I love BTW that the new Republican proposal to cut and cap evolves by 2015 to just about the same amount of cuts, at least from the current rising “baseline”, that you proposed! Good timing MM.

$9.3 billion minus $4 billion is $5.3 billion, and minus $5 billion is $4.3 billion, right? But the actual current political baseline is the House and Senate bills largely based on the Obama plan. ISS + COTS + Commercial Crew + Technology R&D + robotic precusor missions + KSC launch port mods + spaceflight support adds up to _more than_ $9.3 billion, as the budget is larger for FY11. Even just ISS + COTS + Commercial Crew + spaceflight support adds up to about the entire $4.3-$5.3 billion, even if there are no cost overruns (highly unlikely in a NASA program) and even if you can 100% protect your own programs while the other guys’ getting completely cut including all of technology R&D and robotic precusors.

We agree on the HLV cuts, but I don’t at all agree that my favorite programs (especially technology R&D and robotic precusors) should be cut 100% while yours get most or all of their projected funding. And it doesn’t seem a viable expecaton that the politics will go so overwhelmingly in favor of your favorites.

If I have your wrong and you are not proposing 100% cuts to the technology R&D, robotic precusors, and KSC port mods in the House/Senata bill, then at what levels do you think those should be funded and what corresponding cuts would you make from ISS, COTS, and Commercial Crew to make the numbers add up? (You mentioned cutting back CC to one vendor instead of two and that’s a good start).

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420990main_FY_201_%20Budget_Overview_1_Feb_2010.pdf

Exploration: $3.5B
Shuttle: $3B
ISS: $2.1B
Space and Flight Support: $725M

Shuttle and Exploration together add up to $6.5B. Sounds more than enough. Am I missing anything here?

On the other hand, if you are using the previous plan of record as the baseline, keep in mind that it had already canceled the Shuttle and on top of that it canceled U.S. funding for ISS — ISS was going to splash into the Pacific in 2015 or so. So using that as a baseline if you want to save ISS, not to mention adding commercial cargo and crew, you have to add those big items to the budget, probably $3-$4 billion/year which means you have to cut far more than $4 billion, indeed you probably have to cut $7-$8 billion, which means cutting far more than just Constellation/Ares.

If you are merely proposing to cut $4 billion from an imaginary budget that includes keeping all of Shuttle, Constellation/Ares, and ISS, or even two of those, that’s meaningless because such a budget has never been seriously considered and would constitute a vast increase of the NASA budget. Such a move would be like the common game that is played of going from a hypothetical whopping increase to a mere big increase and then bragging that one has made a budget cut.

TANSTAAFL.

So decide which budget you are cutting from and figure out what you want to cut from it. Advocating a cut in the abstract and then defending programs in the particular accomplishes the opposite of the cutting the budget.