You mean there was funding included for 200 researchers here on Earth to work with the WISE NEO data?

Gosh gee, I really love this stuff.

Someday someone is going to be real surprised when they find out in an unimstakable way what “important research” and “significant science” really are.

Perhaps some brave reporter will actually bother to dig NASA’s NEO detection budget out of the bill, whenever it is finally passed, and share that with his readers.

If he is real brave, he will report it in terms of the entire NASA budget, or compare it with the budgets for other NASA science programs.

Be careful about your definitions here. What all probes seem to outlive is their “prime mission”. That’s the mission duration that is necessary to answer the questions the mission set out to answer. It would be pretty stupid to design missions to “live” for just that length of time. So they are designed to live with a low probability of failure during the prime mission, and they have reserve expendables to confidently get them through the prime mission.

That being the case, one has every expectation that probes will live way beyond their prime mission!

A Senior Review is held to decide if the mission should be operated beyond its “prime mission”. As in, whether the mission should be continued after the design goals are completed. In some cases, where the mission is designed to serve a continuing need, the Senior Review can establish whether, in fact, it still meets that need or whether the need still exists.

Do they overbuild or undersell the capabilities?

To start, treatments for cancer, muscular dystrophy, Hepatitis-C, salmonella, and osteoporosis:

http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2013/07/im-doctor-not-astronaut.html

When was the last time SLS or MPCV cured a disease?

“SLS will get us back to the moon and asteroids.”

No, it won’t. Transfer stages, larger deep space habitation volumes, landers, and proximity vehicles are what enable lunar and NEO exploration by humans, not launch vehicles. SLS isn’t necessary to launch any of these systems, and its costs are preventing us from getting them developed.

I never stated that SMD should get $250M per month (from anyone). I argued that one lousy month of SLS/MPCV spending could pay for an _entire year_ of planetary mission operations. Let’s defer SLS/MPCV by a few weeks and pay the bills we should be paying for the missions doing actual solar system exploration today.

Excuse me? It is by all means within the power of Congress to reduce the DoD budget and increase the NASA budget. I’m not talking about a “transfer” where the Air Force writes a check to NASA. It’s a bit of a challenge, since they are in separate budget accounts, and so such rebudgeting is a matter of the Budget Committee more than the Appropriations committees.

Now, that being said, fiscal intertia is such that it’s not gonna happen. But don’t preach about jobs. NASA contractors are largely also DoD contractors. So there will be the same number of aerospace jobs.

As you know first you just cannot transfer mopey out of DoD to NASA – just in case. Second F-35 probably is not the worst waste in the DoD portfolio. There is a need to renew the fleet of naval airplanes with advanced capabilities (stealth, STOVL, etc).

The reason why DoD is “grossly over budgeted” is the exact same why we have SLS/MPCV: It is a jobs program. Worse the program spreads all over the US. Worse even it is built on the paranoia that we need to protect ourselves from absolutely everyone in this world. It is not even flexible enough to move from Cold War threats to “new” terrorists/guerrilla threats/operations.

But for Congress it is easier to point to a couple of stealthy Chinese aircraft and cry Wolf (if I may). Then we go on and build a test stand for no good reason. Could be worse. Could be a monster rocket to nowhere. No wait.

Operations team, DSN telemetry, spacecraft engineering team, tracking & orbital dynamics teams, science instrument teams (12), scientific research (about 200 international scientists), some EPO. Fully burdened, $60-80M is about 300 U.S. people. Of course, ESA and ASI have a share of the Cassini budget, but that fraction is pretty small.

Flagship missions ain’t cheap, mainly because they do a LOT. For a mission that costs the U.S. $2.6B, $60-80M/yr is pretty cheap.

The HST budget is similar, and no, we don’t do servicing on it anymore.

As to shutting down old spacecraft, you don’t shut them down because they’re old, but you shut them down because they’ve answered the questions that they set out to answer. These are questions that are well understood when the mission is developed. The whole purpose of the mission was to answer them. New questions may arise, but it’s a matter of careful prioritization to decide whether those new questions should justify keeping the mission running.