There’s also the KSC port upgrade which ramps up in the out-years and a bunch of other things in the Obama proposal (and AFAIK still in the current Senate and House versions to the extent they are in this years’ budget) at least half of which you are canceling with a wave of the hand. Most of these I wouldn’t miss (e.g. Powerpoint sci-fi stories about “Plymouth Rock”) but many others would.

Which brings us to a matter of practical politics: we can’t just propose to cut at least half of (or out of) other folks’ projects and expect to get away without our own favorites also being cut. A strong starting position for negotiations perhaps but not a significantly probable outcome.

I applaud and support these efforts at specifying budget cuts. It’s a breath of fresh air in a community dominated by the most utterly selfish lobbying for “free” government largesse (i.e. money that will be taken out of our children’s W-2 forms to pay back the Chinese). But don’t kid yourself, all of our favorite projects are going to have to share the pain.

Copying from the other thread:

OK, let’s look at the numbers from the 2010 budget:

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?

A few short hours after the Republicans have released their plan, “Republicans” on this forum start strategizing on how to undermine it. Quite shamelessly in front of us all.

As I detailed in an earlier post, in such a budget not only is there no room for Constellation, Ares, or any sort of HLV, there is only room for a minimally operated ISS using longer-duration crews and Soyuz rather than “Commercial” Crew. The bloated “flagship” technology demos have to go, although we can save the smaller ones. It’s triage time, folks. You better figure out what is the most extremely important to you that we can actually afford. If you can’t figure that out and ditch the rest, you get nothing.

whittington doesnt grasp the political events that are happening in The Republic. He sees everything through either rose or dark glasses and reality tends to fade out.

The very first place that the GOP (if they take the Congress) will find 1) support starting to fade and 2) a lot of attacks by the other party is if they start to make exceptions in their “plan” (and thats being kind) which are viewed by the American people as exceptions to the rule, just to maintain GOP pork.

The lesson of the last few months is that outside of the folks whose congressional pie depends on NASA funding; there is no real appetite for large NASA HSF budgets to do exploration particularly of the kind that Cx etc represent.

So lets say Sun Tan John comes up and says “we dont need more money for school lunches” but “I think NASA HSF is a national security concern so we have to spend 200 -300 billion to race the Chinese to the Moon”.

now you tell me how that plays everywhere but the home of NASA centers…?

Robert G. Oler

I gotta say, RGO, I’m not Whittington’s side here. Not because I think that’s the way it should be done. I agree it’s not the best possible approach by any measure. But I think he’s potentially right on the mark in that it is a distinctly possible outcome. Remember, if we’re looking for folks with solid footing in reality, congress is not the first place to look.

…….. put NASA in the security portion. It is not out of the question this plan would do the same…

yes it is…only goofy people think we need to have NASA as a security function…perhaps to protect “our water” from the Chinese who are going to destroy our purity of essence…

Mark…try and regain some solid footing in reality

Robert G. Oler