Comments on: House Science Committee schedules NASA budget hearing

By: Doug Lassiter

Doug Lassiter — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:27:06 +0000

I think we can assume that ts hearing will be mostly about astronaut safety. Why? Because if you’re going to do something dangerous, and you don’t really have a good reason to do it, then it would be unforgivable if you allowed something bad to happen. There are very few things Congress can do that look good with regard to human space flight right now. In order to look responsible, highlighting safety is the, er, safest policy. When bad things happen, you get to say “But, but, I warned them!” When bad things don’t happen, you pat yourself on the back. “MIssion accomplished” becomes simply survival.

Chairman Hall is expert at this tactic. Safety is job-one. Job-two is, well, going places and doing things. Exploring, inspiring, and all that stuff. Of course, commercial crew will be the logical target for this concern. Congress will protect us against those evil, dangerous, commercial providers. Holdren took heat on this point about human space flight in the last committee hearing on the topic.

By: Coastal Ron

Coastal Ron — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:12:03 +0000

Steven White wrote @ February 28th, 2012 at 12:41 am

“Will someone please ask Administrator Bolden why it costs anywhere near $3 billion per year to operate the ISS?”

Is this your first time on the internet?

If so, I’ll make it easy for you. You don’t have to ask the NASA Administrator these types of questions since the information is public. This is proposed NASA budget that Bolden will be asked about, and the ISS Operations section starts at “SO-1″.

In summary, the ISS Space Operations budget request for FY2013 is broken down into three buckets:

– Systems Operations & Mainenance = $1.494B
– Research = $$229M
– Crew & Cargo Transportation = $1.285B

Hope that helps. Again, welcome to the Internet.

By: amightywind

amightywind — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:13:18 +0000

Steven White wrote:…

Would be nice to know all of these things, wouldn’t it? It would be also nice to have a breakdown of annual contributions by country. I disagree with you about the $1 billion figure. That is far too much for what ISS does.

By: ArtieT

ArtieT — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:59:24 +0000

I hope that the committee asks Bolden what his plans are to make sure a JWST does not happen again, and what plans does NASA have for SLS.

By: Steven White

Steven White — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 05:41:16 +0000

Will someone please ask Administrator Bolden why it costs anywhere near $3 billion per year to operate the ISS? The construction is complete. We only have two astronauts up there. The ISS orbits the Earth due to the laws of physics, not the money we spend. Is the $62 million per seat we are paying the Russians even included in the $3 billion ISS operations cost? Perhaps, $1 billion would be a more reasonable figure for ISS operations.

By: SpaceColonizer

SpaceColonizer — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:27:18 +0000

Oh boy! Better start thinking up some drinking rules. Maybe I’ll borrow Jeff’s “tough fiscal times” rule from the budget rollout… that should be a good one!

So… how much deja vu should we be expecting here? “We love SLS!” “Commercial Crew scares me!” “Do we really need Space Technology in space?” The only new topic of conversation will be Mars stuff… maybe that should be one of the other drinking rules.

By: DCSCA

DCSCA — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:04:10 +0000

More ‘free drift.’