Landing a human on mars would be much much harder than on the moon:
universe today

The American empire is seeing china moving into africa inmass. For the man behind the curtain, Obama is the clear answer for America moving into africa. The US military recently announced the building of a command center in africa. Senior military officials have commented that we can not go into asia and the middle east is very volitile and africa is the clear answer to being in the neighborhood for actions in the 21st century.

Obama is the clear choice for an america if there is to be any nation building in the 21st century.

2) But McCain would never get a rollback of earmarks

Brad,

First, I think the earmark issue is a global budgetary issue, not a NASA issue. I accept the comments by HillGuy, and am saddened that the budget process is toothless. We need to fix this.

We need the line item veto. In one of the worst decisions in recent history, the Supreme Court declared that the line item veto authority — which Newt Gingrich handed to Bill Clinton in a huge act of bipartisanship for the good of the country — was unconstitutional. This was an atrocious decision.

Second, I could make a *policy* case that freezing NASA’s budget might force people to make some critical decisions about priorities, and to bring needed change to NASA. That a “freeze” would be good policy.

However, a “budget freeze” that hits NASA is bad politics at this very narrow point in time.

This has nothing to do with what is good or bad policy, or what NASA should be doing, but is all about presidential politics. The Florida voters who will have a significant say in who the next President will be could care less about “space policy” beyond “how much bacon do we get?”

This is purely a case of “promised money = increased hope for jobs = votes”.

This is a case of “Who can pander more? Obama or McCain?”

At the end of the day, they are both pandering about the same to Florida voters near KSC — communicating they will add a one-time $2 Billion to NASA (e.g., Florida jobs), in spite of a desperate financial situation and a federal deficit that may approach $1 Trillion next year.

After November 4th, many of the spending promises will go away, as the winner will “discover” the national budget crisis. They will then “cut” spending (or projected growth in spending).

In each of the last two debates, the budget deficit was a major topic of discussion. Neither candidate was willing to truly fess up that they could not both keep all the promises they had made and clearly spell out which promises they can not keep.

That will be left to after the election.

FWIW,

– Al

The McCain budget plan will hurt NASA because…

1) McCain would get an overall budget freeze

2) But McCain would never get a rollback of earmarks

Methinks some people are trying to have things both ways, to spin a negative conclusion about McCain.

The Budget Committees very rarely actually produce a conference budget resolution which is binding on the Appropriators. The “caps”, if there are any, are set by the Chairman of the two Appropriations committees in allocating funds among the subcommittees. Each subc gets an amount which they must divide among the agencies under their jurisdiction.

Appropriations is almost entirely a purely political process. The supreme rule is: do you have a majority to pass the bill? At subcommittee, at full committee, and on the floor.

Therefore, buying votes using earmarks helps assure that you get the majority you need to pass the bill. If you don’t pass the bill, then the Majority Party has failed to fund part of the government. Utlimately, that includes getting a bill past the President. (Note the lesson learned by Speaker Gingrich back in the winter of 1995.)

– Hill Guy
(who might need to get an earmark some day)

This is an interesting issue, which is worth thinking about. However, it is not totally clear what the actual linkage is.

I agree there is a link between getting your earmarks, and voting for the appropriations leadership’s priorities. If you don’t vote with the leaders of appropriations, your district/state gets punished. It makes it harder to come up with the votes against a specific appropriation.

However, the overall budget — which is developed and approved each year — establishes caps on spending. The spending caps, which are established by the budget committees, is a completely separate process from appropriations. The budget caps are are not affected by earmarks, and do set hard limits on the regular appropriations process for discretionary spending. The budget process suggests that the earmark issue is not relevant to overall spending levels — but is more relevant to forcing members to vote for the leadership’s priorities within the spending levels.

The real drivers for budget growth are the exceptions to normal budget rules — particularly 1) non-discretionary spending, and 2) emergency supplemental appropriations (which are not subject to budget caps). Non-discretionary spending is exploding, as is the creativeness of Congress is deciding what is an “emergency”.

I, of course, would be interested in hearing from somebody who works/worked on the Hill on this issue.

– Al

Because it doesn’t work that way, and McCain knows it. Congress does the earmarking. For a president to “cut earmarks” essentially means successfully threatening to veto congressional legislation that includes earmarks. This president made that threat, and was largely unsuccessful in doing it. Threatening to veto legislation is hardly a way to ensure stable and reliable funding. A space exploration program that hinges on earmarks that don’t get made is laughable.

Besides, as said above, if the amount committed to earmarks is spread over McCain’s priorities, NASA will be able to barely buy a few more bolts and nuts.

Re earmarks, it’s McCain who’s making more out of it than he should.

Now, a bridge to nowhere could perhaps buy a vote, but that’s worth a bit more cash than a planetarium projector, which is what McCain seems to be obsessing about these days.

$18B just doesn’t roll too many logs. Logrolling is much more effective with funding augmentations that are part of the legislated bill language, rather than glued on in conference report language (which is what an earmark is).

So I guess McCain is promising that his funding for our leadership on a Mars program won’t be in the form of an earmark. Whew! Though if his discretionary budget is frozen, it’ll take more than a scalpel to carve out the $2B he’d like to seed the effort with.