An article in this week’s issue of Space News (no subscription required) identifies the key problem NASA backers face in their efforts to add a billion or more dollars to NASA’s FY07 budget: the extra money is not in the overall budget allocation for the appropriations subcommittee that has jurisdiction over NASA. The article notes that the subcommittee found out earlier this month that they have $109 million more than previously planned to spend this year. However, the Science, State, Justice, and Commerce subcommittee has jurisdiction over a lot more than just NASA, which means plenty of competition for that additional money. And, even if NASA could snare all the additional funding, it would still fall far short of the authorized funding level for the agency in 2007, the goal that NASA supporters in Congress, and outside it, are aiming for.
I think nasa should work better with other nations. This international space agency group that has posted here on sp has some very good points and ideas. It would be good if nasa were to join an international space agency as this group is proposing. It would get us back to the moon to stay and on mars much faster than nasa all alone. It would be cheaper for nasa and the infrastructure would be much larger. The website for this international space agency group is: http://www.isa-hq.com should check it out as they have some good info and ideas.
Yea right. I spend a lot of time working with ESA folks and it is much slower than NASA is with worse politics.
Dennis
Well, European nations have taken much of the launch vehicle business, a good half of the comsat business, and circa half of the commercial transport industry from us in the last decade. True, we “handed” much of this to them through ideologically driven and basically stupid decisions on our part. However, that’s not a bad performance for “worse politics” than those effecting NASA. . . .
— Donald
Don
Let me clairfy.
The items that you talk about are related to a Euro-nationalist strategy that is the official policy of Europe and ESA to become independent of the U.S. in these areas, specifically because of U.S. politics.
Internal ESA politics determine how their science and exploration missions are carried out, including overpaying for hardware subsystems just because they come from country x, y, or z.
Any kind of international space agency would have all of these liabilities multiplied by the number of NASA centers that are in the U.S.
If NASA had a program to acutally support private enterprise as a core value the losses in the commercial realm would be far less than they are today. ESA has succeeded in the areas that you state exactly for nationalistic economic development reasons. An international space agency would do nothing to support that and would simply add another layer of meetings, agendas, and paperwork (ISS anyone) to the existing mess.
Dennis