Former president Bill Clinton was in Houston yesterday stumping for his wife, and he briefly addressed the issue of human spaceflight, according to the Houston Chronicle:
Clinton pointed out that Hillary Clinton places more of an emphasis than Obama on human space travel.
“This is the center of American space travel,” he said of Houston and the Johnson Space Center. “Sixteen thousand (local) jobs — and a lot of America’s future — rely on this.”
(The AP, mentioning that statement in passing, ups the ante, claiming that “about 100,000 in the Houston area work for NASA’s Johnson Space Center or related industries,” which may be true for a particularly inclusive definition of “Houston area” and/or “related industries”.)
Some more from The Hotline’s blog:
“Hillary has always supported the manned space program just as I did when I was president,” he told a crowd of over 250 who gathered in a picturesque neighborhood park in a Houston suburb today. “Her opponent says we should downgrade man space travel and upgrade robotic travel.”
“There are 16,000 jobs and a lot of Americans’ futures riding on this centered here in Houston,” said Clinton today. “You have to make a decision whether you care about this.”
One suspects a few people, recalling the stagnant or declining NASA budgets through much of the Clinton era, may wonder just how strong of an endorsement this is…
The Clintons saying one thing and doing another? I am shocked, shocked.
The fact that it is becoming an issue with a bit more visability is certainly a positive development.
Pandering Alert!!!!
The silver lining here is that the subject gets attention, however we must all recognize this as pandering from a desperate vote seeker. Fairly, it reminds me a lot of Rudy Guliani pandering for Florida votes towards the end.
One comment, that Houston is the center of American space travel, might draw comments from the Florida delegation.
Sadly, few politicians do more than read notes, written by staffers, about space. Few of them are equipped to understand the topic.
Charles
While I don’t disagree with the above comments, it is also worth noting that Mr. Clinton cut NASA’s budget in the context of bringing the national budget on a path not only to balance, but toward paying off the national debt. In retrospect, the impending recession would have ensured that it didn’t happened, but at least he was trying. While I don’t approve of the NASA cuts, it was not in the context of a rapidly expanding structural deficit with no economic excuses not of the President’s own making, as now.
— Donald
Donald, actually you’re incorrect. The budget deficit was in mutliple hundreds of billions during the first years of the Clinton administration, when he was not only slashing space, but the military and intelligence as well. It was only after the Gingrich revolution that the budget came into balance, during a time which–irony of ironies–some of those NASA cuts were being restored.
Comments about obvious parochial pandering by the Clinton campaign to win a narrow contest in Texas aside, a few reality checks on the first (maybe soon to be only) Clinton Administration’s record with regards to NASA and human space flight:
1) The NASA topline budget was not declining throughout the Clinton years. There were years during the Clinton Administration when the proposed and/or passed NASA budgets were higher than the prior years’ proposed and/or passed NASA budgets.
2) In a post-Cold War era when major S&T programs like the SSC were being terminated, the Clinton Administration supported the ISS, brought unending ISS design cycles and sprialing costs under control, and arguably saved ISS from Congressional termination (and post-Columbia technical failure) by bringing the Russians into the partnership. Some of us (myself included) may not be great fans of the decisions made on the ISS program, but to claim that the Clinton Administration did not support NASA’s human space flight programs ignores the efforts expended by the Clinton White House on ISS.
3) The Clinton Administration also started, funded, and even sent the Vice President to a roll out ceremony for a variety of space transportation technology demonstration projects (X-33, X-34, X-37) and commercial launch programs (Alternate Access) that were ultimately aimed at getting NASA’s human space flight missions off the hugely expensive Space Shuttle and onto vehicles with more rational cost structures. Again, some of us may disagree with the strategies used on those programs or wish that the Clinton Administration had used a bigger stick to get NASA to implement them better, but the fact remains that the Clinton Administration not only supported NASA’s human space flight activities, but invested in technologies and vehicles to reform and improve those activities.
FWIW…
Anon,
I agree with you on points 2 and 3, but on your first point you get two Pinocchios. This is not like you.
ANON: 1) The NASA topline budget was not declining throughout the Clinton years. There were years during the Clinton Administration when the proposed and/or passed NASA budgets were higher than the prior years’ proposed and/or passed NASA budgets.
According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
NASA’s top line budget was
1992 13.961 Billion
2000 13.600 Billion
However, these numbers do not account for inflation, which is where your statement becomes an exaggeration (which is the Wash Post definition of two Pinocchios.)
Using 1992 dollars as the standard, the 13.6 billion dollars in 2000 needs to be deflated by 1.182
In other words, in real (1992) dollars, NASA’s top line budget was
1992 13.961 Billion
2000 11.506 Billion
This is a 17.6% reduction in NASA’s top line budget in real dollars during the Clinton Administration.
BTW, NASA’s 2006 budget (in 1992 dollars) would be:
2006 11.290 Billion
This is a 2% reduction in NASA’s top line budget in real dollars from 2000-2006.
FWIW,
– Al
“Politics is not rocket science, which is why rocket scientists do not understand politics.”
More importantly, as I have previously argued, I doubt that Bill’s pandering in Houston is going to get Hillary that many votes. She will get a few, but I predict it won’t be significant. (Recall, that Dr. Foust has already pointed out that Guliani pandering near KSC did not help in Florida.)
Their individual positions on the Iraq war, the character issues (e.g., experience versus judgement, likeability, fighter vs. uniter, etc.), their perceived chance of winning against McCain, their perceived positions on economic policy (the actual positions being nearly identical), the color of their skin or their gender, will play a much larger role in who Clear Lake area citizens vote for.
NOTE: If we can get the final numbers from the polls in the Clear Lake area, and compare them to the polls in similar areas elsewhere in Texas, we might be able to prove this one way or the other and put this debate to rest.
– Al
“Politics is not rocket science, which is why rocket scientists do not understand politics.”
Politicans “supporting space”: “Blah blah blah jobs blah blah jobs blah blah jobs”
“I agree with you on points 2 and 3, but on your first point you get two Pinocchios. This is not like you.”
Oh, I like the term “Pinocchios”. Can I use that?
“ANON: 1) The NASA topline budget was not declining throughout the Clinton years. There were years during the Clinton Administration when the proposed and/or passed NASA budgets were higher than the prior years’ proposed and/or passed NASA budgets.
NASA’s top line budget was
1992 13.961 Billion
2000 13.600 Billion”
Both statements are correct. The NASA topline was lower at the end of the Clinton Administration than at the beginning (your point). But the NASA topline budget did have year-over-year increases during those years (which was the point I was trying, but apparently failed, to make).
For example, according to that same Wikipedia data, NASA’s budget experienced year-to-year increases going from 1992 to 1993, 1995 to 1996, 1996 to 1997, and 1998 to 1999. Most of those increases are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And those are just the Congressionally passed budgets. The original White House budget requests were even higher in some cases.
My point is to just provide some countervailing details to broadly brushed statements like “stagnant or declining NASA budgets”. Like any Presidency, there is a lot to criticize in the Clinton Administration when it comes to NASA decisions and oversight, but the reality is that the NASA budget bounced around a lot, including up, during the Clinton years, and funded a lot of civil space initiatives and achievements, the biggest of which was getting ISS off the drawing boards.
Topline budgets are built program by program. As much as we might like to score political points by looking at the topline trends, budget decisions are not made that way. To really examine a budget under a particular Presidency, we have to look at the details — what Congress actually passed versus what the President proposed; what programs were coming to the end of their life (costs ramping down) during those years; the number, content, and costs of new program initiatives and activities that were started during those years; and what was actually achieved during those years (among other things).
For example, the NASA budget has enjoyed modest but steady increases through the Bush II years (according to the same Wikipedia data). But such a simplistic analysis belies substantial to crippling problems like the fact that those budgets did not meet the original budgetary commitments in the VSE, that the ESAS plan for Shuttle replacement vehicles never fit within that VSE budget, that the VSE schedule for a Shuttle replacement has not been met, that decisions to start VSE human lunar elements have been pushed into the next Administration and put into political jeopardy, and that many valuable activities elsewhere in the agency have been deferred or terminated.
Hope that makes my thinking a little more clear. My 2 cents… FWIW…
This AP quote
“about 100,000 in the Houston area work for NASA’s Johnson Space Center or related industries”
is pure bunk. The entire, nationwide NASA civil servant and contractor workforce is something under 60,000 individuals. There’s no way 100,000 individuals work directly or indirectly at JSC alone.
“Their individual positions on the Iraq war, the character issues (e.g., experience versus judgement, likeability, fighter vs. uniter, etc.), their perceived chance of winning against McCain, their perceived positions on economic policy (the actual positions being nearly identical), the color of their skin or their gender, will play a much larger role in who Clear Lake area citizens vote for.”
One relevant data point to support this kind of argument… just the number of Katrina evacuees that relocated to Houston, some 150,000, far exceeds any remotely possible figure for the total NASA workforce in Houston. And that population is going to be much more highly motivated to vote based on their parochial issues than the NASA workforce on NASA human space flight budgets.
FWIW…
ANON: Oh, I like the term “Pinocchiosâ€. Can I use that?
I like it too, but credit goes to “The Fact Checker”, Michael Dobbs, of the Washington Post at
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/about_the_fact_checker.html#pinocchio
– Al
Both anonymous.space and Al are making some errors in their budgetary analysis.
For one, they should be using different years as basis for comparison. Fiscal Year 1993 started on October 1, 1992, and is therefore the last Bush-41 budget, not the first Clinton budget. The Clinton budgets were FY1994-2001, inclusive.
anonymous.space’s point that Clinton’s NASA budgets did have some year-to-year increases is true but not relevant. What is relevant is that the years with cuts tended to have larger cuts than the years with increases, leaving NASA worse off at the end of Clinton’s administration than at the start, even when inflation is not taken into account.
Al is probably making a mistake by using Wikipedia as a source of budget numbers. The real numbers are readily available here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/hist.html
There is also the issue of which inflation index to use to measure the actual loss of NASA’s buying power. The OMB uses the GDP (Chained) Price Index, which does not reflect the particular “market basket” of goods and services purchased by NASA. A better index is the NASA New Start Index, which is available here:
http://cost.jsc.nasa.gov/inflation/nasa/inflateNASA.html
Based on that, my numbers are as follows:
FY Current $M Constant 2008 $M
1993 $14,305 $20,005 Last Bush-41 budget
1994 $13,695 $18,576 First Clinton budget
1995 $13,378 $17,686
1996 $13,881 $17,904
1997 $14,360 $18,266
1998 $14,194 $17,862
1999 $13,636 $16,820
2000 $13,428 $16,034
2001 $14,095 $16,293 Last Clinton budget
Bottom line is that Clinton cumulatively cut NASA’s budget 1.47% in current-year dollars and 18.56% in constant-year dollars. On a year-to-year basis he cut NASA’s budget five times and increased it three times. All three increases occurred after the Republicans took control of Congress. Two of the three increases (FY97 and 01) occurred during presidential election years.
I see we have a few economists’ here. To me the bottom line is if we can spend 12 billion a month on Iraq. We can and should take 4 billion a year from that expenditure and get back in the lead of space flight, human and robotic. There have been a lot of cuts of very good space exploration programs you can take your pick of the ones that have been canceled or didn’t get funded.
And one last point that Nemo left out. When bush took office we had a balanced budget and a surplus! Before the Iraq war oil was $25 a barrel now its $101. Nemo how do your numbers account for that?
Oboma supports will point out he opposed the war. Ok, what would he have done faced with post 911 and Afghanistan at that time?
To borrow one of Oboma’s lines. The bus is now in the ditch how are you going to get us out? By gutting our human space flight program? I would like to know.
Has anybody checked out http://www.nextenergynews.com ? They highlight a lot of next generation energy sources that NASA technology and funding has brought to the commercial market. This is technology we can take advantage of now. Her proposed plans would take advantage of these technologies.
Hillary will do more for space policy than Oboma. Our next president will still have to do battle with congress and the senate to get the money. How successful has each candidate been at getting their bills passed? If the democrats take back the white house. Do you think the republicans are going to go away? Washington is not unified it is a snake pit and a Jimmy Carter style president will not prevail in today’s political atmosphere.
And one last point that Nemo left out. When bush took office we had a balanced budget and a surplus! Before the Iraq war oil was $25 a barrel now its $101. Nemo how do your numbers account for that?
Oil prices serve as an overall inflationary pressure, which affects the constant-dollar figures.
Captain Nemo,
Thanks for increase in accuracy. I looked for the OMB source for a few minutes, but I (admittedly) got lazy, and used what I could find easily. Thanks for the NASA New Start index URL.
BTW, why didn’t you save me some time, and do the same calculation for the Bush Administration???
– Al
BTW, why didn’t you save me some time, and do the same calculation for the Bush Administration???
Sorry! But it looks like Jeff Foust and Charles Miller picked up the ball and ran with it for a Space Review article:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1106/1
If we spent as much money on the space program as we did in Iraq,
we would already be on the moon. 1% of your taxes goes to the
space program. Americans need to do more then eat fried chicken
and watch American Idol if we want to be a world leader again or
China and Korea will be the next world leader.