NASA administrator warns agency may have to cut ‘everything’ but top 3 priorities if no budget deal
“NASA Administrator Charles Bolden warned Wednesday that, unless Congress reaches a deal with the White House to avoid mandated budget cuts next year, NASA would have to cancel all of its other missions to keep its three top priorities moving forward.”
Washington Monument Syndrome
“Washington Monument Syndrome … is the name of a political tactic allegedly used by government agencies when faced with reductions in the rate of projected increases in budget or actual budget cuts. The most visible and most appreciated service that is provided by that entity is the first to be put on the chopping block.”
The White House is proposing to cut spending on the new NASA booster by $150 million next year and the Orion capsule by $170 million, while boosting commercial space support to about $424 million – double this year’s total.
“This administration seems to think that NASA’s job is to use taxpayer money as venture capital to support speculative commercial companies, the future Solyndras of the space industry,” Shelby said.
Looks like Mr. Obama is working hard to earn. My vote.
The man may have Vision after all 🙂
Looks like Mr. Obama is working hard to earn. My vote.
The man may have Vision after all 🙂
As a life long Reagan republican, and on the issue of space, the O administration is light years beyond Richard Shelby.
Mr. Wingo
In a Spaceflight now post I read where Elon has said a few weeks back that he is working on a plan to get us to Mars and will release that plan later this year. Some nay sayer said he was just dreaming and went on to talk about delays and such.
NOTE Reminder SPACEX ISS Dragon THIS STILL IS A TEST FLIGHT
Anyway what is a dream but a goal.
And then you make a practical plan for that goal.
That goal is divided up into tasks / missions/hardware/ Mr. Cs Lander for moon/ mars and small planets. Maybe Elon proposes that moon/mars recycler/Spaceship. Surely Spacex and New Space test this hardware near ISS and the moon. BANG We are on the moon for CHEAP at least doing something. Mr. Wingo : )
I recall seeing Spacex landers that looked lots like Dragons on dragon trunks in Spacex videos. like I said in the last ISS post.
Sure seems to be so much riding on that next dragon ISS launch : )
Point is I guess if the white house can help and Dragons fly smoothly again on the 30th I may get to see us do really cool stuff this decade and the next : )
A little MONEY in the right place plus a PLAN and at least one company focused on a GOOD plan equals a Space future sooner not later. : )
Get NASA using SLS money to do the right R and D to help Elons plan and who knows : )
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist
Little 6 year old boy with crew cut and his cool Space lunch box and big dreams : )
This year the Commercial budget was cut from $850M to $400M while Orion was given $400M for one unmanned test on a Delta, a rocket the ESAS said was incapable of carrying the Orion. It’s more accurate to say that Commercial is being slasshed to prop up SLS/Orion.
Seed money to prepare to build the Inner Solar System Railroad. Yessssssssss
Charles Bolden has proven to be just another “Yes Man” for the Obama Administration. The man has no intestinal fortitude at all. Is it any wonder that NASA isn’t going anywhere but a downward spiral. The administration has no vision at all and is turning our country into a third-world, stone age mentality.And people voted for this clown. Go Figure.
Not sure you want to introduce politics. Rick, Mitt and Ron want to eliminate the space program. Newt wants to eliminate NASA. A significant faction of NASA middle management is yellow dog Republican and believes Democrats are agents of evil and that Rick or Mick will give them half a trillion to replay Apollo. They make snide remarks about Bolden and Garver, but demand tax cuts and have no idea why this might result in budget cuts.
The last administration spent billions on Constellation without producing a lander, canceled Shuttle, canceled DC-X, canceled X-33 and X-34, dropped NASA role in X-37, and tried to cancel ISS in 2010. And started our longest war war based on the lies of one unreliable source they recruited themselves.
http://www.astronautix.com/… This states that the DC-X was retired in 1996(Clinton) .
http://www.astronautix.com/… X-33 was cxled by Bush in 2001, however it was for good reason. “NASA investment in the X-33 program totaled $912 million. Lockheed
Martin originally committed to invest $212 million in the X-33, and
during the life of the program increased that amount to $357 million.
For that money NASA and Lockheed Martin essentially proved that
rocket-powered / vertical-takeoff / horizontal-landing
single-stage-to-orbit vehicles were not feasible using existing
technology. The result essentially killed further consideration of
single-stage-to-orbit designs in America, Europe, and China for decades
to come.”
http://www.astronautix.com/… X-34 was cxld the same day as X-33. for another cost overrun program, starting to sound like a broken record isn’t it? Politics should not be too involved here, there are MANY political mistakes made by both sides. I will state, as I have before, we need our own “Soyuz”. Arugged and reliable transport to LEO. everyone thinks we need Star Trek or 2001… We need a reliable ride that can be produced cheap, and simple. Why muddy the waters? If I ask for a drink of water, I don’t need a gold chalice encrusted with diamonds to drink it out of!!!!!
Patrick
I will state, as I have before, we need our own “Soyuz”. Arugged and reliable transport to LEO. everyone thinks we need Star Trek or 2001…
I will state, as I have before, we need our own “Dragon”. Arugged and reliable transport to LEO. everyone thinks we need Star Trek or 2001…
I agree!
Dragon is a worthwhile interim step and has probably well under 20% of the launch cost of the Orion, but as Musk readily acknowledges even Dragon will be too expensive in the long run unless some degree of reusability can be achieved. If NASA ever gets around to fully funding Commercial Crew it might be possible to effectively investigate this.
True commercial crew doesn’t include NASA, The bird would be out of the nest in flight on its own. That is the goal that everyone is so scared of but should truly be working for.
Dreams from the little blond boy with the Space lunch box.
🙂
dogstar 3 The guy with the most liked posts lol
Commercial is the only route to Mars!
Thanks for reminding me DC-X was cancelled in 96, demonstrating that the Clinton Administration (and Dan Golden) also made mistakes. Nevertheless it was wrong to cancel it; today the VTOVL tech is being explored by several developers but we could be years ahead.
More than 80% of the cost of orbital launch is in fabricating the launch vehicle. This is a mature technology and little cost can be wrung out of it. So there is no way to reduce the cost of human spaceflight to a practical level unless the launch vehicle is fully reusable. Just look at the spiraling cost of the Soyuz and Atlas V. Even SpaceX will not do better than $20M per seat unless it is able to reuse its vehicles. And even at $20M per seat the commercial market for human spaceflight will never exceed a handful of flights per year. However under Bush all attempts at developing an affordable launch system were abandoned.
“… Democrats are agents of evil… ” This is not
quite true. The democrats are RATS
but Republicans are I CAN.
Please explain??????
Political Gobbledygook
Well thanks for clearing that up Dave lololol
Three of the four GOP candidates want to eliminate any programs for lunar landing. Gingrich wants to eliminate NASA.
The last administration spent billions on Constellation without producing a lander,
I predict that the first human capable lander built and tested will be done by Spacex He got it half finished already. Question is what rock and how soon.
Although it could potentially land other places, the Dragon is apparently being designed to land repeatedly on the most challenging target of all for a reusable lander; Earth.
I so know it and that is why I have such hope regardless of what the clowns in the circus do!
Doesn’t take a rocket scientist lol 🙂
How is Earth the most challenging target – there is plenty of atmosphere to slow you down.
How is Earth the most challenging target for a reusable lander – there is plenty of atmosphere to slow you down, plenty of places to land, plenty of real-time knowledge about the atmosphere and winds? Mars is much more challenging – just enough atmosphere to create heating issues but not quite enough for appreciable drag to slow you down, lots of rocks to avoid, significant temporal and geographic changes in the atmospheric density, no real time wind data, a communication delay that requires full autonomy…
Oh just shut up. If the good ole boy congress would have followed Obama’s plans for NASA, we wouldn’t have to deal with the impracticable and unsustainable nonsense of SLS or MPCV.
If anyone is taking us to a third world mentality, it’s far right republicans who insist on greed and ideology rather than science and logic at every turn. You take all of their BS war spending last decade, tax cuts during a war time, war on terror programs (essentially a war on a human emotion) and this country is in good shape within minimal deficit.
This boils down to the argument of 1) funding private spaceflight companies under NASA guidelines vs 2) funding private companies to build what NASA wants which has been already done without much sustainability.
We funded railroad companies to own and manage their own vehicles the same effect.
That fact is that some of you are adamant about bankrupting the agency just so you can get your precious SLS/MPCV on a handful of flights is just selfishness.
If you want more money from the Agency, you might want to start showing how the agency can be efficient rather than blaming misdirected anger at the executive branch.
Of course there is an alternative, Charlie Bolden brings up retirement or a reason. He should be more blunt. Werner Von Braun was an A-grade A-hole at times, but it worked pretty good to get some results.
“This administration seems to think that NASA’s job is to use taxpayer
money as venture capital to support speculative commercial companies,
the future Solyndras of the space industry,” Shelby said.
REALLY?? Apparently Sen. Richard Shelby needs to learn the facts:
Ok: Saturn V – Boeing, North American, Douglass(commercial)
Saturn V Instrument unit – IBM (commercial)
Lunar Module – Grumman (commercial) Shuttle orbiter – Boeing (commercial) Shuttle main tanks – Lockheed (commercial) Shuttle main engines – Pratt & whitney/ Rocketdyne (commercial) Shuttle solid Boosters – ATK (commercial) MPCV – Lockheed (commercial)
So what part of the ANY of these systems was BUILT by NASA?
Correct very little of it.
Its all about feeding that company with the cheapest price with just mission money when possible. Nice fixed service agreements, Isn’t it? Bring on the new set of piglets lol if the old porkers can’t get the price down.
I think they call that free and fair compatition. free enterprise or something ???
then once the prices are low enough cool things start to happen 🙂
I listened to the entire webcast of the subcommittee meeting (or at least the 1¼ hours relevant to the issues) and I have to say that I found it awfully disappointing. First off, the whole thing, if you removed the pointless repetition, and the outright lies disguised as diplomacy, could have been knocked off in under 15 minutes.
It also brought to mind an earlier NASA Watch post about “NASA Is Now Teaching Its Employees How To Hold a Fork.” Clearly, these subcommittee members could use a course of this nature, no matter how senior they may be. The others were at least somewhat subtle, but Sen. Hutchison is getting way too big for her skinny little boots. She was outright rude, insulting and condescending to Bolden, who showed remarkable restraint in putting up with it. In his shoes, I would have told her that if she’s going to ask a question, then have the decency to be quiet and listen to the answer. She continually talked over top of him when he was trying to answer her questions. Her questions were insulting and the way she asked them even more so. She seems to think that she’s been elected supreme ruler of the country.
Furthermore, Hutchison said, more than once, that everyone had previously agreed that SLS (which every time she called “the launch system”) was the key to the future — her clear assertion was that SLS/Orion was the future and that everything else NASA is doing and planning is meaningless and of no importance. When did it happen that everyone agreed to this? SLS, if anything, is going to be the foolishness that finally brings NASA crashing down. Many people have pointed out that there’s no money for landers or anything else with which to do any missions with SLS/MPCV, and I consider that to be understating the problem. I predict that after Orion is finished, which will take longer than advertised, there will be nothing to go on either end of it.
Bolden agreed to take a couple of issues under advisement (he’ll look into it and provide them with an answer at some unspecified later date) and one of these issues involved something he had clearly never heard about. Aside from this, as far as I can tell, this subcommittee meeting served no purpose whatsoever, except to show how clued-out these subcommittee members are, and to demonstrate Bolden’s “peace at any price” tolerance, which I don’t subscribe to. Everybody complemented everyone else, both before and after the meeting, which some people may consider diplomacy, but it seemed more like hypocrisy to me, given that nobody sounded like they meant a word of it.
A final note: The picture of Bolden at the top of this NASA Watch story does not reflect his appearance during the subcommittee meeting (as seen in the webcast); He was rather upbeat throughout. But it may well reflect how he was feeling during and after the meeting.
Steve
Bolden goes up to Capital Hill, gets his verbal whippings, and then has to keep on going. I do not envy his job.
As noted in previous hearings, “Everyone” (The administration, Congress) agreed on 3 priorities, ISS with commercial access support, SLS/Orion development, and James Webb.
At this point, nearly every Congressman at a hearing is repeating nearly the same script they were using last fall during the FY 2012 hearings.
If you want to be pragmatic, you might want to believe that everyone is waiting for Hutchinson to retire by end of year. She’s only got one more shot (this year) to influence policy on SLS — for reasons unknown, but one suspects a board seat might be in the cards.
Doug,
I’m not so optimistic on this matter. If she retired tomorrow, I’ll bet she would still continue to influence matters, through other people, just to show that no one could defy her. It amazes me that anyone can get to her age and still behave like a spoiled brat.
Steve
We need to insist the Senators face the real issue. SLS/Orion are completely unaffordable. Unless they are canceled immediately Commercial will also be delayed.
And just how do you propose to do that?
Support the Obama Administration?
Outspend ULA in Lobbying?
Republicans are acting like Democrats, Democrats are acting like Republicans and the fact of the matter is NO BODY cares. Not talk radio, not the “mainstream” media, nobody.
Instead, you’ve got Neil “I’m here to sell my latest book” deGrasse Tyson talking about doubling NASA’s budget (Oh yeah, gonna happen — in a Universe where Skynet is being built, maybe), planetary science whining how they’re being screwed for Commercial Crew (when it’s really the Webb that’s eating the lunch), SLS backers whining they’re being screwed for Commercial Crew (when they’re getting the biggest piece of the pie over the next decade).
To take up Keith’s favorite whipping by this week, you won’t see Commercial Spaceflight Foundation fighting very hard because some of its members (ULA, Boeing) want Commercial Crew to be starved out so there are no distractions for the Atlas V monopoly and future SLS work.
Call me when you guys go chain yourselves to NASA’s front door or a space shuttle, or stage a sit-in at Senator Hutchinson’s office next week.
Or go overthrow the “leadership” at The Mars Society as a smaller project to start building yourself a seat at the table. Note I said “start.”
At least we agree on goals. Strategy comes next. There is one potential chink in the armor of Constellation II. That would be Senator Nelson. He has no moral commitment to it and it does little for his state. He is a Democrat so should theoretically not be fighting the administration. For him it is just a matter of horse trading. He would be perfectly willing to scuttle SLS/Orion if we can (help Musk to) persuade him it would be politically advantageous to support Commercial Crew instead.
JSC and MSFC need to be shutdown, there is little reason for these agency locations other than politics. Both SLS and MPCV/Orion are a vast source of expenditures and more importantly unsustainable.
That’s solves much of the budget issues right there. Besides, it will give all the uber idealist conservative morons that work these locations to practice what they preach: A chance to experience the free market and get off the government dole. How could they be against such a thing? unless they were leeches?
“uber idealist conservative morons that work these ocations“
Nassau Goi,
With that sort of language I think you’re posting at the wrong site. It doesn’t accomplish anything (in my opinion) except to make you sound silly. It’s doubly self-defeating when you use highly loaded words like these, but can’t get the simple grammar of your sentence correct. It should be “who” not “that” when you’re talking about people (i.e., who work these locations, or more properly, who work at these locations). If you want to get your point across, use straight forward applicable English. The use of uber in particular is going to make intelligent people ignore whatever comes after it, considering that it is a term adopted by Hitler for his proclaimed supreme race (and was also adopted by punk rockers). Basically, I consider your entire second paragraph to be silly, irrelevant, and backed by nothing at all. At the very least you should have qualified it by calling it your opinion.
Steve
I agree with you Steve but i do agree with this point to
A chance to experience the free market and get off the government dole. How could they be against such a thing?
Fine as long as its done with Webb also and JPL.
I think it’s interesting that you’re more concerned about my language than
anything else.
For some reason some feel appropriate dining etiquette is a priority within the agency as well.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers…
“You can make a first impression in the first five minutes,” Cleghorn said.
“Technical skills and knowledge account for only 15 percent of the reason
you get a job, keep a job, advance in a job. Eighty-five percent is your
commitment to people skills.”
Ignoring the “running Capitalist Dogs” theme, just where do you put ISS operations if you shut down JSC?
I thought we were going to let ISS re-enter to save money for Constellation.
From your rant it sounds like you work on JWST. So what you are advocating is shutting down all manned space from the US, both public and private and throwing up telescopes for some pretty postcard pictures. See how long the public lets that go on. Like it or not, manned space helps to drive funding for ALL of NASA.
I suspect you know little to nothing about MSFC and JSC, their workforces, their facilities, or their capabilities. You want them shut down then give your congressman a shout and make your play. Might as well include KSC in your request as well.
BTW, the US is not a free market economy so where would you suggest we go to experience one?
ALL NASA locations are where they are because of politics, except … maybe, the 2 major launch sites.
Don’t forget Wallops
Thanks.
Lost in all the political sturm und drang is the loss of talent due to NASA’s lack of project management/planning/execution skills and the Administration’s/Congress ineptitude to come up with good solid solutions.