources it’s been given in a responsible way, it has no right to complain when it loses funding.
When will Congress stops ‘buyin’ things’ with money they don’t have on things they do not need and focus on innovation and creativity to spur economic growth? SLS/Orion have compromised all paths forward, with latest bar lowering called ‘distributed launch’. Lost funding to fraud, waste, and abuse?. Jobs where?
Where is the innovation in rebuilding 40 year old expendable LVs, converting the reuseable RS25 to expendible RS68 for a ‘second’ time, rebulding the J-2 the abandoning it, keeping solids –a ‘major mistake’, redoing Apollo again when other architectures are Billions cheaper? Raiding all those ‘directionless honeypots of open ended research’. Most failures occur by lack of resources.
“SLS Won” by one severely flawed assumption, yet no one seems to notice, no one seems to care, one bad policy stacked on another. “Must be shuttle derived” “over 130mT” “No child left behind”, Wars for oil/’WMD’, Medicare Part D, oil and corn subsidies that destroy the environment and increase health care costs, not to mention the 2005 space policy–worse ever as it guaranteed economic access would not be achieved for at least 20, no, now much longer.
Of course the U.S. has a space program – the states do NOT fund a program with their own money. Ohio and Maryland do not have space programs except possibly some state support for the Centers.
The idea that once a Center has a budget – that the budget can never go down unless all go down in proportion – is one thing that has crippled the U.S. program. It is a jobs program and not an exploration program.
Maybe someone forgot to tell Shelby and Mikulski that.
Indeed. Why do I think that Marshall and Goddard will not be contributing to the $150M?
Be aware, the “Ohio vs Maryland” title is a construct of Mr. Keith Cowing. It was not the title of the newspaper article linked to.
That said, I agree with most of what you said, except that NASA funding and project direction seems to come mostly from Congress rather than any other priorities. For example, Center A is awarded/assigned/whatever work on project X. Center B, looking to either get in on X action or wanting to fund their project Y finds a way to get their congress critter to get it written into the next appropriations bill that project Y needs money and directs NASA to cut elsewhere.
Worse yet is if Center B wants in on X they find a way to get funded for it and compete with Center A. Not only is this a waste of resources, but if Center A has weak management, often Center A’s X work gets taken away.
I’m not advocating stove piping entirely, but centers have areas of expertise and the NASA “Agency” needs to promote that expertise while at the same time encouraging collaboration. Instead the “Agency” (often at the direction of Congress, through funding or other means) fosters an us-versus-them attitude and everyone hoards their work or worse yet, gives in to giving it away so as not to look bad.
IMHO getting politics out of technical direction is key. Yes, Congress has control over the purse strings, but it should stop meddling in technical direction.
NASA Centers shouldn’t have to hoard or run scared from work assigned to them. Expertise should be shared and healthy collaboration encouraged.
WRT “Be aware, the “Ohio vs Maryland” title is a construct of Keith Cowling. It was not the title of the newspaper article linked to.” 1. DUH that is why I have the original article and title and a link 2. Is spelling my name incorrectly your way of making some sort of point?
No, it was an honest spelling mistake on my part. Not everyone is out to get you.
As for the title callout, my point to the original poster was that the Ohio vs Maryland thing originated on this site, not in the original article which you so correctly note you linked to.
I did not accuse you of trying to get me – my name is spelled out on every single post I make.
The problem with this deal is not satellite refueling, which might be a reasonable technology. The problem is that logically NASA would propose the development, ask Congress for the money, and then decide within the agency how and where to do it. In this case it would logically be part of Space Technology, which is managed at Glenn, although the centers should certainly collaborate by contributing their combined experience.
Instead we have members of Congress fighting to get dollars for their districts and using NASA as a tool to accomplish this. Human and physical resources are wasted at one center and duplicated at another.
BTW my name gets misspelled too, but after 64 years it doesn’t bother me anymore.
It might be assumed that “hard decisions” are being made by NASA management because of a poor budget situation. In this case though, it’s politics (Mikulski) defending the pork (comm sat refueling, with Cepi, etc.), and we shouldn’t have any pretense that the outcome would be different even if the technical merits of any work at Glenn were competitive or better than this project at Goddard. This is SLS/Orion and Shelby, just on a smaller scale.
That said, assume for a minute that the refueling work was a good project, with good merit, being funded through a bad process. The refueling projects major shortcoming, like many NASA tech projects, remains – it is work in the vein of traditional NASA technology development. This type work, once complete, usually goes no where for an assortment of reasons. Give NASA funding for technology in a traditional procurement model and the project ends up thinking the technical demonstration was the end-goal. Actually getting the technology out into the space sector – not so much a goal, perhaps an after thought.
These are bigger problems than even the politics.
“Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area,” Gates told the Atlantic. “When I first got into this I thought, ‘How well does the Department of Energy spend its R&D budget?’ And I was worried: ‘Gosh, if I’m going to be saying it should double its budget, if it turns out it’s not very well spent, how am I going to feel about that? But as I’ve really dug into it, the DARPA money is very well spent, and the basic-science money is very well spent. The government has these ‘Centers of Excellence.’ They should have twice as many of those things, and those things should get about four times as much money as they do
-Bill Gates
According to the article, the money is to be taken away from the Space Technology Directorate, to be used for … space technology.