Sen. Coburn Is Very Confused About NASA's Budget
Coburn’s ‘Wastebook’ Targets Include Mountain Lions, Sheep, Beer, Roll Call
“NASA draws criticism in a few areas, with Coburn skeptical of the costs associated with the International Space Station itself, including the presence of experiments designed by students. “Some of the other studies being conducted on the space station are designed by elementary and high school students rather than scientists. Fifteen student projects were launched to the space station in July as part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP),” the report said. “While encouraging young people to take an interest in science is an important goal, the billions of dollars being borrowed to support space station science fair experiments could make a bigger impact in the lives of these and other children in many other more cost efficient ways.”
Keith’s note: Contrary to Sen. Coburn’s annual loony report, billions are not being spent on educational projects aboard the space station. Gee, imagine what would happen if NASA actually was spending billions to encourage student experimentation in space …
The National Aeronautics and Space Act, Pub. L. No. 111-314, 124 Stat. 3328 (Dec. 18, 2010)
“Sec. 20163. Program authorized
(b) Activities.–In carrying out the provisions of this subchapter, the Administration shall–.
(1) arrange for participation by the scientific and engineering community, of both the Nation’s industrial organizations and institutions of higher education, in planning and carrying out appropriate research, in developing necessary technology, and in making necessary observations and measurements;”
NCESSE Official Response to Sen. Tom Coburn: “billions of dollars being borrowed to support
“Next let me address Sen. Coburn’s math regarding SSEP use of federal funds. The cost to deliver the national programming, including all launch and return to Earth services, across these 15 communities was $322,500. The communities brought another roughly $300,000 to the table in fully burdened labor hours by their teaching staff to deliver the program at the local level. Through a significant effort, in the best spirit of partnership, $572,500 of the total $622,500 cost was raised in the private sector, from over 85: local companies, school districts, foundations, universities, PTAs, and individual donors (see the Local Partners list). The remaining $50,000 was federal funding provided by CASIS to close budget shortfalls across the 15 communities. That funding truly enabled many communities to participate.”
I take it the report didn’t pick up on the waste of NASA web-sites not having a single controlling authority that establishes and approves all content, thereby preventing duplication …
Still, with 1000s of scientists looking for something to do, its unfortunate science experiments by elementary school students can get allocated. The quest for cheap labor searches for limits.
Wonder if there is a funded effort to award research money to people having unknown or tenuous immigration status. You know that there is, check under cultural diversity programs.
Until the nirvana of all work done by armies of post-docs (preferably foreign) paid chicken scraps, overseen by the well-paid illustrious is fully realized …
Some of this report is looney but some of it is very valid. The problem is that our Federal govt leadership, NASA and even private businesses would rather let this credit spree hit a dead end than rock the boat now. The youth of this country are rather screwed from these policies. The common denominator with most of these leaders is that they happen to be baby boomers. It’s generational warfare at it’s finest.
The fact that this is even attacking a school project and not the millions wasted on other projects is just more evidence to the fact that this is generational warfare.
Without seconding Coburn’s position, NASA should not be in the education business, period. It’s a waste of money.
The pairing of space + education seems natural, but in it’s execution it falls somewhere between pathetic joke and hopelessly patronizing. I’m in my early 30s and a scientist. I grew up a lover of space and NASA and still am to this day. NASA educational outreach had nothing to do with that. It played no role. And this was during the heyday of the Space Shuttle program at that. It was entirely ignored and no one cared. My schools never utilized anything NASA-related beyond the one time someone whose Nephew was an Astronaut on the first Hubble Servicing Mission was talked about. My parents bought me plenty of space and cosmology related books. Today is even worse. More So than ever today with computer/internet/tablet ubiquity. The NASA App is the 165th most popular… of just Education apps. Building Lego models of the ISS on the ISS passes for making kids interested. Kids will forget about it, pretty much right away.
NASA should be focusing on young adults from the ages of 16-22 to make sure they they attract the best and brightest right as the are in the most important formative years of their scientific careers; the years decisions are made about important classes to take, internships, universities to apply to, majors and so forth. That’s where NASA could make a real difference. I like to think of it as JROTC and ROTC for would-be scientists and engineers.
Appealing to kids? The entire effort is for naught the second the kid does pretty much anything else. I was lucky. My father is a scientist and nurtured my interest in it from a very young age. Most kids don’t have that, and no amount of money is every going to make NASA remotely a surrogate for it either.That needs to be good, up to date science teachers, if anyone. And while NASA should certainly provide them with material, that should pretty much be the extent of it.
Couldn’t agree more.
The National Aeronautics and Space Act, Pub. L. No. 111–314, 124 Stat. 3328 (Dec. 18, 2010) Sec. 20163. Program authorized http://www.nasa.gov/offices…
(b) Activities.–In carrying out the provisions of this subchapter, the Administration shall–.
(1) arrange for participation by the scientific and engineering community, of both the Nation’s industrial organizations and institutions of higher education, in planning and carrying out appropriate research, in developing necessary technology, and in making necessary observations and measurements;
That’s why the Florida Space Research Institute (before it was dissolved by Jeb Bush) focused on training teachers and providing them with educational resources, a strategy which could reach millions of students.
Most of Coburn’s examples are congressional earmarks, not administration or agency decisions. And let’s not forget the taxpayer dollars spent every year on preparing the Wastebook so Senator Coburn can demonstrate his frugality.
Wow, lots of NASA haters here. Personally, I’m all for dumbing down your country under the guise of the agency “wasting billions” on science fair experiments (and people seconding that thinking that multiple websites wastes more billions) to help create a compliant and undereducated work force with zero vision. Means they can get paid less. You people really loathe your scientists.
Well, as an ex-President of SPACE (UC Berkeley’s Student’s Promoting Aerospace Careers and Education) I’m all for money spent on on getting students involved in this sort of thing. But I do have to wonder if flight experiments on ISS, from elementary and high school students, is the best use of funds.
Has anyone done the (probably frightening) math, and calculated what an astronaut’s time on ISS costs? I mean dividing the total cost of the ISS program by the number of astronaut-hours available for non-maintenance work. I really doubt the above mentioned experiments could have cost billions. But if they involved just few astronaut-hours, I could see them costing as much as, for example, a CubeSat. At least one high schools has built a CubeSat, and that could very well be a better way of getting students interested and involved.
At $3b/yr and assuming astronauts work for 14hrs a day, with 2 US astronauts at a time, that’s about $290,000 per hour per astronaut. However, that cost is primarily ground-ops. The actual cost derived directly by the ISS (training, wages, supplies) would be a fraction of that.
So I’d suggest that any ISS experiment that isn’t directly related to reducing the cost of operating humans in space, on next-gen space stations, commercial space-stations, and BEO, is a waste of money and time. Even if it’s “grown up” micro-g research that’s passed all the reviews and been endorsed by every committee.
Growing pharmaceutically-useful crystals on a $3b/yr space station is as wasteful as running Jimmy-aged-nine-and-three-quarters’ science fair experiment¹. The sole goal should be lowering the cost of working in space until it actually is affordable for normal research. (And eventually, even kiddy-experiments.)
¹ …which, for the record, was “Hepatocyte Development in Bioscaffolds infused with TGFB3 in Microgravity”. No seriously.
But this is an invalid way of looking at it, as if market forces were somehow setting the value of the time and effort used in getting those projects up there. The ISS and the astronauts manning it are already up there, and that’s a result of national political forces at work. If you can prove that those high school projects _prevented or displaced_ more worthy university-led projects, then there might be an argument to be made, but I am pretty certain that’s not true.
Keith,
While I am sure we’re not spending billions, can you come up with a ballpark figure on how much is spent annually on these projects?
NCESSE Official Response to Sen. Tom Coburn: “billions of dollars being borrowed to support http://ssep.ncesse.org/2014…
“Next let me address Sen. Coburn’s math regarding SSEP use of federal funds. The cost to deliver the national programming, including all launch and return to Earth services, across these 15 communities was $322,500. The communities brought another roughly $300,000 to the table in fully burdened labor hours by their teaching staff to deliver the program at the local level. Through a significant effort, in the best spirit of partnership, $572,500 of the total $622,500 cost was raised in the private sector, from over 85: local companies, school districts, foundations, universities, PTAs, and individual donors (see the Local Partners list). The remaining $50,000 was federal funding provided by CASIS to close budget shortfalls across the 15 communities. That funding truly enabled many communities to participate.”